Because he's doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn't it obvious?
No, you don't throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles, not even if you are as rich as Musk.
Musk is (probably) a narcissist who thought he could make it work in his delusional mind.
He wanted a mouthpiece for the MAGA crowd, and he probably thought the desire in the population for it, would make it succeed, if he made the platform embrace that. He probably envisioned himself as a great liberator, who would be celebrated for bringing free speech back to America.
Musk has been losing it for a long time, and it seems to only get worse.
Who could of forseen brands not wanting to advertise over hate speech that would turn off half their customer base? I'd love screenshots of my companies products floating around next to seasticas and racism.
Yes that's so strange, think of all the extra attention the controversies create!! I bet he planned to double the prices for advertising.
Also, I don't think a narcissist would intentionally and publicly humiliate themselves the way Musk has done (Not a psychologist).
Absolutely true, being humiliated is just about the worst thing for a narcissist.
An example of that, was when Elon Musk called the diver who actually rescued 13 children in Thailand a pedophile. Imagine that, calling the hero of the day a pedophile because you are butthurt!!
No they definitely don't like to be humiliated, they probably feel that a lot more deeply that non-narcissists. But at the same time, they lack the self-awareness that would help them avoid getting into situations that would lead to humiliation.
He’s being bankrolled to keep it up and running for the next election. It will be interesting to see if the money runs out.
Nah Saudi money goes deep
I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software. Historically, hardware was way more complex but the hardware problems have kind of been solved. There’s only so many ways to design a phone or laptop. Software, meanwhile, has only become more complex and challenging.
I agree, but I don't see the point in this context?
The software to build and run Twitter, is probably not worth much besides for running Twitter.
No Twitter means no value in the software for it either.
I agree, but I don’t see the point in this context?
I think they meant Musk thought managing development of the Twitter software would be easier than it was, given his prior… Involvement with Tesla and SpaceX.
I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software.
Ah yes, I can see that could make sense. But I think Musk considers himself as much a software guy as hardware, because he works with AI for Tesla. Putting him somewhat on the cutting edge of software too. Twitter should be child's play by comparison.
Of course Musk has managed to bring Tesla from a competitive position to be way behind the main field, with just a few very stupid decisions. Mercedes, GM and Waymo are now way ahead of Tesla, and Nvidia and MobilEye are probably ahead too.
Of course Musk is now attempting to slow AI development overall, because he is way behind. With suggestions like preventing AI development until we have better regulation and understanding. He is trying to repeat how he stopped investments in public transport with hyperloop. Only this time with AI, because he is losing that battle badly.
No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles
Why not? Elon Musk is famously on ketamine, ambien, and a whole slew of mind-altering substances.
Given how the contract was written, and given how much Elon Musk fought against the contract, it was obvious that he made a short-term decision (likely while high on some substance), and then quickly regretted buying Twitter. Within a week or two, he started a court case to NOT BUY TWITTER, despite signing an ironclad contract.
In my mind, its really fucking obvious what happened. Elon Musk partied a little bit too hard with some mixture of ketamine+ambien+alcohol, it mixed weirdly in his brain and he made a bad decision. A few days later, when he sobered up a bit, he realized how shitty of a decision he made but it was too late to roll things back.
Everything else Elon Musk has done is just... shitty reputation management. He's trying to convince the world he's still got it, despite making a bad (possibly drug-induced) decision
He made a huge mistake, either because he was under the influence, or because he is delusional. That doesn't mean he actually intended to throw out $44B just for shit an giggles. Obviously he didn't when he sobered up.
I don't know. The way it's going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.
Instead he's making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.
The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he's making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he's just stupid and incompetent.
You're saying the guy that has done nothing but look like a total fool for years could actually be a total fool? By the gods, I think you're onto something!
Because he’s doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn’t it obvious?
It is tremendously obvious, I agree. At one point it felt kinda hyperbolic to say, but not for awhile now.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to speculate what's in it for him, but it's 100% obvious that's what's being done.
He might call him self pro free speech, but he actually hates it (as long as it's not his own free speech). Getting rid of Twitter is a massive blow to free speech. One less platform where he and his companies can get outed and criticized on.
I subscribed to the conspiracy theory of the banning of the jet tracker
Twitter was becoming another walled platform (not being able to read the content without being logged in) even before Musk's take-over.
I'm happy for any walled platform to fail. IMO they have no place on internet.
It’s less nefarious than that. He wants to be a championed business leader. He’s just a fuck up who was forced to buy a platform that he never actually intended to buy (except for maybe a couple of days when he first suggested it). Sure, it will help his side when he runs it into the ground, but that’s not his intent despite being the cause.
I think that's obvious to everyone. But, if you're claiming he's doing it on purpose..... That's just some next level batshit conspiracy theory.
Is it? He's either a moron or he's doing it on purpose. There is simply no other explanation.
At this point it's just too many dumb decisions, if he had done absolutely nothing after taking over he'd be better off than he is now.
Delusional rich guy who's nowhere near as smart as most people thought he was is the most simple explanation. He's obviously got some kind of god complex and thinks he's right about everything.
I mean he has been called a real world Tony Stark for the last decade. Maybe that went straight to his mushy brain and he is still on that high. Back in the day he listened to experts, now whenever he's at SpaceX they employ "Elon handlers" who just nod to every suggestion and then try to get rid of him.
He got too much positive press and lost it.
God knows how a wannabe Steve Jobs who bought into all of his companies ever got compared to Tony Stark.
He looked like a real world Tony Stark when he was surrounded by teams of smart people doing all the hard parts and PR for him.
What we're seeing now is pure unfiltered Musk. He was probably always like this, but now he's off the leash.
Not sure I agree. I think it would be totally in character for him to want to destroy Twitter just because they forced him to buy it. He's a petty troll and can afford to lose that money just to show them.
How does destroying it hurt "them" he already bought it? They cashed out way over the value of the company. If I was any major shareholder of Twitter that he bought out Id be gleefully laughing at him running it into the ground now that I'm no longer invested.
True, I didn't think it through. I stand corrected.
Spite isn't rational.
I think in the end he will want you to believe that. And will be glad if you do.
People told me I was crazy when I said he bought it to shut it down. Look who he hangs out with, people with a fuckton of money who hate free speech. Very powerful people who control media empires and run oppressive regimes.
He might be stupid, but the people pulling his strings aren't.
Like others have said, bullshit. He'll drive it into the ground and pretend that was his plan the whole time, like he's some undercover genius three steps ahead of everyone, when really he's just constantly playing catch-up with his narcissistic outbursts.
That's like saying "my car may fail after I poured sand into the gas tank and replaced the electrical with speaker wires"
I keep thinking there must be some high level plan here to destroy twitter for the good of humanity. I mean it's that or Elon actually just is that stupid. At this point the latter seems the most likely ...
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.
A bad rule of thumb. Weaponized incompetence is a thing.
You've got it back to front imo. Twitter was a useful tool for disseminating info, whether for protest movements, political movements, whatevs. Pre-Musk, there was a degree of control on twitter re disinfo, harassment, hatred etc. Now, it's no longer a useful tool for leftwing people to gather and share their thoughts; it's no longer a useful tool to disseminate information; it's no longer a tool for rallying protestors.
Look at who invested (Saudi kingdom); look at when Musk took it over (mid-terms); it seems pretty obvious to me that the takeover was a very expensive purchase to make the actions of oligarchs & despots that much easier.
If he was destroying it for the good of humanity he would have to somehow destroy the concept of it rather than a single platform.
Probably best spending 40 billion on education in the harm social media can do lol.
I really do think he's just delusional. I won't call him an idiot because there is clearly intelligence and talent in his head, but he's gone off the rails in some capacity whether it's mental health issues or power crazed or who knows.
It's probably drugs. He changed a lot the last few years.
No he hasn't. The management of the old x.com (the one that got bought by paypal) threatened to walk if Elon wasn't removed from the office. He was always this incompetent.
You answer jibes with what I have seen plenty of while working with and funding serial entrepreneurs in the Valley: micro-dosing, coke, molly, steroids, random herbal shit, off-label usage of pharmaceuticals, trendy nootropics, blood transfusions, ayahuasca, and Adderall.
That was my original thought when he came on and immediately fired 75% of the staff. It's not some savvy slimming down or cost-cutting. It was more like a wrecking ball.
It was fairly clear that his overall desire was the make the platform less useful for liberals and more for conservatives. It seems like he is content to destroy it if he can't achieve the latter.
For the record, It wasn't failing until Musk came in.
It also wasn't really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he's been talked out of.
It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However ~8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it's much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.
It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.
Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
Ugh. This "global town square" nonsense needs to die.
Twitter's business was selling ads. They don't give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to "the people" being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else's honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.
The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose "global town square" that "gave power to the people".
Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk's fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, manyactual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn't built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actualbots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).
Twitter's a corporation. They never cared about being a "town square", only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He's not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he's the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.
It's just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter's amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it's in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They're acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.
How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.
Thank you, finally. It was nothing more than the internet's comments section.
Once it fails then someone will buy it cheap and rename it twitter.
If there's anything left to buy aside from tacky merch shirts. I'm sure the creditors will pick it clean and auction off the best bits to the highest bidder.
Maybe, or maybe it'll be another Bebo level disaster.
...I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can't remember even hearing that name before.
originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013
It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.
Can't someone else just make Twitter now tho?
Facebook tried with Threads but overcoming ecosystem inertia is hard.
Bingo.
And since won't get back all the staff he dismissed; they're going to have to just slap the Twitter brand on a Mastodon instance.
Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now,".
Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever "great" is a bit of a stretch
twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
better shape, sure but was it ever profitable? I suspect he bought a turd and knew it day 0
Ctrl+F for "Net Income", which will take you to the $1,465,659 (thousands) figure somewhere in its charts. Net Income is the bottom line: after all revenues, costs, etc. etc. of the year were added up.
Musk took it over with a so called "Leveraged Buyout", meaning Twitter borrowed $13 Billion to allow Elon Musk to buy it for $44 Billion (meaning Elon Musk only paid $33 Billion, the random +2 Billion to wipeout all the old debt).
Note that $13 Billion in loans costs somewhere between 10% to 14% right now, depending on how much of the loan was fixed and how much of it was adjustable. At 10%, this means that Twitter took on $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments as Elon Musk bought the company. There's pretty much no hope for Twitter to ever be profitable again, they'd have to execute as perfectly as 2019 despite losing 80% of their staff (Elon Musk also fired everyone when he took over the company).
The company was "barely profitable" in 2019, and "just barely losing money" in 2020, 2021. But add on a $1.3+ Billion/year loadstone, and its just... not... going to ever be profitable again.
The funniest part, though, is that the $13 billion in debt to Twitter is held by lenders who would be first in line to get any payout from a Twitter bankruptcy. If the enterprise value as a whole drops below $13 billion, then Musk would get nothing out of the bankruptcy, and would lose his entire $30b+ investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, of course, Musk decides to put good money after bad, and pony up a new investment of even more money, that the lenders would agree to take.
As much as I'm happy to see both Twitter and Musk fail, your comment reminds me yet again that leveraged buyouts are fundamentally fucked up and ought to be illegal.
Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
Oopsie we repeatedly keep taking away you most valuable organizational tools
The 1%
This take is exhausting. It's like the political version of narcissism: here's how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!
If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk's friend's companies or governments?
You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?
Control is the game for people with money and power whether it is graceful or not. Some of what Elon has done seems like he wants to control the narrative around his jet. Some of what Elon is doing seems like he just wants to keep testing the waters to see how many people still use twitter after crippling the system. Like some sort of “I slap them in the face and they ask to be hit harder- that’s how much power I have over them. People are obsessed with me”.
I don’t think his goal was to kill twitter. His goal was to remain on everyone’s lips without his jet being mentioned. And if that’s at the cost of organizational tools being destroyed, so be it- in fact, destroying twitter has had more people taking about him than ever.
Yeah, I think that's more or less right. Musk has gone off the rails, and is using his fortune as a cudgel in a fit of pique.
It's our own fault that our "town square" was so easily taken over by a rich bully, though. I was warning people back in 2007 that depending so heavily on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, was a bad idea. People did not want to hear it. It's hard to picture now, but people used to love those companies, and couldn't imagine them doing harm. But like...it was inevitable.
We need to build on things like Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora, whatever. If you hand control of the town square to a corporation, they're gonna control access and charge fees, and they'll happily sell it to someone who wants to turn it into a mud-wrestling pit. That's not the fault of the corporations--it's our fault.
Not to mention that the 1% already owned it.
Though if anyone is thinking of spending close to fifty billion to destoy a social network then call me - I'll do it for a billion, or two.
Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actualautocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.
In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they're organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn't do it because they saw somebody's sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the "Like" button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we'll all be better off with it gone.
EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he's done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.
Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him.
DIsagree. He was trying to do one of his many pump-and-dumps and he fucked around and got found out.
Fair. He talked about buying Twitter for the power and attention he meant to get from talking about it, both from the cryptobro fans and also any shady financial shenanigans. But he didn't actually mean to go through with paying for it.
For real!? I cannot think of a worse cancer than twitter/X and the horrific abomination that it is cannot whither away quickly enough.
What possible benefit has Twitter ever offered mankind?
So with wildfires in Canada there's evacuation zones near me, but I can't click on some announcement links from the main site that shows the evacuation zones because they go to twitter and you need to log in now. I think they show some on other pages on the site but they do the quicklink to the twitter announcement in the sidebar so you have to click around a bit to get to it. Yes I know the name but whatever. My point being is when the social media site that was meant for short bits of info isn't good for emergency notifications where everyone can read, it's shitty and potentially harmful.
Governments should either be operating their own systems for this or, hell I don't know, why not just spin up a their ready-to-go Mastodon instance or something else in the fediverse not subject to the delirious whims of a petulant muskrat born with daddy's money?
Very much agree. I read that the Netherlands already did this!
I’m sorry - as someone who has done some work with disaster response, this was one of my main concerns. When they threatened to take away NWS access to API without huge fees, I was honestly horrified. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but a lot of what my organization did was scour Twitter for official information and also personal accounts of folks who needed help/the conditions on the ground.
It is honestly a travesty that a resource such as this can be reduced to literal 💩 when people need it the most. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I hope more and more folks/orgs migrate to a suitable alternative(s) sooner rather than later, but the damage has been done. There’s always a percentage who never do, and you can’t fix that.
X may fail. Twitter didn't fail. Twitter was bought by a twat who decided to shut it down piece by piece.
Don't forget Twitter was already in big problems operating at a loss in a lot of its existing years. It's definitely plummeting even further with his decisions though.
I wish I could operate at a loss and be given billions of pounds.
X? Can we collectively decide to forever call it "X, formerly known as Twitter" just to piss him off?
I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called...
TwiX is unfortunately already taken.
Damn, I could go for a twix bar right about now.
I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an "sh" sound.
Exitter is also a valid prononciation
I saw someone on Mastodon say something along the lines of "I'll continue to deadname Twitter for as long as Musk continues to deadname his daughter" and I love that sentiment.
daaaaaaamn. That's brilliant.
Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don't mention X at all. That would piss him off more.
Best part was he tried to chicken out of his own deal but the feds obv wouldn't allow him back off on his very own proposal to buy Twitter in the first place!
the feds
Delaware Court.
Contract law is weird.
Not really. He entered into a binding contract and agreed to bypass due diligence.
That wasn't even offered by Twitter, he just agreed without any prompting.
Yes yes yes. But that binding contract was in Delaware. Because contract law is weird.
In practice, most business contracts are enforced by the state of Delaware, not the federal government nor any national-level court. Yes, its a state-level court.
Side fact. Delaware's has more registered companies then people
In the same way that car fails when you deliberately drive it 100mph into a brick wall.
So you've got experience with Tesla's autopilot function...
Uh, no. Autopilot was not enabled during that crash.
It disabled itself 0.25s before impact
Nailed it.
Can we start a gofundme to persuade him to take over Facebook?
No, do Jira next pls.
If we make Facebook to go to place to talk about Elon he'll do it out of spite and narcissism.
"Here's 44 billion USD, I might fail though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Genius.
Especially because he could have bought it for so much less.
Good, shut it down. Time to end Twitter.
Now all he needs to do is to connect his own management of Twitter to its failure.
Of all his managerial feats, I'm confident that one is beyond him.
Wishful thinking
I have a feeling that that was the plan from the beginning.
The elite don't like seeing common people have an open forum where they can all talk about how terrible their lives are, that their terrible lives are caused by the elite and that the common people should figure out what to do about it all.
It's perhaps stupider than that. The guy couldn't take getting made fun of on Twitter, so he bought and killed it.
Rich people don't like being made fun of ... but you know what upsets them even more? Poor people realizing that they can make fun of them long enough and often enough to realize that the world should get rid of obscenely rich people.
This is a really lazy take. The elite have forever wanted to control the common people through the manipulation of laws, economy, news,etc. That's why the Saudis put up the majority of the loan to enable Elon to buy it...so they could gain control over public dissent and white wash their abhorrent public image.
Meanwhile, Elon's a glorified troll with a god complex, who wants to build his own clubhouse for more extreme right wing content.
Which makes me think it did both things ...
subverted a major platform where common people were actually debating real life problems with one another in a constructive way
filled it with far right rhetoric to promote extreme ideology and keep people occupied, fighting and divided so that they can no longer organize against the rich
genuinely convinced he may have intentionally destroyed twitter to make the next presidential campaign operate on a different field.
sounds crazy but without twitter or reddit, how do "the youth" communicate? tiktok? insta?
There's no reason to speculate his motives. It's obvious he didn't want to buy Twitter when he was forced by courts to buy it. He was being an idiot trying to manipulate the stock price. I know it's hard to believe a multi-billionaire can be an idiot, but it happened. There's no 4d chess move. Rich people are fallible as everyone else.
Big parts of the youth did not use twitter. Twitter had at its peak about 500mio active users. Instagram has 2.4 billion, tiktok 1 billion, snapchat 750mio. The relevancy of twitter is highly skewed, because the media used it a lot.
Wow crazy that so many people use those social media platforms. I have never used any of them.
I mainly use Snapchat just to keep the pointless streaks going. Never seen an ad in Snapchat for years.
I mean, Elon sucks, but I am kind of happy to hear Twitter might fully die. I've always hated the idea of forced character limits.
The world needs more critical and expansive discussion, not additional reasons to summerize and minimize important topics into long headlines.
In the case of longer form thought, Twitter provided links. What’s the problem?
People just like to rage over things on the internet. I suspect they also don't know how to get to the fkn point rather than ramble like they're waxing poetic on a topic. Reddit is full of that shit.
I think it's just a human problem. You or I may like to read long form journalism, but we're in the extreme minority. It's not dying because it was so hugely profitable.
Logistically too, if you're trying to parse through the top 100 tweets in a day, and each one takes multiple paragraphs to get to the point, the amount of various viewpoints the average person is able to interact with shrinks dramatically.
Granted, it seems like everyone is taking the forced brevity as an excuse to just write +1 to pile onto their side, since that's easier.
I feel like there has to be a medium between "Tweets that shoot context in the head" and "Autobiography attached to a macaroni and cheese recipe". The need for sites to keep you there encourages complete nonsense that doesn't contribute to the thing I'm there for, and so turns me away from long form anything. I got shit to do and a thousand articles competing for attention, most of which were written by bots and contain nothing. The whole scheme is just broken.
I feel like I had a thesis when I started this comment and I forgot where I was going...
...they said concisely in a short internet comment.
He was free to ramble on for thousands of words though
the guy didn't even want twitter. the whole thing is depressing.
And somehow it’ll be the “woke mind virus’s” fault. There will be no self reflection at all.
I wouldn't be surprised this is him urging his cult to buy monthly subscriptions. If we see higher tier subscription be introduced one of these days, that would be the reason for this fear mongering. That said, it's awesome that he's getting a reality check. You can be surrounded by as many yes-men as you want but people en masse don't care and even if they do, they love seeing rich people humbled. No one misses a good shitstorm.
Doesn't matter. The subscription revenue, which ever musk taint sniffers said would take in billions, barely will probably offset 1 month of lost ad revenue for a whole year worth of subs.
He has added a billion dollars of interest negative revenue at the same time he's lost half his ad revenue. That's a bad combo
No doubt, am just trying to read a bit further up because I don't take him as stupid as he acts.
Oh no! Anyway.
Space Karen destroys Twitter.
🍌We're all trying to find the guy who did this
He can still turn it into a porn app
Honestly, might've been better off trying to turn a porn site into an everything app. The internet was built on porn after all.
Thank you for reminding me that the company best set to compete with YouTube is YouPorn.
*"Man internationally, violently and repeatedly stabbing victim in the face now warns that victim may die of facial stab wounds."*
In May Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in the company then still known as Twitter, giving it a value of about $15 billion – or just a third of what Musk paid, The Wall Street Journal Reported.
I think even that was not realistic, and back in May things were not as bad yet as they are now at "The thing formerly known as Twitter". I doubt anyone would buy it at even half that now. Musk added a debt of $20 billion, that's about what it was worth at the time Musk bought it.
With that debt, the company became basically worth Zero. Even at the estimate when Musk bought it.
If the $20 billion debt was somehow removed, it would still be worth less than $10 billion. Meaning that its current actual worth is probably below negative $10 billion! Meaning the only value is the tax value of the deficit. And no creditors get paid. It's basically already bankrupt, unless someone pumps in more money, and I'm not seeing that happening with a company as bad as "The thing formerly known as Twitter".
Seems like the only way forward now, is bankruptcy and maybe reconstruction after selling the company without the debt for peanuts.
Most of the value was probably with the brand itself. Which he then tossed away. Genius.
Yes, and even the name is probably almost worthless now, he has massacred everything including the original name.
It's to bad, because the original concept was OK, and could probably have survived without the insanity Musk brought.
I wonder what term will replace tweet... it worked so well. Oh I tweeted this last night...
People aren't going to say I X'd that last night. Sure you can say I posted something on X or I dunno, but I don't think they'll ever get something as good as tweeting on twitter.
I agree, you can't create something similar easily, it's like to "Google it". Nobody would dream to say "Bing it" or "Yahoo it".
If they had achieved dominance instead of Google we might, but you can't just change such things.
Even if X should become somewhat popular, to X it doesn't really work.
So even with a new service as popular as Twitter used to be, it's unlikely to replace the term "to tweet". It could simply go back to "to message" IDK. That would work disregarding of platform name, but would lack the brilliance of tweeting on Twitter.
Was just thinking on this more and had a laugh at someone saying this out loud
Them: "Did you see my X last night, i ripped them a new one!"
Friend: "You did what to your ex last night? Does your wife know!?"
That's hilarious.
But I'm sure Musk thought that through before implementing the new name for the thing formerly known as twitter. /s
That was a truly insane decision. Of all the annoying and idiotic things he's said, "Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds" is way up there.
He accelerated it. If he had just left things alone, he’d be in a better place than he is today.
Yeah. I wonder which microservice was actually important... Or maybe he needs one of all those people he decided he didn't need...
Stage 5: Acceptance
Oh no. Anyway.
Musk tried to fix something that was not broken, and it almost always is a bad idea.
But he's a rocket scientist and a computer scientist!! (\s he's neither)
I wonder how much money the govt will give him now that he lost 44 bil... ya just know that is what will happen
Yes hello I am Normal Citizen. Where do we go for the money?
Government: fuck you, I'm eating! PS you owe us!
Man who bet billions that Twitter would fail is upset that it hasn't already.
It almost like he isn’t actually a genius but narcissistic grifter who can move money around.
Who can move Daddy's money around. He never would've had a shot coming from blue collar origins.
All of Musk's shit will fail, it's just a question of 'when' not of 'if'. That includes Tesla.
I always thought that the name was changed to something way more unappealing and doesn't have anywhere near the same ring to it as "Twitter". It's kind of cringe imo. Like he was trying to make it seem like this was something so groundbreaking and new that it was deserving of one letter, "X". I'm not surprised it's going to flop.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
I wonder this a bit as folks flock to Bluesky. I mean, Threads is just right out there, but Facebook always has been so that demographic was going to be there anyhow. The people flocking to Bluesky because they don't like Musk had better hope Jack Dorsey doesn't turn out to be nuts now, right?
I feel like this whole debacle should have pumped up the various bits of the Fediverse more than it has.
Dorsey really trusts Musk's "mission to extend the light of consciousness", which I think says enough.
I think he probably would have made it work. The death knoll was certainly changing the name to X.
"I've been drilling holes in the bottom of my boat to shed weight, but now I'm having trouble keeping it afloat and there's nothing I can do about it!"
moving the goalpost. twitter was originally developed to be a "news service" not a "social network"
Do a flip!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta launched its X rival called Threads on July 5 and quickly amassed more than 100 million signups, Time magazine reported, citing data from Sensor Tower.
Musk's efforts to purge the platform of bots and turn it into a "super-app" don't yet appear to be working.
Activist Monica Lewinsky urged him and CEO Linda Yaccarino to "rethink" the move.
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it’s a critical tool to keep people safe online.- that woman
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it's a critical tool to keep people safe online.
In May Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in the company then still known as Twitter, giving it a value of about $15 billion – or just a third of what Musk paid, The Wall Street Journal Reported.X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
I sense a new dictionary definition of self-fulfilling prophecy coming up....
Gee...who could have guessed?...
How long does it take to roll some video akin to tiktok and snapchat into it? Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID and root out all the dirtbags abusing the app at the same time.
Texting and chatting is so last decade anyway just leave it as a remnant of its birdie roots.
If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.
Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID
Fuck that, you'll also exclude most EU countries since that's an overreach of privacy.
If it kills Twitter and Meta get a hit at the same time, it's only a win.
Weed out all the bots at the same time
They don't want to do that. That would destroy a significant chunk of their userbase and make X look weaker.
If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.
As if it doesn't deserve it already, regardless?
What’s the point of copying TikTok? Given Elongs record, it would be done haphazardly and badly. But even if they pull it off, the audience won’t switch over. Or else they’d come back to instagram when they added TikTok features.
'Many of you may die, but it is the sacrifice I'm willing to make.'
if it dies, will he have to pay the debts ?
Dying is the entire point of it. If it dies, it becomes infinitely more difficult for the authorities to subpoena tweet histories of certain orange pieces of shit and his cronies.
It doesn't stop them from getting that history, of course.
But the legal rigamarole of trying to get tweet history from a company that technically doesn't exist anymore (It's X, not twitter), and later on no longer even functions (servers shut down), might just delay things long enough to make a difference in the upcoming shit-show.
So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?
And as if they didn't already subpoena that information before actually filing charges either. They were already investigating for months before Musk bought Twitter.
This is one of the dumber conspiracy theories I think I've ever seen. Why are we attributing some clever political maneuver to Musk when it's clear he just made an unprecedentedly stupid business decision?
The only "conspiracy" surrounding the Elon Twitter acquisition is his market manipulation strategies using social media.
This is just dumb as fuck, there's no way he even cares about Trump let alone enough to devote billions to it. Billionaires don't care about the president because they know their economic future rests in the Senate and potentially judicial branch.
Yeah, my belief is he was trying to manipulate his Tesla stock through the Twitter offer. He thought he could get out of it (because the SEC doesn't do jack shit and he always gets his way), but then when he realized this is (a big money play, where the other side actually has power too) different and thought well might as well buy the platform to make it more easy to manipulate the platform (making lemonade out of lemons).
Now he is starting to see that he is losing eyeballs and you can't use a social media platform for market manipulation if everybody leaves. So just a bunch of desperate attempts to try to trap people onto the platform, all backfiring worse than the precious idea.
That didn't fit with his limiting how many tweets users are able to view.
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. He's an idiot with money.
That didn’t fit with his limiting how many tweets users are able to view.
The theory behind that is that Twitter failed to pay for their web-services and needed to suddenly cut traffic, otherwise they'd be shutdown by Amazon / Google.
After Twitter paid Amazon/Google, they raised the tweet view-limits appropriately, but the damage was already done.
I think the most logical explanation is that the Saudis paid Musk to kill it. Arab spring was organized on Twitter and a lot of Saudi dissidents were and are actively using it to expose and criticize their government.
So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?
Think about it, it makes perfect sense.
Err... Actually, let me rephrase that:
Don't think about it, it makes perfect sense.
They already got his DMs, what more could there be? Wouldn't it make sense to just encourage Trump to use Twitter, create a TruthSocial group or something and then just shout "free speech" and change absolutely nothing. Lol that might have actually been profitable, as the media would play along as they have no where else to go. All Trump has to do is win the next election and he is golden. He will be dead by the end, and if not he could just fly to retire to some country with a slow extradition policy... or probably most small countries realistically as they wouldn't want the political shit storm of dealing with complicated domestic-international politics
They already got Trump's DMs from twitter. Twitter actually fought it and had to pay a $350,000 fine for not turning the DMs over immediately. I think that Musk doesn't like his fellow right wing cultists from being blocked/ignored by regular people and liberals. Hence his recent comment that he was going to remove the ability to block anyone on X. Of course lots of people immediately said that they'd leave because angry right wing stalkers doxxing them and such.
I said this in another post, but I think it bears repeating:
Musk, whether he was paid to do this or not, is acting purposefully. This is all a grand scheme to fully dismantle what was once our global town square. Twitter was once a place where “the people” could hold politicians, corporations, and the generally wealthy accountable for their actions publicly. In the past year, the platform has become unsteady, blue checks are untrustworthy, and even the name has changed to something that causes one to pause.
I dislike the man as much as the next normal person, but all of this nonsense has been planned from the start. He’s not a complete idiot. These actions have been calculated steps to take away the voice of the people and eliminate a single source of truth as things get worse and worse.
That is the result, but Elon is too much of a prideful idiot to do it intentionally. But it's entirely possible some of the others involved were aiming for that.
Because he's doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn't it obvious?
No, you don't throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles, not even if you are as rich as Musk. Musk is (probably) a narcissist who thought he could make it work in his delusional mind.
He wanted a mouthpiece for the MAGA crowd, and he probably thought the desire in the population for it, would make it succeed, if he made the platform embrace that. He probably envisioned himself as a great liberator, who would be celebrated for bringing free speech back to America.
Musk has been losing it for a long time, and it seems to only get worse.
Who could of forseen brands not wanting to advertise over hate speech that would turn off half their customer base? I'd love screenshots of my companies products floating around next to seasticas and racism.
Yes that's so strange, think of all the extra attention the controversies create!! I bet he planned to double the prices for advertising.
Also, I don't think a narcissist would intentionally and publicly humiliate themselves the way Musk has done (Not a psychologist).
Absolutely true, being humiliated is just about the worst thing for a narcissist.
An example of that, was when Elon Musk called the diver who actually rescued 13 children in Thailand a pedophile. Imagine that, calling the hero of the day a pedophile because you are butthurt!!
No they definitely don't like to be humiliated, they probably feel that a lot more deeply that non-narcissists. But at the same time, they lack the self-awareness that would help them avoid getting into situations that would lead to humiliation.
He’s being bankrolled to keep it up and running for the next election. It will be interesting to see if the money runs out.
Nah Saudi money goes deep
I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software. Historically, hardware was way more complex but the hardware problems have kind of been solved. There’s only so many ways to design a phone or laptop. Software, meanwhile, has only become more complex and challenging.
I agree, but I don't see the point in this context?
The software to build and run Twitter, is probably not worth much besides for running Twitter. No Twitter means no value in the software for it either.
I think they meant Musk thought managing development of the Twitter software would be easier than it was, given his prior… Involvement with Tesla and SpaceX.
Ah yes, I can see that could make sense. But I think Musk considers himself as much a software guy as hardware, because he works with AI for Tesla. Putting him somewhat on the cutting edge of software too. Twitter should be child's play by comparison.
Of course Musk has managed to bring Tesla from a competitive position to be way behind the main field, with just a few very stupid decisions. Mercedes, GM and Waymo are now way ahead of Tesla, and Nvidia and MobilEye are probably ahead too.
Of course Musk is now attempting to slow AI development overall, because he is way behind. With suggestions like preventing AI development until we have better regulation and understanding. He is trying to repeat how he stopped investments in public transport with hyperloop. Only this time with AI, because he is losing that battle badly.
Why not? Elon Musk is famously on ketamine, ambien, and a whole slew of mind-altering substances.
Given how the contract was written, and given how much Elon Musk fought against the contract, it was obvious that he made a short-term decision (likely while high on some substance), and then quickly regretted buying Twitter. Within a week or two, he started a court case to NOT BUY TWITTER, despite signing an ironclad contract.
In my mind, its really fucking obvious what happened. Elon Musk partied a little bit too hard with some mixture of ketamine+ambien+alcohol, it mixed weirdly in his brain and he made a bad decision. A few days later, when he sobered up a bit, he realized how shitty of a decision he made but it was too late to roll things back.
Everything else Elon Musk has done is just... shitty reputation management. He's trying to convince the world he's still got it, despite making a bad (possibly drug-induced) decision
He made a huge mistake, either because he was under the influence, or because he is delusional. That doesn't mean he actually intended to throw out $44B just for shit an giggles. Obviously he didn't when he sobered up.
"He cannot be that self deluded."
Narrator: He was.
I wonder if he ever had it.
I don't know. The way it's going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.
Instead he's making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.
The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he's making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he's just stupid and incompetent.
You're saying the guy that has done nothing but look like a total fool for years could actually be a total fool? By the gods, I think you're onto something!
It is tremendously obvious, I agree. At one point it felt kinda hyperbolic to say, but not for awhile now.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to speculate what's in it for him, but it's 100% obvious that's what's being done.
He might call him self pro free speech, but he actually hates it (as long as it's not his own free speech). Getting rid of Twitter is a massive blow to free speech. One less platform where he and his companies can get outed and criticized on.
I subscribed to the conspiracy theory of the banning of the jet tracker
Twitter was becoming another walled platform (not being able to read the content without being logged in) even before Musk's take-over.
I'm happy for any walled platform to fail. IMO they have no place on internet.
It’s less nefarious than that. He wants to be a championed business leader. He’s just a fuck up who was forced to buy a platform that he never actually intended to buy (except for maybe a couple of days when he first suggested it). Sure, it will help his side when he runs it into the ground, but that’s not his intent despite being the cause.
I think that's obvious to everyone. But, if you're claiming he's doing it on purpose..... That's just some next level batshit conspiracy theory.
Is it? He's either a moron or he's doing it on purpose. There is simply no other explanation.
At this point it's just too many dumb decisions, if he had done absolutely nothing after taking over he'd be better off than he is now.
Delusional rich guy who's nowhere near as smart as most people thought he was is the most simple explanation. He's obviously got some kind of god complex and thinks he's right about everything.
I mean he has been called a real world Tony Stark for the last decade. Maybe that went straight to his mushy brain and he is still on that high. Back in the day he listened to experts, now whenever he's at SpaceX they employ "Elon handlers" who just nod to every suggestion and then try to get rid of him.
He got too much positive press and lost it.
God knows how a wannabe Steve Jobs who bought into all of his companies ever got compared to Tony Stark.
He looked like a real world Tony Stark when he was surrounded by teams of smart people doing all the hard parts and PR for him.
What we're seeing now is pure unfiltered Musk. He was probably always like this, but now he's off the leash.
Occam's razor and all that. He is simply a low intelligence person with a fuckload of money.
The first one. He's stupid
I mean... he is a moron.
Not sure I agree. I think it would be totally in character for him to want to destroy Twitter just because they forced him to buy it. He's a petty troll and can afford to lose that money just to show them.
How does destroying it hurt "them" he already bought it? They cashed out way over the value of the company. If I was any major shareholder of Twitter that he bought out Id be gleefully laughing at him running it into the ground now that I'm no longer invested.
True, I didn't think it through. I stand corrected.
Spite isn't rational.
I think in the end he will want you to believe that. And will be glad if you do.
People told me I was crazy when I said he bought it to shut it down. Look who he hangs out with, people with a fuckton of money who hate free speech. Very powerful people who control media empires and run oppressive regimes.
He might be stupid, but the people pulling his strings aren't.
Like others have said, bullshit. He'll drive it into the ground and pretend that was his plan the whole time, like he's some undercover genius three steps ahead of everyone, when really he's just constantly playing catch-up with his narcissistic outbursts.
That's like saying "my car may fail after I poured sand into the gas tank and replaced the electrical with speaker wires"
I keep thinking there must be some high level plan here to destroy twitter for the good of humanity. I mean it's that or Elon actually just is that stupid. At this point the latter seems the most likely ...
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.
A bad rule of thumb. Weaponized incompetence is a thing.
You've got it back to front imo. Twitter was a useful tool for disseminating info, whether for protest movements, political movements, whatevs. Pre-Musk, there was a degree of control on twitter re disinfo, harassment, hatred etc. Now, it's no longer a useful tool for leftwing people to gather and share their thoughts; it's no longer a useful tool to disseminate information; it's no longer a tool for rallying protestors.
Look at who invested (Saudi kingdom); look at when Musk took it over (mid-terms); it seems pretty obvious to me that the takeover was a very expensive purchase to make the actions of oligarchs & despots that much easier.
If he was destroying it for the good of humanity he would have to somehow destroy the concept of it rather than a single platform.
Probably best spending 40 billion on education in the harm social media can do lol.
I really do think he's just delusional. I won't call him an idiot because there is clearly intelligence and talent in his head, but he's gone off the rails in some capacity whether it's mental health issues or power crazed or who knows.
It's probably drugs. He changed a lot the last few years.
No he hasn't. The management of the old x.com (the one that got bought by paypal) threatened to walk if Elon wasn't removed from the office. He was always this incompetent.
You answer jibes with what I have seen plenty of while working with and funding serial entrepreneurs in the Valley: micro-dosing, coke, molly, steroids, random herbal shit, off-label usage of pharmaceuticals, trendy nootropics, blood transfusions, ayahuasca, and Adderall.
Lay off the Kava Elon!
Twitter was not the golden bastion to humanity you think it was.
That's my point. In theory Elon realized how toxic it was to public discourse and sought to destroy it.
If you look at his actions and the actions of a competent person trying to destroy the platform, they are virtually identical
What about Elon Musk makes you think he'd do anything for the good of humanity?
That was my original thought when he came on and immediately fired 75% of the staff. It's not some savvy slimming down or cost-cutting. It was more like a wrecking ball.
It was fairly clear that his overall desire was the make the platform less useful for liberals and more for conservatives. It seems like he is content to destroy it if he can't achieve the latter.
"Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by Dickless here." — Ray Stantz, Twitter engineer
It's true. This man has no dick.
Hmm could be are all his kids invetro?
Most of them are IVF/Surrogacy babies, I think.
How did all of these people replying to you never see Ghostbusters? It's criminal.
For the record, It wasn't failing until Musk came in.
It also wasn't really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he's been talked out of.
It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However ~8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it's much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.
It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.
Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
Ugh. This "global town square" nonsense needs to die.
Twitter's business was selling ads. They don't give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to "the people" being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else's honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.
The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose "global town square" that "gave power to the people".
Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk's fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn't built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).
Twitter's a corporation. They never cared about being a "town square", only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He's not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he's the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.
It's just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter's amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it's in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They're acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.
How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.
Thank you, finally. It was nothing more than the internet's comments section.
It isn't failing, Musk is failing.
Once it fails then someone will buy it cheap and rename it twitter.
If there's anything left to buy aside from tacky merch shirts. I'm sure the creditors will pick it clean and auction off the best bits to the highest bidder.
Maybe, or maybe it'll be another Bebo level disaster.
...I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can't remember even hearing that name before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
Can't someone else just make Twitter now tho?
Facebook tried with Threads but overcoming ecosystem inertia is hard.
Bingo.
And since won't get back all the staff he dismissed; they're going to have to just slap the Twitter brand on a Mastodon instance.
Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now,".
Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever "great" is a bit of a stretch
twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
better shape, sure but was it ever profitable? I suspect he bought a turd and knew it day 0
Yes. Twitter was profitable in 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120000037/twtr-20191231.htm
Ctrl+F for "Net Income", which will take you to the $1,465,659 (thousands) figure somewhere in its charts. Net Income is the bottom line: after all revenues, costs, etc. etc. of the year were added up.
Musk took it over with a so called "Leveraged Buyout", meaning Twitter borrowed $13 Billion to allow Elon Musk to buy it for $44 Billion (meaning Elon Musk only paid $33 Billion, the random +2 Billion to wipeout all the old debt).
Note that $13 Billion in loans costs somewhere between 10% to 14% right now, depending on how much of the loan was fixed and how much of it was adjustable. At 10%, this means that Twitter took on $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments as Elon Musk bought the company. There's pretty much no hope for Twitter to ever be profitable again, they'd have to execute as perfectly as 2019 despite losing 80% of their staff (Elon Musk also fired everyone when he took over the company).
The company was "barely profitable" in 2019, and "just barely losing money" in 2020, 2021. But add on a $1.3+ Billion/year loadstone, and its just... not... going to ever be profitable again.
The funniest part, though, is that the $13 billion in debt to Twitter is held by lenders who would be first in line to get any payout from a Twitter bankruptcy. If the enterprise value as a whole drops below $13 billion, then Musk would get nothing out of the bankruptcy, and would lose his entire $30b+ investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, of course, Musk decides to put good money after bad, and pony up a new investment of even more money, that the lenders would agree to take.
As much as I'm happy to see both Twitter and Musk fail, your comment reminds me yet again that leveraged buyouts are fundamentally fucked up and ought to be illegal.
Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
Oopsie we repeatedly keep taking away you most valuable organizational tools
This take is exhausting. It's like the political version of narcissism: here's how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!
If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk's friend's companies or governments?
You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?
Control is the game for people with money and power whether it is graceful or not. Some of what Elon has done seems like he wants to control the narrative around his jet. Some of what Elon is doing seems like he just wants to keep testing the waters to see how many people still use twitter after crippling the system. Like some sort of “I slap them in the face and they ask to be hit harder- that’s how much power I have over them. People are obsessed with me”.
I don’t think his goal was to kill twitter. His goal was to remain on everyone’s lips without his jet being mentioned. And if that’s at the cost of organizational tools being destroyed, so be it- in fact, destroying twitter has had more people taking about him than ever.
Yeah, I think that's more or less right. Musk has gone off the rails, and is using his fortune as a cudgel in a fit of pique.
It's our own fault that our "town square" was so easily taken over by a rich bully, though. I was warning people back in 2007 that depending so heavily on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, was a bad idea. People did not want to hear it. It's hard to picture now, but people used to love those companies, and couldn't imagine them doing harm. But like...it was inevitable.
We need to build on things like Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora, whatever. If you hand control of the town square to a corporation, they're gonna control access and charge fees, and they'll happily sell it to someone who wants to turn it into a mud-wrestling pit. That's not the fault of the corporations--it's our fault.
Not to mention that the 1% already owned it.
Though if anyone is thinking of spending close to fifty billion to destoy a social network then call me - I'll do it for a billion, or two.
Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.
In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they're organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn't do it because they saw somebody's sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the "Like" button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we'll all be better off with it gone.
EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he's done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.
DIsagree. He was trying to do one of his many pump-and-dumps and he fucked around and got found out.
Fair. He talked about buying Twitter for the power and attention he meant to get from talking about it, both from the cryptobro fans and also any shady financial shenanigans. But he didn't actually mean to go through with paying for it.
For real!? I cannot think of a worse cancer than twitter/X and the horrific abomination that it is cannot whither away quickly enough.
What possible benefit has Twitter ever offered mankind?
@dril
So with wildfires in Canada there's evacuation zones near me, but I can't click on some announcement links from the main site that shows the evacuation zones because they go to twitter and you need to log in now. I think they show some on other pages on the site but they do the quicklink to the twitter announcement in the sidebar so you have to click around a bit to get to it. Yes I know the name but whatever. My point being is when the social media site that was meant for short bits of info isn't good for emergency notifications where everyone can read, it's shitty and potentially harmful.
Governments should either be operating their own systems for this or, hell I don't know, why not just spin up a their ready-to-go Mastodon instance or something else in the fediverse not subject to the delirious whims of a petulant muskrat born with daddy's money?
Very much agree. I read that the Netherlands already did this!
I’m sorry - as someone who has done some work with disaster response, this was one of my main concerns. When they threatened to take away NWS access to API without huge fees, I was honestly horrified. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but a lot of what my organization did was scour Twitter for official information and also personal accounts of folks who needed help/the conditions on the ground.
It is honestly a travesty that a resource such as this can be reduced to literal 💩 when people need it the most. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I hope more and more folks/orgs migrate to a suitable alternative(s) sooner rather than later, but the damage has been done. There’s always a percentage who never do, and you can’t fix that.
X may fail. Twitter didn't fail. Twitter was bought by a twat who decided to shut it down piece by piece.
Don't forget Twitter was already in big problems operating at a loss in a lot of its existing years. It's definitely plummeting even further with his decisions though.
I wish I could operate at a loss and be given billions of pounds.
X? Can we collectively decide to forever call it "X, formerly known as Twitter" just to piss him off?
I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called...
TwiX is unfortunately already taken.
Damn, I could go for a twix bar right about now.
I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an "sh" sound.
Exitter is also a valid prononciation
I saw someone on Mastodon say something along the lines of "I'll continue to deadname Twitter for as long as Musk continues to deadname his daughter" and I love that sentiment.
daaaaaaamn. That's brilliant.
Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don't mention X at all. That would piss him off more.
Seems like it will be the website formerly known as existing soon enough.
I just call it Twitter. Just like I call the (former?) rapper Kanye West. I don't cater to the whims of the 1% if I can help it.
Best part was he tried to chicken out of his own deal but the feds obv wouldn't allow him back off on his very own proposal to buy Twitter in the first place!
Delaware Court.
Contract law is weird.
Not really. He entered into a binding contract and agreed to bypass due diligence.
That wasn't even offered by Twitter, he just agreed without any prompting.
Yes yes yes. But that binding contract was in Delaware. Because contract law is weird.
In practice, most business contracts are enforced by the state of Delaware, not the federal government nor any national-level court. Yes, its a state-level court.
Side fact. Delaware's has more registered companies then people
In the same way that car fails when you deliberately drive it 100mph into a brick wall.
So you've got experience with Tesla's autopilot function...
Uh, no. Autopilot was not enabled during that crash.
It disabled itself 0.25s before impact
Nailed it.
Can we start a gofundme to persuade him to take over Facebook?
No, do Jira next pls.
If we make Facebook to go to place to talk about Elon he'll do it out of spite and narcissism.
"Here's 44 billion USD, I might fail though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
Genius.
Especially because he could have bought it for so much less.
Good, shut it down. Time to end Twitter.
Now all he needs to do is to connect his own management of Twitter to its failure.
Of all his managerial feats, I'm confident that one is beyond him.
Wishful thinking
I have a feeling that that was the plan from the beginning.
The elite don't like seeing common people have an open forum where they can all talk about how terrible their lives are, that their terrible lives are caused by the elite and that the common people should figure out what to do about it all.
It's perhaps stupider than that. The guy couldn't take getting made fun of on Twitter, so he bought and killed it.
Rich people don't like being made fun of ... but you know what upsets them even more? Poor people realizing that they can make fun of them long enough and often enough to realize that the world should get rid of obscenely rich people.
This is a really lazy take. The elite have forever wanted to control the common people through the manipulation of laws, economy, news,etc. That's why the Saudis put up the majority of the loan to enable Elon to buy it...so they could gain control over public dissent and white wash their abhorrent public image.
Meanwhile, Elon's a glorified troll with a god complex, who wants to build his own clubhouse for more extreme right wing content.
Which makes me think it did both things ...
genuinely convinced he may have intentionally destroyed twitter to make the next presidential campaign operate on a different field.
sounds crazy but without twitter or reddit, how do "the youth" communicate? tiktok? insta?
There's no reason to speculate his motives. It's obvious he didn't want to buy Twitter when he was forced by courts to buy it. He was being an idiot trying to manipulate the stock price. I know it's hard to believe a multi-billionaire can be an idiot, but it happened. There's no 4d chess move. Rich people are fallible as everyone else.
Big parts of the youth did not use twitter. Twitter had at its peak about 500mio active users. Instagram has 2.4 billion, tiktok 1 billion, snapchat 750mio. The relevancy of twitter is highly skewed, because the media used it a lot.
Wow crazy that so many people use those social media platforms. I have never used any of them.
I mainly use Snapchat just to keep the pointless streaks going. Never seen an ad in Snapchat for years.
Would that have been worth $44b?
It wasn't worth that much when he bought it. At most, it was worth half that. One of the many reasons why Musk is a fucking moron.
It doesn't help making an offer that was too high just so he could make a silly "420" joke.
I'd say that's stupid, but so is every other idea he comes up with for it so who knows.
thanks for nothing you clown
I mean, Elon sucks, but I am kind of happy to hear Twitter might fully die. I've always hated the idea of forced character limits.
The world needs more critical and expansive discussion, not additional reasons to summerize and minimize important topics into long headlines.
In the case of longer form thought, Twitter provided links. What’s the problem?
People just like to rage over things on the internet. I suspect they also don't know how to get to the fkn point rather than ramble like they're waxing poetic on a topic. Reddit is full of that shit.
I think it's just a human problem. You or I may like to read long form journalism, but we're in the extreme minority. It's not dying because it was so hugely profitable.
Logistically too, if you're trying to parse through the top 100 tweets in a day, and each one takes multiple paragraphs to get to the point, the amount of various viewpoints the average person is able to interact with shrinks dramatically.
Granted, it seems like everyone is taking the forced brevity as an excuse to just write +1 to pile onto their side, since that's easier.
I feel like there has to be a medium between "Tweets that shoot context in the head" and "Autobiography attached to a macaroni and cheese recipe". The need for sites to keep you there encourages complete nonsense that doesn't contribute to the thing I'm there for, and so turns me away from long form anything. I got shit to do and a thousand articles competing for attention, most of which were written by bots and contain nothing. The whole scheme is just broken.
I feel like I had a thesis when I started this comment and I forgot where I was going...
...they said concisely in a short internet comment.
He was free to ramble on for thousands of words though
the guy didn't even want twitter. the whole thing is depressing.
And somehow it’ll be the “woke mind virus’s” fault. There will be no self reflection at all.
I wouldn't be surprised this is him urging his cult to buy monthly subscriptions. If we see higher tier subscription be introduced one of these days, that would be the reason for this fear mongering. That said, it's awesome that he's getting a reality check. You can be surrounded by as many yes-men as you want but people en masse don't care and even if they do, they love seeing rich people humbled. No one misses a good shitstorm.
Doesn't matter. The subscription revenue, which ever musk taint sniffers said would take in billions, barely will probably offset 1 month of lost ad revenue for a whole year worth of subs.
He has added a billion dollars of interest negative revenue at the same time he's lost half his ad revenue. That's a bad combo
No doubt, am just trying to read a bit further up because I don't take him as stupid as he acts.
Oh no! Anyway.
Space Karen destroys Twitter.
🍌We're all trying to find the guy who did this
He can still turn it into a porn app
Honestly, might've been better off trying to turn a porn site into an everything app. The internet was built on porn after all.
Thank you for reminding me that the company best set to compete with YouTube is YouPorn.
I think even that was not realistic, and back in May things were not as bad yet as they are now at "The thing formerly known as Twitter". I doubt anyone would buy it at even half that now. Musk added a debt of $20 billion, that's about what it was worth at the time Musk bought it.
With that debt, the company became basically worth Zero. Even at the estimate when Musk bought it.
If the $20 billion debt was somehow removed, it would still be worth less than $10 billion. Meaning that its current actual worth is probably below negative $10 billion! Meaning the only value is the tax value of the deficit. And no creditors get paid. It's basically already bankrupt, unless someone pumps in more money, and I'm not seeing that happening with a company as bad as "The thing formerly known as Twitter".
Seems like the only way forward now, is bankruptcy and maybe reconstruction after selling the company without the debt for peanuts.
Most of the value was probably with the brand itself. Which he then tossed away. Genius.
Yes, and even the name is probably almost worthless now, he has massacred everything including the original name. It's to bad, because the original concept was OK, and could probably have survived without the insanity Musk brought.
I wonder what term will replace tweet... it worked so well. Oh I tweeted this last night...
People aren't going to say I X'd that last night. Sure you can say I posted something on X or I dunno, but I don't think they'll ever get something as good as tweeting on twitter.
I agree, you can't create something similar easily, it's like to "Google it". Nobody would dream to say "Bing it" or "Yahoo it". If they had achieved dominance instead of Google we might, but you can't just change such things.
Even if X should become somewhat popular, to X it doesn't really work.
So even with a new service as popular as Twitter used to be, it's unlikely to replace the term "to tweet". It could simply go back to "to message" IDK. That would work disregarding of platform name, but would lack the brilliance of tweeting on Twitter.
Was just thinking on this more and had a laugh at someone saying this out loud
Them: "Did you see my X last night, i ripped them a new one!"
Friend: "You did what to your ex last night? Does your wife know!?"
That's hilarious.
But I'm sure Musk thought that through before implementing the new name for the thing formerly known as twitter. /s
That was a truly insane decision. Of all the annoying and idiotic things he's said, "Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds" is way up there.
He accelerated it. If he had just left things alone, he’d be in a better place than he is today.
Yeah. I wonder which microservice was actually important... Or maybe he needs one of all those people he decided he didn't need...
Stage 5: Acceptance
Oh no. Anyway.
Musk tried to fix something that was not broken, and it almost always is a bad idea.
But he's a rocket scientist and a computer scientist!! (\s he's neither)
I wonder how much money the govt will give him now that he lost 44 bil... ya just know that is what will happen
Yes hello I am Normal Citizen. Where do we go for the money?
Government: fuck you, I'm eating! PS you owe us!
Man who bet billions that Twitter would fail is upset that it hasn't already.
It almost like he isn’t actually a genius but narcissistic grifter who can move money around.
Who can move Daddy's money around. He never would've had a shot coming from blue collar origins.
Regular effing Nostradamus
Get on with it already
All of Musk's shit will fail, it's just a question of 'when' not of 'if'. That includes Tesla.
I always thought that the name was changed to something way more unappealing and doesn't have anywhere near the same ring to it as "Twitter". It's kind of cringe imo. Like he was trying to make it seem like this was something so groundbreaking and new that it was deserving of one letter, "X". I'm not surprised it's going to flop.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
I wonder this a bit as folks flock to Bluesky. I mean, Threads is just right out there, but Facebook always has been so that demographic was going to be there anyhow. The people flocking to Bluesky because they don't like Musk had better hope Jack Dorsey doesn't turn out to be nuts now, right?
I feel like this whole debacle should have pumped up the various bits of the Fediverse more than it has.
Dorsey really trusts Musk's "mission to extend the light of consciousness", which I think says enough.
I think he probably would have made it work. The death knoll was certainly changing the name to X.
"I've been drilling holes in the bottom of my boat to shed weight, but now I'm having trouble keeping it afloat and there's nothing I can do about it!"
moving the goalpost. twitter was originally developed to be a "news service" not a "social network"
Do a flip!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta launched its X rival called Threads on July 5 and quickly amassed more than 100 million signups, Time magazine reported, citing data from Sensor Tower.
Musk's efforts to purge the platform of bots and turn it into a "super-app" don't yet appear to be working.
Activist Monica Lewinsky urged him and CEO Linda Yaccarino to "rethink" the move.
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it’s a critical tool to keep people safe online.- that woman
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it's a critical tool to keep people safe online.
In May Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in the company then still known as Twitter, giving it a value of about $15 billion – or just a third of what Musk paid, The Wall Street Journal Reported.X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
I sense a new dictionary definition of self-fulfilling prophecy coming up....
Gee...who could have guessed?...
How long does it take to roll some video akin to tiktok and snapchat into it? Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID and root out all the dirtbags abusing the app at the same time. Texting and chatting is so last decade anyway just leave it as a remnant of its birdie roots.
If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.
Fuck that, you'll also exclude most EU countries since that's an overreach of privacy.
If it kills Twitter and Meta get a hit at the same time, it's only a win.
They don't want to do that. That would destroy a significant chunk of their userbase and make X look weaker.
As if it doesn't deserve it already, regardless?
What’s the point of copying TikTok? Given Elongs record, it would be done haphazardly and badly. But even if they pull it off, the audience won’t switch over. Or else they’d come back to instagram when they added TikTok features.
'Many of you may die, but it is the sacrifice I'm willing to make.'
if it dies, will he have to pay the debts ?
Dying is the entire point of it. If it dies, it becomes infinitely more difficult for the authorities to subpoena tweet histories of certain orange pieces of shit and his cronies.
It doesn't stop them from getting that history, of course.
But the legal rigamarole of trying to get tweet history from a company that technically doesn't exist anymore (It's X, not twitter), and later on no longer even functions (servers shut down), might just delay things long enough to make a difference in the upcoming shit-show.
So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?
And as if they didn't already subpoena that information before actually filing charges either. They were already investigating for months before Musk bought Twitter.
This is one of the dumber conspiracy theories I think I've ever seen. Why are we attributing some clever political maneuver to Musk when it's clear he just made an unprecedentedly stupid business decision?
The only "conspiracy" surrounding the Elon Twitter acquisition is his market manipulation strategies using social media.
This is just dumb as fuck, there's no way he even cares about Trump let alone enough to devote billions to it. Billionaires don't care about the president because they know their economic future rests in the Senate and potentially judicial branch.
Yeah, my belief is he was trying to manipulate his Tesla stock through the Twitter offer. He thought he could get out of it (because the SEC doesn't do jack shit and he always gets his way), but then when he realized this is (a big money play, where the other side actually has power too) different and thought well might as well buy the platform to make it more easy to manipulate the platform (making lemonade out of lemons).
Now he is starting to see that he is losing eyeballs and you can't use a social media platform for market manipulation if everybody leaves. So just a bunch of desperate attempts to try to trap people onto the platform, all backfiring worse than the precious idea.
That didn't fit with his limiting how many tweets users are able to view.
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. He's an idiot with money.
The theory behind that is that Twitter failed to pay for their web-services and needed to suddenly cut traffic, otherwise they'd be shutdown by Amazon / Google.
After Twitter paid Amazon/Google, they raised the tweet view-limits appropriately, but the damage was already done.
I think the most logical explanation is that the Saudis paid Musk to kill it. Arab spring was organized on Twitter and a lot of Saudi dissidents were and are actively using it to expose and criticize their government.
Think about it, it makes perfect sense.
Err... Actually, let me rephrase that:
Don't think about it, it makes perfect sense.
They already got his DMs, what more could there be? Wouldn't it make sense to just encourage Trump to use Twitter, create a TruthSocial group or something and then just shout "free speech" and change absolutely nothing. Lol that might have actually been profitable, as the media would play along as they have no where else to go. All Trump has to do is win the next election and he is golden. He will be dead by the end, and if not he could just fly to retire to some country with a slow extradition policy... or probably most small countries realistically as they wouldn't want the political shit storm of dealing with complicated domestic-international politics
They already got Trump's DMs from twitter. Twitter actually fought it and had to pay a $350,000 fine for not turning the DMs over immediately. I think that Musk doesn't like his fellow right wing cultists from being blocked/ignored by regular people and liberals. Hence his recent comment that he was going to remove the ability to block anyone on X. Of course lots of people immediately said that they'd leave because angry right wing stalkers doxxing them and such.
I said this in another post, but I think it bears repeating:
Musk, whether he was paid to do this or not, is acting purposefully. This is all a grand scheme to fully dismantle what was once our global town square. Twitter was once a place where “the people” could hold politicians, corporations, and the generally wealthy accountable for their actions publicly. In the past year, the platform has become unsteady, blue checks are untrustworthy, and even the name has changed to something that causes one to pause.
I dislike the man as much as the next normal person, but all of this nonsense has been planned from the start. He’s not a complete idiot. These actions have been calculated steps to take away the voice of the people and eliminate a single source of truth as things get worse and worse.
That is the result, but Elon is too much of a prideful idiot to do it intentionally. But it's entirely possible some of the others involved were aiming for that.
It was the circus, not "our global town square".