Musk’s first email to Twitter staff ends remote work
I keep thinking it&#x27;d be much cheaper for Elon to have paid to build an entirely new Twitter that has the features he&#x27;s looking for.<p>Let&#x27;s say Elon had set aside a budget to hire some of the best developers he&#x27;s ever worked with or heard of, and lets give them an imaginary salary of 1.5 million total comp per year, at about 10 devs for easy math. And let&#x27;s say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could&#x27;ve tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.<p>So then you need users. Elon has 115 million followers on Twitter. He&#x27;d get users no matter what he built, so he&#x27;s solved that problem too. You&#x27;re correct that he wouldn&#x27;t have the existing Twitter user base, but if he built a better product that is more modern and cut out some of the dead-weight features, wouldn&#x27;t this option still be significantly cheaper than acquiring a company for $44 billion who only deals in software? At least apple makes products, as does amazon and at least amazon is a distribution behemoth. I struggle to see the 44 billion in value for what appears to be a relatively mundane application.<p>In my mind I don&#x27;t see anyone even spending on the order of 1 billion to build a better Twitter from scratch.