A couple of things:
* It's mostly hobbyists running their instances, some literally in their basement.
* Most scaling glitches have usually been addressed within a few days. The comparison to early-day Twitter is fair, maybe people have literally not expected such a fast scaling route.
* I don't think anyone in their wildest fever-dreams expected Elon Musk to burn down Twitter this fast, thus causing a mass-migration.
Not sure he lied. I think he fooled himself into thinking that moderating a social media platform can be done on a rose-tinted ideological basis. Then reality hit, and the fact is, there are so many edge-cases that being ideologically consistent is almost impossible.
Moderation is hard. And it matters, both to keep audiences & advertisers. Besides, First Amendment-based moderation is not even possible for an international company. Most of Europe have strict laws on holocaust-denial. Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.
>Thailand & the UK have laws banning speech offensive to their royal families.
The UK may technically have some old law on the books stating this but it's never enforced. I mean, the Sex Pistols ("God save the queen... A fascist regime...") demonstrated this quite convincingly.
I did hear about someone getting arrested for yelling at Prince Andrew in a funeral procession, but that was for breach of the peace during a funeral and (importantly) was thrown out in court.
Growing up, I saw plenty of posters with words like "The great Royal debate: should we hang them, or should we shoot them?" and no one cared in the slightest.
The UK royal family has pretty wide control over what can and cannot be said about them in the media.
There is for instance, many stories about royal improprieties that have been covered up in recent years, in exchange for “juicy” Harry & Meghan stories being circulated in their place. This is probably at the core of the schism within the royal family. I can read about it, because I’m not in the UK. Bet it’s not very well covered in the UK though.
Smartphones saw rapid growth in China at the same time as mega-apps formed. The tech giants that built these mega-apps also acquired many consumer services that used to be independent companies and integrated them into the mega-app over time. Then out of the interest to compete with each other, these tech giants kept making their own mega-app larger in order to capture more user activity within their ecosystem of services. The emergence of mega-apps in China was not the consumer's choice.
We already have "everything apps" - it's called a browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't already have it.
I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.
But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of investment.
But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably handy, because it is a reliable route into all the services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you avoid running into firewalls & thought police.
Not sure it’s long term the most valuable thing I built, but definitely short-term most profitable:
Built an airline pricing system as the sole developer in 3 months in the early 2000’s.
When demoed during late stages of development, it received pre-order guaranteed sales from airlines of $60mn for the next 12 months.
I was paid a paltry $500/day for the contract, and got my marching orders when it was done.
I'm wondering if this erratic behaviour is Musk having some sort of breakdown over how things are unravelling?
* Currently that revenue is cratering and things are not going well. Bankrupcy is a real risk with the high debt servicing cost for the take-over.
* If the value is going quickly in the direction of $0, banks will call the loans.
* If banks call the loans, he has to sell Tesla stock to pay the $44bn.
* If Musk starts to sell Tesla stock at that scale, the value of Tesla could quickly crater in the current climate. It's the last bubble-stock of this cycle, still 80% way to go down, if valued like its auto industry peers.
The outcome of that could be that even selling his entire holding of Tesla, Musk could end up broke, and potentially still owe money from the Twitter take-over.
It would make the wealth destruction of FTX look like a Sunday stroll in the park.
Honestly, I think any "smart money" managers who invested in this should be ashamed. It's absolutely an indictment of their intelligence.
The basics of due diligence is:
* How is their record keeping of board decisions & financials?
* What board decisions and indemnities exist in those records that may have conflicts of interest or claims from other third parties? (FTX didn't even have a board)
* etc..
Furthermore, probably should raise every red flag ever for a reasonably intelligent person if some 20-somethings with a few years of experience claim they have the secret sauce to trade successfully under every possible market regime. It falls on its own implausibility and only reeks of hubris.
To understand most market regimes likely to occur, you likely need people in their late 50'ies onboard, or even older (there's a reason Buffett, Soros et al come out relatively unscathed out of most crises, while everyone else bleeds out).
