We do just about everything with one or more Postgres databases. We have workers that query the db for tasks, do the work, and update the db. Portals that are the read-only view of the work being performed, and it's pretty amazing how far we've gotten with just Postgres and no real tuning on our end. There's been a couple scenarios where query time was excessive and we solved by learning a bit more about how Postgres worked and how to redefine our data model. It seems to be the swiss army knife that allows you to excel at most general cases, and if you need to do something very specific, well at that point you probably need a different type of database.
You'd think there would be enough controls in place to not allow a couple hundred million to go missing, even if there was a "hack" on one employee's computer.
Didn't know that about the comp at his companies. Kind of crazy considering the risk to human life associated with many of his companies. Would've expected them to pay top tier.
I guess there's that.. but at a rate of 2 million a year, if someone was under-performing I'd imagine Elon would quickly be able to cycle in and out. And if the whole thing fails after 1-2 years, it's still not even half a billion spent. Compared to the titanic Twitter sinking.
Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate.
Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.
Your theory is the one that seems most plausible to me. Pushed into a decision he thought he could back out of and now trying to fix it the best way he sees fit.
I'd argue his followers are his greatest chance at profit. Many people despise him and have been closing their twitter accounts. So despite it still being twitter brand and established users, they don't like Elon so they don't want to support the platform.
I think for an insane comp and equity in a new company led by Elon, lots of people would consider leaving. Network affects are real and is probably a top 10 world individual as far as the power of his network is concerned. Having a ton of YC press is way different than being Elon.
Even still he could pay people to use his application. Pay businesses $20 a month for a verified business account. Pay individual users $10-100 a month based on activity and engagement. Does it scale? Absolutely not but I still think it'd end up cheaper than $44 billion.
I keep thinking it'd be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he's looking for.
Let's say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he's ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.
So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He'd get users no matter what he built, so he's solved that problem too. You're correct that he wouldn't have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn't this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.
In my mind I don't see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.
Sorry that happened to you. I had a similar experience not being approved for being different with my first high school crush. We both liked each other as much as young kids can like each other. What surprised me was when it came time to ask her to date formally, she didn't seem interested. This was surprising to me based on all of our interactions and I found out a couple of months later from her friend that it was because of me being "different" and fear of how her family would react if she dated someone "different". She didn't want to upset me so she never told me, but damn it hurt just as bad to hear it from someone else.
So what's my regret? Well there's a couple but the biggest one is that instead of embracing being different and who I was and where I came from, I instead tried to hide it as best I could. I avoided anything to do with my native culture or language because I think I was so hurt internally that someone who appeared to have feelings for me would put them aside for fear of their family's reaction. I even gave up my interests that I feared were too nerdy and contributed to my being "different", after all I am on hacker news so there's some nerd in me, right?
Ended up going off to college in a big city school where different was normal and got back to my roots and interests and this put me on a wonderful path that lead to great success early in my career, stronger relationships with my family and culture, and a much happier life. It feels good to embrace "you", even if some small-town folk may think it's "different".
My secondary regret is that I never reached back out to her to see if she still had similar feelings or maybe tried to get a relationship going on as more mature adults. I've thought about her a good bit but I think what I've realized is that it's not so much her that I'm interested in, it's that all I wanted was to be accepted by her and that maybe if I were to be accepted, I could prove to myself that I'm really not "different".