I don't think it was a conscious pivot, but what started as a casual acquisition/turnaround idea with some spicy culture-war potential is now entirely a vehicle for politics. A sort of de facto third political party rather than a business.
Conversation
There are 2 things to know about the mindset difference between PE turnaround guys and startup guys.
1. Old distressed industries are at or near the commoditization stage.
2. They generally feature sclerosis equilibrium that requires a holy war to disrupt, not innovation.
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The "first principles" thinking shtick is actually "commoditization stage thinking." When an industry is very mature, governing laws at all stack levels and the causal path from math/physics to economic value are very clear and legible. That's why PE types are more excel-driven.
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Ordinary PE turnaround types stop there: go in with full control, and with extreme aggression and prejudice, clean up shop driven by unsentimental spreadsheets and an eye not on LTV but on *residual harvestable value* (RHV) because the turnaround is usually endgame-prep.
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But the higher-level operators bring more than mere aggression and prejudice. They bring a kind of ideological holy war mental model about the potential for cleanup/renewal/rebirth.
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This is a powerful and good thing on occasion. Holy warriors in the right place at the right time can reanimate zombies, and turn what looks like a harvesting endgame into a whole new game. It's an infinite-game-reboot mindset.
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But twitter violates the PE-holy-warrior playbook necessary conditions in 2 ways.
1. It's a people-as-product business, and people don't "commoditize" except when doing machine-like labor ripe for automation.
2. It is unclear if Twitter (age: 15) is old enough for holy war
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Re: 1, this is why there are no "first principles thinking" ways to orient in a true people business. The only first principle with people is to relate to them as people, not fungible objects (Buber I-you vs. I-it relations).
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There are other non-fungible people-qua-people businesses, and it's useful to look at edge cases where they are treated as *almost* fungible-but-for-humannness. Like modeling or K-pop bands. Not interchangeable cogs on an assembly line but as close as you can get.
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Twitter is as close to the other extreme as a major business has ever gotten. Firmly in I-you territory. People being as human as technology will let them. And much more so than facebook, instagram, even 4chan etc.
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Replying to
I don't see any obvious way to apply physics-style "first principles" here. We're not talking lithium chemistry or aluminum welding or inverted pendulum equations to land a booster.
If you try to do "commodity stage" first principles, there's only one place it can end: adtech.
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Good social product thinkers fundamentally *enjoy* people as a phenomenon in the universe the way physicists enjoy quarks or black holes. They enjoy figuring them out, and in the best case, find the "I-you" connection at scale. Even if they are on the spectrum and find it hard.
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Elon has famously said something like "I run people in emulation mode." This is not in itself a problem. I know of many people who self-identify as on the spectrum and similarly think about people in unusual ways. Many are great social product thinkers nevertheless.
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And they're good at it because they actually care and want to form rewarding I-you connections and help others do so. It's not about whether they care in a neurotypical way or not.
They don't "love humanity" in the abstract. They enjoy the grounded challenge of I-you connecting.
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By the way, if you want to think about the I-you (often written I-thou for some weird German translation reason) and its relation to asperger's and tech mindsets, wrote a great meditation on it on ribbonfarm in 2013
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But in general, I'm really hoping against hope that this is temporary Trumpish insanity that will pass. Because unlike Trump, whom he uncannily resembles right now, I think there's a there there with Elon worth a redemptive third act arc.
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And he's young enough he may live to be a hero again. You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself turn into a villain, and then a hero again.
Because I really don't want either elon or twitter to go down in the dumbest, least necessary fire in history.
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