Elon Musk's Twitter takeover math has changed

Flying Squid@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 158 points –
axios.com

I really hate Axios' format, but they're not wrong.

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter when he bought it for $44 billion in late 2022, after unsuccessfully trying to renegotiate or renege.

Now a new conventional wisdom is emerging: Twitter is a loss leader for the rest of Elon Inc.

The argument is that Musk bought Twitter for power, not profit. And that the gamble paid off.

  • Musk used the platform to help shape public opinion during the election, artificially amplifying his political messages and giving him- influence with Donald Trump that money alone wouldn't have bought.
  • Trump's victory means that Musk has become the most powerful unelected American ever — and that could be a boon for SpaceX and Tesla, whose fortunes are heavily dependent on federal government contracts and policies.-
  • Those two companies also are much larger than Twitter/X, even at $44 billion, and more core to Musk's lifelong goals.
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Nope, the Twitter buyout was dumb as shit and there were far more effective ways of spending that money for influence if that was Elon's goal.

Fuck. As someone into tech can I just say FUCK. Stop trying to make Musk's dumbass decisions look smart in retrospect when in actuality he just has enough money to weather a shit ton of idiocy.

The man is not a genius... I can't stand the media's constant drive to portray him as one.

And yet he got everything he wanted. And Twitter was a big help.

I don't think he's a genius. You don't have to be a genius when you can buy your way into and out of anything.

As long as we're not assuming he bought Twitter with this outcome in sight I can accept that.

Honestly my pet theory is that he bought Twitter to destroy it after his breakup with Grimes... kinda like throwing your ex's clothes out the window. They separated in March 2022 and Musk started his bullshit offers in April 2022. It was probably either for revenge or just because he was off balance emotionally.

Well, the solution is clear.

Find a way to their server farms while carrying an axe?

Aww deleted comment because of a veiled threat of violence. Good thing our conservative mods are here to protect their way of life.

Talking about plans to commit crimes on public forums is basically just doing the cops work for them

You're right, the proper place to talk about committing crimes is up on stage.

I'm just saying that I wouldn't mind if someone had to shoot through Elon Musk. Let's put him with a rifle standing there will 9 barrels shooting at him, ok? Let's see how he feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on his face.

Trump taught us we are allowed to say that stuff now.

3 more...
4 more...

the most powerful unelected American ever

Other than the "unelected American" part, it reminds me a bit of William Randolph Hearst (who is widely considered as the inspiration for Fox's Murdoch - not to mention Citizen Kane).

William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism in violation of ethics and standards influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest stories.

Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos. Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often published his personal views. He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain.

During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.

Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians. Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favorable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers. He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right. Hearst's publication reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s.

His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane (1941)

It seems he bought Twitter and successfully traded twitter's market cap into right wing populist influence (RWPI) [and presumably a capital gains deduction], and now RWPI into governmental influence.

Everyone already knew this.

Yeah I thought that became fairly obvious not too long after the deal. He didn't do anything to make it a sustainable business. Quite the opposite. The changes functioned to amplify right wing voices along with his.

Elon Musk is an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT! I'm SURE Republicans will be UP IN ARMS about an ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT Buying an EXTREMELY POWERFUL Government Role!

Now we know how much it costs to assemble an army of bots and bootlickers, enough to net you a seat of power in government.