Twitter

“Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams And BizStone were launch partners of the Facebook platform, and they built Twitter to update Facebook statuses.”

“Twitter is a shockingly unsuccessful company in the big picture. Like, shockingly, right, given the head to where it was.”

“The nice part about ripping off Twitter, if that's what this is, which it is is no one likes Twitter. So no one's like, oh, you ripped off Twitter.”

“All they need to do is convert, I guess, about 18% of Instagram to threads, and they'll have an app the size of Twitter.”

“I actually am pretty optimistic. I think this will work. Now, whether it kills Twitter or just becomes yet another place you post things, I think is TBD. Like, I don't, it's hard to see it killing Twitter”

“I think that the mainstream audience is going to be on threads and it's going to be powerful. And so I think to Sam's point, that distribution, Advantage can't be ignored and it will be very powerful three years from now, no question.”

“I mean, I just don't think it's I don't think it's existential for Twitter. But I do think it's existential for Twitter ever being a hundred billion dollar company, right?”

“Seeking Arrangements is famous. It's awful. And it has rebranded itself Arrangements. It's still seeking arrangements, and it's advertising on Twitter.”

“I think any thinking person who, especially who's worked on the internet, would take the massive under on that, right, in terms of that being the outcome. Like, I think that's extremely, nearly impossible from the position he's currently in”

“This is a big one, and it does destroy a lot of brand value.”

“Twitter ruined Twitter and then sold it to Elon. And now Elon can do whatever he wants.”

“I think this is why VCs like Twitter. And why VCs like crypto, and why VCs like podcasting. You know, it's like you see numbers go up every day, and you can get a feedback loop, right?”

“I just don't think we're going to get to a place where it's like they kill Twitter. What you're going to get to is a place where it's also a text-based social network-y interesting thing with a lot of cross-posting.”

“No, I don't know if I agree with that. There's no way she should have this job.”

“That actually will ultimately probably be one of the things that crushes the company.”

“Twitter is a cockroach.”

“I think she sticks it out, right? I think she was hired to do this job exactly as it's playing out, and I think she knew what she was getting into”

“He did it in a big way and gave everyone else permission to cut burn.”

“The information reported this week that Elon had killed a tool that had been involved, that Exit or Twitter had been using to spot fakes and misinformation, and he killed it because it was hosted on Google Cloud, and in his big cost-cutting efforts, he had wan…”

“They clearly don't have it under control, or at least Twitter, whatever Twitter calls itself, doesn't. Meta seems to be in a much better position.”

“There's a Twitter strategy, which intellectually, don't shoot the messenger. Intellectually, I actually agree with, right, which is like, it's not our job to moderate this stuff. Go nuts. Like, I actually think that is the intellectually correct position.”

“Twitter, which did nothing for 20 years.”

“And my sense is honestly that the fact that Twitter hasn't been able to means the answer is probably no.”

“When I went and worked at Facebook on the way in, one senior executive reviewed all my investments and told me which ones I had to divest from. Interestingly, path was fine at the time, but Venmo was a big problem. And then, yeah, believe it or not, I had to s…”

“Where you had a thing that was kind of a shitty public company, and like had been under executing in manager mode, and then you had Elon come in and founder mode it, Right. In a lot of ways. And I would argue he's kind of broken it.”

“It's this weird dynamic that's developed because he's the kind of key person in all these companies where people fund these things or his dalliances, even Twitter, right? For access to the actually good stuff. And so you end up in this weird zone where like, I…”

“We were meeting with a very large LP today who summarily said to this we have a lot of data on this and we can definitively say that the venture capitalists that are tweeting the most are not the ones producing the DPI.”

“The kind of aggressive layoffs post COVID, which by the way, we're also spurred by Elon when Elon fired. 70%, right? Firing 20 or 30 or 10 didn't look so bad.”

“Today it's a 2.7 billion dollar company. Yes. It's worth half as much, But they're doing 1.25 billion and he grew EBITDA margins from 13% to 46%.”

“It's just like the interesting experience I had is, you know, you end up, I like double the number of Twitter followers I have of these people who are interested in this economy.”

“Twitter was at one point reliant on a single Mac mini to stay on the internet.”

“And the truth is that they have been able to run Twitter at much less than they were spending on it with far fewer employees. It's still up and running and it's become You know, the water cooler place again.”

“The funny thing about LLMs is, like, LLMs are excellent at this. Like, if you just, like, download your Twitter data right now, and you're like, hey, can you just, like, give this me in, like, one flat file? Like, they'll never give it to you that way. They'll…”

“Venture capitalists who have, like, too many Twitter followers can't really use Twitter. Right. Like you need like the right scale Twitter following of like intense loyalty and people who like are into what you're doing. If you get too broad, it just kind of s…”

“That if you truly had the American internet or, like, the French internet, this can be global in various ways, it is so much more moderate than what you get on Twitter, right? Like, it would, like, it would be so much more moderate”

“He bailed out his XAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money, and if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, whatever, you kind of got robbed on a few things, but number bi…”