[jasonwilk]

While I don’t advocate for anyone losing their job, my partial view on what Elon will do with Twitter once he takes it private is to shut down their ad business and focus on Twitter Blue (or some variation of subscription based product announcements). This will have several benefits.

1. Simplifies the business operation by reducing fixed headcount significantly

2. This will have a hard hit to Twitter revenue but Musk will have the benefit of downgrading the new ad-free business valuation and using the haircut against his future personal Tesla stock sales. Losing the ad business doesn’t actually cost him anything.

3. Product will now be more user friendly than competition, focusing more on product Vs ad tech. Eventually because it doesn’t have ads it could reignite growth to become a dominant social network.

Whether it grows in value or not is irrelevant to Musk and because of this, he seems like the most aligned to improve the product Vs any other financial suitor.

[axg11]

Without the ads business, Twitter will be operating at huge loss, much larger than recent times. The best way to monetize attention is through ads. I'm not saying that I am happy with that, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that subscriptions will lead to much lower revenue/profit than ads. There's a reason why no other social media platform has ever succeeded through a subscription model.

[corobo]

Have any tried? The only one I can think of close to social is the forum Something Awful, which did (does?) pretty good for itself

[bombcar]

Something Awful ended pretty awfully, at least for the founder.

[drawfloat]

It was making a lot of revenue and even got a (for the time) huge buyout offer. Lowtax being a mangosteen addict with a deeply troubled personal life who couldn't be bothered to take advantage of any of these opportunities/organise an effective was the main issue.

[irthomasthomas]

And for that moderator who was killed in the attack on Benghazi.

[nerfhammer]

app dot net

[MisterBastahrd]

You could have just said he planned to throw away 40+ billion dollars, because that's far more accurate given the reality of social media subscriptions and the internet.

[natly]

I have a feeling the server cost to run twitter is pretty miniscule. The major costs are probably headcount (and they don't seem to be doing very much). I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't require that many subscriptions to keep twitter alive (and as long as it's still running it won't die down).

[heartbreak]

The major costs after this deal closes will be about $1 billion per year in interest payments on the debt Twitter is incurring to go private. In addition to that Elon himself will have about another $1 billion per year in interest payments in his own debt for this deal.

[MisterBastahrd]

There's no amount of subscription revenue that will approach even a small fraction of ad support. That's a pipe dream.

[natly]

I'm not saying subscription would equal ad revenue I'm saying cut out the fat in the form of supurflous PMs and the C and B player fraction of the 7,500 employees at twitter (each probably 100k or more a year) and I don't think it's infeasible the same amount of profit would remain on the table (or at least enough to keep it going - without the negative dependencies musk thinks an ad income is associated to).

[jasonwilk]

That’s the point. Musk doesn’t need to maintain the ad business. Reduce the headcount, get enough subscriptions to break even and take a write off on the deflated value of the business. Just making it a great product, free of ads and better at spam.

[MisterBastahrd]

Sorry, but that's silly. He didn't spend that money to implode the company. Every single move the man has made since he hit puberty has been about filling his pockets, regardless of his altruistic self-narrative.

[randomsearch]

At the risk of replying to flamebait: if musk was only interested in money, so you really think he would have started SpaceX? I can’t think of an easier company to bankrupt yourself with. That assertion is objectively wrong.

I can understand people not liking Musk, but I don’t understand why that leads to “he only cares about money” or “his business success is sheer opportunism” when those are wrong.

Such assertions seem to be emotional rather than rational. “I don’t like Elon therefore he is 100% bad in every way and nothing he has ever done is skill”. Surely the more likely situation is - he’s sometimes good, sometimes bad, and his business success is a combination of hard work, skill, luck, and timing.

Even if you’ve made Elon your personal enemy, surely you can accept that eg SpaceX is an amazing achievement.

[fullshark]

Whatever the case, if I worked at twitter I'd be very worried about downsizing, his ambitions are not what the board was likely put in place to accomplish (growth growth growth).

[prepend]

That seems reasonable. But as a user, that seems to make sense. I don’t understand Twitter’s staffing given their profitability and while downsizing may be rough on the downsized, it might help out the org.

[Kye]

If it's like most companies with huge employee numbers, most of that staff is sales. Self-serve advertising is a neat concept, but actually making money at the scale of Twitter requires someone to go out and land deals to match.

[avs733]

the innate value of Twitter is that it is open to the public and the interaction basically drives (sadly) a lot of public discourse.

Look at the trump presidency for just...rife examples of this but the phenomenon occurred before and after. Until the remaining news media stops having news stories that are primarily based on 'X tweeted Y' organically, there is a serious negative incentive to have Twitter's corporate leadership end it for them.

[newsclues]

The content moderation team needs to be fired