[hraedon]

Twitter needs to generate roughly a billion dollars a year in additional cashflow just to service the debt Musk saddled it with. They already weren’t profitable, but let’s say that they were breakeven and that ad revenue would be sufficient to cover non-debt costs.

There’s absolutely no way that 100,000,000+ people are going to sign up for twitter blue; they would be exceptionally fortunate to get a tenth of that figure. His other ideas are chickenfeed, so how does he get to an extra billion in revenue? How does he do that when he seems to be actively antagonizing twitter’s only meaningful source of revenue?

[ALittleLight]

I'm not saying that it will work or that this is a good plan or anything. I really have no idea. I'm saying that it might be part of a plan and one way to know is to wait and see if it works out.

If someone is playing a video game you've never played, and you see them mashing the controls in a random way, it's possible they have no idea what they're doing. If you wait a bit and watch you can see if they lose, which would validate the theory they didn't know what they were doing, or if they win - which would suggest they did know what they were doing.

[hraedon]

I think we have already waited long enough with Twitter to conclude that the emperor, in this case, has no clothes.

Twitter isn't like SpaceX or Tesla: there aren't enormous government contracts, subsidies, or climate credits to prop up its finances. There is no plausible replacement for the advertising revenue his style of leadership is actively alienating, and there is a real risk that his strategy is exposing Twitter to enormous FTC sanctions given that they are already under a consent decree.

It is much more likely that he's deeply in over his head and floundering than it is that he has a master plan he can only execute by taking a blowtorch to Twitter's current business structure. How much worse does it have to get before that theory is validated?

[ALittleLight]

It's been a week or two, hasn't it? How is that possibly long enough to arrive at a judgement. Twitter under Elon is just getting started and there are no quantifiable results yet. Reaching a conclusion now, before there is any real data, is unreasonable.

Suppose shedding 4k employees saves about a billion dollars a year, and the increased attention and activity brings in more users, and the increased users attract more advertisers? If Twitter Blue reaches 10 million subscribers there is another billion in revenue - and maybe more if you can more profitably sell ads targeted to people who pay for Twitter.

Again, I am not saying the above is what I think will happen. I genuinely have no idea. I'm saying the above seems at least like a plausible path that is still open to Twitter becoming stable and/or profitable. It's also possible that the chaos and losing so many employees will cause Twitter to break apart and crash - but we haven't seen that yet. Or that the place will become so toxic advertisers will refuse to advertise there and it will never be able to make money and die. Or many other negative possibilities.

It is simply premature to be writing the death certificate for a patient who is still alive and screaming.