Just want to point out that Twitter is not running anything like it used to. It’s handling orders of magnitude less load because they have broken all publicly embedded tweets, blocked public searching of tweets, blocked public browsing of tweets, and cut off all API access except for a very few who are paying.
Brand safety is also essentially turned off. This was a staff-intensive feature because brands can’t delete other users’ tweets the way they can hide or delete or turn off comments in Meta platforms and Youtube. They had to have help from Twitter staff, and now they don’t.
Finally, Twitter’s ad targeting is horribly broken and there is little recourse. Again, that customer service was staff-intensive and therefore a target of cuts.
Elon dramatically shrank Twitter into a much smaller service and company. And that’s a fine approach for a private company, because customers can just go elsewhere (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, etc) if they don’t like it.
It will not work as a way to improve the federal government. If you take away highway funding and healthcare and national defense, there is not an alternative federal government that American citizens can switch to.
It’s a dramatic demonstration of how poorly many business leaders understand what government does. Tech leaders can move fast and break things because they operate inside the protected, optimized space created by what government does. Break the government and you also break all the assumptions that give license to innovation.
Also after Musk took over my DMs were full of bots (never had a bot DM me before that). And the platform is drenched in outright naked racism and antisemitism in a way it wasn't before because they just decided you don't really need to do anything with that (except if someone says "cisgender", of course).
Ok, but how do you balance that with the fact that Twitter did $1.3B in profit in 2024, double the highest adjusted EBITDA of Twitter which was $682 million in 2021? You're talking about a bunch of metrics that are not the one metric that matters in business.
Brand safety is also essentially turned off. This was a staff-intensive feature because brands can’t delete other users’ tweets the way they can hide or delete or turn off comments in Meta platforms and Youtube. They had to have help from Twitter staff, and now they don’t.
Finally, Twitter’s ad targeting is horribly broken and there is little recourse. Again, that customer service was staff-intensive and therefore a target of cuts.
Elon dramatically shrank Twitter into a much smaller service and company. And that’s a fine approach for a private company, because customers can just go elsewhere (Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, Truth Social, etc) if they don’t like it.
It will not work as a way to improve the federal government. If you take away highway funding and healthcare and national defense, there is not an alternative federal government that American citizens can switch to.
It’s a dramatic demonstration of how poorly many business leaders understand what government does. Tech leaders can move fast and break things because they operate inside the protected, optimized space created by what government does. Break the government and you also break all the assumptions that give license to innovation.