They won’t be directly affected if Twitter goes down the toilet.
But Musk is burning his reputation and credibility at a really startling pace, and that’s good for neither of those companies given how closely they’re aligned to him personally. I still think that Musk is likely to lose control over Tesla in particular, given how heavily he borrowed against it to buy Twitter. And to be honest … that might be a good thing for Tesla. What Tesla really needs is to professionalise at this point. It doesn’t need cowboy startup engineering culture any more. It needs to fix its quality control issues and its workplace safety etc issues. Boring, discipline, process sort of stuff that Musk isn’t good at. Cos Tesla has a lead in the EV space right now, but all the big car manufacturers are coming for them and a Toyota EV is going to have a lot fewer rough edges than a Tesla one.
If the Belt wants to be seen as a nation it needs centralised government, not a bunch of OPA factions doing their own cowboy actions when they feel like it. Otherwise they eventually be overwhelmed by Mars and Earth regardless of whether they posess the protomolecule.
Way this is going Musk will crash Twitter and its advertising sponsors etc. will have fled. And given the debt he’s carrying he’ll likely just cut his losses and put it up for sale. Could be sooner rather than later.
Enter Jack Dorsey and his backers buying it back at a discounted price. Not sure that’d be allowed or legal clauses somewhere prevent such a scenario. Or even if he’d be up for it But that’d be priceless if it happened. Jack might do well to acquaint himself with a certain Kerry Packer years ago in Oz when Packer reflected on his huge profitable sale and later buyback of Channel 9 from a desperate and bankrupt Alan Bond…
"Packer was quoted as saying “You only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine” Musk is shaping up as an updated Alan Bond destroying a very expensive asset very quickly for which he paid overs for.
I don’t think Dorsey would buy it back. He’s already building a new social media platform to avoid some of the stuff that evolved around Twitter that he was never happy with. Musk will hold onto it like grim death because he fears ridicule and being labelled a failure if he sells it more than he fears losing the money. He’s basically Kylo Ren at this point, a big, dangerous baby flailing around in a tantrum over a crisis of his own dumbass making, demanding everyone respect his badassness because he has a scary black mask.
But if it does go bust, I reckon some Saudi or Indian billionaire or consortium of billionaires would be the most likely buyer. Less to actually run twitter, though there’s obvious benefits to an authoritarian to owning a major worldwide communication network, and more to get access to the info Twitter holds on Twitter’s users.
There’s a long tweet thread somewhere from a retired systems guy who pretty much laid out why Twitter is completely farked, and played out 30 different scenarios in which one small thing would throw the entire company infrastructure into chaos. And how there’s pretty much nobody left in charge of maintaining the systems that would prevent any of these from happening.
(EDIT: found it)
Also with the World Cup starting, he’s expecting the thing to crash as nobody will be able to deal with the server load coming from the spike in worldwide traffic.
Feels like the entire thing is a land mine waiting to be stepped on.
I’ve read that parts of the system are already glitching. People are posting tweets and the tweets are disappearing, then re-appearing, then reappearing again multiple times. As someone mentioned earlier on here, things that were once geo-blocked are unintentionally becoming less so. It would be a concern if there was a glitch that made DMs less private than normal, and no team around to address it.
Yeah, it’s subtle stuff at this point. I think follower/following counts on profile pages are not correct, or not being updated correctly too.
Canaries in the coalmine. And I think there’s a global code freeze on at the moment, so Twitter won’t be trying to change anything structural, and the back end will be more stable than usual. Once they lift that freeze (and they’ll have to, you can’t stay static indefinitely), the likelihood of major glitches really starts ramping up.
Incredible. Incredibly well thought out scenarios based clearly on experience. Scary many of them. Any one of those technical failure types could directly or indirectly halt the whole thing. Bad actors out there tweeting bad stuff without being reined in. Bad actors being allowed into Twitter if the HR controls are not policed … cause nobody’s left to oversee.
I suppose the financial and banking systems aren’t in clear and present danger. But social cohesion, news and security certainly are. Right up to national security. And then there’s Trump and his cult. As if the world via Musk’s Twitter wants to hear about his dangerous lies and spin all over again.
Musk is way out of control. He’s drained his own bathwater and Kool-Aid in one hit it seems.
Yup, hung parliament. None of the 3 major coalitions were able to secure simple majority.
Barisan Nasional was the worst performing, it looks like most of the Malay voters switched to voting for the Perikatan Nasional coalition, which has the Muslim fundamentalist party PAS in it.
The opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan looks to have done slightly better, winning back some seats that it lost through defections.
The Sabah and Sarawak parties will be the ones needed to form government. No idea which of PN or PH will suceed, but I sincerely hope it is PH as they are multi-religious and multi-ethnic based and the better way forward for Malaysia.
Ethnic Chinese colleague whose family migrated from Malaysia has contrasted what he perceives as a widening gap between Singapore and Malaysia in rights for ethnic Chinese.
Although Singapore could do better on migrant workers and human rights.
