One of the worst things about the "new Twitter" is that the "old Twitter" provided so much surplus to the world in terms of the open source work their engineers did, all the design frameworks, the neat technical blogs, the sponsored events and whimsical nature of the company. It felt very much in the original spirit of Silicon Valley. It was a fine, if slightly underperforming company who had ~infinite runway to fix things as they had billions of dollars in the bank and were roughly break-even profitable.
"New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience.
Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.
The constant politicization of things was not wise for Dems. Twitter was comfortably status quo, now Elon is pushing tweet suggestions to the right of the political spectrum. It's interesting, though, to see a major social media platform that goes in a different direction.
What in the world does the Democratic party have to do with anything? Musk was forced to execute the contract that he signed, but that was the Delaware Court of Chancery's doing, not Joe Biden's..
Musk has agency.. he chose to overpay, he wasn't forced to. To avoid squeezing the shit out of Twitter, he could have just not made a binding contractual offer to buy the company for $44 billion. It's like saying that of course these ghoulish private equity companies have to squeeze the shit out of the nursing homes they buy in order to make their money back.
They could just not do the first part and avoid making everything around them shittier?
My mom used to license and regulate nursing homes. When in a licensing action for a particularly bad one, the owner cried poverty, blah blah.
During the hearing where his license was getting revoked, he literally requested an emergency recess, during which closed on a deal where he bought an assisted living/nursing home complex, with his son as the license holder for the nursing home.
"New Twitter" feels like the worst version of private equity LBO capitalism. Suddenly the rationale for every decision is entirely extractive finance; load the company with debt to juice your shareholder returns, fire everyone who can't be proven to be profitable, break your leases, close your offices, kill all perks, cease all meetings of your employee affinity groups, make sure nobody is working on projects that don't have a straight-line to revenue growth, squeeze every dollar out of your users, monetize any surplus that you were previously providing while relying on inertia to keep your users through the much worse user experience.
Elon-era Twitter is basically 2000s-era Sears -- and man is it depressing that people are cheering it on.