Found on FB, talking about Musk and Twitter's data

[TXPaganBanker]

Elon bought Twitter for the data.
He is not there to make money with the company itself. He’s NOT failing. This is all intentional.
I keep saying this and it keeps surprising people so I’m gonna just go ahead and post about it again. (I copied some of this from a comment I made elsewhere.)
Twitter is/has perhaps the most valuable dataset on the planet, in terms of building AI that can predict human behavior.
Elon’s antics are a side-show distraction, and he never intended to keep the company functioning—but he also can’t make it TOO obvious that he intends to drive it to bankruptcy.
In AI, whoever has the biggest dataset wins—and Twitter is the largest extant dataset with which to train AI models on human behavior/sentiment.
Being a public corporation limited what could be done with the data—but Elon took it private.
He will easily make his investment back just from the existing data—even if Twitter dies tomorrow.
Furthermore, any sort of evidence-based inquiry (including science and (real) journalism) is a threat to billionaire (neofeudalist) rule. So it’s actually good for Elon if Twitter dies—now that he has the data.
Elon’s antics are a sideshow, don’t forget that, no matter how much fun it is to laugh at him. This was planned. When you say things like, “Elon has more money than sense,” you are helping provide him cover. This has all been deeply calculated.
Though I think there’s still a chance it won’t work out like he thinks. No idea what that means, though. Yet.
(BTW I’m a software/data/DevOps engineer with almost fifteen years of professional experience, and I’ve done some work with machine learning—I’m not just pulling this stuff out of thin air.)
——————
EDIT:
No, I don’t have definitive proof of this. I think obfuscating evidence is a big part of the point of what Elon is doing, generally. Go read through the technical subreddits for yourself.
Twitter may not be the largest existing dataset, but it’s definitely one of the largest, and I think it’s critically important for building certain kinds of AI, and yes I really do think it’s worth 44 billion dollars to Elon for that reason alone.
I know, I know, it’s really fun to laugh at Elon. I’m not trying to take that away from you, laugh away. I just want you to THINK a little while you’re doing it. If you can, you’ll be well ahead of most people you know, I expect. 🤠

By Sloan Ahrens

It definitely is a new way of looking at things, and makes a whole lot more sense. It's 16 years of real time behavior data from hundreds of millions of users.

[OAITW r.2.0]

1. Very interesting and makes a lot of sense in these terms. nt

[zipplewrath]

2. You may be right

It could explain his supposed concern about the number of "bots" on twitter. No point in buying a database so that you can create AI to predict the behavior of bots.

But if he did, he'd be an idiot. Which of course is very likely.

I've been exposed to AI for 40 years. The promises have been legendary. It's gone by a variety of names, including machine learning, and expert systems. IBM has had Watson around for at least 20 years. It is a technology with some useful purposes. But the company I worked for tried it about 20 years ago hoping to replace a bunch of engineers. These really smart people came in and interviewed a whole bunch of us. In the end they achieved nothing. I'm pretty sure I knew why too. They interviewed a wide swath of the existing engineers. The really smart ones, the moderately good ones, and the ones that were on the list of the first to go in a downsizing effort. They probably should have only interviewed the really smart ones.

Twitter is a cesspool of idiots with the occasional reasonable person mixed in. The filtering that database would require in order to obtain any predictive value out of a particular population would be approaching impossible. Could politics and advertising in general be able to make use of that database? Maybe, I'm dubious but I suspect it is possible. I'm just not sure it'd be worth the amount he paid for it.

But I'll admit, his focus on people who are writing the software does sort of support your assertion. He may be looking for people talented enough to make use of the database.

[Faux pas]

3. I

think that makes him a vulture capitalist.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/vulturecapitalist.asp

KEY TAKEAWAYS

A vulture capitalist is an investor who purchases troubled companies whose prices have been severely depressed in the market.

Aggressive action is taken to revive the company and boost profits, usually via hefty cost-cutting exercises like job layoffs.

If they don't succeed in this goal, vulture capitalists will find other ways to line their pockets, such as engaging in asset stripping to make money.

[brush]

4. We'll see. Doesn't look good so far. The final scenes of...

"The Wizard of Oz" comes to mind...behind the curtain and all.

[Gaugamela]

5. Yanis Varoufakas makes the same point in an article on Common Dreams:

For while he [Musk] was busy working out how to make mass-produced electric cars desirable and to profit from conquering outer space, Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Facebook, and Tencent’s WeChat were wrapping their tentacles firmly around platforms and interfaces with “everything app” potential. Only one such interface was available for purchase. Musk’s challenge now is to enhance Twitter’s own cloud capital and hook it up to his existing Big Data network, while constantly enriching that network with data collected by Tesla cars crisscrossing Earth’s roads and countless satellites crisscrossing its skies. Assuming he can steady the nerves of Twitter’s remaining workforce, his next task will be to eliminate bots and weed out trolls so that New Twitter knows, and owns, its users’ identities.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/11/25/dont-be-fooled-what-elon-musk-really-twitter