[autospeaker22]

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.

[thr0wawayf00]

> 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.

[rmbyrro]

I think he did want to buy since the beginning. He's got bigger plans for it beyond short messages. The free speech thing is just marketing.

[jrochkind1]

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.

[sytelus]

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.

[wingworks]

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.

[runarberg]

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.

[autospeaker22]

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.

[throw8383833jj]

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.

[gray_-_wolf]

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".

[fortydegrees]

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.

[selectout]

I'm always curious if he just set aside say $250k/year (2 year contract maybe?) to the top 100 content creators at Twitter/IG/TikTok today.

Add $25 million to the annual costs and have the chicken/egg problem semi-saved.

[autospeaker22]

Makes sense.. there's a small handful of social media platforms people actually use compared to cemetery of failed attempts.

[jensvdh]

If you paid me anywhere between 750-1.5M a year just go on in the office 40 hours a week I'd take that offer any day every day.

I did the same for less than half of that not even 2 years ago.

The problem with Musk companies is 1) It'll be MINIMUM 40 hours a week, no WLB 2) His companies aren't known for paying competitively

[autospeaker22]

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.

[VirusNewbie]

Didn’t need to be too competitive when you had 11x stock growth. Will be interesting to see if things change now that their stock is flatish.

[misiti3780]

All of the people (or most of the people) that matter would not have left Twitter for Elon's new company. Tons of people have tried this.

Remember Dalton Caldwell's App.net. That didn't even get off the ground and it had a ton of YC press.

Network affects are real.

[autospeaker22]

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.

[kondro]

You're right. But how much marketing can $44B and time buy you to replicate these network effects?

There are plenty of people trying to replicate the success of the existing social networks, but they're all doing it for $10's - $100's millions.

How much traction would you get if you paid the top 5,000 Twitter accounts $5 million to post exclusively on your new social network?

[photochemsyn]

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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13387723

[awinder]

Congratulations, you just lost all your invested capital on Truth Social 2.0.

[autospeaker22]

Better in theory than IRL. You think the Don was able to get top dev talent lol?

[throwuwu]

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.

[autospeaker22]

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.

[ur-whale]

> 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.

[shp0ngle]

He doesn’t want to build a better twitter.

He wants to _own this twitter_.

[jonny_eh]

"You made this? I made this." https://imgflip.com/i/70bgz4

[lesuorac]

I wonder if he'll get himself retroactive added as a founder of twitter in the past just like tesla.

[eftychis]

He bought the users not the equipment, developers etc. The brand and domain is what he bought -- in his mind at least.

[PartiallyTyped]

> 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.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

[autospeaker22]

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.

[simonebrunozzi]

Disagree, a lot.

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.

[siquick]

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.

[dools]

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.

[TulliusCicero]

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.

[qez]

> 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.

[vonseel]

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.

[NewEntryHN]

> cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter

That's cute.