Data from two research firms and figures published by Musk and X suggest a deteriorating situation for X by some metrics. Musk has marketed it as the world’s “town square,” but in number of users it continues to lag far behind social media rivals that focus on video, such as Instagram and TikTok.
In February, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the U.S., down 18% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm based in San Francisco. The U.S. user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022, the first full month of Musk’s owning the app, and in total it’s down 23% since then, Sensor Tower said.
My point is, look I’m a dumb white hick. I’ve never ran anything as significant as this. Just from the way the guy talks I can tell he has eons more experience than I do. His track record? Jesus Christ.
Still, if I were him I would’ve just… stopped. Long, long ago.
Yet he hasn’t. Admittedly, I’m a dumb fuck yet smart cookie compared to some but honestly what are the odds that with zero experience I could make better business decisions than this guy?
Make it make sense, ya know? Explain to me like I’m 5 why he would make decisions that are so obviously detrimental to the company? What are the odds that I could give better business advice than this guy?
Yet this is what he’s doing. He’s either purposely destroying it or has some weird master plan and I’m not sure I can be convinced otherwise tbh. We all see it, as bad as he seems to be there’s no way he doesn’t.
He’s the best example of someone falling upwards. He’s not much more than a cash cow for other people running the companies that he owns and their successes are not happening because of Musk, they are happening despite of him. It goes as far as SpaceX allegedly using “handlers” to keep him from interfering with the actual development. I’m pretty sure that you, as a mod of !mechanicadvice@lemmy.world, have more technical experience as the guy who claims to be the genius behind Tesla.
The reason that Musk is making these obviously dumb decisions at Twitter is because it’s 100% his toy to play with and there’s nobody else running the show for him. What we are seeing is essentially the unfiltered effect that he has on a business.
Elon sounds like he’s experienced, skilled and is approaching things from a theoretical or ethical or other grand point of view. He used to impress me with his approach on building an electric car company with full self-driving vehicles in the 2010’s. I wasn’t a full believer, but I thought he was competent and wanted Tesla to succeed.
Then he went and bought Twitter. As a software engineer all my life, and in the startup scene, and having worked in a failed social media platform, I have some experience. Everything he’s said about Twitter is crap and everything he’s done is stupid. And the results speak for themselves.
I’ve seen people say that Elon sounds great about things they don’t know too much about. But when the topic comes to things they do understand, Elon clearly is wrong.
He started his career with hundreds of millions of dollars, and he bet it all on a couple of businesses be bought (he was never a founder, always a purchaser).
Basically he’s been lucky twice (Paypal and Tesla), but each of these won 10-100x on his initial stake.
From what I’ve heard about his time at Paypal he really lucked out by basically being pushed out of the company with a golden parachute to ride out on.