this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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Unlike others, I saw at least $20B of potential in Twitter. Advertisement and media alignment was basically Twitter's P0, and why they had a bloated staff that managed corporate sales and media accounts. TV execs around the world wanted a slice of Twitter's analytics to measure what people interacted with, and we're willing to pay for it. It wasn't $44B worth, but they had a "solved" solution for scalable social networks, and whoever could scale enough to be irresistible to advertisers would have come close to justifying that valuation over time.
Knowing a few people that worked there, it justified it's reputation a bit before Musk came in. The tech side was fairly limited compared to the sales/accounts side, and there were a lot of people doing very little outside of making sure that an advertiser was happy. A smart CEO would have scaled that side of the business without scaling sales staff, but Musk did the exact opposite - and utterly gutted the thing that made any money, and made it about himself...
He's obviously a fucking idiot, but I consider Twitter to be a vanity project above anything else. He leveraged his debt against the company, ran it to be barebones, and now it'll just "exist" until he can sell it when he's bored.
As a software engineer, the one company I really wanted to work for was Twitter. It's sad to see it killed, but they also kinda deserved it too. At least they got a payout!