I did a deep dive into tech companies performance prior to investing and Twitter stood out as complete outlier on the low side. I have kept up with it and periodically posted about it.
Twitter stock IPO'd around $42 and stayed there for 10 years. It crept up and back a few times. Compare that to other tech companies that grew 3x to 10…
I did a deep dive into tech companies performance prior to investing and Twitter stood out as complete outlier on the low side. I have kept up with it and periodically posted about it.
Twitter stock IPO'd around $42 and stayed there for 10 years. It crept up and back a few times. Compare that to other tech companies that grew 3x to 10x in that time. Twitter never made money. A few positive quarters, but mostly lost money. Revenues grew very slowly, but costs grew faster. Again, compare that to the revenues of Amazon, Google, Facebook (not to mention some of their subsidiaries who outdid Twitter by miles - WhatsApp, Youtube, Instagram, etc. Total monthly users at Twitter were stuck at 300MM while many sites grew to over 1B. Twitter has been sliding down the rankings of users and is now at 22 among social media sites. There was virtually zero innovation in making the product better. Increasing the number of characters was about it. Musk has already done more innovation and promised much more. It seems most of the people in Twitter were developing tools to censor and/or running around like chicken littles personally trying to censor. Using mostly Twitter data (which, over the years, Twitter made less available) they had about 66MM daily active users in the US. When you subtracted out their estimates on bots at the time, businesses, almost all of whom are on Twitter, including hundreds of accounts for larger ones, duplicate estimates (lot of Pierre Delectos and Carlos Dangers out there), government agencies - federal, state, local), charitable organizations, etc, and you get down to somewhere between 600K and 3MM actual people tweeting every day. Less than 1% of the country. Twitter is not the real world.
I worked for a fortune 5 company, and had to lead some large government contracts at times. I thought I knew bureaucracy, TLA spewers (three letter acronyms), and dysfunctional decision making. One of the biggest takeaways from the Twitter files outside of the actual news put out by these reporters is just the sheer dysfunction within Twitter, the number of teams - half of whom did not really seem to know why they existed-, the horrible "decision by committee" that routinely got kicked up to executive levels, and of course the group think that it took to come to some of their conclusions. Stunning. Musk was right to lay waste to the structure. By the way, I liked how he did it. First top down (it was easy to see and calculate how many people you actually needed), and then bottom up with his "work hard or leave" ultimatum, where people self selected out.
I did a deep dive into tech companies performance prior to investing and Twitter stood out as complete outlier on the low side. I have kept up with it and periodically posted about it.
Twitter stock IPO'd around $42 and stayed there for 10 years. It crept up and back a few times. Compare that to other tech companies that grew 3x to 10x in that time. Twitter never made money. A few positive quarters, but mostly lost money. Revenues grew very slowly, but costs grew faster. Again, compare that to the revenues of Amazon, Google, Facebook (not to mention some of their subsidiaries who outdid Twitter by miles - WhatsApp, Youtube, Instagram, etc. Total monthly users at Twitter were stuck at 300MM while many sites grew to over 1B. Twitter has been sliding down the rankings of users and is now at 22 among social media sites. There was virtually zero innovation in making the product better. Increasing the number of characters was about it. Musk has already done more innovation and promised much more. It seems most of the people in Twitter were developing tools to censor and/or running around like chicken littles personally trying to censor. Using mostly Twitter data (which, over the years, Twitter made less available) they had about 66MM daily active users in the US. When you subtracted out their estimates on bots at the time, businesses, almost all of whom are on Twitter, including hundreds of accounts for larger ones, duplicate estimates (lot of Pierre Delectos and Carlos Dangers out there), government agencies - federal, state, local), charitable organizations, etc, and you get down to somewhere between 600K and 3MM actual people tweeting every day. Less than 1% of the country. Twitter is not the real world.
I worked for a fortune 5 company, and had to lead some large government contracts at times. I thought I knew bureaucracy, TLA spewers (three letter acronyms), and dysfunctional decision making. One of the biggest takeaways from the Twitter files outside of the actual news put out by these reporters is just the sheer dysfunction within Twitter, the number of teams - half of whom did not really seem to know why they existed-, the horrible "decision by committee" that routinely got kicked up to executive levels, and of course the group think that it took to come to some of their conclusions. Stunning. Musk was right to lay waste to the structure. By the way, I liked how he did it. First top down (it was easy to see and calculate how many people you actually needed), and then bottom up with his "work hard or leave" ultimatum, where people self selected out.
👍👍 comments.
Good old hard core analytics of the data.
Bravo !