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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27878 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Six years ago, Sarah A. Hoyt coined "roll hard left and die".

Years ago, watching science fiction magazines and newspapers of various sorts come and go, I identified a process I called “roll hard left and die.”

When a magazine or a newspaper or any news or entertainment media was in real trouble, they went hard, hard left, then died.

It took me a little while to realize this was a sane strategy. In a field completely controlled by the left, when you knew that your job was in peril be it through missmanagement or whatever, your last hope was to go incredibly hard left, so you could blame the failure on ideology. And instead of not being able to find a job, you found yourself lionized by all the “right” (left) “thinking people.” New jobs were assured.

In his December 15th newsletter, Josh Barro wrote the following about Elon Musk:

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

If you’re going to lose money, it’s best to feel like you’re losing it for a cause [...]

The difference here is that I can't see Musk's root motivation as "not being able to find a job" when all is said and done.

And if that's the case, it makes me reconsider how much of "roll hard left and die" really does boil down to Hoyt's lifeboat theory, and how much is "losing money for a cause".

I'm still keeping my original position: twitter is bad for society if all musk manages to do is kill it off he still did something meritorious.

I think Elon will have the last laugh. He's on the right side of Metcalfe's law, and from a certain viewpoint it's insane that Twitter was actually for sale at any price.

The ways he loses are

-successful swarm governance action cancels twitter entirely. This is very tough, especially in the absence of a dramatic scandal and/pr effective competitor. (Mastodon ain't it)

Or

-successful oldschool-conspiracy, eg advertiser blockade, getting Elon arrested or the company fined out of existence. This is very difficult, Elon is very rich & sufficiently connected/established that he will be quite hard to dislodge, Twitter can run on like 50 people.

Ok I'm curious, I admit to being a relatively minor Twitter user with a poor understanding of the platform, but I used to use it to check sports news and war updates. Then, a couple weeks after musk bought it, I kept getting porn on those hashtags. It happened enough that it became impossible to open in public, and within a week I deleted the app.

Idk if that is typical or Musk related related, but isn't that a failure mode? That eliminating jannies just leads to bigger piles of trash and an unlivable space? The problem with social media moderation is that your enemies are always human, The Most Dangerous Game.

I could argue that 'porn on sports hashtags' is probably failure mode 1, swarm actors deliberately trashing the joint. But I guess it's possible that this was always a problem and twitter's old mod team just handled it effectively.

In that case, failure mode 3 would be "old fashioned incompetence, making the service worse than existing incompetent competitors and squandering the absolutely massive advantage of 340 million active users."

This could happen! I'm no Musk fanboy, I think he mostly succeeds on having a good sense of when breaking the rules won't be punished. But Twitter was already wildly incompetent(1) & it dominated regardless, and despite the platform having much more powerful enemies now I think Elon probably won't screw it up as badly as would be neccessary, and nor would anyone with a modicum of business experience, regardless of their politics.

(1) one of my big takeaways from the Twitter Files has been the incredible disorganization of the company & ignorance of upper management towards major issues until it was alreasu a PR disaster.

"Be a multibillionaire and just don't care" may not have quite such wide applicability, but many many people spend similar portions of their net worth on unproductive hobbies.

"Elon wants his own (huge) forum and is willing to pay for it" doesn't seem like the worst explanation for all of this. (Not to mention that the tech-stock crash was pretty inconveniently timed vis-a-vis his stock offer; turned out there wasn't much he could do about this)

A major distinction is that "roll hard left and die" is losing other people's money for a cause whereas whatever Musk does is losing largely his own money for a cause.

(Other people - e.g. banks who financed him - may also lose money, but they have senior debt. Musk, Jack and the Saudis have only equity. It seems unlikely that the banks will lose money, debt service is $1B/year, assuming average fully loaded cost per fired employee of $200k/year Musk just saved $1.5B of which $1B is going to banks.)

A bit of a tangent, but as to the first half of the above, I think it is a two-way street. It’s not just “get woke, go broke”, but also and likely more the case, “get broke, go woke”.

All this leftward movement in the prestige press came after journalism’s financial peak and did not cause it. Social media companies and search engines siphoned off ad revenue, Craigslist killed the classifieds section, etc. The industry was shrinking, and the number of people that could make at least a middle-class living within it was, too, with the added strain imposed by aggregation of news on free sites and the increased ability of readers to shift to non-local coverage provided by the largest outlets (NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Guardian, FT, etc.)

This downward trend in financial prospects for journalists meets with the accelerating desirability of journalist as a prestige job and the increasing number of journalists who attended a select set of colleges (Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Mizzou, etc.). Gone is the very-old industry joke of, “Please don’t tell my mother I’m a journalist — she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse.” Also, not gone, but largely-diminished, are the kids who graduated from state schools and worked their way up from small beats, with normie political views, because there aren’t enough newspapers and jobs anymore to provide jobs for them, and they can’t list a degree from a highly-ranked J-school on their resume, nor draw on significant networking resources.

What happens when an industry contracts is that you get a lot of people with significant professional experience applying for the same jobs. And then also a lot of kids out of school trying to get their feet in the door against that current. So to Ms. Hoyt’s point, networking is certainly very important and this does make at least not outing yourself as not having “correct” views important. But that follows on the heels of the contraction.

The impact of millennials entering the industry was also two-fold.

(1) In the digital age when revenue was tight, both traditional and online outlets noticed opinion and reaction got as many clicks as first-hand coverage and investigative journalism, and that it could hire millennials just out of school to crank the former stuff out on the cheap. Those millennials had come through American universities that had already gone through their leftward shift, and brought that political orientation with them.

(2) Those millennials would not stay satisfied being cheap fodder as they got older. Paying one’s dues in one’s early twenties is one thing, but many would change careers as they got older. Those that landed choice jobs had to contend with a glut of some straggling boomers and a slew of gen-Xers above them. Twitter and Slack provided spaces for millennial journalists to try and enforce an industry culture. Then the murder of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests while America was doomscrolling during pandemic lockdowns, and the collective national freakout and heightened sensitivities. Millennials were able to pounce and clear out a few older colleagues as the gen-Xers were on aggregate less likely to be up on their intersectionality, id-pol, etc. These incidents while few had a chilling effect that is only now starting to thaw just a little bit. Also, millennial tech staffers at big outlets had enough clout to feel emboldened to weigh in on journalistic matters in company Slack channels. In the pre-digital economic model, editors did not care what anyone in the print shop thought about the paper’s focus of coverage, and also might have to listen to ad salesmen complain, but would not have treated them as peers — would have considered the thought insulting.

Multiple factors have coupled the media’s leftward shift to its digital-age financial decline. It isn’t as simple as normies not liking the leftward shift and withdrawing their attention/subscription revenue.

All this leftward movement in the prestige press came after journalism’s financial peak and did not cause it.

The prestige press has been leftist for at the better part of a century. Ask Walter Cronkite... or Walter Duranty.

So you don’t think there was a noticeable shift left that at a minimum overlaps the digital age, whatever the press’s aggregate position before it?

I don't think that "all this leftward movement" came after journalism's financial peak.

Journalism always manages to hold out. By 2006-2012 the major outlets made the smart move to use paywalls and embrace mobile. This allowed them to make 2x the revenue: first with google ads and then with the paywall. A lot of journalists moving to substack, or twitter.

This is true for the major outlets but not the industry as a whole. And my point was not that journalism will fully cease to be. But that consolidating up to the biggest publications caused small-to-midsized ones, and all the jobs they provided, to shrink, and that contraction’s impact, in combination with other factors, helped push the industry left.

This, too, also has a feedback loop. With the rise of cable TV and social media, politics are increasingly national, so easy enough for papers around the country to just syndicate stories from the AP, Reuters, WaPo, the NYT and WSJ, as readers who live outside New York and D.C. are less interested in a localized view of politics.

Musk is losing money. This is probably because twitter was never going to be worth the price he paid for it.

Cutting expenses to try to minimize the damages is a reasonable response. The easiest expenses to cut are moderation and diversity, which angers the wokes.

There is, however, another factor- certain progressive groups seem to be threatening vaguely defined legal action.

In that context it makes sense to buddy up with whatever legal authorities he hasn’t already alienated, which the anti-woke rants are doing.

I think Musks always was buying twitter partly for control. Twitter is a classic example of a company that fails to create a lot of its own value creation. A lot of value goes thru twitter, I believe it’s the most powerful media property in the world, but it doesn’t monetize well. It always had a bit of being a trophy assets. With fairly high confidence I believe trump wins the election in 2020 if Musks was in charge. Which makes at 50 billion twitter relatively trivially cheap.

That being said I do believe he can turn around twitter and make it financially viable. If he can get twitter to 6 billion revenue and 4 billion costs then it’s worth 50 billion. Meta has 120 billion in revenue. And from twitter he can spin off into tick tocks and other side projects.

It’s going to be ugly financially for a bit but it’s an asset that creates value for people and musks just needs to figure out how to capture a bunch of that.

If he can get twitter to 6 billion revenue and 4 billion costs then it’s worth 50 billion.

Interest rates are 4.09% as of yesterday, so a highly liquid $2B revenue stream guaranteed by full faith and credit of the US government is worth $50B.

Even if Musk gets twitter to make $2B/year, it's certainly not highly liquid and/or guaranteed by the US govt. Hence it's worth less.

That said, if Musk can get twitter to $1B EBIT then debt service is handled and he eventually owns twitter outright and just needs to keep it in the black. Then it's his prestige property, much like the Bezos Post or the Soros Conspiracy (I have no idea what to call Soros's shadowy enterprise that gets you called antisemitic if you acknowledge it's existence and influence).

That’s not exactly how you do a dcf.

And your a bit high on rate. I am seeing 10 year at 3.8% and 30 year at 3.9% - which are better duration matches.

But twitter presumably once achieving $2 billion income would still be growing income at inflationary rates or more. Even if Twitter just grows at nominal income growth that’s another 3.5% yield.

Twitter at $2 billion at $50 billion valuation would have yes a 4% cash flow yield plus earnings growing at 3.5% a year which is still a nice premium over a 3.9% US treasury 30 year.

I looked at a 20 year: https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/bond/tmubmusd20y?countrycode=bx

Which I admit is perhaps a little cherrypicked to be the top of the long term yield curve, and also just a mental ballpark calculation: https://www.ustreasuryyieldcurve.com/

But twitter presumably once achieving $2 billion income would still be growing income at inflationary rates or more. Even if Twitter just grows at nominal income growth that’s another 3.5% yield.

Or it could be shrinking as competition in that space grows (due to Amazon + Microsoft getting in the game).

I agree that a blue chip history of growing with inflation twitter could be valuable, but that's not just getting twitter to $2B profit. That's getting twitter to the point of having had stable profits for long enough that equity markets consider it reliable. That's quite a ways in the future, just to get back to the $44B price tag.

Well figure is unpredictable.

But a standard dcf would just assume out a modest out year growth rate. They could do better and take market share or they could shrink but most would just throw in some kind of long term growth rate of nominal gdp trend.

Also $2 billion was just a number I threw out that seems possible. They could normalize to $4 billion or more. Don’t think anyone knows what twitters ultimate monetization value is.

Inside baseball - 20 year old doesn’t have market liquidity support. It’s been 20-30 bps higher yield than anything else near it for about a year. So odd you happened to pick that year because it’s been out of synch with every other benchmark for a year.

Equity is priced differently than debt. In part because debt is often a fixed return. If we give a 20x return then 2b is 40b. You need higher multiple to get to 50b. I don’t think you see that unless interest rates fall.

I'm not going to try to do the thing that Trump supporters still do where they justify all of the actions in some 4D chess move. I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter. That said the doom posting on it seem incredibly excessive. It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value. It also wouldn't surprise me if behind the scenes all that really mattered was cutting the costs by firing tons of people and this will all come up Milhouse. What I really object to are all the people that are pretending they have any clue whatsoever what the future holds on this matter. Sometimes the skeptic is a fool for not seeing the obvious but I think far more people are going to seem far more foolish when we do a retrospective in 5 years.

It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value.

That isn't really even the issue right now (he almost certainly overpaid which is why he tried to wriggle out at first), the question is how much Tesla stock is backing this purchase and what the drop in its price means.

We'll see how things are going when Tesla hits its bottom.

His net worth is still very high. He could just cut a check and just cover the remaining debt ending these problems now and it would not hurt him much. Twitter was decent financial shape before Elon's purchase. Twitter is only losing lots of money now because of the debt Elon took on to buy twitter. He began selling tesla shares early this year at near peak, which was good for him.

I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter.

Yeah, he didn't seem to come in with a clear plan for how to address the issues of uneven content moderation and how the tone of Twitter discourse is toxic. He's fumbled haphazardly with the first issue, and leaned into toxicity on the second.

I mean, isn't that a good sign for the acquisition? (If a bad sign for the public internet.) If toxicity is how Twitter farms ad impressions, then Musk leaning into the toxicity promises that eyeballs may remain high, or at least won't be depressed by a prosocial attempt to reduce drama.

In 2019 tesla seemed close to dying and then it went up 10x. Twitter could see a similar revival. Who knows. Musk has shown an ability to defy naysayers over and over.

I think this is similar to what Carlous Rex told himself when deciding to advance ahead of his supply lines and into Russia. And in his defense, taking the initiative had helped him in a number of previous battles and to secure his kingdom.

Elon has enough wealth and sold enough stock that this cannot possibly break him. He could just walk away and take the $25 billion hit (he's already down $10 billion probably) and still be the second or third richest person in the world. He's only on the hook for the $13 billion loan. The rest is paid for by him and business partners. But it's not a good look for him making such a blunder, assuming twitter fails.

Some people are spinning out baroque theories of what the underlying business strategy is, but my strong feeling is that there isn’t one. I think what’s happened is that Musk has greatly overpaid for this company, he’s not running it in a way that’s likely to produce financial returns that come close to justifying the price he paid, and leaning into the idea that he is serving a great social mission (vanquishing the proprietors of the “woke mind virus” who were trying to destroy our society) helps him feel better about the unpleasant business position he’s gotten himself into.

Elon can choose to be woke, anti-woke, or neutral (like Bezos). I think he's choosing the correct team in terms of maximizing engagement but possibly risks alienating left-leaning Tesla buyers. However, be began pivoting anti-left in 2018, and it has not seemed to hurt Tesla sales. So maybe he knows what he is doing.

risks alienating left-leaning Tesla buyers

But they will often just buy other electric cars.

By aligning himself with conservatives, maybe gas-guzzling climate deniers will instead buy Teslas. Which is a net positive for the electric car industry at a whole.

Teslas are a popular ‘wife car’ in the red tribe elite, but they’re not replacing F-150’s or soccer-mom-mobiles.

New jobs were assured.

Were they really?

No, genuinely, I don't know that they are or were. I could see people hoping to land a cushy job somewhere, but I could just as easily see that hope be vain and forlorn as it comes.

I do want to note one thing that Josh said:

I also said in October that Elon Musk can’t possibly unbias Twitter

This is only the case for a rather strict definition of bias (where it applies to any assumption about what is acceptable or not). Musk could say something like "Hey, you aren't allowed to glorify violence, spam, post illegal material, or generally insult and harass someone". It would take lots of effort to get people who aren't going to give either side a pass for what they say, but it could certainly be done. Think Zorba but moderating Twitter - not impossible, just unlikely.

The problem is that Elon isn't interested in doing this at all, and instead wants to fight with the left. There's no justification for Elon banning the ElonJet account or all those journalists other than him waking up and saying "Today, I want to flex my power against people I don't like".

There is a justification. Doxxing is bad. Just like libel isn’t curtailing free speech, doxxing need not curtail it either. It is also worth noting that Elon’s jet wasn’t as publicly known as most people thought. So elonjet guy wasn’t just signal boosting. The journalists were signal boosting elonjet.

It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"

It's one of those debates "Is making it easier to find publicly known info the same as doxing?"

Yes, that's exactly what it is.

My street address is not private. It's in the phone book. But if a journalist with 50k followers tweeted it with the implication that I'm a bad guy, that presents a hazard that didn't exist by my address merely being the in the phone book.

That is, Doxxing is a two-ingredient recipe: 1. The information, 2. The reason for calling attention to the information to a specific audience. Neither ingredient is necessarily a hazard on its own.

Honestly all I need is the intentional malice, everything else is just rules lawyering. If someone unintentionally lets my address out because the posted a photo we took together in front of my home that's not even the same universe as someone doing something intentionally harmful.

I think this is right. Intent matters. Of those 50k the vast majority will not do anything but all it takes is one crazy person...and also employers, family, etc.

I've always come down on the side of "yes, absolutely that is doxxing". Because we have a bunch of legal and technical systems that are not designed with privacy in mind at all. The DMV sells off driver license information. House ownership is listed in public court records. Websites often require real life names and addresses just in case an unlikely legal incident requires the website owner to need those things. Phone numbers and addresses are also routinely scooped up by advertising companies and resold.

I think Musk made the point that if someone has been posting these reporters' home addresses all over twitter they would rightly be screaming bloody murder at twitter for allowing that doxing to take place.

I do think that the government should get its fucking act together and start allowing a bunch of these public records to be privatized, or at least hidden from easy public view. At least that will end this silly aspect of the doxxing debate. Though it will probably make things worse in terms of actual consequences for people, since the government routinely scoops up a bunch of private information, stores it in an unsecured way, and gets predictably hacked. The idiots had the whole security clearance database hacked and leaked to the Chinese.

It is precisely because all of those things are historically public information that associating them with someone's real name is not doxxing. Doxxing is specifically and exclusively the act of exposing the real name of a pseudonymous person.

A reporter's home address is not dox unless that reporter is Deep Throat.

That is not what doxxing is. Doxxing is exposing personally identifiable information (PII) about a person online. PII is not just someone's name. It also includes phone number, address, and SSN.

I'm not making these definitions up, search for the definition of doxxing and it will be much closer to my definition than yours.

If only FDR had thought to add "freedom from inquisition" to his Four Freedoms. I wonder what the corresponding Rockwell painting would look like.

It was all public to begin with, however. It might not be easy to find, but the account wasn't publishing information that would not have seen the light of day. This isn't a case like Scott Alexander's, the law requires that planes be identifiable to the ground and to each other.

Not really getting how this is doxxing. Is it bad? Probably. Should you signal boost such accounts? Probably not. But Elon Musk isn't the modal private citizen either, he's got lots of attention on him by default. If it was his home or something, that might be different, but I don't think you inherently have the right to not have your private jet identified by people and posted online when you fly.

I don't think it's accurate to say that the information was "all public to begin with", because Musk had enrolled in the FAA privacy program that periodically rotates tail numbers. ElonJet was deanonymizing it by correlating with other information, then publishing that non-public mapping.

Jets that fly with the temporary identification number can be easily found on the ADS-B Exchange, as shown by a screenshot shared with Insider that shows the jet that Sweeney says is Musk's was flying on May 7 with no callsign, no tail number, but had "PIA" flagged.

ref. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-appears-use-faa-tool-block-jet-tracking-twitter-2022-10

(even this quote is conflating two definitions of "easily found" - yes, the plane appears on the public list of all planes, but there is no indication that it is Elon's without the additional deanonymization performed by Sweeney.)

I think a useful analogy is Bitcoin transactions. In some sense they're "all public to begin with", because the record of all transactions and their corresponding addresses is in a public ledger. But someone who analyzes transactions and correlates them with other information, then publishes a mapping of addresses to their owners, isn't "just publishing public information", any more than someone who publishes a mapping of Twitter account names to their physical addresses is, since the set of all physical addresses in existence is public.

There seem to be a lot of mental gymnastics going on to try to make Musk look like a hypocrite. Maybe the location of Musk's plane is not, technically, doxxing but it's worlds away from censoring scientific information or unpopular political opinions. Twitter is free now in ways that it definitely wasn't before. And it's because of Musk. This is why people are upset, not because they think there is a legitimate reason to track his plane on Twitter.

Well, yes, if Musk changed the bias at the top, Twitter is free as it wasn't previously. You're free to be Alex Jones, you're not free to be someone Musk happens to dislike (not as easily, anyways). The complaints about Musk can definitely be seen as partisan whining, but we shouldn't take that to mean he's any better than the people he replaced. The only way to judge him as being better is to see how he acts against people he doesn't like. Hell, Bari Weiss even said as much, leading to a rift between her and Musk despite their Twitter Files collaboration.

If Twitter ends up going bankrupt or sees some other horrible fate, Elon is going to take the blame. In a vacuum, there's nothing unusual about that; the problem is that he also owns a number of other companies, one of which has a p/e ratio that's off the charts and is responsible for a great deal of his wealth. Most of his companies are sci-fi dream companies that can fail without being a reflection of Elon's business acumen. Not so much Twitter, which was existing and, if not consistently profitable, then at least relatively stable. Now Elon comes in and buys it and all of the sudden it's doing miserably. Is this a reflection of Elon's business acumen? No! It's a reflection of how the haters sought to destroy him because he dared to stand up for principle, dammit. No need to worry about the management of Tesla or any of his other companies; those aren't ideological, so keep the money flowing in. Tesla is the car company of the future and its stock price should be every bit of what it was back in April. This little dip is just a consequence of a general tech slowdown and backlash against political concerns involving one of his other companies. So don't worry, investor. Management is just fine. The fundamentals are the same. Buy buy buy.

Not so much Twitter, which was existing and, if not consistently profitable, then at least relatively stable. Now Elon comes in and buys it and all of the sudden it's doing miserably.

It's more like the media is trying to create a self-fulfilling prophecy . The only way to know would be if Elon tried to rise money again, what price would he get per share of tesla? Likely less than $54.

Barron's either has an inside scoop or is irresponsibly wrong.

As per my recollection, and as Matt Levine said today on Twitter, Musk at one point considered borrowing against Tesla shares, but instead borrowed against Twitter and funded the rest from stock sales (+investors +large shareholders who rolled over their shares).

Barron's is flat out wrong and should feel bad.

Elon is trying to avoid having to pay full price. this is smart of him. Loading twitter with debt and then going bankrupt is a common private equity move. This is tiny relative to Tesla's value, so the extra shares should not have too much of an impact.

You keep saying this but there are virtually no examples of this occurring. It’s not a common tactic. The equity is in the vast majority of cases wiped out. He would need a very friendly judge and the owners of the debt would need to play ball.

The debt owners could also tell him to fuck off. And if he decides to try and permemently blow up the company while control is transferring to debt holders he would face legal liability.

A more likely scenerio is someone like Elliot Management snaps up key debt tranches and gains control. Tells Musks to fuck off. Purchased say the debt stack from 12-18 billion for 3 billion. Owns twitter at around 15 billion EV. Brings back Parag as CEO.

Him pulling that off would require a corrupt deal with a friendly government, is what you’re saying.

Which means it’s unlikely that he can do it while headquartered in California.

Except that bankruptcy is Federal so what state he's in doesn't really matter.

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