Yes, it's a valuable lesson that, though it may become a nazi cesspit and vastly more annoying to interact with, an organization can survive for a surprisingly long time as a shambolic remnant of its former self, doing less and less well for fewer people.
As I understand it:
- twitter became less appealing to advertisers so revenue dropped
- you can't really firmly track the valuation over time after it was delisted but Fidelity late last year estimated its value had declined by 80%. There's a bump from people speculating that Musk's political position will somehow enrich it, but I don't think that's evidence that twitter itself was well-managed.
- a bunch of communities that had previously been very active on twitter did just kinda fizzle or go elsewhere as using their product became deeply unpleasant
It still works last time I checked – with fraction of headcount and with people working from the office.
Twitter had few months runway until it'd run out of money and go bankrupt.
Bloomberg analysis says (despite advertisers and communities leave etc) platform earnings seem to be staying at $1.2 billion a year.
Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from $682 million in 2021 (the last full year before the takeover) – so they are on right track increasing profitability and big part of it likely due to workforce cut from 7500 to 1500 (they did more moves than that, all of them have some impact).
It seems argument around layoffs and working from the office leading to doomsday scenario (it'll stop working, it's gone etc. sentiments at the time) have been refuted with time.
It works in the sense that if you open the website it will open... probably.
Based off of what I've seen on Twitter, I'm not convinced it's very popular. I regularly see the stupidest people who walk this Earth making obvious rage bait. You know, Nazi stuff, women shouldn't vote, that type of thing.
The naive thing to say is that these people are morons because they're Musk supporters and surely that's the only thing left for Twitter. But I don't think so. They're bots. Millions and millions of them. Bots talking to bots talking to other bots.
The reason this bubble hasn't popped is because nobody has told advertisers. They're essentially burning their money but shhh it's a secret teehee!
In Twitter's defense, they're not the only ones doing it. Facebook deleted what, 1.5 billion bots a year ago? But if you log on, you'll see AI Jesus made out of cornflakes with 200,000 thousands comments that all say "God Bless". Hmmm...
Your argument seems to be entirely financial rather than what twitter _does_.
My understanding is their MAUs and DAUs have fallen. Fewer people are looking at it or posting on it, less often.
I think it's interesting that you mention bloomberg as saying that things are going ok.
My recent read was that they thought twitter was just messing with numbers.
> its improved fortunes owe much to heavily adjusted financials and investors’ fear of missing out
> The 2024 figures weren’t audited, but the 2023 figures were, said one of the people. None of them would qualify for generally accepted accounting principles, also known as the GAAP standard that the US Securities and Exchange Commission requires for publicly traded companies.
... i.e. the recent numbers aren't trustworthy
> Even under those unusual calculations, X’s debt burden was roughly nine times adjusted earnings — far beyond the baseline of six that bank regulators characterize as risky.
> The threat of litigation — and Musk’s advisory role to Trump — has been a topic of conversation among some advertisers as they decide whether to return, according to several ad industry sources. While few believe X’s product or ad offerings have improved in the past year, marketers are weighing the possible downside of ignoring X and what that might mean in terms of retaliation from Musk.
... i.e. to the extent that some advertisers have returned, it's b/c they think they'll be punished if they don't, not because it's a good way of reaching an audience or promoting their brand.
I think the actual revenue story is worse than the usage story. My first searches show that their Q4 revenue was $2.5B, roughly half of where it was in 2021.
Analogously, I don't think any of the recent sudden moves mean that the federal government at large is _over_ ("doomsday scenario") except for the departments that the administration actually wants to kill, but I think the current administration is setting the government up to do less and less well. Possibly it will be a great financial outcome for Musk.
My argument is around cutting workforce and requirement to be present in the office in context of efficency in general. Sentiment of people predicting total failure back then feels like flashback now.
I saw few predictions of rapid collapse. Many predictions of slow or delayed reductions in revenue, active users, content quality, service quality, and ability to deliver new features.
abeppu's argument was efficiency and health are not the same.
One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy.
Despite this out migration, so far their health looks exceptionally good. They're running at 20% of original workforce (!).
Just think about it (and I really mean it - taking aside personal dislikes, political views etc) – you have a company, you cut 80% of workforce and it still seems to work very well. This is insane.
It's also not one off example - he is well known for speedrun stunts (ie. e2e completion of colossus supercomputer in memphis in 4 months <<!>>).
The argument is – can you do something similar with government as well? As a body that is notorious for inefficiency it seems plausible the answer is yes.
> One off, politically driven reductions in advertisers and user groups is not caused by unhandled load from reduced workforce or implications of work from office policy.
I think this is basically backwards; aggressive cuts and short-term revenue attempts alienated advertisers, casual users and influencers with large audiences. In particular:
- they abandoned content moderation, including flagging misinformation, hate-speech, and targeted harassment. This obviously saves money, b/c it eliminates systems and ML models that needed to examine tweets/messages and accounts in real time. These are adversarial problems, so you can't just create the model once and leave it alone; you need to pay a team to keep finding the current abusive patterns. But abandoning this means that you have a network where (a) any post you see is more likely to be manipulative misinformation (b) you will see slurs and hatespeech and perhaps receive them and (c) if you're determined to be in some way objectionable to an army of trolls, you may be endlessly harassed. So it's a kinda awful place to engage.
- they tried to sell blue checkmarks. This had multiple bad effects. It let any rando with a few dollars impersonate large companies and brands. This alienated those large companies who felt understandably burned, and it made casual users less trustful of content even that appears to be marked as legitimate by the platform. Further, b/c they were trying to force previously verified accounts from notable people to start paying them, they alienated celebs and influencers with large audiences.
It's not just that people who disagree with Musk politically were moving away from twitter in some slow-rolling boycott -- the choices Musk made have transformed twitter to a place where it's harder to get real information, it's hard to have a conversation with your community without being attacked, it's hard to curate your feed (Musk posts may be injected whether or not you follow him), and far from being a "free speech" paradise, it's one where a bunch of people don't feel safe engaging at all.
Reports from Feb 2025 say that X doubled its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from $682 million in 2021 (the last full year before the takeover).
It's worth looking back from time perspective.