“Fidelity is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion”
I found this funny.
Honestly terrifying that they still think it is worth that much.
they still own the twitter trademark, that might be their biggest asset
Since they don’t seem to care about it, start using “tweet” for every social media post to devalue them further.
Tweets are a specific type of a microblog post you do on twitters. Have you tried tweeting, make your own twitter at https://joinmastodon.org/ today!
If someone were to buy it, ban the Nazis and get advertisers to come back it’s still salvageable, I guess. The longer Musk owns it, the bigger the chance is that it’ll become the next MySpace.
At least the MySpace guy was able to run a fun site, cash out before social media became crazy, and spend the rest of his life having fun with that money.
Trump will lose, and Musk will be holding on to a useless site that serves nothing. He’ll probably sell for a fraction of what he paid (not that it was his money in the first place), but by that point it’ll be too late. Twitter will be long dead.
I doubt the saudis will be very happy if Musk doesn’t repay them their investment. I’m surprised they haven’t threatened him into stepping down and handing their investment to someone who can properly manage a social media platform already
That’ll probably be what happens if Trump loses. Musk didn’t spend “his” money so it’s no loss, and many from the Middle East have wanted control of Twitter ever since the Arab Spring.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of this remaining value is because the Japanese internet still heavily relies on it as a platform, even if the west has begun moving elsewhere.
Musk did not buy this as an investment. He bought it to flip elections and manipulate public opinion.
Tesla is writing him a check that will cover the entire purchase price, and Saudi Arabia and Russia will pay the operating costs.
Active users are what matters; if they lost 75% of their users then I’m paying attention.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure he gave an outlandish bid for Twitter to manipulate it’s stock prices when he pulled put, but he was sued into following through.
I don’t think he ever wanted to buy it, or at least he wanted to crash it’s value to come back and buy it on the cheap.
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If he was that competent why would he resort to openly pumping and dumping meme coins in public just prior to this stunt.
He has some dangerous strings he can pull, but that doesn’t make him a good puppet master.
I think you’re giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn’t like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.
I think it’s even pettier than that. He’s the loud guy on the forum who literally bought the site so he could be admin.
Honestly, everyone needs to listen to the episode of Search Engine about Elon. It’s such a clear narrative of what happened between the Iron Man cameo and now. It’s pure hubris - someone who is very unlikable desperately hungry for love to the point where his brain bust a fuse.
My first thought is ‘I can’t wait for it to turn zero’ but then I realize that 79% decline from 44 billion still means it is worth 9.24 billion.
And that is still a shitload of money.
But on the plus side, this idiot is 34.76 billion poorer
%79 so far
And yet, he’s still one of the what, 5 richest people on the planet?
He doesn’t give a shit, and neither should you (as nice as the schadenfreude might feel). He got something worth more to him than plain old money - an established propaganda platform, which he is using as he intended - to war monger and otherwise interfere in politics to ensure fascism progresses as fast as he can help it. The “dent” (more like a surface scratch) it put in his finances is completely invisible and irrelevant to him.
And it should be to you, too.
He is NEVER going to end up without means or power, not even fucking close, unless we take them from him, and abolish the system that encouraged and enabled him to amass them in the first place.
What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.
Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.
Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price…
Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.
Yeah a lot of people miss the fact that the play for Twitter was never about money, but control. Owning one of the most popular social medias makes it easy to spread propaganda and amplify your voice.
Lots of people spout this conspiracy theory, but Ive yet to hear a good reason why he had to be sued into making the purchase (after making price manipulating statements) if it was some sinister plan.
Far more likely he’s just a fuck up.
Fucked up then adapted musk is a welpling but like every rich WASP be it from England or its colonies he is weirdly adaptable. Which is why the most effective method of WASP removal is via flamethrower.
A real socialist! Took money from the rich to give it to the poor (minded). /s
its worth comes from being able to influence world politics. Does he seem like someone who cares or needs money?
Twitter currently has $1.5 billion/year deficit which is a lot, even for Musk, to bankroll.
that brightens my day a little to hear
True, but that power is also diminished greatly as more and more regular users abandon the site. No eyes on the propaganda makes it worth a lot less.
Yeah I’m sure I’m not the norm but I’m actually shocked when I see companies advertising their talent’s twitter accounts on tv broadcasts. I truly can’t believe that site is still mainstream after everything that’s happened.
Idk then I look over and see trump as a presidential candidate and ugh… I guess I’m just still not comfortable/accepting of how far off the rails things have gone 🙁
Elon is a genius at losing money.
that’s why he is the richest person in the world with 270B net worth.
look, i hate the asshole as much as the other guy, but changing meaning of words and underestimating the enemy never helped anyone.
it’s just that he could take big risks (not even a smart one) in investment because he didn’t care about the money, he has so much that he can never lose it all, so of course if you can invest blindly you’ll for sure win at some point
it’s just that he could take big risks
yes, that is definitely part of his success. and since this strategy got him to position of richest person in the world, it is pretty clear that “genius at losing money” is not really accurate description of situation.
as for twitter, he clearly is not in it for the money, otherwise he wouldn’t be there to begin with. he originally hoped to buy position of cheered and admired hero and when he failed, he settled for a position of hated douchebag. infamous still means people know you, i guess 🤷♂️
It would appear that he didn’t want to buy Twitter and was literally forced to do so. I think for him Twitter is a temper tantrum. He didn’t get what he wanted so he’s destroying everything around him as a result.
More to the point though, I do wonder why he didn’t just pay the billion dollars to get out of the deal (with his 270 billion net worth - which by the way includes assets not necessarily liquid cash).
I don’t know that he’s not in it for the money. I think the point is to destroy it so he doesn’t have to pay back what he borrowed to buy it.
More to the point though, I do wonder why he didn’t just pay the billion dollars to get out of the deal
I don’t know that he’s not in it for the money.
your first sentence explains he is not in it for money, if money were the concern, eating the 1b fine would be logical thing to do (i am not fact checking that 1b piece of information, i trust you on this).
with his 270 billion net worth - which by the way includes assets not necessarily liquid cash
that’s how it works, no one has 270 billion in cash
I think the point is to destroy it so he doesn’t have to pay back what he borrowed to buy it.
that doesn’t make sense, destroying twitter doesn’t absolve him of obligation to return money he borrowed.
This is just conjecture though. I do think he originally did not intend to buy Twitter. I do think he was essentially forced to buy it. I know from news articles around the time of the sale that he gave significant pushback when relevant parties forced the issue. Things may very well have changed after he became the owner (and what deals he made to be able to afford it may never be known).
I do think he was essentially forced to buy it.
he was, but it doesn’t contradict what i said. if he had a way to back out of his stupid bragging offer for 1b, and all he cared about was money, the reasonable thing would be to pay the fine, instead of paying 44 billion for something that doesn’t generate profit.
Impressive. I could not have done that.
How to become a billionaire: Start with 54 billion
We knew this was going to happen before he made the purchase.
Everyone said, the best way for Elon to keep his money was to change very little, or even take a hands-off approach.
Masnick suggested this would happen
It was that and so much worse. Moral of the story: Running a huge social media service is hard. Maybe don’t assume that because you’re a billionaire you’re the best at doing stuff.
Meanwhile he is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire
I think the purchase was more about welding power than any financial gain
The way to make it hurt is to establish a replacement that keeps discussions away from trolls and hate propaganda.
“Maybe don’t assume that because you’re a billionaire you’re the best at doing stuff.”
This is literally every second generation billionaire. They seem to have the tendency to believe that their success is solely due to their intelligence and not at all due to their parents’ connections and money.
Masnick gives 20 levels of development. Elon stopped here:
Level Two: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM!”
And that’s about it. Ex-Twitter has copyright infringement, hate speech and doesn’t give a fuck about local laws unless the law actually has teeth (Brasil, anybody?).
Masnick’s post is well put, but also a disturbing reminder of how much power nation-states can exert over the Internet.
Tesla is next. I’m not sure even he can fuck up SpaceX but I’m sure he’ll give it the ol’ college try.
Elon Musk’s greatest personal achievement has been his tireless work and incredible effort toward disproving the myth of Billionaire Exceptionalism.
And may it continue to crash and burn. It’s just 4 chan at this point.
4chan at least had a consistent brand of being the anti-social network and being full of Nazis, weirdos, pedophiles and people who are just anti-social for the lulz. You couldn’t ruin 4chan.
Twitter’s image was being the “internet town-square for serious thinkers” with politicians, scientists, journalists and a small but good measure of standard shitposters. Loosing that brand diminishes it’s value massively. Unfortunately neither Bluesky nor Mastodon was able to catch that clientele yet.
I wish, I wish… I wish I was a fish.
I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.
Like: we’re going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We’re going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.
You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.
But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I’d like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who’d be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.
I may as well wish I were a fish.
I like your idea. But you’ll have to settle for being a fish.
