It's been overrun by Nazis and is worth a fraction of it's purchase price. Having a website be technically online is not the measure of if it's "doing well".
>Operationally, Twitter is doing well, even with 80% of the workforce gone.
>It’s pretty clearly a success story on any objective measure.
Your comment actually underscores the problem. That is, even if Twitter really is more efficient operationally, the overall business is greatly diminished.
You point to the advertiser feud as the reason for revenue drop-off, as if it's a tangential thing. But, in fact, part of the reason for that is the chaos, as well as other, let's say..."human dynamics". And, now we're seeing a mass exodus from Twitter, the impact of which remains to be seen. It's all related. Having humans in the mix makes things far messier.
So, business success is not merely about operational efficiency and, when it comes to government, it's orders of magnitude more complex.
The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter. They care about bad press. If Twitter was a lesser known company or Elon Musk wasn't a political enemy of liberal journalists, there would have been minimal revenue loss. This had nothing to do with the layoffs. Twitter would have the exact same problem even if they kept all the employees.
>The advertisers couldn't care less about operational chaos at Twitter
I wasn't referring to operational chaos or layoffs. I was referring to social chaos—you know, all of the controversial "free speech" stuff.
You could certainly characterize it all as merely political. But many would say (do say) that the kind of speech, disinformation, etc. that now occurs regularly there is much more than that.
Obviously, you're free to disagree, but then that leads to a somewhat tedious and unresolvable discussion wherein we debate what other people actually think or how much hate speech occurs; or we disagree over semantics of the "who decides what's hate speech?" variety.
Overall, I think most would agree that things changed under Musk. Some call it free speech. Some call it hate speech. But, whatever side you choose, it's controversial by definition. Advertisers, especially those serving a "general audience", tend to not like controversy.
Everyone has the right to choose and, among those with that right, are advertisers.
objectively, the ad business used to bring in around $5 billion. It now brings in closer to 1. Sure, costs got cut, and now it's cashflow positive, but if the goal was really to reform the business from a strictly monetary point of view, it's impossible not to bring up the fact that there could have been an extra $4 billion in profit, if someone had just been less polarizing of a character.
so objectively, looking strictly at the numbers, it's not a winner. if I were a PE firm and my hired CEO's personality caused revenue to drop that hard, I'd find another CEO who could just as easily have cut costs without all the insanity. insanity brings risk and has cultural and political costs, and who wants that? Just make me money and don't get me in the newspapers.
so the only reasonable conclusion is that it's not about money or the stated goals but about power. Ever get annoyed with a waitress at a restaurant over something small? A normal person would just brush it off, but if you're a billionaire, you can buy the restaurant, cut her wages (because firing her is less humiliating), and have her boss treat her like shit, because it's fun for a billionaire to flex on the peasants like that.
It stopped being about the money a couple hundred million dollars ago.
