Comment by jbreckmckye
3 days ago
I cannot see how it was a success.
1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.
2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.
3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.
I can't see any positive outcome from it.
Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.
I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.
I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p
I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
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Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website.
[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...
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I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.
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> I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
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They liked the gesture. The rationalization is just public pretending they would theoretically mind.
Ok, everything can be seen as a success if you set your expectations low enough...
Were they? My recollection is that in the tech space a lot of people were saying "it's just an app, why do they need so many people"
The "why do they need so many people" were probably in favor of Musk ?
On the other side people were already asking why Twitter didn't do more moderation and better filtering (= more people).
And we expected that breaking rules would have serious repercussions, which was a foolish assumption as we've seen.
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Tech industry has been perpetually growing in the last decades. That means juniors are always a large share of the tech population, and as any demographic, some are bound to be clueless and still vocal. The issue is that in more stable industries, there would be a larger share of seniors to respond with more grounded takes. In ours, these voices are drowned, especially on relatively anonymous media such as HN.
Virtually nobody said that it would go under in a year because that makes no sense. It's financially possible for it to tread water for years whilst losing money.
I don't see how this could be deemed a success when a magic 8 ball or a hamster attached to a giant pile of money could keep it going as long.
Lol the overwhelming tech jerk opinion was that he was firing elite engineers and the site would be unmaintainable as a result, and that he had over-leveraged himself to the point of bankruptcy.
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Whether or not X goes under is almost fully dependent on whether it services its debt. That debt is backstopped by Elon Musk, who has enough assets to service that debt for at least another few decades.
Whether or not X goes under is almost entirely one man's choice.
The Twitter-purchase debt problem is a lot less relevant now that he's rolled X into xAI. Now X the app gets to tag along with a higher value AI company (or at least it is currently valued much higher due to investors dreaming big).
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I don’t think most people were betting that or if they were they weren’t thinking that hard about it. Musk can run a money loser as a hobby if he likes.
Seems like it is mostly bots and neo-Nazi adjacent folks
> Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.
Is this where the bar is set now? Not tanking a $40B corporation within a year now passes off as success? Really?
You people are desperately grasping at straws.
I joined it about 6 months ago and absolutely love the ~uncensored free for all nature of it!
And while the format and content varies in many ways from other sites, one thing they all have in common is millions of humans who cannot distinguish facts from personal opinions. I do not know why but I am absolutely fascinated by the phenomenon, and on Twitter/X you can discuss such things fairly seriously, at least with some people.
Censoring people who disagree with you is not the same as no censorship.
See, example of a guy thay calls X uncensored despite it literally doing that. Just not to fascists.
> ~uncensored
The term "cis" will still get you a warning while my for-you page has been consistently filling up with more and more far right content. I regularly see blue checks espousing actual jewish-conspiracy antisemitism.
Every time something happens to anyone, blue check comments asking if any of the parties were black, sometimes not even asking just assuming and blaming it on black people.
Elon has truly created a cesspit Nazi bar of that site.
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> It makes X an increasingly niche website.
I did not use Twitter. I do not use X. I'm even less inclined to become a user after the Musk takeover. I don't even know anyone who is active on X. However, I still constantly get linked to tweets and see screenshots of tweets (or whatever they're called now). And I never see anything from competing platforms.
X may be failing by many metrics, but in terms of popularity it is still the undisputed king of its market. It's by no means "niche".
Yeah screenshots getting around is a funny metric but it's a good one.
I see BlueSky picking up and occasionally Threads. Sometimes you can't tell where it's from due to crop.
I domt see screenshots of tweeta anymore tho. That one defintely stopped in places where I go.
> The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.
Thanks for putting this into words — I have also noticed this and felt that product decisions have been shaped by this force of institutional rot.
Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
Anyway, what kind of features Twitter (or any social network for that matter) needs after it existed for so many years? Hacker News haven't changed a bit a it does what it does perfectly well
> Twitter's back-end is written in Scala, but they used "better Java" style so an average developer should have no problems making changes
You sound like someone completely oblivious to software development practices who somehow felt compelled to post opinions on software engineering.
Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software. What matters is systems architecture and institutional knowledge of how things are designed to work. If you fire your staff, you lose institutional knowledge. Your choice of programming language does not bring it back.
“Your choice of language is irrelevant if your goal is to maintain software.”
It may not be the most important choice, but it’s not irrelevant. And whether the staff he fired had useful institutional knowledge is an open question. Didn’t he fire a lot of non-technical, recent hires and people likely to leave eventually due to his muskism? I’m not convinced that his initial firings are the wpest move he made. Sadly, being overconfident, he assumed the same model could be applied to government, a mistake that will take a long time to fix if it is even fixable given America’s overall trajectory and the fate of the dollar.
Language is relevant, Haskell or Scala written in functional style uses quite foreign terms and paradigms. Like, wtf is Kleisli arrow?
I generally agree with you but I think you were a little strong in your view that the OP was "oblivious." I only say this because an enormous percentage of companies hiring software engineers specifically with requirements of X years with Y language and W years with framework with silly name Z. I think they are also misguided in that but I think it is is too prevalent to say they are all oblivious but honestly that may actually be more of an apt description.
From what we gathered on the kitchen side he fired the most infrequent committers. Which statistically speaking would not affect the institutional knowledge much.
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There an argument that he paid $44B to get a Us administration that would hugely advantage him and his companies. Certainly he’s made billions from contracts initiated by this administration and seen many regulatory difficulties removed.
Of course it may all fall apart because everyone involved has the temperament of a five year old on a meth bender, but the basic “buy media to influence politics to multiply wealth” approach seems to have worked well.
A US administration does not cost tens of billions. He paid $250M to the trump campaign making him the single largest donor of all time, and that's what let him buy the current admin. And that was close to 1% of what he paid for twitter.
The evidence is that Trumps win has more to do with the dynamics of the party+media symbiosis on the right side of the spectrum, than anything X did.
If your media ecosystem can get away with selling narratives and conspiracies as facts, without any pushback, then this allows you to set the topics of discussion for any debate. Agenda setting power > platform power.
> Agenda setting power > platform power
The Alt-Right Playbook feels like a bummer version of XKCD for these discussions: [Control the Conversation](https://youtu.be/CaPgDQkmqqM)
Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures.
What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...
Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.
Bluesky seems to be doing reasonably well all things considered. It’s active and relevant. They also seem to have a pulse and ship new features.
Not saying it will emerge from being a niche thing and take over but it’s a pretty big niche. And Twitter is about half an inch from a platform ending meltdown at any time so it seems like the future isn’t yet set.
I check in on bsky every now and then and I'm kind of surprised at how much is happening. My city posts bulletins there. I follow journos and some individuals I used to follow on twitter who migrated. There are shitposters. Idk why people think it's dead?
Bluesky only has a future as a Twitter replacement. There are strong network effects favoring high utility of the dominant platform.
Take a look at the graph I linked. Threads drank Bluesky's milkshake.
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BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.
JD Vance is not banned, he’s just widely blocked, which is something BlueSky users are free to do.
The sitting vice president is a monarchist, not just a little right of center
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3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people. One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts” or loud voices.
> 3. Didn’t go well? I don’t remember twitter (x) crashing for days or data erased. Means that organizations don’t need that many people.
I don't think you have a solid grasp on the problem. To start off, Twitter did experienced major outages that it never experienced before. Also, you hire and retain people when you need to implement changes. If your goal is to cease any form of investment in your platform, like rolling out a new product or providing a new service, then your responsibilities are limited to keep the business barely aflost while coasting.
See it as a navy ship. You need full crew to perform all your missions, but mothballing the ship requires a skeleton crew.
Here you are, boasting that a ship doesn't require more than a skeleton crew to be kept afloat. I mean, sure why not? But are you saying what you think you're saying?
discord is manned in 20s-30s employee, valve who makes steam is also has small number of team
if you thinking you need 500s employee or something well you are wrong since many company do this for a long time and still do well
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It never experienced before? Were you aware of the Twitter "fail whale"? I think it is very hard to say that it has been a complete technical failure as many anticipated. I think if Musk had the "correct opinions" as you see them then many people would probably not have been making these proclamations.
Crashing isn't the totality of unsupported code. I previously worked in a company where a goodly proportion of the back end product team was let go, and their system stayed running for two plus years without a single fix or update going in.
Proofing that it was a real good back end team..
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Twitter has a permanent outage reporting breaking news. Whenever something big happens now, the feed looks like any other day. This didn't use to be the case.
"One thing I learned from this is to not trust so called “experts”"
Really? THAT is what you learned?
Can confirm the frontend piece - there is previously available functionality that was removed from the ui that you can still access via the web api
From my perspective personal perspective, that whole category of social media has been destroyed. Pretty much no one I know/followed still posts. It’s gone from something I watched/posted very frequently to something I might glance at once in a very great while. And after initial flurries of interest neither Mastodon or Bluesky really achieved critical mass.
I don't think DOGE would have happened without it. Maybe not even Trump winning the election.
It wasn't good for the company but allowed Musk huge influence in politics and likely making it out with some really juicy data.
I give a lot more weight to the $250M Elon spent on the campaign.
That was a factor, but his CV stating "I cut Twitter's expenses and staff by 80%" or however much was probably a big factor too. Of course, he's the only one actually bragging about that being a success.
Twitter's takeover also helped him get a number of loyalist goons that he sent out to various US federal agencies to extract data from.
Advertising works well on local races. But for POTUS, I don't believe it moves the needle much.
The bigger factors are whether the large media players back you (Murdoch, Musk), whether social media personalities back you, and whether the foreign intelligence agencies back you in their spamouflage and information ops (e.g. via the Internet Research Agency).
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He doesn't seem particularly happy with how things are going with the new administration, and Trump seems to be enjoying the fall out rather more. As Elon himself acknowledged, to the extent he actually believed in cutting the deficit the Big Beautiful Bill is doing the opposite, and I'm pretty sure some of the cuts that actually are taking place are ones he isn't happy with.
He could have gained valuable information and he certainly got to exact petty revenge on regulators that crossed him, but I'd have a hard time putting a higher valuation on that than the tangible revenue drops of some of his businesses, not to mention risk of repercussions. I also think Trump is remarkably easy to get close to for someone with Elon's money,came and social circles whilst spending a lot less, especially if he's offering unqualified endorsement. Don't forget DOGE was launched as a collab with a relatively minor Silicon Valley player whose other claim to fame was running against Trump...
I’m pretty lazy about curating my feed, but I do a little. And I never see any porn bots and only rarely any spam accounts. Political stuff, yes, but I don’t mind and it’s not a ton, in fact my feed has a lot more insightful analysis than advocacy. I still get a lot of “breaking news” that I’d otherwise have to be very active on Facebook to get, especially regarding other countries.
I guess that’s just TL;DR: YMMV, but I do think there are a lot of people on X who find it very useful and don’t run into the problems you listed.
As for Elon’s overpayment, I have thought about actually paying for an account, which I never would have done on Old Twitter.
This msy surprise you, but the average person doesn't even know who owns what tech platform. Not Meta or X or Google. They don't care either.
Most don't even know Musk bought Twitter.
To complete this thought, most users of X are siloed too. There is no "capture" of the platform, whatever thst means, for them.
I agree that in some circles there may be brand damage,
X exists in other languages than english. it provides insight into non-english speaking places that other platforms owned by elon musk do not.
> where the news happens
It never was, despite what lazy journalists led people to believe.
He did not make X "everything app" but X is still somehow still working, functioning, and somehow adding new features, even if they suck.
Also it made him win an election.
1. Agreed. One of the worst timed purchases of all time.
2. Unfortunately, nothing has truly displaced Twitter. Is Meta even still trying with Threads? I don't see ads, but I have to wonder why any real company would risk advertising on Twitter.
3. Eh. As a casual user, I haven't noticed any difference. For a mostly finished product, there were probably were a bunch of overpaid do-nothings on staff.
4. TSLA stock price seems impervious to reality.
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