Item — HN Reader

In 2022, Twitter / X was supposed to have completely shut down according to many doomsters at the time. It is clear that many in [0], [1] and [2] also would like to ask the same question why Twitter / X still hasn't shut down.

Turns out almost 4 years later, we are going to waiting even longer for the collapse.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33984823

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34214903

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34617964

5 comments

He had the good fortune to cut just as AI was beginning to mean you needed fewer software engineers for the same level of output. And yes, software companies across the industry had accumulated in many instances people whose business was not, and was sometimes orthogonal to, building software.

Elon was well on top of what AI was capable of. That sounds less luck and more well played.

How is this guy who keeps starting or taking over and fixing wildly successful companies always this lucky?

It has collapsed. It is just bots and racism that have collapsed it, not a technical failure.

It has also collapsed on a business front. There are rumors that it has 1/10th the revenue that it did before.

>It has also collapsed

>There are rumors

Interesting methodology you use to make concrete assertions.

In 2025, Ad revenue was down 60% as compared to 2021..

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-approach-advertise...

The site has become a right-wing echo chamber and Musk's personal soapbox: https://www.natesilver.net/p/social-media-has-become-a-freak...

About 90% of the interesting people I ever followed on Twitter are now on Bluesky or Mastodon. They're never coming back.

The HN discussions you linked to:

1. 10 points, 15 comments

2. 9 points, 17 comments

3. 44 points, 84 comments

That’s not exactly that many doomsters. The first two were barely discussions and the third was a retrospective asking “why didn’t it happen”.

I don’t even really understand why it would be notable that people had that view in the light of mass layoffs. Look at the discussion around Vimeo layoffs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699

(471 points, 512 comments)

Plenty of discussion about the negative impacts in the long term. But it didn’t involve Elon Musk so people didn’t get weirdly defensive about it all.

Assertions that Twitter/X was surely going to shut down after the Elon Musk acquisition were wishful thinking on the part of two groups of people:

1) political progressives who liked the way the pre-Elon-Musk management of Twitter engaged in political censorship on the platform (i.e. anyone using the term "nazi" with respect to Twitter or Musk)

2) software engineers who saw a bloated software company summarily fire a bunch of software engineers who the new leadership thought were mostly doing unimportant work, and really wanted it to be true that this was going to tank the company, because it was bad for their job security if it turned out that Twitter didn't actually need that many software engineers after all.

You don't think he tanked the company?

Twitter used to be profitable.

Now, it needed to be folded into xAI to survive. Then that combined mass needed to be folded into SpaceX to survive. Then that combined mass needed to IPO to survive.

Sure, Elon can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Doesn't make it not a tank.

> Twitter used to be profitable.

Twitter posted a profit in only two of its eight full fiscal years (turning profitable in 2018 and 2019)

In its last year (2021), Twitter reported a net loss of $221 million on $5.1 billion in revenue.