Twitter was doing fine. By taking it private, he saddled it with massive debt its current revenue couldn’t service. And every decision thereafter has been half baked and poorly executed. So by trying to “save” it, he’s killing it much quicker than if it had just been left alone.
That is not at all what looking at their financials say. Twitter was a very profitable company which over hired like crazy in 2021. This could have been solved without gong crazy like Musk did. Just do responsible layoffs.
There are no articles to confirm that it was losing $4m a day prior to the acquisition. This is a number that Elon put out (post acquisition) to justify layoffs.
There are no articles to confirm that it wasn't, either.
As for justifying layoffs, Twitter (or X, or whatever it is) seems to be working just fine, despite the dire predictions that the whole thing was going to die within days.
It appears reasonable at first glance, but upon further reflection it seems unlikely that the internet was the only factor influencing the riots. If the internet wasn't available, it's likely that some other means of communication would have been used to spread the news that sparked the unrest. There have been MANY instances of people trying to take over a government building before the age of the internet.
This is true but I’m not sure you’d have had the critical mass of people primed to respond to those messages. Fox News heavily pushed lies about the election but the people who responded were part of a world which grew a lot in the later 2000s as blogs, Facebook, etc. opened up new audiences for ideas which would have been too extreme even for cable news.
To be honest, don’t don’t it. Unless you’re of Chinese descent and speak the language, you won’t be able to advance in most companies. The work culture is alien to most westerners and the benefits to your career are negligible.
Mostly depends on what you want out of your career but speaking as someone that lived in China and worked in Chinese tech companies for seven years, including being the first foreign hire for a large mobile games company, it’s not something I’d recommend mid-career. Maybe just starting out or if you can be hired into a c-level role.
Not knowing the culture will definitely hinder you compared to someone that does, but you might be able to carve out a niche as a “Western/English” facing executive. Basically you will be the executive that interfaces with foreigners.
"Unless you’re of Chinese descent and speak the language, you won’t be able to advance in most companies."
There is no such issue when working for international or western companies and/or startups. Also a local mobile games company is not a good example to generalize with since games industry is known for being pretty horrible here. Internationally as well.
While there are some things many westeners might find annoying, there are lot of good things as well. For example income tax and living costs are very low. I moved from Europe to China to work in software engineering and my living standards have increased significantly.
I guess language barrier is the main issue here? In western companies, it's also hard to advance to high/exec levels if someone cannot communicate in English well.
I'd say it's more like being brown in the US and trying to advance into C-level roles ... possible, but you may encounter resistance depending on the company and region.
Jumping on this thread, I came 4 year ago starting a company to mentor and coach young people who want to get into MNCs. Think English resume editing, LinkedIn Profile enhancements, interview coaching. Right now, Chinese is intermediate level (I am behind as my work is almost entirely in English).
You can make wonderful friends and the average Chinese is a decent, hard working person. Still, the level of mistrust throughout the society, for very obvious historical reasons, means people keep to themselves. You have to work 2-3x as hard to build brand and reputation. This coming from someone with 5 start ratings and laudatory comments in all our reviews.
And as for the "traction" techniques, quite common in US based startups. Almost none of them work so marketing and demand generation is a long, slow painful effort. Generally, they are in the historical economic cycle where they seen the "value" in an iPhone X. Services to better their lives, other than primary school education, not so much.
Disappointing to say the least as the need for career upgrades/polishing is huge. As someone once said to me, and it took time to really sink in...Just because they use the latest cellphone you do, doesn't mean they think in the same way. Truly the logic here is more convoluted and less linear. Hard to explain.
I love the adventure aspect, not sure I would do it again.
IMO, unless you really need to live in China for whatever reason, you should focus on starting a career in the States and getting an expat assignment in China. You will have a much more comfortable lifestyle and have something at home to go back to if things don't pan out.
Thanks for the insights, much appreciated! To be clear, are you a westerner who made this move, or a Chinese native? If the former, how did the startup culture compare to the US startup culture?
>of Chinese descent and speak the language
What about westerns who speak mando? Is it workable or still too much of a culture shock? Is racism abundant?
I am a white guy from the states who speaks Mandarin. It's not really racism per se, it's just more that it's harder to win their trust if you're not one of them to begin with.
The startup culture is similar but the difference is most companies expect you to be putting in OT and weekend hours almost as a default. The idea of burnout prevention hasn't caught on, at least in my experience.
Also the dev practices are different as well, things that won't translate well if you'd like to bring your skills back.
I found that people didn't expect me to speak/read/write any Mandarin being white and from the states.
Elevator rides were interesting because they were crowded and I was taller than a lot of people. People would talk about the "foreigner" standing next to them. One girl told her friend that she liked my boots (Dr. Martens) and when I got off the elevator I turned and said: "They are so comfortable I walk 3 miles from my hotel to work each day in them". I've never had such stunned silence of 30 people in an elevator. :-)
As a counter-point I've always heard them shortened to Mando and Canto (as in, "do you speak Mando, Canto, or both?") amongst Asian-American friends. Never thought anything of it really.
My Chinese friends do. Not sure if regional. I think it's just the logical shortening when the other option is 'canto', but it doesn't really make sense.
Richest man in history and already unknown to most of the world, along with many others on the list. Just goes to show that legacy is not measured on a balance sheet.
Yes. Legacy is governed by controlling the narrative. That is the real lesson.
Another lesson - there is no one legacy, we each have our own context. Go overseas and they will know Mansa Musa better than our local legends. Sort of like you comparing your high school music playlist with a friend in college from another country and you're like...woah...never heard of these artists!
It would be interesting to see how well known he is in Africa. As westerners we have only a very limited view of history and we know only about people who were relevant to our own history.
If the Canadian government requests the United States government to detain someone, the US would. That's the nature of extradition treaties. Nobody is doing anyone's "bidding".
Sure but don't act like it's just some run-of-the-mill legal process without significant political implications for Canada and their citizens, which are most certainly balanced and considered beforehand. I doubt it's an automatic process merely because a treaty exists.
You're right! It's by no means some run-of-the-mill legal process without significant political implications.
It's a run-of-the-mill legal process that the Chinese government has decided should have significant political implications for Canada and Canadian citizens. It's important to bear in mind that this was a set of decisions deliberately chosen by the government of China in response to Canada obeying its obligations clearly laid out in a readily available treaty.
As you so wisely and correctly note, no legal process is automatic. Yet routine extraditions, even of politically sensitive people, come quite close.
A treaty means it's a matter of law in both countries. It may not be automatic, but if they don't follow the laws they promised to uphold, they risk voiding the treaty.
He was caught using two fake reactions, and he owned up to those. But we can’t say if the others are real or not with any certainty. Personally, I thought the parking garage reaction looked like bad acting as soon as I saw it, so I’m still skeptical.
He also initially claimed the package was placed in Illinois, but he edited the video after people called him out on it.
And he presents the device as something he engineered himself, only briefly mentioning that someone helped him. Another video shows that the other guy, Sean Hodgins, actually built it (find the link in jtokoph's comment below).
So who really knows? It wouldn’t be the first time something on the Internet was staged.
Its disappointing that Sean is getting absolutely zero credit. Mark Rober just keeps saying “I built”. There’s a link in the description but just suggests Sean has more build details.
He could have at least brought Sean into the original video for some credit. Who knows, maybe this was the deal and Mark is giving Sean all of the ad revenue in exchange for the views/subs/credit...shrug
Faked and discovered to include fake reactions that were then removed, are different situations. Mark has been producing high quality educational and entertaining videos that encourage kids to get into science. I have personally watched kids go nuts over his Fluidized air bed experiments, and convince their parents to try it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My4RA5I0FKs
It sucks there was fake content in there, but the device was real and the fake actions removed.
I'm a bit more miffed that he didn't make it very clear he didn't create the device. I enjoyed watching the video of the guy who did, but I only got to watch that video because somebody in the last HN thread recommended it.
> "I was presented with information that caused me to doubt the veracity of 2 of the 5 reactions in the video [...] It appears (and I've since confirmed) in these two cases, the 'thieves' were actually acquaintances of the person helping me."
It wasn't faked. The incidents where the pickups happened at his place were real. However he paid people to place it on their doorstep and those people had an accomplice pick it up.
No. Ask a person why they are "successful" and they will give you the answer they tell themselves. "I worked harder than others, I am smarter, I went to a good school, etc. etc." While they think that's true, it's mostly hogwash and most people can't tell you why they are or aren't successful.
The problem is that most of what it comes down to is luck. Luck in the sense of time and place. People born into a wealthy family or even with two loving parents are lucky and way more likely to be wealthy than those that were born without.
Warren Buffett came of age in the greatest period of prosperity in American history. Bill Gates came of age right at the time that PCs became possible. Bezos was first to market on a new and unproven platform. Zuckerberg got lucky because he was able to get started when broadband penetration in developing countries was finally starting to get some traction.
No man is an island and teaching success as a skill is just silly in my opinion.
Bill gates, bezos and zuckerbeg aren’t really good examples of “wealthy” because they are so beyond wealthy that it’s not even really worthwhile trying to emulate them for practical purposes. The very definition of the ultra rich is that there are only a few of them. (Realistically no one is going to become a billionaire, and it’s not even worth trying really. 100 million is already unlimited money for all intents and purposes) So it’s much more practical to think about people that are able to provide for their families comfortably. When you start thinking about wealth in terms of billions, it completely skews perception of what actions you shod be taking, and is ultimately a pretty unrealistic and unnecessary goal. I see so much “entrepreneurship” garbage peddling where kids now think being an entrepreneur is about becoming a billionaire and redefining entire industries. When it’s really much more practical and useful to think about how you can run a small business. If you get good at that then you can run a medium business and make make a few million which is plenty enough to be happy and live a good life.
I think you're both right and wrong. In our current system, yes, a lot of success comes down to luck. However, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to remove a lot of the luck from the equation.
For just one example, if you look at the average person's level of financial literacy today, the situation is appallingly bad. So statistically, it's true that you have to be lucky to be financially literate, but that doesn't mean it inherently requires luck to be able to learn these things. It's just not stuff that most people are even aware of, because nobody is teaching them. It's not an unfixable problem.
At the extreme end of the spectrum, yes, it requires a lot of luck to become as rich as Gates or Buffett, but I don't think that's what OP is trying to achieve. Helping everyday people achieve better financial outcomes is a very different goal from trying to break into the top 0.1%, and is much more achievable IMO.
That's very simplistic. Of course they were lucky, but the thing that differentiated these people your mentioned from everyone else with their original privilege was their ability to make the best of the opportunities awarded to them. “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity"
The whole point of his question was that you take those advantages away from those men and see what they would do. The key is their creativity and ability to find ways to make money.
Bill Gates was actually famously asked a version of this question. (What would you do if you were poor with no education and lived in a third world country.) He responded "Buy Chickens".
The one thing in common about the mega-rich is that they are obsessed with money and/or success. Warren's family members often complained he didn't spend enough time with the family because he was in his den sifting accounting and finance material. Warren is in love with numbers.
The thing is the obsession trait doesn't necessarily scale. If you cloned a billion Gates', that would NOT give us a billion Microsofts. It's not a zero sum game, but pretty close to one. There's only so much room in any given niche.
Another thing, I've been using and following Microsoft for about 3 decades. They didn't do anything special or innovative in my opinion, at least not relative to their size. MS just did smart marketing, acquisitions, pricing, and packaging. MS mostly leveraged monopoly in one category to gain another category: not raw merit. If MS never existed, the world would be the same or even better off: more OS and office-software choice. I have a bit more respect for Steve Jobs: he spotted useful product configurations before any one else (with means). MS just copied/purchased trends after it was obvious they were catching on.
I don't mean exactly the same, but in terms of general innovation. There were decent, good, and great alternatives to ALL of their key products: PC GUI's, spreadsheets, word-processors, desktop databases, etc. Heck, they purchased most of them from other co's. Granted, MS usually charged less, at least initially, but that's because they took an up-front loss in that product to gain market-share. But then stagnated once they killed competition. I know an obvious MS-Access bug not fixed for 15 years.
> The whole point of his question was that you take those advantages away from those men and see what they would do. The key is their creativity and ability to find ways to make money.
And the answer is that most wealthy people, when reset to zero, would never be able to regain their wealth. The only way they may have a shot is by exploiting things from their formally wealthy life (e.g. contacts, connections, niche industry knowledge, or an ivy league degree).
You have no problem ignoring all the hard work that goes into becoming successful and your comment comes across as... one should just sit around waiting to be lucky. You say that during the golden age of internet based business opportunities and funding. I suppose that you think Tiger Woods was lucky enough to win 79 tournaments and 14 majors because he got lucky?
Opportunity = hard work + luck
We as individuals should strive to learn how to be successful by looking at those who are successful, and many of those qualities are right in front of our faces. Hell just search for "discipline" or "confidence building" on youtube and one can find how to apply the correct qualities within a few hours. Try David Goggins if you don't know what I'm talking about.
What everyone is overlooking is that of course the Prius would be a top trade-in how many have been produced in the last 20 years? It's like saying that the CAR X is the new Camry, because the number one trade-in is the Camry. The Camry being the best selling passenger car for the last 25 years...
What's number two on the list? The BMW 3 Series, which is way more in line with what you'd expect and certainly not a "green car" by any stretch of the imagination.
