Musk warns twitter may have to declare bankruptcy

[Needfuldoer]

46 minutes ago, Majinhoju said:

Elon isn't just ripping out the drywall, he's smashing through with a wrecking ball without thinking of the consequences.

(Not pictured: the fourth panel where the pink blob's screaming at another pink blob for not cleaning up the mess he created fast enough.)

 

Yup. "Just get rid of it and if something breaks we'll just fix that" isn't a long-term plan. Remember when he pruned "bloatware" and killed 2FA?

[Kisai]

Let me list all the ways Twitter is likely going to die.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html

 

All of these are tech issues not "idiot at the helm" ones.

 

[wanderingfool2]

9 minutes ago, Needfuldoer said:

Yup. "Just get rid of it and if something breaks we'll just fix that" isn't a long-term plan. Remember when he pruned "bloatware" and killed 2FA?

He killed 2FA just like how Twitch killed 2FA...oh wait, they didn't 2FA was down for a shorter time...yet Twitch still had a 2FA issue as well.  Twitter prior to him entering was a whole lot of mess up...again it can be told easily by what Mudge mentioned in his Whistle Blower complaint, or the massive amounts of "issues" twitter had in the past.  It's not even the first time that the 2FA went down either.  Sometimes the simplest approach is to break some things to see what's connected.

[Majinhoju]

18 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Let me list all the ways Twitter is likely going to die.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html

 

All of these are tech issues not "idiot at the helm" ones.

 

I'd say most of those have a greater risk of happening when the idiot at the helm axes 1000s of employees.

 

This one stood out to me:

[trevb0t]

To be clear to those confused, he's not talking about closing the company, nor is further layoff a requirement of bankrupcty.

There are many forms of bankruptcy, and it appears that the purpose of this one would be to restructure and consolidate debt and how it is paid, and eventually potentially charge off large amounts of debt after x years of plan payment.

 

From releases on the state of Twitter prior to the acquisition, it has been circling the toilet for quite a while.

Add 44bil in debt to that, it makes sense to restructure. 

 

Don't take anything in this message to mean I like what's happening here, with 3700 employees getting canned. Nor am I a personal fan of Elon.

I just see a lot of confusion about what this actually means.

[HenrySalayne]

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I quoted the source

No, you did not. That's exactly why I stopped even responding. You quoted a source. An irrelevant source. You still need to go and find a source saying Twitter doesn't has to pay back around 1 billion in the next 12 month.

 

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

How would you supposedly fix a bad workplace culture, especially one where it's overstaffed? 

It's irrelevant to even talk about this. That's just the opinion of an erratic and recently more and more delusional CEO and not a fact.

 

2 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Telling people it's going to be a lot of long hours ahead to change the platform is just good business sense in that you only keep people around that are passionate about the job or agree in the vision they see.  It's also something that Musk does himself, working as long as the teams are working.  Is it stressful?  Sometimes, do you get a lot accomplished?  Yes.  Do you additional time off once things settle down?  Probably.  Do you get compensated for when you are working more?  Yes

Pardon my french, but you need to be an utter idiot to fire half of your employees and telling the rest they now need to work really hard to keep this ship afloat. That you even try to call this "smart" is an insult to your own intelligence and to the rest of the people in this forum.

12 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It's actually a pretty smart plan overall,

 

 

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

28 minutes ago, trevb0t said:

o be clear to those confused, he's not talking about closing the company, nor is further layoff a requirement of bankrupcty.

There are many forms of bankruptcy, and it appears that the purpose of this one would be to restructure and consolidate debt and how it is paid, and eventually potentially charge off large amounts of debt after x years of plan payment.

A court will decide IF restructuring is even a viable option. With the amount of debt Twitter now has accumulated, it will most likely be liquidated (sold), because there is no business model to cover this amount of debt in a foreseeable future.

[ravenshrike]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Let me list all the ways Twitter is likely going to die.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1593541177965678592.html

 

All of these are tech issues not "idiot at the helm" ones.

 

The bad code push bit is particularly amusing because Twitter never had a test platform. All code rollouts were live.

[wanderingfool2]

7 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

No, you did not. That's exactly why I stopped even responding. You quoted a source. An irrelevant source. You still need to go and find a source saying Twitter doesn't has to pay back around 1 billion in the next 12 month.

You are the one trying to claim it's that amount.  Prove it by quoting a source then?  Not some article that makes the claim...as I showed, they say it's 13 billion in debt but even in the SEC filing which I quoted showed that the real debt would be closer to 7 billion...If it's based on SEC filing, then quote to SEC filing that says the rate at which it was lent at.

 

Again, if you somehow believe $1.2 billion, and the SEC source is effectively saying it's $7 billion in debt that is over 17% interest rate.  So go on, you are the one trying to use asinine numbers that reporters have glomed onto...site an official source the.

 

It's stupid saying it's an irrelevant source, because it's A from the SEC site(government body).  B shows exactly where they were getting their numbers from, and how they conveniently ignored an important factor.

 

Do you concede that the current realistic debt load is $7 billion (as $6 billion was from a bridge loan)?  That's what the SEC document says.  If you concede $7 billion, and your claim in $1.2 billion in interest, do you agree that the effective rate is 17%?  And do you think it's realistic to assume the interest rate is 17%?

 

17 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

It's irrelevant to even talk about this. That's just the opinion of an erratic and recently more and more delusional CEO and not a fact.

If you assume workplace culture and workplaces being overstaffed is an opinion and irrelevant then it's irrelevant of you trying to argue that laying off employees is bad.

 

Revenue per Employee at other social media companies...Google nearly 2x.  Meta also boasts higher revenue per employee.  Twitter is overstaffed.

 

29 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

Pardon my french, but you need to be an utter idiot to fire half of your employees and telling the rest they now need to work really hard to keep this ship afloat. That you even try to call this "smart" is an insult to your own intelligence and to the rest of the people in this forum.

Again, you propose a method to fix an overstaffed place.  Literally they had an additional "day of rest" each month...on top of vacation.  It's the same stupid mentality that I witnessed after the place I work for merged with the new union for some of the workers.  We lost so much productivity the higher ups began investigating for "fraud" from the previous owners of the merged company (for hiding the numbers or salting the mine so to speak).  In reality though, the employees had a fixed quota per day and after they finished they just sat down and played cards [not a joke, I literally walked in on them playing cards].  There were still some who kept doing their thing, exceeding the quota.

 

So again, it's realistically the quickest way to get a better workplace culture.  Instead of the slacking off, or coming up with excuses why things aren't done instead of doing it; you will get people who are motivated to work, and just get things done instead of trying to justify why things won't get done.

[HenrySalayne]

16 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You are the one trying to claim it's that amount. 

No, I'm the one with several sources saying it is. You did just throw some numbers in the air, applied some 5th grade maths to it and say you are right and every article out there is wrong. Be my guest and tell all those news outlets about their giant mistakes. I don't need to argue with this kind of streetsmarts about a topic I know very little about while you are completely clueless.

24 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

If you assume workplace culture and workplaces being overstaffed is an opinion and irrelevant then it's irrelevant of you trying to argue that laying off employees is bad.

Don't make up claims and try to apply some weird logic to it. I never said lay-offs are bad in a vacuum.

 

[wanderingfool2]

21 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

No, I'm the one with several sources saying it is. You did just throw some numbers in the air, applied some 5th grade maths to it and say you are right and every article out there is wrong. Be my guest and tell all those news outlets about their giant mistakes. I don't need to argue with this kind of streetsmarts about a topic I know very little about while you are completely clueless.

The news articles reference the other articles and the SEC report...which I quoted....so your stupidity of saying it's irrelevant earlier just shows ill-informed you are.  Your reading comprehension needs to be improved as your "sources" are making assumptions on interest rates that you are regurgitating as facts.

 

It's stupid saying I made numbers up out of thin air.  In an earlier analyses I was doing a rough "worst case" debt scenario for Twitter...and guess what the SEC thing pretty much says I was approximately right in regards to the payment he was to initially make.

 

You call me completely clueless, but the SEC number backs my "numbers in the air".

 

The simple FACT from the SEC in regards to Twitter debt:

UP TO $13 billion

$6 billion in bridge financing (again based on stock sales this bridge financing is already closed)

 

Your article, claims $13 billion and $1.2 billion interest.  Guess what, YOUR source supposedly would put the interest rate at 9% interest rate.  That's your source!  So again, do you really think 9% interest rate is going to be a thing?

 

The SEC numbers, which isn't a made up number, says $7 billion.  So going to your source of $1.2 billion, that's 17%.  Your sources don't pass the smell test, and the fact that you somehow think I"m clueless...what does that make you?

 

Guess what, else...$1.2 billion is roughly the amount spent on R&D and $1.2 billion is about the amount in sales/marketing expenses.  So even if it were $1.2 billion, they could easily cut costs.

[mr moose]

7 hours ago, RealBACONATOR2 said:

What a ridiculous statement. From a management perspective, Elon has fired or lost a TON of critical staff,

Not a big loss if they aren't performing or are damaging the company.

 

7 hours ago, RealBACONATOR2 said:

and he's not about to learn how to maintain servers himself.

He doesn't have to, that 's thing about knowing how to run big companies, he knows how to get staff that can do that for him.

 

7 hours ago, RealBACONATOR2 said:

His own toxic ideology lost significant manpower from the company he runs, and the lights may not stay on. Every company has a culture to create so that people have a healthy and productive environment. Elon has failed to create a productive environment by acting like a child throwing a fit. It's an incredibly competitive job market right now, and for some reason Musk must have thought his employees had nowhere else to go when.... they do. lol.

What toxic ideology,  so far he has only said he doesn't want the company to be profiting from impersonation and misinformation,  censoring users and he wants to protect freedom of speech.  If that's toxic then you are a long way from understanding what is good for society in general.

[Quackers101]

how funny it sounds when trying to make the 44 billion deal for a social media platform was ever a good idea. More so when he wanted it a bit for the "memes" and the "lolz" has he has shown and still currently do about the situation. Would be god awful to know this is your boss and throws sh*t in your face and don't respect the people behind it. Then to push unrealistic goals and solutions, just because of how the deal went and what he got... I guess the best he can do is 420 blaze in the face of the haters and have fun while tanking an social media and "social service" platform. Could maybe rise again, but I guess its no longer as the same one, or try keep it as is.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, Quackers101 said:

how funny it sounds when trying to make the 44 billion deal for a social media platform was ever a good idea. More so when he wanted it a bit for the "memes" and the "lolz" has he has shown and still currently do about the situation. Would be god awful to know this is your boss and throws sh*t in your face and don't respect the people behind it. Then to push unrealistic goals and solutions, just because of how the deal went and what he got... I guess the best he can do is 420 blaze in the face of the haters and have fun while tanking an social media and "social service" platform. Could maybe rise again, but I guess its no longer as the same one, or try keep it as is.

Who cares if it is a good idea or not, the two hings people seem to be failing to grasp are the fact that when you have Billions to waste on a bad Idea then whatever it is is moot and not proof something terrible is happening.  And 2 you don't know that he is forcing good workers to work harder,  all we know is he sent out an email (assuming it is even real and not another fucking hoax/troll that main stream media loves to suck up these days), we Don't know how many people it was sent to or if they were targeted because they were shit employees taking the piss with work from home options.

 

God knows I've told workers under me to pick up their socks and work harder and longer or find another job. But as most bosses would,  I only said it to the genuine slackers who were causing more work for the other decent workers whom I never gave a hard time.

 

 

[jos]

Some tasks there is no use of more employees.since some need to be done sequential and will take time. That does not entitle for an employer make the employee to work for a long time.developers are humans, they need rest and have free time. This is modern slavery.

[Taf the Ghost]

As a reminder, the only thing Twitter does different from a decade ago is require more Data Centers, and almost all of that is controlled remotely. Core staff of 500 is about right for what the site actually does. Everything else can be contracted out to fill in gaps. Then you'd have 750-1000 other employees dealing with everything else. (It's still a large Ad Platform, so you need dedicated Ad Teams & Brand Managers.)

 

There's a couple of reason there's a wall to wall Negative Narrative Campaign. The primary one is the Twitter is a massive information & data collector. This makes it a real power broker in the Information space. Bezos bought Washington Post. Musk, in effect, bought all of the newsstands themselves. Musk represents & favors different factions than Twitter previously worked for. (Those with better understanding would assume it's a DoD vs CIA proxy battle, which is a bit of what it looks like.) This is the main reason for the *massive civil liability* campaign against their advertisers. (We'll ignore, for now, how terrible the RoI on Twitter Advertising has historically been, which is why this was easy cover to get out of those deals, lol.)

Another factor is exactly what you're seeing. The harsh reality is that most Web Tech companies have always needed very small staffs. It's always been a key issue with them, because the needs for the managers become too dominant in the culture since they'll very quickly out number the actually productive employees. The core money making product is, at the end, maintained and developed by a very small staff compared to the money generated. Web companies are, thusly, the most Revenue Efficient companies in history, but it also means they're very fragile since there's little institutional momentum within them. Thus, 80% of the employees in Silicon Valley are currently terrified for their jobs, as they probably rightly should be. If most of the companies weren't be fed backside Fed printed dollars, they'd have to actually figure out how to make a profitable company. It's always important to remember that humans are hyper aware when someone threatens their food supply, in this case, their entire career. That'll ensure there is a willing audience for a freak out.

 

And even a further factor is the cultural layer around Information. Somehow, the verification system (since it's basically a PR platform first) was converted into this weird Class/Priest-like badge. It really pissed off the NYC-DC corridor media types. The blue check mark literally made some of these people feel superior to others. There's a couple of sociology PhD thesis in there, but it's a very real effect that we've seen. And these types are prone to lashing out in weird ways, as we keep seeing. Which means there will be endless amounts of ankle biting.

 

All of this before the real heavy hitters that slowly progressing in various courts. Twitter has a lot of ... useful information. Oh yeah, I know some Egyptians that might want certain information to execute a couple of people for. (If you ever wonder why this stuff ends up mattering. Well, Social Media gets people killed regularly. There's always factions that want payback & Twitter would have a lot of useful information.)

[Kisai]

7 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Another factor is exactly what you're seeing. The harsh reality is that most Web Tech companies have always needed very small staffs. 

 

That's definitely not true.

 

If your site sells "anything" you need people, who are not techs, handling that.

If your site sells services, you need people to manage that.

If your site hosts anything, you need lawyers, not just moderators.

If your site has international reach, you need international lawyers, staff, data centers, etc.

 

A site run entirely by just "the techs" is a site that nobody wants to use, because it will lack the people who who are needed to say "that's ugly, bad, difficult to use", hard to market an ugly app to people who care about aesthetics and usability.

 

An example of "run by techs" is Linux, and dozens of open source programs that lack intuitive GUI's. 

 

What you can get rid of in "tech" companies are people who only exist to be "idea" people. Tech people are more than capable of being idea people, you just need someone with technical experience to be a tie-breaker when two or more solutions are presented because otherwise all the tech people will resort to tribalism of who is the smarter monkey in the room. You don't want that.

 

Hell you see it here on the forum "I worked for X, I'm therefor an impeachable source of experience on everything X ever dipped it's toes in." Just because someone has worked for a specific company doesn't mean they worked for that company in a capacity that actually did anything productive, and good gawd there are definitely people I've seen or met at bigger companies that seem to have been "moved to the storage" (see "The Office" film) and don't stick up for themselves. Their original position at the company was eliminated, but they're still there because they are the only person who knows how to do X, and thus the only thing they do is X, and when the bean-splitting bean counters ask "why does this guy have three computers at his desk, and he's asking for a laptop?" you have to go "this is the only guy who can do X, which requires a specialized $20,000 computer that we only have one license to, oh and that's not three computers that's three monitors."

 

[Taf the Ghost]

@Kisaithe "Web" part of the "Web Tech" was there for a reason. It's been a repeated reality in the Tech space for over 20 years since the Internet hit. The people needed are much smaller than any other chunk of the tech space and especially anything at industrial scale.  Twitter has the need for 400-500 core employees that handle all primary systems, development and production. There's likely around another 1000 needed to make a fully functional company. That isn't he 7k they had when Musk bought the company.

 

If Twitter had any other major products, they'd need more staff. But they've killed all of those off. Most of what everyone thinks they're losing can be solved with some outside contractors. If Twitter suddenly gets into Silicon design, we can talk about a lot bigger staff, but, for now, the staffing target appears to be about correct for what is needed for the company.

[Donut417]

On 11/18/2022 at 2:38 PM, trevb0t said:

To be clear to those confused, he's not talking about closing the company, nor is further layoff a requirement of bankrupcty.

There are many forms of bankruptcy, and it appears that the purpose of this one would be to restructure and consolidate debt and how it is paid, and eventually potentially charge off large amounts of debt after x years of plan payment.

 

From releases on the state of Twitter prior to the acquisition, it has been circling the toilet for quite a while.

Add 44bil in debt to that, it makes sense to restructure. 

 

Don't take anything in this message to mean I like what's happening here, with 3700 employees getting canned. Nor am I a personal fan of Elon.

I just see a lot of confusion about what this actually means.

I do agree with what your saying. One thing to add is that Meta for example has laid off like 11,000 people from what I have heard and they are not the only ones. Lots of tech firms are laying off people OR doing hiring freezes. Mainly due to the economic conditions. ALSO due to the low interest rates we used to have in the US, borrowing money was cheap, so companies were borrowing SHIT loads, because interest rates were low. Now that the Fed has raised rates to stop borrowing a lot of companies are now reevaluating projects and cutting their losses. 

 

I do agree that maybe Twitter can go thru some type of bankruptcy proceeding and consolidate and or reduce it debts. Its all going to depend on the court and the debtors. Detroit went thru this process not too many years ago, where bond holders were taking cents on the dollar. BUT Musk is going to have to come up with a plan where Twitter can make money or this will fall apart. 

 

I think why a lot of people feel Twitter is going under is mainly because of how Musk is handling things. I mean he's an Ass hole, there is really no other way to put it. In the last 3 years people have become fed up with dealing with ass hole bosses. Also, 3700 people were laid off, that sends signals thru the ones who didn't get laid off that an exit strategy might be needed. Because there's no guarantee that more lay offs wont happen due to restructuring. I have been thru a layoff cycle as Ill call it, after the first group got canned I figured Ill probably be laid off as well, the good news is I had money saved just incase. The fact is, if enough employees decide to exit, that will cause issues at Twitter. That will cause more work for less people, more stress, that leads to more people leaving and the cycle continues until more people are brought in, or the business suffers, with the potential of not being able to keep their doors open. You see a lot of this happening with the restaurant industry here in the US, they cant find employees so they either have enough to do carry out or they have to lock their doors and shut down. 

[Majinhoju]

lol, he just unbanned Trump. I wonder how many more advertisers will flee now. At this point I'm starting to think he's just tanking twitter for the lulz.

[ravenshrike]

6 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

lol, he just unbanned Trump. I wonder how many more advertisers will flee now. At this point I'm starting to think he's just tanking twitter for the lulz.

The most amusing part is that currently Trump as an exclusivity agreement with Truth/Social. So while his campaign account can post to Twitter, he can't have a personal account. Should be interesting to see  if that contract gets renegotiated.

[mr moose]

8 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

lol, he just unbanned Trump. I wonder how many more advertisers will flee now. At this point I'm starting to think he's just

tanking twitter for the lulz.

Oh no, musk is letting us decide if we want to read trumps tweets.  The sheer unmitigated audacity of him!!  I don't know what's sadder, some of the things trump has said or the fact people don't understand that twitter being the arbiter of what we see is worse.

 

 

[Arika]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Oh no, musk is letting us decide if we want to read trumps tweets.  The sheer unmitigated audacity of him!!  I don't know what's sadder, some of the things trump has said or the fact people don't understand that twitter being the arbiter of what we see is worse.

 

 

Careful, you're gonna get the same treatment i did and be called a trump supporter, despite both of us being Australian.

[Beerzerker]

9 hours ago, Majinhoju said:

lol, he just unbanned Trump. I wonder how many more advertisers will flee now. At this point I'm starting to think he's just tanking twitter for the lulz.

That could be part of the plan for now - Let them go to be replaced by others that he wants.

As for tanking Twatter.... I can assure you if he thinks that's what best, he'll do it.
It's gonna be an interesting next few weeks to come.

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

I'm going to leave this here without much context. But, realize, this is a problem that's been actively reported to Twitter for a Decade. It was known to be at least passively supported by some faction in Twitter. Looks like we have final proof it was being actively supported. If you've ever wondered why I have already had a very dim view of their Management. Click the link and read.
 

 

how much staff does it take to remove CP from your platform?

 

7000 is clearly not enough .... oh wait it can be done for far less? it's as if twitter was bloated with mostly useless people that brought nothing of value to the company.

 

And now i'll wait for the obligatory i must be a "musk fan" accusation, even though i've labelled tesla as a garbage brand with a trash product many, many times

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

Oh no, musk is letting us decide if we want to read trumps tweets.  The sheer unmitigated audacity of him!!  I don't know what's sadder, some of the things trump has said or the fact people don't understand that twitter being the arbiter of what we see is worse.

 

 

i find it more funny than none of the "ban this person i don't agree with" crowd have no problem with terrorist groups been allowed in the platform and it being used as a recruitment hub