Although I’ll never doubt Musks persistence to make something work, I feel this is a situation he is not accustomed to and he has been making all the wrong calls so far. His prior companies were much smaller so he got to a grow company culture organically. I think his companies have an atypical culture–from what I have heard people either love it or hate it–and I think he doesn’t like the very corporate culture at Twitter. He made fun of Twitter’s corporate training right after purchasing which is standard practice at virtually all large companies. You can’t change a culture as fast as he wants to.
In the short term Musk will use the expertise of his extensive team to iron out the kinks, flush out the excess, learn from initial mistakes and make Twitter better then ever. My money’s on him long term.
Absolutely. He’s not an idiot, by a long shot. This will go how these things always go. There’s a lot of buzz right now, and everybody is paying attention. Companies are trying to virtue signal like crazy right now.
Twitter will be up and running functionally in no time. People will forget. And all the advertisers will return.
All the keyboard CEO’s who know better than Elon will move on to something else.
And all the morons who are going to “boycott” any business or brand advertising on Twitter will be patronizing all of them without a thought.
No, he's not an idiot. He has a very high IQ, for sure. His problem is his EQ (emotional quotient). It seems to be in the low single digits, thanks to his narcissism and sociopathy. He does well when working with things, and horribly when working with people. Twitter is all about people, so he's floundering.
Maybe a hint of narcissism, but what leader doesn’t have that. Musk certainly doesn’t have any EQ issues. Most of his prior employees love him. He obviously cares very much about people’s and societies problems. Just as different people learn differently and one size fits all doesn’t work for education, I think the same is true for corporate culture. I think Musk works better starting from a smaller company. Musk has people that thrive under the culture developed at Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter was built under a different culture and you can’t expect those people to thrive if it suddenly changes. At some point Musk will either replace most of the staff at Twitter with those that like to work his way or learn to live with the staff in place and work their way. It might be best for Musk to assign a different president and he could just run a skunkworks team inside Twitter aimed at some of his goals.
In the short term Musk will use the expertise of his extensive team to iron out the kinks, flush out the excess, learn from initial mistakes and make Twitter better then ever. My money’s on him long term.
Absolutely. He’s not an idiot, by a long shot. This will go how these things always go. There’s a lot of buzz right now, and everybody is paying attention. Companies are trying to virtue signal like crazy right now.
Twitter will be up and running functionally in no time. People will forget. And all the advertisers will return.
All the keyboard CEO’s who know better than Elon will move on to something else.
And all the morons who are going to “boycott” any business or brand advertising on Twitter will be patronizing all of them without a thought.
No, he's not an idiot. He has a very high IQ, for sure. His problem is his EQ (emotional quotient). It seems to be in the low single digits, thanks to his narcissism and sociopathy. He does well when working with things, and horribly when working with people. Twitter is all about people, so he's floundering.
Maybe a hint of narcissism, but what leader doesn’t have that. Musk certainly doesn’t have any EQ issues. Most of his prior employees love him. He obviously cares very much about people’s and societies problems. Just as different people learn differently and one size fits all doesn’t work for education, I think the same is true for corporate culture. I think Musk works better starting from a smaller company. Musk has people that thrive under the culture developed at Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter was built under a different culture and you can’t expect those people to thrive if it suddenly changes. At some point Musk will either replace most of the staff at Twitter with those that like to work his way or learn to live with the staff in place and work their way. It might be best for Musk to assign a different president and he could just run a skunkworks team inside Twitter aimed at some of his goals.
Re: the “skunkworks” thing. So you’re saying Musk would buy Twitter and then start a secret side project designed to essentially replace what he just purchased? Never thought of that kind of “takeover from within” strategy. This would make the person he assigned as president of the current Twitter a caretaker/placeholder/puppet leader tasked with keeping the current ship afloat just long enough to prepare the subscribers for moving over to the “New Twitter” ship.
I suppose this could work because it would give Musk more leverage to move current subscribers over to his new ship. If he started his “New Twitter” ship independently of the current Twitter ship he would have to engage in a battle to convince current subscribers to abandon their old ship and come aboard his shiny new one. With Musk owning the old ship, he can simply sink it and state that anyone who doesn’t want to drown comes aboard his shiny new and still floating “rescue” ship. As long as there are no viable competitors to pick up those he forcefully casted adrift, it could work.
It sounds a little crazy, but it is far from being out of the question. I’ve actually worked for companies that were variations of this theme. The larger company bought a smaller company and then sold off or divested pretty much everything beyond what the smaller company offered. This allowed the larger company to move in a new direction. Of course the spin-offs continued to operate either independently or under the umbrella of a new owner, whereas Musk creating a New Twitter to redefine a business would most likely end up with the original Twitter being euthanized.
"Twitter has had a tumultuous few days" ONLY in the eyes of the mass media, which includes AppleInsider. And I say this truth as an avid reader of AppleInsider who continues to love content here. But despite my love for AppleInsider, I call it like it is.
Daily reporting of Musk is either mass hysteria, cancel culture at work, or simply capitalist profiteering from hot-button "shock" news to draw in more readers. Or maybe it's all of those things.
Here's reality...
It's not that big a deal.
Musk is a rich guy who for his own reasons bought Twitter -- a social media platform that I myself never use except for the rare cases of entering some kind of giveaway or sweepstakes. FaceBook interactions mean far, far more to me. (I'm not into Instagram either, for what it's worth.) And while a large number of people really do care about Twitter, we all need to sit back, take a deep breath and relax because before Twitter existed, human beings existed and got along with each other about as well as we are today.
Can the world live without Twitter? You bet it can! In some ways, it probably would be better for it.
So when a rich guy buys a company and then tries to get a return on his investment, he will try many things. Some things he tries will fail and others will succeed. Musk is playing with ideas now. LET HIM! The mass media is having a hay day with it only because CHANGE ALWAYS TRIGGERS CONTROVERSY! But in the end, all the mass media does is manipulate the minds of readers. That's right. It's not some crazy rich guy touting freedom of speech that endangers minds. It's the mind manipulating media! The same is true of election time. We have all this so-called "news" which is little more than biased commentary, all constructed to trigger people and indirectly influence votes. Why? Because triggered people help ratings and viewer/reader-ship. Yeah. It's as petty as money. Or better: "filthy lucre."
Don't get me wrong. I still like AppleInsider. They are merely playing follow-the-leader when it comes to hot button and "trending" stories like this. But in the greater scheme of things, this topic about Musk and Twitter doesn't matter. If you died today and went to heaven, do you thing the saints will be asking you about the latest news on Twitter? Think about it. There are much, MUCH more meaningful things than the need to dwell daily on what Musk is doing with something new he bought.
Don't worry. Be happy.
It's good advice for us all. Yeah, it does work. And if you leave somebody alone to think long enough, good may come of it. Leave Musk and Twitter alone, and report on something else. We all need a breather from this incessant Twitter/Musk news. The only reason it seems to be a big deal is because the mass media wants you to believe that. It's time we all stop listening to what others tell us to think and start thinking for ourselves, even if that means we need to take a break from the crazy daily news for a while.
Wow, thanks for all the information about what rich guys do and how to run a business. It amazes me the extent Elon-stans go in defending him. I mean just look at that screed. And of course it’s the usual blame the media b.s.
There’s no reason for the media to ignore a story about someone overpaying for a company by 20 billion dollars, laying off thousands of employees, putting their remaining employees in legal jeopardy with the FTC (Twitter is under a consent decree from before elon purchased it) or ruining the value of Twitter as an ad company by being so toxic that more and more brands don’t want to be associated with it.
Elon is one of the biggest trolls around. Telling other people to just leave him alone is pretty rich.
Let's see... Currently 5 Likes & 3 Informatives on your post which does nothing other than bash, proving my point about the media which triggered your negativity. The topic I mentioned about the media and the negativity it creates includes Elon Musk but it also transcends him. I thought I made that very clear in my post. So to focus exclusively on Musk and overlook the greater problem is even "more rich."
I stand by what I wrote. Sometimes, you need to take a breather and switch off the negative news for a while. To avoid doing that only proves one's addiction to negativity. And the more you feed that side of yourself, the more angry and bitter you become. And while I cast much of the blame on the media for this, we each are mature adults who bear responsibility for either continuing that path of addiction, or breaking from it. Not everything in life needs to be negative or an online argument with people you don't even know.
For social media conversation, it is only behind Facebook, WeChat and Weibo.
The ad spend is quite large. Twitter makes nearly 90% of their revenue from ads. This was $4.5b out of $5b in 2021. This is small relative to Facebook where the ad revenue in 2021 was $115b but it's still a lot of revenue. Costs were $1.8b direct costs, $1.2b R&D, $1.2b marketing, $0.6b general/admin, $0.7b litigation. Net income was loss of $0.5b. In the recent quarter (before Musk takeover), the losses have been $340m, which is nearly $4m/day.
Firing 3500 employees likely saved around $0.5b/year in payroll costs and there's an aim to cut some of the direct infrastructure costs by up to $1b/year at the risk of service outages under heavy load:
Musk owns $200b in other companies. If he needed to bankroll Twitter, at $5b/year, he could for a while and it's not likely it would lose $5b/year. Plus Twitter has around $6b in current assets so most likely sustainable for at least 3 years.
AppleInsider said:
It's unclear why Musk thinks that Twitter is entitled to the advertising dollars since the companies are executing the free speech rights they are entitled to in pulling the ads.
It demonstrates what Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey had conversations about, as does the EU trying to dictate what's permitted under their rules:
Advertisers threatening to defund Twitter and the EU threatening fines for speech that doesn't conform to their preference is restricting the freedom for people to say what they want. Restrictions are necessary if the aim is to have meaningful, civil conversations but having corporations and politicians determining this standard for public conversation is not ideal. People just assume that it's right for elected representatives to determine the status quo but imagine a time in history when people believed the Earth was the center of the universe and people were prosecuted for saying otherwise:
The modern equivalent would be that if Galileo spread his (now known to be correct) ideas on Twitter, companies would stop running ads and the EU would fine Twitter unless they were removed.
This is why Musk wants to move Twitter's revenue stream to subscriptions because it takes away the control of the conversation from corporations and puts it in control of the people having the conversations. Most of the normally suppressed content is unlikely to be Galileo quality information, the vast majority of suppressed content is justifiable but once in a while there will be information suppressed that shouldn't be.
There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.
Tweets from the most followed account would generally be safe:
If the replying comments have offensive content, they can hide the ads when a user opens the comments or hide those replies as sensitive and hide the ads when they are opened.
It would be easier to manage if the topics were tagged by category. The most likely comments to be offensive will be political. They can have a bot tag political comments and allow advertisers to avoid those conversations.
OK, I'll 'fess up here. I do have a twitter account, and I follow a few entertaining accounts (at least for now). But what are these "twitter advertisers" you speak of? I'm looking at a twitter client on my desktop, and I don't see any ads. Yes, if I click on something there, I'm directed to something that does, but all I see is the 140 characters. Am I doing something wrong, because...boy...if I'm missing ads on twitter, I feel really like I'm missing out.
It's quite an effective way to advertise because people don't know they are ads. Apple's main account seem to not be loading past tweets in the main feed, maybe it's just a glitch or maybe that's how they suspended the campaigns:
"Twitter has had a tumultuous few days" ONLY in the eyes of the mass media, which includes AppleInsider. And I say this truth as an avid reader of AppleInsider who continues to love content here. But despite my love for AppleInsider, I call it like it is.
Daily reporting of Musk is either mass hysteria, cancel culture at work, or simply capitalist profiteering from hot-button "shock" news to draw in more readers. Or maybe it's all of those things.
Here's reality...
It's not that big a deal.
Musk is a rich guy who for his own reasons bought Twitter -- a social media platform that I myself never use except for the rare cases of entering some kind of giveaway or sweepstakes. FaceBook interactions mean far, far more to me. (I'm not into Instagram either, for what it's worth.) And while a large number of people really do care about Twitter, we all need to sit back, take a deep breath and relax because before Twitter existed, human beings existed and got along with each other about as well as we are today.
Can the world live without Twitter? You bet it can! In some ways, it probably would be better for it.
So when a rich guy buys a company and then tries to get a return on his investment, he will try many things. Some things he tries will fail and others will succeed. Musk is playing with ideas now. LET HIM! The mass media is having a hay day with it only because CHANGE ALWAYS TRIGGERS CONTROVERSY! But in the end, all the mass media does is manipulate the minds of readers. That's right. It's not some crazy rich guy touting freedom of speech that endangers minds. It's the mind manipulating media! The same is true of election time. We have all this so-called "news" which is little more than biased commentary, all constructed to trigger people and indirectly influence votes. Why? Because triggered people help ratings and viewer/reader-ship. Yeah. It's as petty as money. Or better: "filthy lucre."
Don't get me wrong. I still like AppleInsider. They are merely playing follow-the-leader when it comes to hot button and "trending" stories like this. But in the greater scheme of things, this topic about Musk and Twitter doesn't matter. If you died today and went to heaven, do you thing the saints will be asking you about the latest news on Twitter? Think about it. There are much, MUCH more meaningful things than the need to dwell daily on what Musk is doing with something new he bought.
Don't worry. Be happy.
It's good advice for us all. Yeah, it does work. And if you leave somebody alone to think long enough, good may come of it. Leave Musk and Twitter alone, and report on something else. We all need a breather from this incessant Twitter/Musk news. The only reason it seems to be a big deal is because the mass media wants you to believe that. It's time we all stop listening to what others tell us to think and start thinking for ourselves, even if that means we need to take a break from the crazy daily news for a while.
That was a whole lot of words to say, "Help, I can't find my scroll wheel!"
"Twitter has had a tumultuous few days" ONLY in the eyes of the mass media, which includes AppleInsider. And I say this truth as an avid reader of AppleInsider who continues to love content here. But despite my love for AppleInsider, I call it like it is.
Daily reporting of Musk is either mass hysteria, cancel culture at work, or simply capitalist profiteering from hot-button "shock" news to draw in more readers. Or maybe it's all of those things.
Here's reality...
It's not that big a deal.
Musk is a rich guy who for his own reasons bought Twitter -- a social media platform that I myself never use except for the rare cases of entering some kind of giveaway or sweepstakes. FaceBook interactions mean far, far more to me. (I'm not into Instagram either, for what it's worth.) And while a large number of people really do care about Twitter, we all need to sit back, take a deep breath and relax because before Twitter existed, human beings existed and got along with each other about as well as we are today.
Can the world live without Twitter? You bet it can! In some ways, it probably would be better for it.
So when a rich guy buys a company and then tries to get a return on his investment, he will try many things. Some things he tries will fail and others will succeed. Musk is playing with ideas now. LET HIM! The mass media is having a hay day with it only because CHANGE ALWAYS TRIGGERS CONTROVERSY! But in the end, all the mass media does is manipulate the minds of readers. That's right. It's not some crazy rich guy touting freedom of speech that endangers minds. It's the mind manipulating media! The same is true of election time. We have all this so-called "news" which is little more than biased commentary, all constructed to trigger people and indirectly influence votes. Why? Because triggered people help ratings and viewer/reader-ship. Yeah. It's as petty as money. Or better: "filthy lucre."
Don't get me wrong. I still like AppleInsider. They are merely playing follow-the-leader when it comes to hot button and "trending" stories like this. But in the greater scheme of things, this topic about Musk and Twitter doesn't matter. If you died today and went to heaven, do you thing the saints will be asking you about the latest news on Twitter? Think about it. There are much, MUCH more meaningful things than the need to dwell daily on what Musk is doing with something new he bought.
Don't worry. Be happy.
It's good advice for us all. Yeah, it does work. And if you leave somebody alone to think long enough, good may come of it. Leave Musk and Twitter alone, and report on something else. We all need a breather from this incessant Twitter/Musk news. The only reason it seems to be a big deal is because the mass media wants you to believe that. It's time we all stop listening to what others tell us to think and start thinking for ourselves, even if that means we need to take a break from the crazy daily news for a while.
That was a whole lot of words to say, "Help, I can't find my scroll wheel!"
Being a child of the 70's, I existed prior to the Twitter character limit and even prior to scroll wheels. There was a time when people read multiple paragraphs of text and appreciated it. If my comment was hard to read, AppleInsider articles must be harder because some are much longer than what I wrote.
My company tripled the Twitter marketing budget . We care about getting more customers, not politics.
A case of 'Never mind the Quality, feel the width' then? More customers does not always translate into more profits. You need the right sort of customers. Now it your company makes products that are aimed at the sort of people who will be left on Twitter then fine but you are ignoring a lot of people with disposable income.
No ad agency recommends limiting your reach on the largest platform you advertise on. LOL
Just political stunts to try to cancel free speech. Lame.
“Get woke, go broke.” It’s a thing.
You obviously know nothing of the ad industry, brand management or marketing, nor it seems anything about free speech either. Just repeating silliness you read that idiots and bigots say.
Mr. Musk knows this, but the principles of free speech do not compel any individual or company to buy advertising on Twitter.
Whatever anyone might think, pro- or con- about whatever it is that Musk is doing with Twitter, it is unsurprising that any reputation-conscious company would wish to suspend advertising on Twitter right now. Whatever it is that Musk is doing, it's both unpredictable and controversial. Few company leaders would want to risk waking up one morning with a brewing boycott because their ads are suddenly appearing next to something or someone that offends or irritates their customers. Many even wouldn't want to find themselves paying to sponsor something or someone they personally find reprehensible.
So the safe bet with regard to Twitter is to pull back and wait for the dust to settle (if it settles) before making any decision to advertise on the platform. Musk's jab at Apple is just a transparent effort to drag them into some controversy anyway, hoping that the downside to that would cancel out the downside risk of continuing to buy ads on the platform. It's not likely to work, and it's almost as unlikely that Apple will even respond. Musk's trash-talking will fairly quickly just look like desperation as his investment tanks without financial benevolence from Apple. It's not a good look.
Musty is the crazy drunk uncle that everyone remembers as pissy and slightly frazzled. He's invited everyone to Thanksgiving Dinner, taken a dump in the middle of the parlor and doesn't understand why everyone is going elsewhere. They simply want him to clean up, tone down the crazy talk, and maybe they'll be back after place airs out.
To some degree i'm able to separate the artist from the artwork, however I'm concerned Mr. Musk's and often the seemingly new shock rock brand of publicity "always fighting / no publicity is bad publicity" is going to take his focus away from his most important products, and ultimately end his chance to achieve Mars. Sad.
There's probably a way to make it work well for most people. What people want is control over their association. Companies don't want their brands to be shown next to offensive content because it makes it look like they are directly funding it. Twitter would need to identify offensive content/language and users and isolate the advertising from it and give advertisers assurance that this is happening. They can give advertisers the option to only run ads on selected groups of users with different grades of content.
I think that the underlying issue is that even those espousing/consuming ideas that the advertisers find unsavoury are still potentially viable customers. Advertisers don't want to miss out on potential sales and they think that targeted slots are the mechanism that allows them to balance these concerns.
I think that the simplest solution for Twitter is to not show ads as part of a feed, but I've never used the service so I don't have a suggestion as to where they could be placed instead. Maybe each advertiser can have an account that they post content to, and users can decide to follow them if they find the information relevant? That would, of course, put the power back in the hands of the users and advertisers would balk at the loss of control - then again, it would mean that any appearance of an advertisement next to objectionable content can be directly attributed to the choices of that particular user. Discovery of new advertisers could perhaps be driven by a "most popular tweets" section with different categories; possibly even a system where Twitter becomes a paid service but following a certain number of advertisers means the user gets their subscription fee waived.
Comments
I suppose this could work because it would give Musk more leverage to move current subscribers over to his new ship. If he started his “New Twitter” ship independently of the current Twitter ship he would have to engage in a battle to convince current subscribers to abandon their old ship and come aboard his shiny new one. With Musk owning the old ship, he can simply sink it and state that anyone who doesn’t want to drown comes aboard his shiny new and still floating “rescue” ship. As long as there are no viable competitors to pick up those he forcefully casted adrift, it could work.
It sounds a little crazy, but it is far from being out of the question. I’ve actually worked for companies that were variations of this theme. The larger company bought a smaller company and then sold off or divested pretty much everything beyond what the smaller company offered. This allowed the larger company to move in a new direction. Of course the spin-offs continued to operate either independently or under the umbrella of a new owner, whereas Musk creating a New Twitter to redefine a business would most likely end up with the original Twitter being euthanized.
I stand by what I wrote. Sometimes, you need to take a breather and switch off the negative news for a while. To avoid doing that only proves one's addiction to negativity. And the more you feed that side of yourself, the more angry and bitter you become. And while I cast much of the blame on the media for this, we each are mature adults who bear responsibility for either continuing that path of addiction, or breaking from it. Not everything in life needs to be negative or an online argument with people you don't even know.
It’s an also ran, with stagnant growth.
was not let down
Just political stunts to try to cancel free speech. Lame.
Use "woke", treat bigotry like a joke.
Whatever anyone might think, pro- or con- about whatever it is that Musk is doing with Twitter, it is unsurprising that any reputation-conscious company would wish to suspend advertising on Twitter right now. Whatever it is that Musk is doing, it's both unpredictable and controversial. Few company leaders would want to risk waking up one morning with a brewing boycott because their ads are suddenly appearing next to something or someone that offends or irritates their customers. Many even wouldn't want to find themselves paying to sponsor something or someone they personally find reprehensible.
So the safe bet with regard to Twitter is to pull back and wait for the dust to settle (if it settles) before making any decision to advertise on the platform. Musk's jab at Apple is just a transparent effort to drag them into some controversy anyway, hoping that the downside to that would cancel out the downside risk of continuing to buy ads on the platform. It's not likely to work, and it's almost as unlikely that Apple will even respond. Musk's trash-talking will fairly quickly just look like desperation as his investment tanks without financial benevolence from Apple. It's not a good look.
Especially Apple, which should be 'above the fray.'
I think that the simplest solution for Twitter is to not show ads as part of a feed, but I've never used the service so I don't have a suggestion as to where they could be placed instead. Maybe each advertiser can have an account that they post content to, and users can decide to follow them if they find the information relevant? That would, of course, put the power back in the hands of the users and advertisers would balk at the loss of control - then again, it would mean that any appearance of an advertisement next to objectionable content can be directly attributed to the choices of that particular user. Discovery of new advertisers could perhaps be driven by a "most popular tweets" section with different categories; possibly even a system where Twitter becomes a paid service but following a certain number of advertisers means the user gets their subscription fee waived.