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by c420 977 days ago
Sounds like Twitter.
3 comments

Everything except short-term profits. X seems decently focused on the long term, especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream.

Also not sure about R&D, as I don't know what R&D Twitter was doing pre-acquisition, but there's been an extraordinary increase in the rate of addition of new features and changes to the platform.

> especially with subscriptions being introduced as a (new) revenue stream.

I don’t think that’s ever likely to offset the massive amounts of debt Musk offloaded to Twitter’s balance sheet to fund the acquisition.

> changes to the platform.

Likely one of the most horrible rebrandings in the history of corporate rebranding?

He fired the ML Ethics Transparency and Accountability team. They did a lot of high quality work on understanding bias in opaque ML models.

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-ethical-ai-team/

Exactly. Most of the Twitter acquisition money was borrowed, and that debt is now sitting on the company's balance sheet as liabilities.
Elon's Twitter acquisition was exactly to do that but he muffed it.
Elon's twitter acquisition was a play to sell lots of incredibly overvalued TSLA stock without tanking the price.

May a lot of noise, declare you're done with Twitter's bots and BS, sell a ton of stock -- not because it's overhyped, no it's for Twitter -- and then back out of the sale.

And he would've gotten away except he tried to back out 3 times and they held him to it. So now he's got this trainwreck situation, and he's doing what he thinks is the right play, lemons into lemonade.