We do just about everything with one or more Postgres databases. We have workers that query the db for tasks, do the work, and update the db. Portals that are the read-only view of the work being performed, and it's pretty amazing how far we've gotten with just Postgres and no real tuning on our end. There's been a couple scenarios where query time was excessive and we solved by learning a bit more about how Postgres worked and how to redefine our data model. It seems to be the swiss army knife that allows you to excel at most general cases, and if you need to do something very specific, well at that point you probably need a different type of database.
You'd think there would be enough controls in place to not allow a couple hundred million to go missing, even if there was a "hack" on one employee's computer.
I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price.
We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.
This. First and foremost, Twitter's product was never its software but its users, and people who remark cynically about this in every other instance ("If you're not paying for the product, you're the product.") seem to have forgotten the maxim when blinded by politics or celebrities. There are plenty of start-up Twitter/FB clones, like Tribel and Gab, but none of them have a large userbase. Twitter's is big and international, despite whatever demographic quirks it may have. Musk bought Twitter for its userbase.
Musk has already said that he more or less intends to turn Twitter into a global WeChat, an all-in-one app that does payment, micro-apps, social media, video, etc. The steps he's taken already, even in the short period he's owned Twitter, point to that. He's already integrating payments by getting people to pay $8 for a blue check, which means payment validation of identity; there's a way to turn your Twitter avatar into an NFT, but only if you attach your crypto wallet—logical next steps are to turn Twitter into a payment platform, get people to order food over it, verify identity and attach online identities to financial records, develop a financial/speech surveillance system, and pretty soon you have WeChat 2.0 but with the NSA lurking in the shadows instead of China's equivalent. He can't get to that point without existing users.
But why did he fight so hard to back out? I just can't understand why someone with a grand vision for Twitter puts in an offer in April and spends the next 6 months and millions on lawyers fighting to get out of the deal.
Except that maybe, just maybe, users won't stay if Twitter suddenly is not Twitter anymore but some kind of WeChat.
Users are what gives it value, but users are here for the app, not for the brand. That's what Metasbook seems to have forgotten when making Instagram look like TikTok. If people want TikTok, they will go to TikTok, not to Instagram.
Back when the Boring Company was new, although I thought it was weird even then, I had enough trust in his business vision to be motivated to guess how it might fit.
Best I got was, experience with tunnel boring machines would be really useful for Marian and Lunar colonies.
Now though? Well, now I think it was always merely the billionaire equivalent of me picking up Blender, modelling half a spaceship before I get bored, quit, and forget I even have Blender installed for another six months.
I mean, I don't think the dumb tunnel under vegas is good evidence of not being a brilliant engineer. He obviously has a very deep understanding of engineering type shit as well as engineering management[0][1]. He's got engineer brain! Engineer brain can make you do a lot of really stupid shit even if you're a great engineer.
That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time.
To be honest the thing that worries me most about the dumb Las Vegas tunnel, is not that he had a bad idea. I have bad ideas all the time too. But my bad ideas don't turn into dumb tunnels because I have limited resources (he doesn't) and because I have feedback from the harsh reality.
The dumb tunnel makes me think Elon Musk is fully insulated from reality. Nobody around him dared to tell him the tunnel was dumb. And or he didn't listened.
Fast forward today where he decides on a whim that every engineer must stop working remotely and must instead work like crazy to satisfy his ego. And here again the feedback from reality seems minimal on him.
I think and I hope that the good engineers at Twitter are making plans to leave this terrible boss ASAP.
I suspect it's all about his process and he doesn't really have a grand plan but a general strategy. He is really good in few things and as a result he thrives in precarious situations. IMHO, he really believes in Twitters potential in he is trying to find the solution to dig himself out of the pit he jumped in.
Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration. Of course, if a solution exists.
It is like going back to the basics and look at the situation with a fresh eye and understand why something doesn't work, create a solution and try again if the solution doesn't work.
> Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration.
This works well in a startup whose business position is a kind of blank slate and you have lots of VC money compared to you run rate, but when your existing business relies on established trust in the market, uninformed blind rapid iteration that harms brand position and existing relationships adds additional problem while you are exploring the solution space for the preexisting problem.
The Boring company is how he will build tunnel networks on mars, which has no magnetosphere. I thought everyone knew all his efforts were oriented towards colonizing mars. Why electric cars? There is plenty of lithium on mars but no oil. Etc.
Personally I prefer to have a boss that lives on planet Earth
So if I worked at Twitter and was not on the list of people he thought he needed to fire after reviewing swiftly millions of lines of code, I would make plans to leave ASAP
Then why did he fight for months and months and ostensibly spend millions in legal fees to back out of the deal? I just can't square that with him truly wanting the platform. If he wanted it from the beginning, the acquisition would've been completed in what, May? He made the offer in April.
I may be missing something, but would it have been that hard to fail to get financing and get out of it, since it was a bad deal that others shouldn't want to finance, if he had started working on failing to get financing before he... succefully lined up financing?
I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw away his and others billions.
The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.
If you look at the timeline, he made an unsolicited offer with no details, the twitter BoD instituted a poison pill, then he lined up all the financing and made a second ("final") offer with very specific details about the funding (including commitment letters for the loans), then he negotiated to buy it with no due diligence, etc. Morgan Stanley, etc, already agreed to loan the money back in April. At the time, the big banks did want to finance it!
Why did he not do any due diligence before buying? It's not like he had FOMO he was going to miss out. That's the part I don't understand in all of this.
No idea, but he seems like the kind of guy whose ego can't suffer from the embarrassment of being called out. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he did all this just because he was incapable of losing face for acting like an idiot. Joke's on him though.
To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of the guys on his van were in tech.
When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on at the end of the day and they would talk about their severance. The first question in response to “I got laid off” was “What’s your severance?”
At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a box. He played the game, even though he wasn’t in tech, and asked one of the guys with a box, “What’s your severance?”
No, there's a $1B fee under extremely limited circumstances. There is no written agreement on how to handle any other circumstance (hence the court case).
> Either Twitter or Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement if, among certain other circumstances, (1) the Merger has not been consummated on or before October 24, 2022, which date will be extended for six months if the closing conditions related to applicable antitrust and foreign investment clearances and the absence of any applicable law or order making illegal or prohibiting the Merger have not been satisfied as of such date; or (2) Twitter’s stockholders fail to adopt the Merger Agreement. Twitter may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including to allow Twitter to enter into a definitive agreement for a competing acquisition proposal that constitutes a Superior Proposal (as defined in the Merger Agreement). Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including prior to the adoption of the Merger Agreement by Twitter’s stockholders if the Board recommends that Twitter’s stockholders vote against the adoption of the Merger Agreement or in favor of any competing acquisition proposal.
> ...
> Upon termination of the Merger Agreement under other specified limited circumstances, Parent will be required to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1.0 billion. Specifically, this termination fee is payable by Parent to Twitter if the Merger Agreement is terminated by Twitter because (1) the conditions to Parent’s and Acquisition Sub’s obligations to consummate the Merger are satisfied and the Parent fails to consummate the Merger as required pursuant to, and in the circumstances specified in, the Merger Agreement; or (2) Parent or Acquisition Sub’s breaches of its representations, warranties or covenants in a manner that would cause the related closing conditions to not be satisfied. Mr. Musk has provided Twitter with a limited guarantee in favor of Twitter (the “Limited Guarantee”). The Limited Guarantee guarantees, among other things, the payment of the termination fee payable by Parent to Twitter, subject to the conditions set forth in the Limited Guarantee. [1]
Tbh I thought that was the entire play. $1 billion is way cheaper than $44 and whatever he just sold of Tesla to keep Twitter afloat.
Jack hyping Elon as twitter’s great hope and such I almost expected this was some subtle game to get that $1 billion to Twitter
Now I can’t help but wonder if Jack was tweeting such praise to goad Elons ego into it. But in hindsight I’m probably giving these guys too much credit
Story I read in one of the tweets from his old friend was that he has surrounded himself with too many yes man who work overtime to boost his ego. I can imagine he casually mentioning idea of buying Twitter and all the yes men praising him for his brilliance. No one did due diligence to figure out that he would need to sell $4B of his TSLA stock just to avoid bankruptcy after spending $44B.
Allot of how Elon handled the layoffs from what's public doesn't sound ideal. But also idk how many of those people would've had a job at twitter for much longer anyway. We get a post in HN every other day at the moment of x company laying of 1000 of people.
Twitter was almost certain to see layoffs had Musk not bought it, but they’d have been slower, more considered, less harmful, and probably smaller because the company didn’t have a ludicrous leveraged buyout $1bn annual debt bill.
The way things are going now there’s an increasingly real possibility that Twitter may not exist in a few months, putting the jobs of the other 3000 or so employees at risk too. Not to mention all the people who used Twitter to make a living.
The destruction of lives and so much value for one man’s ego is astounding.
Getting kicked out of the App Store could put the company in a death spiral, but I still have a really hard time seeing how that leads to the company ceasing to exist within a few months.
I think you're getting hung up on the technical difference between Twitter continuing to exist in any recognisable form and continuing to exist as a shell of a company with neither revenue nor staff. I see them as functionally the same.
A few weeks ago I didn't think this sort of outcome was possible, I thought Musk might muddle a bit and cause a long term decline, but nothing so sudden. Now, with the FTC consent decree potentially breached, advertisers running for the hills, Musk himself saying the company is close to bankruptcy, the resignation of virtually all key top staff including their head of Trust & Safety, and the departure of so many SREs that it will cause stability issues, there's a perfect storm developing that'll have mutually reinforcing effects. Social networks don't always die slowly, sometimes they collapse as Hemingway described: Slowly, then all at once.
The death knell would be if Twitter is kicked off one or both of the App Stores, but I think long before that the company will become completely unsustainable financially. I expect Musk to successively lay off more and more staff to try to stay ahead of that, making things worse.
They are seeing a massive advertiser exodus, have apparently created potential new FTC/DOJ issues regarding the existing privacy consent decree with their desire to push-down responsibilty to facilitate velocity, are seeing policy churn that undermines trust, and their big revenue ideas are becoming a for-pay social network and payment processor with that trust deficit.
When you are this rich, stuff like this doesn’t matter. Even if he lost all the 40 Bn USD means he’ll still be the richest person on earth, that’s how much money he has. To keep with the poker analogy, his “bluff” involved only 40 poker chips, but he has 200 after the fact, while his “opponents” have 1 or 2 each.
But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no matter what he does. When you are this rich, you’ll always end up making money.
You are neglecting to consider the other fundamental needs of a filthy rich person like an Elon Musk, two that are of greater priority than sheer wealth even, name and fame.
Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me. Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.
Anybody can build a twitter at a tiny fraction of the cost of Twitter. The problem is always user acquisition. It's extraodinarily difficult to get a vast segment of the userbase to switch to your platform. Even getting a tiny handful would cost vast sums of money. Think about it. If it could be done, it would be done and we'd see a largely segmented social media landscape with hundreds of twitter clones. It's not the case.
Isn't one exception to this the case when you control both the old and new platform, and can technically just migrate what content possible and just replace the old one with new? It technically does not even have to be "new" platform, it could be presented as "twitter redesign".
Twitter has 450M monthly active users. Elon bought it for $44bn. With ~$5bn in operating expenses, that gives you an absolutely insane CAC of $90 to play with.
Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon.
Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
Top comment on app.net shutdown notice on HN ( Jan2017):
> "So to recap, Twitter exploded onto the scene in 2007, the "fail whale" appeared a lot, developers made all sorts of wonderful programs hooked into Twitter, the fail whale disappeared, Twitter started to destroy the app ecosystem, App.net launched to great fanfare in response to Twitter's knuckleheaded anti-developer stance, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber arrived and knocked all the nerds out of the top spots on Twitterholic, Donald Trump came and bludgeoned everyone with his bombastic prose, and now App.net is shutting down. And after all this, Twitter still does not have a viable business model."
I don't think you even need top dev talent to build Twitter now. Maybe you did back when it started, but it's not something a team of experienced, competent, 'regular' engineers couldn't build and more successfully than 'top' talent.
Let us start with engineering team A and and an equally talented engineering team B. If team B had the luck to work on a successful product due to a successful market, we call them talented. If A flamed out due to unpredictable reasons (that their market turned out to be shit), we lambast the lack of ability of team A.
But technical talent is definitely not overrated - because there are too many examples where talented teams have built unicorn multi-billion $ businesses.
I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
The problem with your proposal is that Elons Twitter followers do not equal a profitable market. He needs Twitter’s brand and established user base to bootstrap whatever X is (something payment related probably). If it were just a bunch of his fans it wouldn’t have the penetration needed to loop more people in.
I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
So let's say we're being generous and say Elon has 10M hardcore followers.
So $44B/10M = $4.4k per follower on Twitter. If he can sell each of those a Tesla it might be fine.
I'm beginning to hear the term "Muskmobile" bandied about in not a good way though. Consumer Reports is reporting a ton of reliability problems as Tesla scales up [1]. And Ford/GM is not far behind in their electric offerings either.
Elon reported on Nov 7 that Twitter usage was at an all time high. Do you believe that is dishonest? Or do you believe this uptick will be short-lived?
> I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Two things to counter that idea:
1. Social apps aren't about features, they're about the network effect and the user base. Rebuilding that of Twitter at this stage would have been very hard.
2. Even assuming that was possible, the time it would take to rebuild something like it means guaranteed failure.
> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.
Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.
For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.
Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.
Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate.
Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
> Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them.
Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1].
> Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!
> Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability.
So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to.
> He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
Probably no. Read the post in the comment above.
Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing.
Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3].
His tweets:
> Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks
> Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL
, @YaelEisenstat
, @rashadrobinson
, @JGo4Justice
, @normanlschen
, @DerrickNAACP
, @TheBushCenter
Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides
about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies
As for this one:
> How is his current reality any better than starting fresh.
He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth.
Most people underestimate two things, IMHO. One is obvious: the cost of convincing everyone that Muskitter is the place to go.
The second one? You could NOT build a twitter equivalent for a billion dollars. I'd be happy to take bets.
Corollary to number two: building it means actually two things: one, building it, and two, having a team that can start from the moment of finished building it, and continue developing and bug fixing and supporting the platform from T+1 onwards.
This is a pretty naive take on how hard it is to build a application that relies on any kind of network effect, activation, and retention, not to mention a complex ad platform that needs CS/Sales to even get it off the ground.
It would be even cheaper to just buy the political influence he is trying to wield by directly funding politicians like his buddy Peter Thiel. Corrupting the GOP is surprisingly inexpensive for the value you receive in return.
That money would get you a very robust prototype, but getting to scale requires building a lot of random other features that most users aren't aware of, plus being around long enough with half-decent community management to acquire users.
Companies like Twitter don't get big for no reason. Yes, there's obviously some bloat, but a lot of it's just random 'non-core' features that still need to get done.
> So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too
No. He got that number of followers because he is on Twitter. He would not get the same number of followers on some other social media platoform. Trump had 20 times as many followers on Twitter than he has on Truth Social. And those Truth Social users are less valuable.
Engineers like to think that the engineering is the important part of platforms. It's not. The engineering can be easily replicated. The valuable part of platforms is the users. You buy the platforms to buy the users.
I’m just guessing, but maybe Elon really loves Twitter. Building a new platform wouldn’t allow him to rescue the thing he loves. Seems more like an emotional decision than a logical one.
Sorry that happened to you. I had a similar experience not being approved for being different with my first high school crush. We both liked each other as much as young kids can like each other. What surprised me was when it came time to ask her to date formally, she didn't seem interested. This was surprising to me based on all of our interactions and I found out a couple of months later from her friend that it was because of me being "different" and fear of how her family would react if she dated someone "different". She didn't want to upset me so she never told me, but damn it hurt just as bad to hear it from someone else.
So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?
Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".
My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".
