Twitter is a Private Company

dave said:

A complete rewrite of Twitter's code?  He should use chatGPT to do it.  Because it can.  Speaking of which: when chatGPT takes itself public I'm buying 1000 shares and retiring.

From what I've read, Twitter doesn't have a functional dev or staging server, which is why even minor updates break everything. I've found myself in exactly the same situation in my job, and the first thing we did was copy everything and build a dev site and set up a staging site, so we can fully test upgrade compatibility well before pushing it into into prod. Musk has been in charge of Twitter for 6 months now and only now is he talking about a ground-up rebuild? That **** costs money Twitter doesn't have, and will need to hire more resources after he fired everybody. I'm not a hater, but WTF has he been doing for the last 6 months?


ridski said:

dave said:

A complete rewrite of Twitter's code?  He should use chatGPT to do it.  Because it can.  Speaking of which: when chatGPT takes itself public I'm buying 1000 shares and retiring.

From what I've read, Twitter doesn't have a functional dev or staging server, which is why even minor updates break everything. I've found myself in exactly the same situation in my job, and the first thing we did was copy everything and build a dev site and set up a staging site, so we can fully test upgrade compatibility well before pushing it into into prod. Musk has been in charge of Twitter for 6 months now and only now is he talking about a ground-up rebuild? That **** costs money Twitter doesn't have, and will need to hire more resources after he fired everybody. I'm not a hater, but WTF has he been doing for the last 6 months?

Amazing.  Even little old MOL has a staging server.  



dave said:

ridski said:

dave said:

A complete rewrite of Twitter's code?  He should use chatGPT to do it.  Because it can.  Speaking of which: when chatGPT takes itself public I'm buying 1000 shares and retiring.

From what I've read, Twitter doesn't have a functional dev or staging server, which is why even minor updates break everything. I've found myself in exactly the same situation in my job, and the first thing we did was copy everything and build a dev site and set up a staging site, so we can fully test upgrade compatibility well before pushing it into into prod. Musk has been in charge of Twitter for 6 months now and only now is he talking about a ground-up rebuild? That **** costs money Twitter doesn't have, and will need to hire more resources after he fired everybody. I'm not a hater, but WTF has he been doing for the last 6 months?

Amazing.  Even little old MOL has a staging server.  

Crazy, right! It's like website 101. Granted, when I worked for Citi I had an ipod with more storage capacity than our staging server, but at least we had one.


I'm surprised  that such a large company could get away with that. Aren't they audited by ..?somebody?... to make sure they meet basic IT requirements?


drummerboy said:

I'm surprised  that such a large company could get away with that. Aren't they audited by ..?somebody?... to make sure they meet basic IT requirements?

Elon flies a guy up from Tesla once a week, I think.


I can't see how it's possible for Twitter not to have some form of a Dev/Staging site. Maybe they have an-almost-up-to-date sandbox that is close to being a Dev/Staging server? Maybe they just don't have a centralized server for all of Twitter? If developers/engineers had been throwing completely untested code into the live maelstrom, I think Twitter would be doing even worse than it is now.


Here's a good article about hangups in Twitter's development process.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90848175/twitter-stuck-in-code-loop-nightmare

This is from a month ago - prior to the most recent screw-ups.


Are there any “lemon laws” in place to protect people like EM from getting shafted? He was probably thinking “ a bird in hand is worth two in the bush”…


A report that I saw this morning reminded me of the tedious ranting against "woke" that was on this thread.

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:

Now the NY Times is accused of antisemitism -- by the ADL no less, which does so by citing a Fox News report. Who's the woke adult here?

Oh no, let's not go for the Non Sequitur Hall of Fame as well.

Mr. Defense of Woke (on this thread) runs to the exit.

Survey results reported today - "Americans are less divided over the definition of 'wokeness,' as over half say 'wokeness' means being informed about social injustices. Differences by party and age, however, remain present. Fifty-six percent of Americans say 'wokeness' encompasses being informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices. In contrast, two in five (39%) say 'wokeness' involves being overly politically correct and policing others’ words."

Not surprisingly: "A vast majority (78%) of Democrats say being 'woke' means being informed, while nearly three-fifths (56%) of Republicans say it means being overly politically correct."

Link to report on survey results.


Jaytee said:

Are there any “lemon laws” in place to protect people like EM from getting shafted? He was probably thinking “ a bird in hand is worth two in the bush”…

The genius waived due diligence.


The "Twitter Files Boys", Taibbi and Shellenberger, were thrilled that the GOP was going to allow them to testify before a House committee.  They didn't do their homework.


This seems too stupid to be true, and yet completely plausible?

"Managers were recently told to provide a list of people who ought to be promoted, says one former staff member still in touch with some who remain working. Little did they realise they were signing their own death warrant: many of those managers were subsequently fired and replaced by those they’d recommended, as part of a cost-cutting drive."

https://inews.co.uk/news/pressure-cooker-elon-musk-twitter-2196309

(I've never heard of "inews" before and have no idea how seriously to take this reporting -- but again, seems totally in character for Musk?)


PVW said:

This seems too stupid to be true, and yet completely plausible?

"Managers were recently told to provide a list of people who ought to be promoted, says one former staff member still in touch with some who remain working. Little did they realise they were signing their own death warrant: many of those managers were subsequently fired and replaced by those they’d recommended, as part of a cost-cutting drive."

https://inews.co.uk/news/pressure-cooker-elon-musk-twitter-2196309

(I've never heard of "inews" before and have no idea how seriously to take this reporting -- but again, seems totally in character for Musk?)

"i" is a genuine newspaper in the vein of USA Today or The Week, with a mix of investigative journalism and compact "commuter" journalism. I've never read it, but it seems like a legit independent UK source in among a sea of increasingly tabloidy broadsheets. 


PVW said:

This seems too stupid to be true, and yet completely plausible?

"Managers were recently told to provide a list of people who ought to be promoted, says one former staff member still in touch with some who remain working. Little did they realise they were signing their own death warrant: many of those managers were subsequently fired and replaced by those they’d recommended, as part of a cost-cutting drive.”

A single anonymous source apparently providing secondhand information (“still in touch with some”), and “many” out of how many?


DaveSchmidt said:

A single anonymous source apparently providing secondhand information (“still in touch with some”), and “many” out of how many?

I'll be honest -- my standards for sharing stories that feed schadenfreude at a plutocrat acting like an idiot is considerably lower than for, say, an accusation of sabotaging an international pipeline.


So mr Musk is planning on building an entire city in Texas to house his employees. He’s going to be on the planning board, maybe make himself mayor. 


Jaytee said:

So mr Musk is planning on building an entire city in Texas to house his employees. He’s going to be on the planning board, maybe make himself mayor. 

This is how China had / has its communes / work-live areas set up. He probably got the idea from his visits to China.  A combination of convenient and creepy.


dave said:

Jaytee said:

So mr Musk is planning on building an entire city in Texas to house his employees. He’s going to be on the planning board, maybe make himself mayor. 

This is how China had / has its communes / work-live areas set up. He probably got the idea from his visits to China.  A combination of convenient and creepy.

Maybe he'll make it look like Hallstatt?


Fight the woke and what do you get? Forty-four billion dollars in debt. Sold my soul now my company's sore.


dave said:

This is how China had / has its communes / work-live areas set up. He probably got the idea from his visits to China.  A combination of convenient and creepy.

Jonestown comes to mind. 


Now he’s a trump supporter, did he just abandon DeSantis? What is really wrong with this muskrat?


Elon is supporting DeSantis, and trumpenstein is losing his siht over it…fun times at the OK corral…


PVW said:

Elon Musk Values Twitter at $20 Billion (NYT)

How much did he buy it for again?

go anti-woke and go broke. 


ml1 said:

go anti-woke and go broke. 

Given he made this valuation in the context of employee stock grants, I'm skeptical it's worth even that much. He's got a lot of incentives to claim a higher number and so convince the remaining workers he's not just giving out monopoly money -- and even then, his claim is that he's destroyed over half the value of the company.


PVW said:

-- and even then, his claim is that he's destroyed over half the value of the company.

An indeterminate mitigation: He claimed Twitter was already worth significantly less than $44 billion when he got it, hence his attempts to back out.


DaveSchmidt said:

An indeterminate mitigation: He claimed Twitter was already worth significantly less than $44 billion when he got it, hence his attempts to back out.

"Musk makes terrible business decision and massively overpays" works for me just as well grin


Trumpenstein is right about the muskrat…. He’s a bull siht artist… it’s a fierce competition, there can only be one king in the pantheon of artists dedicated to bovine scatology.


Martin Peers in The Information:

All those investors who put money into Elon Musk’s Twitter buyout should have a “believe” sign tacked up over their office doors, as seen both on “Ted Lasso” and in the Biden White House. The news over the weekend that Musk is making stock awards to employees at a “roughly $20 billion valuation” suggests faith is what’s needed to own Twitter stock. His estimate is optimistic, to say the least. Given public valuations for Twitter rivals like Snap and Pinterest, Twitter was arguably worth $20 billion back when Musk bought it last October for $44 billion.

But that was before Musk loaded it up with $13 billion in debt and sent half its advertisers running for their lives. Those two events have most likely wiped out Twitter’s equity value completely now.

That means Musk is starting from scratch—perhaps what he meant when he said the company was operating like an “inverse startup.” Now, you can’t rule out the possibility that Musk may be able to rebuild the company, given enough time. But increasing Twitter’s revenue and profits enough to lift its valuation to a level that would justify the price he paid for it may be much harder than Musk’s fans realize.

For one thing, Musk faces a digital ad market that, from here on out, is likely to grow much more slowly than it has in the past. Between 2014 and 2021, global online advertising broadly expanded at an average annual rate of 23.5%, according to ad firm GroupM. For most of that period, Twitter’s growth lagged the industry’s. And now online ad spending is slowing. Excluding the ad business related to video streaming, digital advertising is expected to grow by an average of just 7.7% between 2022 and 2027, GroupM projects. In other words, Musk has to try to win ad dollars in an era when everyone in the market will be battling harder than ever for every dollar they can get.

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