Twitter is nearly breaking even financially with satisfactory growth.
…
Twitter is down to 1,500 employees (from over 7,500)
Wasn’t it losing money with 7,500?
Twitter is nearly breaking even financially with satisfactory growth.
…
Twitter is down to 1,500 employees (from over 7,500)
Wasn’t it losing money with 7,500?
How many of the wokerati who loudly declared that they would leave Twitter if Musk took over have actually done so?
Was wondering how long it would take Elon to turn a profit at twatter after binning all the non-jobs. Seems it’s going to be a lot sooner than most expected.
Saw today that Twatter ad revenues were down 28% which seems like a result if staff numbers have fallen so sharply.
“How many … have actually done so?”
About the same number who moved to Canada when Trump won.
Twitter may be nearly profitable but it’s buggy as hell. Yesterday it started talking to me in Swedish rather than English, today it’s lost my interests again so I don’t get the feeds I want. I don’t see ads on the web interface (good for me, not for their revenue) but I get a ridiculous number of ads on the Android app, most for very niche and local US companies that wouldn’t sell to me anyway. About 10% of pages are blank and need reloading at least once to see. Even so, it’s better than most of the alternatives.
I gather Mastodon suffers badly from content warning police and operators having hissy fits at each other. If it’s supposed to be a federation, it’s not helped by the over squeamish refusing to federate with sites, not because they don’t like the site, but because they don’t like the guy who wrote the software the site uses. The fediverse is more fissiparous than the extreme left.
There was a certain tax expert/political economist/academic/ blogging chancer from Ely who was disgusted, outraged, but didn’t leave. And to be fair, for a day or two he observed the Spirit of the Leaving rather than the Letter of the Leaving. And then shoved it all down the memory hole.
…a certain tax expert/political economist/academic/ blogging chancer from Ely.” Ironman, who can you possibly mean?
Did anyone see the BBC reporter who made the mistake of interviewing Musk without having done his homework first, quite amusing
Skittles-haired people not revenue generating? Who knew?
6,000 job losses. That is the benefit surely, assuming they can get employed or add value elsewhere.
I can’t help liking Musk
But someone should tell him to Get A Life, man
witter, electric cars, trips to Mars, long distance tunnels…
I think he should find something useful to do with his talents.
@BniC
Possibly the best BBC interview I’ve seen.
Not for reasons the BBC will like.
whatever you think of Musk he’s no dummy and the BBC sending in a young reporter who had clearly not done his homework was an act of self sabotage that makes you realise how low the BBC has sunk
According to Musk Twitter was 4 months away from bankruptcy when he took it over. It would have been interesting to see who might have bailed it out…
Diogenes: “How many … have actually done so?”
Hopefully none, so Musk can have the pleasure of sacking them.
@Julia… As the headcount has gone down from near-8000 to 1500, I guess that he already has! 🙂
Never been a Twatterer, so can’t comment on usability, but I did hear some anecdotes that the solution to code inefficiency had always been ‘throw more compute at it’ which Elon has banned because compute is expensive. They’re actually having to fix issues when they arise now…
@philip
If you had the resources and capability to do anything, would you do stuff that you thought was cool/fun/interesting/important or stuff that other people thought was “useful”?
Matt said:
“… would you do stuff that you thought was cool/fun/interesting/important or stuff that other people thought was “useful”?”
Fine with Musk doing that; it’s his money. The problem with Twitter seems to have been that the staff had the same attitude, and it wasn’t their company.
As it happens, Mastodon (for which I signed up in 2017), has been a lot more pleasant than Twitter. There have been no problems with content police etc. that I’ve encountered.
What it lacks is any ability to use it for complaining at crap companies or contacting customer support, because the relevant companies aren’t there. Not that I can do that any more on Twitter – last time I tried DMs wouldn’t send so I couldn’t get very far.
“Fine with Musk doing that; it’s his money. ”
Not entirely, he put in about $27bn…..the Saudis and Qataris, investment funds, Tech investors and big banks stumped up the rest. How much is equity and how much is debt I don’t know.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/12/24/elon-musk-twitter-funders/
‘throw more compute at it’
I can’t understand that attitude. I spent the Easter weekend combing through a project tidying up bit of inefficiencies, rationalising code and layout. But then I grew up in an environment where a transient had 512 bytes and that was it, full stop.
float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
long i;
float x2, y;
const float threehalfs = 1.5F;
x2 = number * 0.5F;
y = number;
i = * ( long * ) &y; // evil floating point bit level hacking
i = 0x5f3759df – ( i >> 1 ); // what the fuck?
y = * ( float * ) &i;
y = y * ( threehalfs – ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 1st iteration
// y = y * ( threehalfs – ( x2 * y * y ) ); // 2nd iteration, this can be removed
return y;
}
Above example from the days when coders had to think about what they were doing, instead of throwing more processor power at a problem.