More On What's Happening At Twitter

I found two items in yesterday's feed that, while there's some dissonance between them, provide additional insight into what Elon Musk dsicovered at Twitter. The first is the video above on the UK UnHerd YouTube channel, a follow-up in their developing series on Twitter that I first noted here on December 21. It features David Sacks, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal with Musk. I'll discuss this video after I talk about the other data point, a piece by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge, The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays Off About 40 Data Scientists And Engineers Working On Ad Team. This simply confirms my surmise that at the time Musk decided to buy Twitter, there was simply no there there.

For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.

Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off "about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team" late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.

A person with direct knowledge of the matter said that the layoffs now leave the company with "few engineers" working on “machine learning for ad optimization”.

These cuts come after additional reports this week that Elon Musk would be, among other things, downsizing the company's San Francisco headquarters from six floors to only two.

Earlier this week I noted a report that Musk had stopped paying rent on that headquarters. Durden concludes,

Interestingly, Twitter users have not noticed much of a difference in terms of functionality for the platform despite the mass layoffs.

We said it then and we'll say it again: the only difference has been the ability to speak more freely on the platform.

Let's move to the YouTube video with David Sacks. At about 1:43, he says,

The mood at Twitter, I think, they are kind of heads down now and working on product development. The things that people talk about outside the company, it's 95% about speech debates, that's about 5% of the conversation inaide the company. The other 95% is just building the product: how do we make this better? How do we ship more features? How do we get more efficient as a company?

Even so, Sacks continues to talk about the outside 95%, the revelations in the Twitter files involving coordination with the US government to censor the speech on the platform, and he goes so far as to say Musk's motive in buying Twitter was to end the censorship -- in other words, the irrelevant 95%. Wait a moment. What are the ideas the insiders are supposed to be floating, 95% by his account, on how to improve the product? Indeed, how did the additional layoffs of 40 more engineers affect this? He finally moves on at about 3:55:

. . . I think that Twitter can be a great business as well. In addition to fixing the censorship issues, I think it can also be a great business, because they simply haven't done much with that product. This product simply hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years, and already in the last month or so we've seen more improvements to the product than we have in the last number of years.

But as far as I can tell, for all that 95% of Twitter is now on improvements, there so far have been only two such improvements: monetizing the blue checkmark status and reducing the level of censorship. These have actually been minimal, while for good or ill, Musk has managed to damage the former prestige of the Twitter brand by doing just those things, while diminishing his own credibility as an entrepreneur by expending so much visible time and effort on Twitter, while investors are upset about the decline in Tesla's share value.

Prompted, Sacks turns to Musk's cost cuts at Twitter, but those aren't product improvements, and in effect, he acknowledges this at about 6:10:

The reality is, Twitter, like a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, was very bloated and overstaffed. It was possible to cut, call it, three quarters of the employees and actually improve the performance, because you didn't have a bunch of people working at cross purposes getting in each other's way. . .

But actually, the evidence we have from the "My Day at Work" TikTok video, which Tyler Durden inplicitly refers to at that link, was that employees at Twitter and elsewhere in Silicon Valley were, and often continue to be, occupied with "free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings". They weren't working at cross purposes; they weren't working at all. I'm not sure how much either Sacks or Musk understands the extent of this problem -- and both seem to be indulging in wishful thinking that there was ever value at Twitter.

Sacks seems to be a Musk ally and apologist here, but even in the course of making the best possible case for Musk's takeover of Twitter, he's basically acknowledging that Twitter never really had a product, and that by cutting the workforce 75%, he's been able to do nothing more than produce that same tired old non-product. But the information we have from accounts like Tyler Durden's is that anybody who might have been working on product improvements (if any of them actually was doing this) was laid off last Wednesday. In other words, there was never a there there, and there still isn't.

The question I continue to have is why Musk didn't understand this about Twitter before he made the offer to buy a company with an essentially worthless product. And yet again, why can't he recruit a CEO? No matter how Sacks tries to spin things, these questions keep coming back.