When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce.
They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if these people who complain like headless chickens are actually serious people …
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.
Is it really impressive to reduce expenses drastically if you also reduce revenue drastically?
Secondly it's doubly unimpressive because I believe Musk could have actually maintained very similar revenue levels, but the haphazard and immediate way of laying everyone off was incredibly counterproductive.
Revenue went down a lot less than expenses. So yes, profits went up a ton and are now positioned to go up even more as revenue recovers and the tech keeps functioning.
The revenue reduction was also more related to political positioning/image than technical capacity of the platform.
Let's look it up together. Musk has approximately doubled X's profits from 0.68B to 1.25B.
[0] article quote:
"During the last full year prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) of about $682 million and about $5 billion in revenue.
In 2024, X had an EBITDA of about $1.25 billion and annual revenue of $2.7 billion.
While X’s revenue is about half of what it used to be, the company’s costs are just about a quarter of what they were before.
As per the WSJ, investors noted that these were better figures than they had anticipated."
Even this [1] hilariously biased article is forced to admit in the middle that yes, X's profits have gone up since Musk took over.
"Now X also, of course, has reduced its overheads significantly, by culling around 80% of staff, so X’s profit margins are now much better as a result."
The word “adjusted” before EBITDA for 2021 is an important one: it references a one-time legal settlement that Twitter paid that year. If you don’t take that into account, the EBITDA was $1.47 billion.
Xai or whatever it's called was pumped with $6 billion, by, wait for it, fidelity. And, they still value X at 1/3rd of its original price. So, yes, the numbers will look good to people like you doing basic ebitda and revenue back of the envelope math. There's also no denying that the product sucks and users are leaving, which in turn will make your cute ebitda numbers look even bigger a few years down the line when there's only naz1s left!
a) Trust and Safety teams were disbanded which led to the EU now investigating the company for breaching DSA Risk Management provisions. If X is banned from EU this decision will be a major part.
b) Content Moderators were fired which has led to an increase in the amount of bots, spam etc which has directly attributed to a major loss in revenue as advertisers require a trusted platform.
c) Fidelity, an X investor, has valued the company at 20% of when it purchased. That is indicative of widespread wealth destruction.
> When Elon stripped the Twitter organisation down to its fundamental parts, saved tons of money and the service is still ran like usual, people said the he’s a moron and the service couldn’t possibly run without a bloated and inefficient workforce.
- The bot problem is much worse than before the acquisition
- Search is completely broken, borderline unusable
Twitter as it stands post Musk is a disaster, though. Revenue has dropped off significantly. How is that a success?
Not to mention the absurdity of comparing something like Twitter to the federal government. It shows the staggering arrogance and ignorance of people in tech who think that.
The companies EBITDA is nearly double from when he purchased it so although revenue is down the company is making more money than before due to efficiencies. It’s probably worth about what he paid for it today. If advertisers come back, which I can see occurring with the huge cultural shift, it will certainly be worth well more than what he paid.
So why did the bankers that finance the loan write it down by nearly 80%? They have access to all the financial data and yet decided to take a major loss on their loan due to?
From what it appears, Late 2024, Fidelity wrote down their loans by 79% [1] and then sold it early 2025 for 97 cents on the dollar (of the reduced value) [2].
I really struggle to believe that the banks are just taking this massive loss by mistake and that the value is actually still there.
Fidelity was not part of the banks that sold their loans. Also it was a partial sale. The banks that sold their loans at just under their original valuation and profited, apparently. Original source reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/banks-sell-down-55-...
> At 97 cents, it is likely they sold at a profit, he added.
I would guess that the 3 cents loss on the loan value still results in profit due to payments which amounted to more than 3 cents + loan expenses.
I don't agree with parent that xitter is worth what he paid for it, far from it. EBIDTA isn't the whole story. But things do look better than a few months ago. So far I haven't seen a viable contender for a xitter replacement. I can't believe I'm saying this but I'm actually rooting for Threads.
I strongly doubt the current Twitter programmers could recreate Twitter from scratch. They are living of of the work a much larger number of programmers and building up a lot of technical debt.
There's this thing autistic people do where they try to reduce everything down to very simple systems that they can wrap their heads around. Sometimes this can be very powerful, but it oftentimes is an incorrect model of reality. Looking at the United States like a company is exactly this, and it's deeply misguided.
For Elon and all the neo Nazis who were banned from Twitter, Elon's takeover of the platform worked out great. For others, like trans people who were just living their online lives in a community they formed over years, Elon unleashed a barrage of hate and toxicity that forced them off the platform entirely.
The same will be true in our country. What Elon's doing now will work out great for him and neo Nazis, not so great for people that Elon and neo Nazis hates.
If I read this post 2 years ago it’d sound really relevant and current. But today it sounds fossilized. Like it came from a world that hasn’t existed for a long time. It’s amazing how much has changed in the last year. Like the Berlin Wall fell.
They were wrong. Now that Elon is applying the same philosophy to all of his companies and now the federal government, people are once again saying he doesn’t know what he’s doing.
At a certain point, you have to ask yourself if these people who complain like headless chickens are actually serious people …