The price 100% was $20/mo as previously reported by journalists until Twitter dunked on it, and Elon's interpretation of the backlash is "the price is too high" and not "any price makes no sense at all."
You joke, but after reading some texts from Musk and his social circle [1], I find it plausible that that is how some of these business decisions get made.
This is probably fine though, it is the Elon way of doing business. Make fast decisions and try and whole heap of things. He then gets criticised for not delivering on the majority of them but still comes out ahead of orgs that take 6 months to make the decision in the first place.
Doesn't seem like too bad a method to me. Apart from in situations where you have a ton of data (e.g. Amazon) most product prices are pulled out of someone's arse anyway.
It's such... odd behavior. For sure Stephen King who has a net worth of $500 million dollars does not mean "the price is too high".
If Elon is successful, even I will read the business school case study on it, because it flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems and... well just about everything. The only way this works is if Elon's internal processes are way different from his public persona.
One of the things I admire about Elon (which is saying a lot...) is that for whatever reason, he's ready to bet the farm over and over. Whether he's some genius tactician or an impulsive moron, he just bought Twitter and is poised to drastically alter it.
"flies in the face of everything I understand about complex systems" indeed!
Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day, "you know what, !@#$ it. We're done managing this complex system. Let's assume Russia doesn't have or won't use nukes and change our entire doctrine overnight. Get ready to deploy everything."
There's a real possibility Elon buys Twitter for billions and runs it straight into the ground because he does not understand complex systems. Or maybe he gambles and is lucky. Or maybe he really does _get it_ and this is all in some absolutely bizarre way, calculated.
I don't quite think it is luck - but a weird second thing.
Musk has a reality distortion field. I think he is a bloviating jerk but I know a lot of really really smart and dedicated engineers in software and in more traditional fields like mech-e and aerospace who would rather work for Musk than any other person and are willing to take pay cuts to work for him. This means he really can surround himself with very skilled people who can distill his "fuck it, we are doing FOO" commands into real plans.
What this tells me is not that Musk is a visionary but that a lot of shitty visions are nevertheless achievable if you've got enough smart people around you.
The distortion field has been significantly fading over the past couple years. And it might be gone entirely soon enough depending on how poorly the Twitter acquisition turns out to be.
Tesla is making record profits right now and SpaceX is achieving things no other space company has come close to. Twitter is basically a vanity project.
Mission, and there are a lot of smart people in the world. Also, some people identify with him because he acts completely the same as That One Guy in the university who had studied programming before getting to the CS classes.
I think that a lot of people also don't have to directly work with him, and there are a lot of assholes running companies. That being said, Musk's behavior personally turned me off from all of his companies' products, despite maybe 5 years ago thinking "if I ever buy a car, it'll be a Tesla"
Like a certain real gungho-ness and actual knowledge that then turns into their whole personality. Assuming they actually know everything the world has to offer because they figured a bunch of stuff out on their own in this one domain in the past.
Someone who ends up getting something done, but in the most chaotic manner possible and with loads of unforced errors because they are not absorbing information from their peers.
Yeah but I feel like "work on twitter" is way less of a .... shall we say noble/socially fulfilling job. I'd value working on sending people to mars (not to live, just to do a walk on it), it'd make me part of something historic. One day people would write books and make documentaries about the work done to make it happen, and even if I weren't featured for the entire rest of my life if I could tell people "I worked on the software for the Mars shuttle" or whatever and have them go "Oh cool!". Hell, even before it succeeds I think it'd have social capital with the right crowd: pushing boundaries to put someone on mars is a cool job....
Twitter on the other hand... "Oh I work at twitter doing software". That's.... nowhere near as exciting or epic a thing to tell people that you do.
So he might have a harder time finding smart people willing to work for less than market rates at twitter compared to finding them for SpaceX and Tesla
> Imagine a new form of news and communication that solves all of our social woes, allows people to be informed, and have constructive discourse.
I did imagine that happening once - I imagined the internet would lead to that. The state of things now is very different from what the me of 15 years ago imagined, in part because of things like twitter in fact. I now believe that social woes have significant parts that aren't just misunderstandings they are big problems that can't be solved only through dialogue. Further many of the misunderstandings are actually deliberate misrepresentations - how many people who are pro-choice have you seen making the incredibly bad faith argument that pro-lifers just want to control/punish women? (Note I am pro-choice myself, but that particular argument is a really shitty obviously untrue argument and I see it constantly and it really gives me the shits).
> I'm sure Elon will have a mission statement that will appeal to some people.
This I do agree with, but I think the pool of people that are willing to work crazy hours at sub-standard pay is smaller when the work is making whatever Musk's improved version of twitter looks like than it is for putting someone on mars or making electric cars mainstream.
I don't think the communication problems are inherent to the internet but I'm sympathetic to your greater point.
I think the gamification of communication on the Internet is one of the worst inventions, feeding into a lot of very negative neural architecture. Encourages people to seek quick validation from there like-minded peers, and encourages a sense of superiority people can only get from knocking down strawman. This is exacerbated by brief and content without any Nuance or resemblance to reality. In a lot of ways, Twitter incorporates the worst aspects of this. Reddit is arguably worse in terms of gamification, but at least it doesn't have a 144 character limit and tools to curate your consumption.
I don't think the problems are inherent to the internet... sadly I think they are inherent to human beings.
Twitter by design exacerbates a lot of these problems though IMO. Character limits, the way replies work and things are displayed such as to make any particularly active comment section practically impossible to follow, etc
EDIT: I do actually genuinely hope that Twitter dies, but I am scared that is a monkey paw where whatever the next thing happens to be it ends up being worse
Twitter is a social media platform, that space is never going to have the kind of social cache novel space exploration does. It doesn't matter how amazing of a communication app or social media platform it is, as a job it is less epic than working on getting a guy to mars - this is my documentary argument from earlier.
Elon offers people a chance to operate at a true 100% on a thing that matters. Next to that, work-life balance pales. And comp? Comp follows company glory. Tesla engineers are rich, man.
I don't understand Elon either, but I'm certain that he's not an impulsive moron who doesn't understand complex system, or that he's financing all this with his dad's emerald mine money.
For me, there is enough track record to prove he has some very unique business skills, and often succeeds by doing things that conventionally looks crazy.
That said, Elon's Twitter may well be a failure regardless. Pretty sure it won't be boring though :)
The emerald mine claim comes from statements made by Errol Musk (Elon's father) who described it as a part share in an Zambian mine which resulted in a total lifetime revenues in the order of a few hundred thousand dollars. None of what Errol has said has been corroborated by anyone. No independent sources exist. It's also worth noting that Zambia is not a conflict gem country and an emerald mine in Zambia would not be morally problematic absent any specific evidence.
(And regardless of any of the above, I've never been particularly enamoured of criticism of a person because of who their parents are or what their parents did. Blaming Elon for being the son of white people in South Africa is kinda gross, actually.)
"Who payed for those computers in the 90s that Musk had access to?"
Its like yeah ok, he wasn't found in a dumbster during a civil war. Is that the level now, where nobody can get any credit because they were not born into abject poverty?
That just basically means that 99% of people who achieve anything don't deserve credit for anything.
Its basically materialist logic taken to an absurd degree.
Or those takes where it’s argued that because his companies have many hundreds of employees, it’s literally impossible for Elon to have contributed anything of value whatsoever.
Or even more hilariously, that Elon is some kind of marketing genius. Seriously, the guy is the opposite of a smooth communicator, and leans heavily into his autistic sense of humour. Yet apparently the only reason anyone ever bought a Tesla is because they were suckered in by a slick sales pitch.
Agreed. Though it does seem that Elon's family were quite well socially connected and that at least some of his early success in raising funds comes from that.
For instance, his connection to Roelof Botha, who in turn leveraged the connections made by his father when he was spending a lot of time in the US as South Africa's last apartheid-era foreign minister.
Def. won't be boring. Really we only get to see probably less than half of what he's planning. If the other half is more strategic, then he'll do fine, if the other half mirrors his public image, then I can't see it working.
Matt Levine has an interesting take on this [0], basically that nothing in that Musk claims of their behaviour meets the specification of "cause" in their employment contracts, and further that the golden parachutes are a good thing in that they prevent the C-suite from being focused on their continuing salary:
"The basic problem with Musk’s efforts to walk away from these severance agreements — beyond the lack of actual arguments — is that if he can stiff these executives then no golden parachute is binding. The point of a golden parachute is that a CEO with a golden parachute will sell his company to a buyer whom he doesn’t like, if that’s what is best for shareholders. If the buyer can stiff the CEO on the parachute payments because they don’t like each other, then no buyer will ever pay severance, and no CEO will ever trust it."
"And then Elon Musk showed up for his first day of work as Twitter’s chief executive officer — technically its Chief Twit — and said “hey, do you have any other contracts I could violate?”
Oh, this is going to be a fun read.
In response to your quote, I guess he did it as revenge for making him go through with it.
I really don’t want to live in a world in which so much depends on impulsive individuals. Your example sounds like a nightmare. That’s no way to make decisions.
If you read the stories of many "successful" CEOs (I'm thinking Jobs here, but there are others) the decisions they'd make often would come out as quite impulsive.
If you dig significantly you might find that they're not as impulsive as they seem, that the person was actually considering many aspects but playing their cards close until cut-off time.
This is true, and so far Elon is doing exactly the thing everyone says you can’t do with a social network. If he succeeds, it will completely change the space. Also interesting change of strategy during an economic downturn.
But I do think one difference at least from where I’m sitting, is usually the response is, that’s crazy, but if it works you’ll be rich!
I’m not even really clear on what the “if it works” is in this situation, I guess if he proves that people are willing to pay $8 per month for a social network?
Yeah. It does sound like a nightmare. And I'm glad that, for now at least, those who get to make the decisions are not as impulsive as countless people are online about the matter.
And when it comes to a $44 billon purchase, it sounds like a nightmare to affect it so impulsively.
At least, unlike the nuclear fallout, it's not my money, I guess.
It's easy to be impulsive and make risky decisions when those decisions aren't actually risky for you. He's the richest person in the world. Even if he made a terrible decision to "bet the farm" and lost 99.5% of his wealth, he'd still be a billionaire and in the top 0.00005% of net worth in the world.
> Forgive me for this analogy but it's in the news: Imagine if NATO just said one day
No, I definitely won't forgive you your 'analogy', because it's sneaking in a highly irresponsible argument for military escalation into a completely unrelated discussion.
Let me help you out: the point of the analogy _is_ to underline how highly irresponsible Elon’s approach is.
I think one could criticize that the analogy hyperbole, but I’m quite amused at the pearl clutching that somehow I’m trying to push for nuclear annihilation. Saying the words three times in a mirror doesn’t make it happen.
He’s saying the price is bullshit, not that he can’t afford it. To him, it offers basically no value. While him being on Twitter does offer Twitter value.
He’s probably right, although it doesn’t generalize to most celebrities who do have a vested interest in paying to promote themselves.
And if Twitter’s user experience degrades to the point where King can’t Tweet effectively without a blue checkmark, then the platform is deeply screwed.
And what will he do about the hundreds of "RealStephenKing" "OfficialStephenKing" "StephenKingTwitter" accounts that will spring up and start scamming people and linking them to fake websites? How much will that cost Stephen King?
> Twitter offers him value, or he wouldn't be on it
I mean yes, but that value might be so low as to not be worth paying for. Not even for the monetary cost, but for the effort involved in setting up the payment (entering card details, etc) and then checking your bill is what you expect for the rest of time. That tiny amount of extra effort might make twitter not worth it alone for some people, even without the financial cost.
And even that yes it does offer value I'd qualify in that the value might ultimately on reflection be considered to be ultimately a loss on net. For example a heroin addict gets value out of heroin, but on balance the value they get (a fleeting pleasure) often isn't worth the damage done to their lives, but you could say "well it obviously offers value or they wouldn't be taking it". Note that I'm not claiming twitter is addictive or damaging like heroin, just trying to point out that "must have value because they do it" isn't really a solid argument a lot of the time
When Oprah is seen dining at a restaurant, the restaurant gets more value from the PR than Oprah gets from the meal. That does not lead to the conclusion that she should go open a restaurant.
Some blue checks need Twitter (mid-level youtubers, for instance). Some don't (Stephen King, for instance). In either case, Twitter needs the blue checks because they are, to a large degree, the reason non-blue-checks visit and engage with Twitter.
I can see someone like Stephen King being annoyed at having to pay anything when his presence is probably helping Twitter quite a bit to begin with.
Why does he care? Seems like that's worse for Twitter than it is for him.
[EDIT] My point is, from King's perspective, this likely looks like "you're here and making $X over what you would if you just relied on your fans to repost all your stuff on here for you, we're making $Y more than we otherwise would because you're here, plus we've given you this blue-check thing to solve a problem we have, but now $Y isn't enough and we're going to make you pay money to keep participating in this program that exists to solve a problem for us."
You can see how, unless $X is pretty big, someone who's already rich might say, "well fine, fuck you too" over such a thing.
I'm struggling to understand how that would not be true. Nobody follows a Twitter link to see what Joe Blow posted about anything. They follow them to see what someone they've heard of posted. People create accounts to follow blue checks, or to try to network with them. I get that there are several market segments for Twitter but ~all of them are pretty dependent on blue checks to drive eyeballs to the site and to keep people coming back, as far as I can tell. If people just want a group chat with other nobodies, Whatsapp exists.
Thing is, the "blue checks" aren't all Stephen King level famous. If you're doing much notable at all, and using the platform, you've probably got a blue check. I do not, for the record—I'm not sure I even have an account?—but I see an awful lot of them on fairly niche but interesting & active personal accounts. Take them out and the best content goes back to being "I'm a Twitter Shitter!" kinds of stuff, like in the very early days—and the novelty for that is long gone.
If these posters stay but let their blue checks lapse, we go back to having an impersonation problem, which is mostly a problem for Twitter, which they may want to solve. Perhaps for accounts that are likely to be impersonated they could introduce some kind of free verification system....
For King and many other blue checks it's a status symbol. A way for the Lord to distinguish himself from the peasants.
King (aptly named) would be happier if it was a Veblen good that cost $100,000/mo, which he could afford, but the peasants can't.
Elon is mocking King and his status symbol by saying "fine, how about $8?", which from the King's perspective, is worse than $20 because even more peasants will have it. The Blue Check is easier to get than a Netflix subscription.
I think you're misreading how much an elderly ultra-famous and quite rich author gives a shit about his "status" on some stupid website like Twitter.
I think he was insulted at the idea of having to pay anything to be verified on the platform, when both his presence and his being verified are helpful to twitter and make twitter money, even if they do also drive some book sales for him. I took it as his saying that he'd respond to such an insult (being asked to pay) by simply leaving, because Twitter and whatever little extra money it's making him don't really matter much to him.
I doubt he's alone in that thinking. Though sure, some celebs, most or all brands (that's who they should be soaking with monthly charges), and the media will stick around until/unless the platform enters clear decline and a viable alternative emerges.
Yeesh, what is with the Twitter/Musk fanboy crowd and journalists and blue checks. It's such an unhinged and nonsensical hatred. Reeks of being jealous.
Completely wrongheaded. If anything, twitter should be paying anonymous users. Bluechecks are the ones who use twitter to build their personal brand, sell books, etc..
Yes I do know who Steven King is. Even famous authors need to spend a lot of money on advertising when they publish a new book, and twitter certainly helps here.
Also, HN has a rule against asking people whether they've read the article. Asking people whether they know who some famous person is, is obnoxious in the same way.
Saying Steven King, one of the most successful authors in the world, needs Twitter to market his books is a such an insane take that it warrants asking if you have any idea what you're talking about imo
Depends on the type of subs one frequents. Niche ones like StableDiffusion are super active with very in-depth discussion and tutorials being written. I rarely see that much commitment even for any Twitter thread
I don't think its that. I think it is literal to the effect of, twitter wouldn't have such a huge crowd to serve ads to without people like King who have tons of followers coming to the platform to get updates. An example, I don't have a twitter account, but I will surf Hector Martin's twitter for updates on Asahi Linux development. If it wasn't for Hector Martin's content, twitter would never be requested by my browser.
So it is essentially, charge the people who bring the users to twitter.
It's remarkable how quickly so many of those defending Musk are emphasising the 'lords' and 'peasants' language after he used that terminology in a tweet.
It's not original, it's not adding to the discussion, and it just sounds like sycophancy.
Elon completely miss the point in this exchange, which is that Twitter needs people like Stephen King far more than people like Stephen King need Twitter. Why should Stephen King care about how Twitter pays it's bills?
The entire point of the blue check is that Twitter has an impersonation problem, what happens when some fraction of users find it worth paying $8 to impersonate a celebrity?
This threat is interesting. I wonder what the minimum number is of top Twitter accounts that would have to leave for the platform to lose an unrecoverable amount of its daily impressions.
For example, out of the top 100 twitter accounts (https://socialblade.com/twitter/top/100), almost all are musicians, sports figures, politicians or news outlets.
If the top 5 musicians and the top 5 sports figures got together and started posting content exclusively on a new platform, I wonder if it would be enough to cause a gravitational shift.
The critical thing for the platform is that if I want to find the Twitter account for {celebrity foo} I can do so with a high degree of confidence that it will be real.
I think the loss of trust from consumers is the bigger risk, successful impersonations are relatively high profile and people don't like being tricked.
I think it's bimodal. Either Twitter is worth like 100$+ per month if you're a journalist/brand, or it's less than 0, and in Stephen King's case he's correct that Twitter should probably be paying him.
It would be fun to try and mediate the discussions to try and convince which of the big ego'd celebrities/journalists/politicians are of value to twitter and twitter should pay, vs which are a sink and they should pay twitter. Hey monetezation plan! I would pay good money to watch that reality TV show.
My gut instinct is that the right price for verification is something like $1000 as a one-time fee. Lots of people who are active Twitter users will find that fee useful at some point in their life (as a business marketing expense), and Twitter will likely extract a lot more from them by charging $1000 once rather than $8/month.
I think it should just be 3x the cost of their verification process, and something that disappears and needs to be re-done if you edit your name/bio/handle.
Exactly. Who's hurt more if it's hard to tell who the real celebrities are on Twitter? Whose press is worse when a celebrity is impersonated by some asshole on Twitter—Twitter's, or the celebrity's? Maybe initially the celebrity, but I'm gonna say it's Twitter in the medium-term. Who's gonna be hurt by "Twitter has an impersonation/fraud problem" headlines?
Whatever else the blue checks are, they're also a solution to a problem for Twitter, and those blue-checks and their activity are a huge part of why everyone else engages with the platform. If they make people pay, they better hope the adoption rate is incredibly high among existing blue checks (who cares about the unknowns who pony up for it, in addition) or they're gonna be in for a bad time.
Real celebrities will likely end up getting the check for free under any plan. Like it or not, that's how celebrity works.
The people who won't get it for free (who have blue checks currently) are entry-level journalists with a few hundred followers and cryptobros. Both of those classes of people should have to pay.
A lot of hustlebros and cryptobros do pay for checkmarks, they just don't pay Twitter.
I can imagine the exchange between Stephen King and his agent:
> "Stephen, I'm trying to market your books, but the publishers aren't seeing any engagement on Twitter".
> "Oh I left because I don't want to pay $20 / month to someone I disagree with politically."
> "Have you been hitting the bottle again?"
End of conversation. The value most of these celebrities get vastly exceeds $20 / month. The Twitter-celebrity relationship is symbiotic, nor parasitic.
I think you're overestimating the value of Twitter to Stephen King - who has been famous far longer than Twitter has been around. Taking a dig at his past alcoholism was a bit of a cheap shot, especially since he's been sober for decades by now
Imagine making pricing decisions for a 40 billion dollar business on a fucking whim based on feedback from a famous author. I guess this is in character, given that Musk likes to price things with meme numbers already.
He's owned Twitter for a few days. He threw out $20 and then adjusted it down to $8, seemingly based on feedback. Did he already know that $8 was the appropriate amount? Was there already some internal analysis done that he is just piggy-backing on? It certainly seems like Musk is making big changes literally moments after arriving on scene.
The messages shared as part of the trial don't show a particularly rigorous or deep level of thought regarding what to do with Twitter once he acquired it.
One would hope that still took place, but the haphazard approach so far doesn't provide much confidence that it did.
Perhaps he actually did - I think in part he's just playing it straight as an outsider, openly talking about the emperor being naked. That is, a lot of the serious business is just bullshit LARP people do, and if Musk can openly mock it and make money on the meme value of it all? That's a well-earned entertainer salary.
I guess it is possible he floated the $20 knowing someone very-famous would object and he could counter—either misreading the room badly, or else as a deliberate insult—with $8, which was what he wanted all along.
5d chess and all that.
Or he's impulsive and tweets dumb shit basically all the time. It might just be that.
if you only proof the price was $20 is because "journalists" reported it as so then I question your ability to critical think and judge facts because "journalists" report false things every day all day
there is little to no evidence it was ever really $20, and even less evidence that Elon's mind was changed by Stephen King of all people... Who care what Stephen King thinks?
This "5d chess" stuff is approaching the level of faith that qanon followers have - nothing is ever wrong, everything is always going according to The Plan, when it deviates it's because The Plan has changed and you weren't informed, Hillary was arrested and sent to gitmo but unfortunately she was cloned, etc, etc.
Look, he's spitballing ideas and playing it a little fast and loose. It may pay off, it might not - it looks a little stupid to some of us on account of how much he's paid for the company, but it shouldn't really surprise anyone and he doesn't need anyone making excuses for him.
It is not 5d chess, nor it is making excuses for him. It is a matter of critical thinking and evidence based research
I do not count reporting based on anonymous sources as evidence of anything, Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20, so I have no evidence to believe outside of Rumor from sources that have been showed to be negatively biased on the subject and widely inaccurate on the subject, so why should I trust their $20 figure?
I trust traditional news sources less than I do the government today, for which I would trust a Cartel bass more than the government.
> Elon never said, and no official at Twitter ever said the price as going to be $20
Except that he did. In the tweet he made just before he said it would be $8. If you discard the tweets where he said it would be $20 and then $8 - then yes your statement holds. But we shouldn't, because those are the tweets where he said those things.
This pricing clarification is most likely due to Stephen King's complaint: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587312517679878144
> We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?