Do you think there is a degree you can do on "how to run Twitter?" lol.
The ongoing Elon Twitter saga: "insert demographic" melts down
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So far, a GCSE in PR, HR, Marketing, Law & Economics would have helped.
It's tricky man. Some of us are at home watching fight videos on Reddit; others are the 2nd richest man in the world. Seems Musk and I have "don't really know what we are doing but getting paid for it" in common.
Probably similar time line he done the same to other companies. I'll reserve my judgment for a few years, and see if he really does fail or not.
But history shows he clearly understands business.
Soldato
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Well right now that Degree would be "how to train chimps to use hammers to fix delicate things"
I'm curious though thats all.
If its as @Fuzz says, and i am by no means saying its not, there should be some kind of reasonable timeline available as to when he stops breaking in order to learn surely?
You know 6 months maybe, 12 months, 2 years? How long is a reasonable expectation that something that was basically working needs to be bashed around in order to make it better.
If you were to take over Man U tomorrow would you decide the best course of action to take was to let all the players go, sack all the staff, level the stadium, or would you maybe try just a pep talk and some minor coaching staff changes before you went nuclear?
Haha yeah I guess.... it just takes a different kind of mentality to be a transformation CEO. Incremental change isn't how you turn things around, that's for sure. Nothing worse than a limp wristed CEO who doesn't crack on.
If Man U wasn't generating money and you had staff that wasn't required would you reduce staffing or keep it the same?
Bad analogy really considering, he hasn't sacked all the stuff or level anything. For what it's worth nearly every big tech company is sacking staff. Pretty sure Facebook has just sacked a lot more than musk did?
Other tech companies are trimming the pandemic hiring spree fat (10%-20%) Elon is cutting to the bone ~75%
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Depends it went from a minor income to expense issue to a major one
When business are growing then tend to need more staff, when business are transforming they need more staff, when businesses are stable they tend to slowly overstaff.
When businesses are at risk of going under they tend to hack massive chunks out of the workforce, trim literally everything they can and hope to survive in some kind of form so they can try to rise again.
Which one sounds most like twitter right now?
You need to read some Jack Welch I think!
He's sacked something like 75% of the staff, IIRC it's gone from around 8k to well under 2k.
In with that 75% were all the people that brought in the money, and most if not all the staff that are legally required for Twitter to operate in many parts of the world, including the EU, and many of the most senior and experienced staff, and the entire groups that did things like maintained and updated the various mobile phone clients (next time Apple of Google do a major update it's possibly going to be fun, as Twitter no longer has dedicated experts on those OS's).
And in the Man U analogy he's stopped paying the mortgage on the stadium, he's sacked everyone except the top goal scorers (they're hardcore, they get the goals!) so the team consists of 3 people, and he's refusing to allow the broadcasters access to film games, and complaining they're biased against him because they've stopped paying him for the rights to show the games, meanwhilst the stadium is gradually rotting away as the only people left to do any of the maintenance on it is Keith the mascot and Dot who used to take the lads their half time oranges (but it's ok, she's cheap as she's only contracted for an hour a week, but likes to hang around and tidy the changing room up a bit).
If you buy a company with an interest in turning it around, what you don't do is load the company up with so much debt that it's now losing 3 times as much before just on the interest on the money you borrowed to buy it. You also don't fire people whose job you've no clue about. Normally when you buy a company you do so with either a plan in place and some understanding of how the company works, or you buy the company and try to leave things alone as much as possible whilst you learn about it.
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Soldato
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So to summarise the last few days.
Everything is or will be great, and it's all thanks to Elon and his master plan. If it looks bad, then spin it with some random theory as to why that bad is not bad and bam, it's greatness again.
Everything that is actually bad. It's those pesky purple hair monsters.
We wouldn't understand as nuance is hard and we're just users of a social platform. What do we know. How can someone who plays 3d chess understand that of a 4d chess player! Although 'they' get it and have figured out the top secret plan that Elon has that'll lead twitter to £440 billion valuation.
Did I miss anything?
Everything is or will be great, and it's all thanks to Elon and his master plan. If it looks bad, then spin it with some random theory as to why that bad is not bad and bam, it's greatness again.
Everything that is actually bad. It's those pesky purple hair monsters.
We wouldn't understand as nuance is hard and we're just users of a social platform. What do we know. How can someone who plays 3d chess understand that of a 4d chess player! Although 'they' get it and have figured out the top secret plan that Elon has that'll lead twitter to £440 billion valuation.
Did I miss anything?
With all due respect.... said no CEO ever.
You have 100 days to make a difference, otherwise the markets will get spooked that you are just going to maintain the status quo.
The point is Twitter seems to be working just as much as before; we'll wait until we see some financials come out before saying he has fired the crown jewels.
We agree often @dLockers, but in this case I don’t think that that’s true at all.
While obviously I’m not on Elon’s scale, I run a successful software development company and I think that Elon’s recent shenanigans look like inexperienced, naive nonsense for the most part.
His actions are precisely the kind of thing that I used to see from mid level managers who thought that they had to “shake things up” to get noticed.
They just looked silly and their lack of understanding and expertise were very quickly exposed.
Maybe he’s playing 4d chess that just so happens to appear exactly the same as the kind of thing that every new, inexperienced leader who’s put into a new role does, but I’ve no good reason to think that’s true just yet.
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You notice the bit before that, where you have a plan?
Also the markets were spooked before Musk bought Twitter, the Markets are now utterly spooked because the only way it could become more of a clown show is if he started handing out red noses and theatrical face paint.
He's gone into it with zero plan, zero understanding about the most basic things such as the legal obligations, and he's basically throwing stuff around utterly at random, whilst he's pretending he knows everything an ever increasing number of the core Twitter users (the ones people use twitter to communicate with/keep up to date with) are getting in any and all digital lifeboats and if not abandoning ship making sure they've got lodgings ready elsewhere for when Musk either finally breaks it, or does something that puts them at risk.
Having said that we're 100+ days in and so far the only difference Musk has made to twitter is he's increased it's liabilities by pretty much every metric, from debt to decreasing income, to legal liabilities in both civil and criminal cases, and is making it more and more unstable.
well actually if a company was in trouble and hired a new ceo to change strategy they would have hired someone with a plan/vision. This was the first problem so Musks without any idea should have spent the first months researching. Downsizing staff might be important, but this is a delicate process that takes a lot of time to plan and select which departments and what kind of staff count is required. It is also best done iteratively, cut 5-10% and then reassess. Twitter had a relatively small head count and but was simply impossible to properly function with the massive cuts - there will be massive legal and functional impacts on this.
What markets.
He bought it and took it private. There is no share price to speculate on.
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