[bikeshed]

it's wild that Musk was trolled into paying $44B to destroy a perfectly viable company.

[jsonne]

Losing 200 million a year and mostly being not profitable is viable?

Edited to say "mostly" not profitable.

[_jal]

I think it is fair to say that left to its own devices (that is, pretend the last year of disruption and then this hadn't happened), Twitter could have become profitable enough to muddle on.

Everyone knew they had too many employees, and that big money-making possibilities... don't seem to be there, due to the nature of the niche they've carved. But they had a lot of money in the bank, so they didn't need to make any sudden movements. Sensible downsizing and incremental improvement of the bottom line, and, yeah, that's a viable business.

It may not be super exciting, but if you want exciting, head south on 101, Meta is about 40 minutes out depending on time of day.

[stefan_]

No, having enough cash in the bank to continue on for another 10 years (as Twitter did) is viable. Viable is not "making profits".

[Imnimo]

Didn't Twitter post like a billion in profits in 2019?

[suprfsat]

They certainly could do worse.

[fbdab103]

Amazon went 14 years before posting a profit. Not that I think Twitter was necessarily investing revenue correctly, but a business can go pretty far even in the red.

[Whatarethese]

Tesla historically has not been profitable until recently and they are getting help from carbon credits.

[dilyevsky]

His determination to set his 44B on fire is commendable

[rufusroflpunch]

Layoffs were always coming, whether Musk bought it or not.

[twelve40]

it's funny how he got so much shit here a week ago, but now everything just started tanking, stripe layoffs, lyft layoffs etc etc

apparently he was into layoffs before it was cool

[rybosworld]

Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.

But calling twitter a "perfectly viable company" is part of the problem. It's comments like this that inflate the bubble. Twitter has thousands of employees who have done close to nothing for at least several years.

Facebook/meta are at least trying new things. Twitter seems to be afraid to make any decisions at all.

[dehrmann]

Make take on Twitter for the last 5+ years is that it grew into its potential, it has value as-is, but there isn't a growth or monetization story beyond what it already has.

The private equity downsize strategy is probably right--you have to get it into a leaner state to start printing money--but the execution is poor, and Musk can too easily fiddle with the wrong knob and drive away uses a la Tumblr.

[unity1001]

> Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.

You people really miss the bigger picture from the business side of things - Musk now owns the most impactful social network on the planet. Having an additional $44 billion in wealth does not bring you anything that is actionable. Its just inert wealth. Only when its used, wealth actually becomes something meaningful.

And Musk bought the biggest social network on the planet with that money. At this moment, he can do anything from boosting his own projects and businesses through Twitter to creating entirely new paradigm like making Twitter into a Western Wechat.

(Im obviously not counting Facebook as a top social network at this point)

> Facebook/meta are at least trying new things

Meta is banking on something that may or may not materialize. Its a gamble. Musk is going to copy what's already successful elsewhere.

[kypro]

Were they ever even profitable?

[bikeshed]

2018 and 2019 apparently

[refurb]

Do you have a crystal ball? How do you know how things will turn out?

I mean, it's not like Twitter had some amazing business plan going forward.