The Six Five team discusses Elon finally breaking Twitter.
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Transcript:.
Daniel Newman: Pat, Elon Musk broke Twitter, the press loved it, they wrote all about it, for what, was it was about an hour, an hour and a half, people, some customers were struggling to tweet and send DMs, and basically the question came is he moving too fast? Is he breaking stuff?
And so Elon Musk basically has moved and advanced and improved and I think a lot of foundational movement in terms of the infrastructure of Twitter. And he’s done it with, what, 70% less staff. So going down for an hour, I mean, some of the technical questions, I don’t think we got a certain answer to what it was, but people were back, people were moving again. By the way, Twitter has had plenty of downtime in its history. So while everybody wants to lob a grenade and blame this on Elon, I’ve had more than a few fail whales in my life. So Pat, did he break Twitter, I mean, or is this a free app, or mostly free app that consumers use and it had a little downtime?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so here’s what I noticed. I follow a lot of the press in my Twitter feeds, and a lot of press, particularly the ones that, I don’t know, that say that they’re also on Mastodon and really tried to get people off and said they were quitting, came back on Twitter, as you and I predicted, and they came out of the woodwork. I saw some person had 10 tweets about the challenge that I think lasted maybe an hour and a half.
What happened recently was people got a rate limit error so they could schedule tweets, but they wouldn’t automatically come out. And that is absolutely a fail. But the amount of press that I saw come out and the amount of articles, they were literally, my impression was they were just so happy that something finally happened. Now, forget the fact that it’s been months since Elon literally went from 7,000 people to 1,000 people and 500 engineers.
Okay, think about this for a second. And didn’t skip a beat, they did add features, there were some momentary issues with Blue, but you can tell who is egging on and who is definitely looking for a reason to shit talk Elon Musk. And I actually think it’s incredibly amazing that he got rid of 6,000 people, got down to 500 engineers, and that we even have Twitter. And I’ll end with you and I predicted at the end of 2022 that these were momentary issues, advertisers would come back, and users would come back. I don’t know exact users, I think the recent meeting in the last two days is Elon is firing somebody because he doesn’t get enough interaction on his posts, yet another way to just denigrate.
And overall, I think it’s more of a personal thing about Elon, they don’t like his personality and what he does, and might even question his political leanings. But here we are. I think you and I have been proven right so far, it’s only February 10th, on what’s going on with Twitter. But so far we look pretty good. And I’ll key off what you said I think on a call yesterday, which is, “Hey, as analysts we only talk about the predictions that we got right,” and I think so far you and I got this right.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, Pat. I think it’s working well. I talked to The Wall Street Journal about it this week, and I think there’s a lot to be desired for building a feature set that people will pay for, yet the subscription part I think lags a little bit in terms of what people would pay the eight bucks. An edit button’s kind of cool, but I’m not sure what that’s worth to everybody. But I do think this stuff works, it’s robust, there’s been very little disruption. By the way, all the hype about all the advertisers leaving, that came and went. I’m not saying people are and aren’t, we don’t know, it’s a private company and they really no longer need to disclose that. But I do think that it just seemed like it was a temporary, it was a weather pattern, it stormed over, and now it’s moved on.
Most people don’t even know, they don’t pay attention. And by the way, Pat, I’ve turned off some of all, I just don’t do as much doom scrolling and rage scrolling as I used to do. And to me, Twitter just feels like Twitter. So I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel any different to me now than it felt to me a year ago. So I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I always loved Twitter and I still love Twitter. So for what it’s worth, I think Elon will probably end up doing just fine. I don’t think he’s really ever had a business that didn’t do just fine. And usually it’s some orders of magnitude better than that. So, hey buddy, that was a good show. We did it. We did it.
Patrick Moorhead: We did, we did. Let’s get on to our day. I’m back to back until six, and I’m sure you are as well.
Let’s go on to our final topic because we’re at that five-minute warning before we’ve got a sprint off and do the thing we do after we do this thing. By the way, my favorite part of the day. Pat, Elon Musk broke Twitter, the press loved it, they wrote all about it, for what, was it was about an hour, an hour and a half, people, some customers were struggling to tweet and send DMs, and basically the question came is he moving too fast? Is he breaking stuff?
And so Elon Musk basically has moved and advanced and improved and I think a lot of foundational movement in terms of the infrastructure of Twitter. And he’s done it with, what, 70% less staff. So going down for an hour, I mean, some of the technical questions, I don’t think we got a certain answer to what it was, but people were back, people were moving again. By the way, Twitter has had plenty of downtime in its history. So while everybody wants to lob a grenade and blame this on Elon, I’ve had more than a few fail whales in my life. So Pat, did he break Twitter, I mean, or is this a free app, or mostly free app that consumers use and it had a little downtime?
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so here’s what I noticed. I follow a lot of the press in my Twitter feeds, and a lot of press, particularly the ones that, I don’t know, that say that they’re also on Mastodon and really tried to get people off and said they were quitting, came back on Twitter, as you and I predicted, and they came out of the woodwork. I saw some person had 10 tweets about the challenge that I think lasted maybe an hour and a half.
What happened recently was people got a rate limit error so they could schedule tweets, but they wouldn’t automatically come out. And that is absolutely a fail. But the amount of press that I saw come out and the amount of articles, they were literally, my impression was they were just so happy that something finally happened. Now, forget the fact that it’s been months since Elon literally went from 7,000 people to 1,000 people and 500 engineers.
Okay, think about this for a second. And didn’t skip a beat, they did add features, there were some momentary issues with Blue, but you can tell who is egging on and who is definitely looking for a reason to shit talk Elon Musk. And I actually think it’s incredibly amazing that he got rid of 6,000 people, got down to 500 engineers, and that we even have Twitter. And I’ll end with you and I predicted at the end of 2022 that these were momentary issues, advertisers would come back, and users would come back. I don’t know exact users, I think the recent meeting in the last two days is Elon is firing somebody because he doesn’t get enough interaction on his posts, yet another way to just denigrate.
And overall, I think it’s more of a personal thing about Elon, they don’t like his personality and what he does, and might even question his political leanings. But here we are. I think you and I have been proven right so far, it’s only February 10th, on what’s going on with Twitter. But so far we look pretty good. And I’ll key off what you said I think on a call yesterday, which is, “Hey, as analysts we only talk about the predictions that we got right,” and I think so far you and I got this right.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, Pat. I think it’s working well. I talked to The Wall Street Journal about it this week, and I think there’s a lot to be desired for building a feature set that people will pay for, yet the subscription part I think lags a little bit in terms of what people would pay the eight bucks. An edit button’s kind of cool, but I’m not sure what that’s worth to everybody. But I do think this stuff works, it’s robust, there’s been very little disruption. By the way, all the hype about all the advertisers leaving, that came and went. I’m not saying people are and aren’t, we don’t know, it’s a private company and they really no longer need to disclose that. But I do think that it just seemed like it was a temporary, it was a weather pattern, it stormed over, and now it’s moved on.
Most people don’t even know, they don’t pay attention. And by the way, Pat, I’ve turned off some of all, I just don’t do as much doom scrolling and rage scrolling as I used to do. And to me, Twitter just feels like Twitter. So I don’t know. It doesn’t really feel any different to me now than it felt to me a year ago. So I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but I always loved Twitter and I still love Twitter. So for what it’s worth, I think Elon will probably end up doing just fine. I don’t think he’s really ever had a business that didn’t do just fine. And usually it’s some orders of magnitude better than that.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
