[nedbat]

This is nothing personal against Musk. When you look at what he has done since taking over Twitter, it's nothing but chaos. He doesn't seem to have a clue how to run that company. I have liked Twitter, and I hate what he is doing to it.

[cbeach]

As someone who likely has opposing political views to yours I think the following outcomes were vital to a well-functioning public square for inclusive and civil discourse:

* taking the company private, and off the stock market, so decisions are no longer made with short term valuation / stock price movements in mind

* sacking the vast majority of bureaucratic staff, who have shown themselves to be politically biased. Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story would NEVER have happened on an impartial social network

* trying out new ideas. Twitter was haemorrhaging money and was technically stuck in a rut

* sacking the board and C-suite (for the gross failures described above)

A lot of people will have their noses put out of joint by Musk’s moves so far. But there are tens, possibly hundreds, of millions of ordinary people out there who will feel they can trust the network again, since Musk’s changes. These people are not extremists, or racists, or bigots - they are just people who have right-of-centre views and who value fairness and freedom of expression.

[zimpenfish]

> Twitter was haemorrhaging money

Well, no, if not for the $800M lawsuit settlement (a one-off), they'd have made $580M profit in 2020.

> technically stuck in a rut

Being under an FTC consent decree where every feature has to be thoroughly documented, analysed, and approved re: user privacy before launch tends to slow development down.

Ol' Musky has made the first almost infinitely worse ($1B interest/year) and cannot do anything about the second.

[nedbat]

How do you feel about taking on a billion dollars of interest per year? Then fumbling new features to lose half the advertisers? What do you think of asking software engineers to bring screenshots of lines of code? It makes no sense.

[cbeach]

He's the world's richest man. He can take on big interest payments.

He experimented with some changes to Twitter, and his style is to rapidly try different things and see what works. I would expect him to continue like this. I hope he does. He's one of America's greatest innovators. This is how he works.

The screenshots of code thing wasn't so he could pick over the lines and analyse their style. It's so he had hard evidence of engineers who weren't writing code (many companies have them) and fire them immediately.