Good morning. Hello. How are you? #764
Vote! Sick. Mimi. Way too much, again, about Elon and expanding on my comments in The Atlantic.
Good morning! Hello! It is election day! Have you voted? Go vote! Pretty please! I will mail you a nice butterscotch if you go vote and weren’t planning on it. Who doesn’t love a nice piece of butterscotch?
I’m going to let myself be hopeful about the election today why not. My wife is pumped, convinced we’re going to clean up. Her optimism is infectious even if I don’t rationally believe it. But the last polls all a) look a lot better than the media narrative would have you believe and b) were a marked improvement over a month or so ago, thus giving some of that all-important “momentum,” mysterious and elusive in politics but undeniably real. It’ll be bad enough to lose the house. If we can just keep the senate, I am happy. Fingers crossed.
I felt truly sick and awful yesterday. Ended up spending a few hours of the day in bed. Headache, chills, exhaustion. It was really unpleasant. Took a COVID test, not that I’ve seen any people in the last week or two, at least not inside. It was negative. I’ll take another one today, though I do feel a fair amount better today. This has happened a few times lately and it is a bit.. annoying. I miss the two years of no illness that lockdown gave me that part, at least was nice.
Yesterday my social feeds were such an outpouring of love and affection for Mimi Parker, it really was something to behold. When none other than Robert Plant reconfigures his set to play a song in tribute to you, when Max Richter does the most beautiful piano version of one of your songs, when so many friends post loving tributes and photos. Man, Mimi touched a lot of lives. Alan posted his thanks. Her funeral is open to the public. If it were less than two thousand miles away, I would 100% go. Let there be multitudes.
Thank you to the friend who sent me this haunting track by Pan·American on which Mimi does lead vocals. I’d never heard it before, which was a real treat. It has now been added to the Mimi playlist.
Aside from Mimi and the election, it is, I must confess, Elon all day. I mean yes, I am “over” it. Yes, I want things so despertely to go back to “normal.” But I can’t turn away, the whole thing is such a trainwreck. And I will remind you of my priors here: I like Twitter. I think that on the whole Twitter’s previous management was doing a pretty good job. Was it perfect? No. Was the site still held together with duct tape and wire? Sure, but there was no fail whale anymore. Was the harrassment terrible and the bots bad? Yes, but they were trying, their hearts were in the right place, and they were making progress. ;
Everyone keeps going on about how Twitter should have been doing more, moving faster, but I’m not especially one of those people. I don’t think speed in internet engineering has ever been half the virtue people make it out to be. Fast followers win just as often as “innovators” and “moving fast and breaking things” leads to… a lot of broken things. They were not perfect, but they were also by no means the incompetent buffoons that people make them out to be.
I also knew perfectly well that it was going to be a bad thing for Elon to own Twitter. it seems to me manifestly obvious that Elon owning Twitter would be an existential threat to Twitter. I never doubted that. I’ve also known quite clearly for quite some time Elon is not the genius people make him out to be. The evidence abounds if you care to look for it.
All that being said, it is stunning — stunning — how quickly and badly he fucked this up. Charlie Wartzel write a nice article in The Atlantic this week about the extent of Elon’s bungling: Elon is bad at this. And it starts off with a few choice quotes from yours truly.
There were four main points I wanted to make, and I think I got two of them across quite clearly:
“The dude could’ve napped and saved billions of dollars,” Webb said. “Every decision he’s made has lost him money. It’s astonishing.” I don’t think this can be over-stated. Yes, according to Elon Twitter was losing $4 million a day, but like most things Elon says, this was a half truth. First off, $2.8 million of that was debt Elon added to Twitter when he bought it, that was not there before. Secondly, Twitter has six billion dollars in the bank. Which means at that burn, Twitter had four years, one month and ten days of cash in the bank. Elon did not need to move quickly, at all. Elon had plenty of time to do these things in the right way. I strongly dispute Twitter was over-staffed, but even if it was, there was no need to do it quickly. Elon’s rapid actions have done nothing but cost himself billions of dollars. He’s like Donald Trump, who goes around bragging about being rich, yet he would have been a lot richer had he taken his inheritance money and put it into index funds.
Webb suggested to me that Musk’s now-deleted Paul Pelosi tweet was perhaps the most expensive tweet ever: It may have cost Twitter billions in advertising revenue. I think history will prove this true. The Paul Pelosi Tweet showed advertisers Elon’s true colors: not his political stripes, which they already knew, but his colossally poor judgement. Posting that Tweet, then deleting it, indicates a profound lack of impulse control. It is not undoable. Elon really seems to think Tweeting something then un-Tweeting it is the same as not Tweeting it at all. This is so untrue. He never apologizes when he un-Tweets these things. He Tweeted two different Nazi memes yesterday. Two! In a single day! un-Tweeted them both but he is telling brands, in plain language, he cannot be trusted.
The other two were a little muddled, owing to my general nonstop ranting to Charlie, who really did an amazing job translating it:
“The advertisers are gone because of his awful tweets,” Webb told me. “There’s no room for debate. He stated his intentions up front. He cared about advertisers and didn’t want them to leave and then he told us they’ve left.” What I’m trying to say here is that even if you judge Elon only by his own actions and words, this is a catastrophe. You don’t need to project here, you don’t need to get into his headspace or read tea leaves. The very first thing he did when buying Twitter was write a loveletter to advertisers. The very first thing! It was obvious that advertisers were massively important to him. And then his very next official act while owning Twitter was to publicly punt on any controversial moderation decisions. Punt it down the road in time, shunt it over to a committee. He’s repeatedly said, over and over, about how they aren’t doing anything different with moderation. All of these facts unequivicolly indicate Elon Musk wants advertisers on the platform. Badly. And then Elon Musk Tweeted out that advertisers are flocking from the platform. These are the facts. Let me ask you this: If you were a peon working for Elon Musk, in charge of keeping advertisers on Twitter, and you managed to completely destroy their ad business in three days, do you think Elon Musk would not fire you for that? If Elon Musk were any other employee working for Elon Musk, Elon Musk would have fired him so fast by now.
As bad as that sounds, Webb argues that the reality is worse: “What people might not understand is that the advertisers don’t need Twitter. They barely cared about it at all before Musk. The only reason those people cared about Twitter ads is because they had personal relationships with members of Twitter’s marketing team or because there are hundreds of Twitter account reps making them pay. And Elon may have fired those people.” I’m trying to make a few points at once here. Charlie did a good job of condensing it but this is my overly-verbose newsletter, so I will expand it. First, Twitter is heavily reliant on brand advertising: big brands like Pontiac and Pepsi who, obviously, care about their brand image. This is distinct from Facebook, Instagram, etc, who make their money primarily, or at least in large part, off of direct advertising: as in “hey look at this awesome necklace don’t you want to buy it right now?” Twitter never really made a solid direct marketing business. This means brands that might stay on Twitter because it is demonstrably making them money every day off of e-commerce are pretty few and far between. Prior to Elon ruining everything, there was an upside to this: Twitter was more insulated from Apple’s anti-trust shenanigans. But he’s ruined that lol. So yes, advertisers will bail at the drop of a hat because the whole point of this ad money is to make people feel good. Many of these advertisers don’t advertise around the news at all. Twitter was barely brand safe to begin with. And then, on top of that, like I said in the article, Twitter was never really that important to begin with. It’s not Facebook it’s not TikTok it’s not the New York Times. They absolutely don’t need the hassle.
One other thing that we talked about a lot that didn’t make it into the article is whether Elon could turn it around. I had said that if Elon kept his mouth shut and Elon went to Madison Avenue and grovelled a ton and he didn’t decimate the ranks of his account team, there was a chance. But I laughed off the notion of the world’s richest man — the man who “single-handedly” moved America toward electric vehicles and spends his time worrying about the future of a single-planet humanity would waste his precious time going to Madison Avenue and groveling. It seemed utterly absurd. But it turns out it happened! He did it! I am completely stunned. Also, while exact numbers are hard to come by, it seems like he did not gut the ranks of Twitter’s sales staff as much as other departments.
However, by all accounts Elon’s groveling was so poorly done that he made things worse. On the one hand, I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, the dude has been surrounded by sycophants for so long he doesn’t know how to be humble. But on the other hand — the thing about CEOs is they are often salespeople! Elon is the CEO of a huge fucking company that has a small number of clients and he should be good at this! He’s done plenty of groveling to the US government for SpaceX and other potential SpaceX clients. Or maybe he hasn’t. I don’t know. I mean I suppose that the US Government has very strictly regulated procurement processes so the grovelling isn’t as necessary, and of course, if you lose a sale you can just sue. That’s not gonna work here.
It shoulda been obvious, but I didn’t expect Elon would be so bad at dazzling Madison Avenue executives. As someone who’s spent a fair bit of his life doing this, I can tell you: It is not hard. It should be a lot easier being the world’s richest man and having a private jet. Shit dude, all he had to do was tell ‘em all you would send em up in a rocket. He didn’t have to “have a plan” for Twitter. He just had to not do anything to fuck it up.
I would assume (as my friend Noah does) that Elon will eventually get good at this. But man, now I am not so sure.
The other thing I didn’t factor in is that he just can’t shut up.
Twitter can still be saved. All he has to do is shut up, let the (hopefully not decimated) sales team do their jobs, and stop changing things. But he’s fundamentally unable, it seems. His job at Twitter right now, in the short term, is so easy. My mom could do his job better than him right now, and that is not hyperbole. Write one last tweet saying something like “sorry for the drama we’re going to stop fucking with things and listen for a while,” go take a single half-hour groveling class, and go try again. That’s it. That’s all he has to do.
There’s still the larger issues, of course, about what he can do to make Twitter worth twice as much as it was. These are valid concerns. But hey newsflash: it turns out that creating $20billion of value takes time. It was never going to happen in a week. But what has happened is that now, instead of him needing to create $20 billion in value to break even on this stupid bet, he needs to create $25 ish billion of value.
I finally signed up for Mastadon. Thought I did it years ago but can’t find that login. My profile is @rickwebb@mas.to. I think. I am dubious. It is bordering on unusable. I don’t know why we’re not all going back to Tumblr, it is so much better. Here is my Tumblr. But of course, you guys don’t care about that, GMHHAY is pretty much my one and only real outlet on the internet anymore, and here you are.
Not sure what’s going on in this picture. I tried to ask Jane, but I was projecting answers and I think I was influencing her, so that was unreliable. Maybe she’s saying boys can’t brush their teeth, or don’t brush their teeth, or just that she is a girl brushing her teeth and not a boy brushing her teeth. I haven’t seen the X O iconography in any of her drawings yet, that is new. Wonder where she got it.
Jane is reading these books, Junie B Jones. In the books, I gather, Junie narrates her life to the reader. So Jane has taking to “doing narration,” and narrating everything we do. It is so great. Also she’s started calling Emma “Mother” this week, since that’s what Junie B Jones calls her mom. This is a step up from “Emma” like last week. Apparently Junie B Jones has no father, because I’m still “Daddy” this week.
Also she’s taken to doing spins and calling them “flourishes” like in Animal Crossing, because she’s been playing Animal Crossing. They are so cute. Little spins all the time. And then maybe a Parkour flip. Can’t beat it.
Justa mix today. Let’s see… we have the Kevin Hewick track that is the first recorded appearance of New Order. I’m reading the second volume of Stephen Morris’ autobiography, the one covering his time in New Order. We have a PJ Harvey demo from the new B-Sides, Demos and Rarisites box set. My six-LP box set version showed up yesterday, it is beautiful. I’m working through this morning, on side 3A right now. We have more new Suede and Carly Rae since both of their new albums are great. Very into this Samia lady though yesterday I learned she is Peggy Hill’s daughter, from King of the Hill, so that is weird. Why must everyone be a legacy. Thank you Todd Demma for alerting me to Assorted!, the Love and Rockets rarity album put out a few years ago I had no idea about that. Also Beggars Archive is re-issuing all the Love and Rockets, Peter Murphy and Bauhaus on vinyl so I can finally pick up a Sweet FA and Hot Trip to Heaven and Burning from the Inside vinyl very exciting. I don’t know anything about this Indigo Sparks woman but she’s majestic. New Bonny Light Horseman is great. New First Aid Kit song is very solid hope this means a new album soon? Haven’t checked. Love the new Big Joanie, trying to get into this Horsegirl band everyone loves but so far not really doing it for me. I don’t know why I decided to listen to obscure Factory signing The Wendys yesterday for the first time in a decade but they were better than I remembered.
Okay! Vote! Vote! Get out and vote! Then go to sleep tonight don’t stay up all night watching the returns it is not healthy. Also, Rick, take your own advice.