Not aware of any upper limits other than the ‘Unlimited’ Top up by bank transfer, so unless there’s some sort of BACS/FasterPayment thing going on (which seems doubtful if you can see the incoming in advance)
Unlimited 
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The issue I have with this statement is that Twitter 1.0 and Twitter 2.0 have vastly different business models.
Twitter 1.0 was making big, progressive bets on new features like Communities, Spaces, Super Follows, etc. So Communities was the top priority at the company and as such we had dozens of people working on it, were shipping quickly and had very great usage figures. Same with Spaces and a whole host of other things.
None of those things have had any movement since November. Because basically everyone working on them got fired.
Now, if you view Twitter, the Home Timeline, as the only product, then sure, it still works. Because that was a mature product. It’s been more or less the same for a decade at this point. But that’s not what we were doing on 1.0 - we were making new product bets. The company has to do that to survive. And depending on what you decide those priorities to be, you’re gonna need to hire some domain experts.
Clearly right now the cost cutting is more important (due to the economics of the merger agreement more than anything else, which is a problem that didn’t exist with Twitter 1.0) and that’s fine, but at some point, you’re going to want to build something and realise… You no longer have the people to do it.
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I don’t disagree with any of that. But it seems he is trying to make v1 profitable before progressing, through cutting costs. Therefore people not required to keep v1 working were dead wood. Just a different business strategy.
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Twitter has had years to develop new features, from what I can see most of the innovation has come from copying a other products:
NFT profile pictures.
A Snapchat Stories clone. (Fleets) - didn’t work
A Clubhouse clone. (Spaces)
An OnlyFans clone. (Super Follows)
Spaces actually seems to have gained a bit of traction recently under Musk.
If Musk can make the company profitable in the next year, and release a couple of popular new features, then that will be very impressive. All with a quarter of the staff.
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Almost no chance of that though, advertising revenue has been killed off.
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You might be right, but I think Q4 revenue were down 40%, and wouldn’t be surprised to see improvements this year. Staffing is probably Twitter’s largest cost, and that might come down 75%. Then there will likely be lower marketing and acquisition costs. Twitter Blue is probably marginal and hardly worth mentioning as it stands.
This would all be very well if he wasn’t having to pay a fortune to service the debt, however, I’m not really factoring this in when considering the profitability of the company itself.
Interestingly a quick look at Twitter’s annual report for 2021 shows they were already profitable to the tune of $500m, but with a $750m legal settlement that brought them to an overall loss.
Looking at it it looks a bit like doing absolutely nothing would have actually made it profitable again (as it was in 2019).
Will indeed be interesting to see how Musk’s ‘strategy’ stacks up against that.
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The NFT profile picture was supposed to be the first step in a much larger Web3 suite of tools led by an amazing Web3 lead named Tess Rinearson. It was designed as a sort of low cost, low risk entry point to get users comfortable with connecting their wallets to Twitter, which would then unlock more possibilities like crypto-gated Communities as one example.
Fleets was shuttered before I worked there, but a sizeable amount of people wanted it back. I remember having a discussion about why it was shuttered, but I don’t recall the details. Spaces had an advantage over Clubhouse in that it didn’t require people to rebuild existing social graphs. And Super Follows wasn’t an OnlyFans clone for the simple reason that we never opened it up to NSFW creators.
I actually led the Alpha rollout of Super Communities literally the two weeks before I got laid off, which were paid access Communities for Super Follow creators and there was a lot of appetite for it - we were about to introduce the first ever live chat feature within those paid Communities as well. Had some great creators in the Alpha including Jenna Ezarik (iJustine’s sister) - I pulled a personal favor with her to get her onboard as they’re both friends of mine lol.
Sadly, all this stuff is now by the wayside. But we had a very compelling product plan which Nick (Sphere CEO) was one of the main drivers of, which would see Communities as essentially the bedrock and connecting glue for a lot of the other products coming together in a cohesive way - Community Spaces being one step towards that vision which we shipped, Super Communities being another. The appetite for that plan, and the very promising feedback and usage stats for it saw Communities become the number one product priority in the whole company in the months before the acquisition.
Spaces may well have traction still but the whole team was fired. So I would not expect any meaningful progress on that feature any time soon as there’s nobody left who worked on it.
One thing that is very telling - the sole person I know that is still there is working on… Twitter Blue.
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It sounds like you had some really fun stuff in the pipeline there that would have added a lot of value to the Twitter experience, I’m sorry that it all got canned.
From what I saw of it, I’d say Super Follows was closer to being a Patreon analogue. First time I saw it and thought “Eh? What’s that?” was on a film critic’s profile.
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Crazy that Twitter had Vine – and closed it down! – before TikTok and all its clones got going.
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Yep, I think that’s a fair analogy. One thing that I feel, that was made apparent by working with the Twitter Notes team (which also seems to have been canned in favour of… Really long tweets in Twitter Blue 
) is that Twitter is a text-first platform. It does photos, but it’s not Instagram. It does horizontal video, but it’s not YouTube. It does portrait video, but it’s not TikTok. It will never be any of those things and going too far in chasing any of them will ruin what the platform is, IMO.
This was supported by the fact that some of the top earning Creators in the Super Follows program were actually making very decent money from… Text. One that stood out was a very well known former FAANG Product Manager, who shares lots of good public advice about product management, but goes into significantly more detail via Super Follows content.
Of course, there were indeed people making good income from photos and videos as well, but they were the exceptions, since if you are making video or photo first content… Chances are your primary platform is gonna be IG, TikTok or YouTube.
The stuff that E.M is saying about making Twitter competitive with YouTube for video creators… I personally don’t see it happening.
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Yup. Giant mistake. Periscope too. Could have been a behemoth suite of apps, like Meta has. But for whatever reason, some people never wanted to push the product strategy in that direction. Sphere could have been a standalone experience that replaced the dated DM functionality, like FB did when they acquired Beluga back in the day and turned it into Messenger. But that was never on the cards, sadly.
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Seems to be quite a few errors on twitter this morning. Can’t see my feed. Only get “Welcome to Twitter”. Plus have some issues with search and a few other things.
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Apparently he’s not paid that bill either. Rumour has it that twitter could lose SMS access worldwide in days (unfortunately the site that’s from is paywalled so I can’t verify the source, so take that as speculation for now).
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This article convincingly argues for pretty much the opposite of what I’ve been saying. Will be interesting to see how it plays out
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Unless we subscribe we can’t read.
Here’s the thing that I’ve learned. You have to look at product development (and thus, company evolution) through a psychological lens of who is making the decisions and what their motivation is.
E.M may very well have some grand “save humanity” visions somewhere for what he wants to do, but those are essentially pie-in-the-sky at this point, because they are dwarfed by what appear to be his two pressing concerns:
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Currying favour with right-wing politicians - one would imagine that this is to continue to benefit from government grants and assistance at such time a Republican party gains power again in the US, which, as US history shows us, is only a matter of time.
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Make money however and wherever possible to offset the terrible economics of his purchase and the eye-watering interest sums that he is on the hook for.
The issue here is that product development through this lens benefits him but does not benefit the user community. And if the platform is becoming more boring, it’s because the userbase that feels this is a perfectly valid way to run a company tends to be at best, quite dull, and worst, mimicking the worst behaviours of the owner.
Ultimately, you get the community you deserve. We have what we have here, in no small part thanks to the literal personalities and motivations of folks like Tom and Jonas. And even though Tom’s been gone a while now, the vision, the culture and motivations were set so strongly, and imbued out into the user community from the start.
Where Twitter is, and likely will continue to be, is a place where there’s an ideological clash between what Jack believed in and what EM believes in. And while that may be great fodder for billionaire business analysis… it’s not particularly interesting or fun for most folks. I get why people believe in Tesla, or SpaceX, or Neuralink, despite the fact that those motivations may actually be smoke-and-mirrors, and may fail to deliver. I think it’s a much harder sell to understand the “humanity-saving” vision with Twitter 2.0.
The one benefit is that there are, and have always been ways to shape the platform for a personalised experience that strips out all of that stuff. Despite all his efforts to boost his own reach, if you block the owner, you’re free from a lot of it. But it involves the willingness to put in the work to create that personalised experience, which creates a pretty steep cliff for your average user and certainly for new users, most of whom won’t get to a place where the platform benefits them.
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I don’t know too much about this, but I think that Jack endorsed Musk for Twitter, right?
And part of that play is/was to open source (parts of) Twitter on which Jack would build a separate product?
I see that Jack’s released Blue Sky (a Twitter clone?) to private beta but I’m not sure whether it’s totally new or if Musk has indeed open sourced anything of Twitter.
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