A new report sheds light on how advertising is going at Elon Musk's X — and the numbers aren't good

bachalxyz@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 186 points –
A new report sheds light on how advertising is going at Elon Musk's X — and the numbers aren't good
businessinsider.com
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Turns out telling would-be clients to go fuck themselves is a great way to change their status firmly into the “not clients” catagory

I just want to know how much Russia paid Musk to buy Twitter.

Billions of the funding to purchase came from members ofthe lovely ruling family of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

You know, the guys who gave Jared kushner 2 billion for... some reason. And who TFG absolutely adores.

Middle Eastern money is a good sign for Musk, with 32% of the original $7.1 billion equity commitment coming from Alwaleed and the Qatari fund.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prince-alwaleed-becomes-twitters-second-largest-shareholder

Russia doesn't pay people for that sort of thing, especially not a person like Musk. Instead they extort. Possibly over rare materials.

Anyway I don't think Russia was part of Musks takeover of twitter, that stemmed from Musks own arrogant stupidity, but they certainly did become one afterwards.

I was going to edit my comment to include blackmail / kompromat as well, which in the end I do find to be more likely.

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I think Putin just flattered Musk and he fell for it hook, line and sinker.

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Elon can make money through ads because he has collected loads of user data and know your interests. I'd be happy to see him take a hit in this regard. Why not use decentralized social media? They don't collect any data and there won't be any targeted ads.

due to the semi anonymous nature of Twitter its metrics are the worst CDN/ADN anyway, buying it was a stupid decision even if you were The Best and Trying To Do Good Things with the platform.

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It's fine. He thinks they can all go fuck themselves anyways. Giant ass fuckin manchild. I hate that him and bezos are going to be around for so much longer. It's not like the geriatric fucks that are nearly dead anyways. Just a whole new generation of rich corrupt assholes.

He is bringin back banned ppl, he is showing he doesn't care about hurt advertiser fifis and he has enough money not to care :P

He leveraged his Tesla stock as collateral to buy Twitter. His antics haven't just harmed Twitter but also Tesla. As the value of that stock drops the banks can force him to provide additional collateral or call in the loans. He would have to put up more stock or sell. Selling could create a spiral where the price continues to drop.

As Jeremy Clarkson once said, "Oh no, anyway."

So deciding to have Tesla leave the Nordics, some of the most EV dense countries, will not only hurt Tesla and give the competition an edge, it might actually cost him stock in spaceX? Is that the analysis here?

He isn't overly leveraged on twitter, and it might actually be 0 leverage. He was leveraged and then he sold a shit load of stock so he wouldn't be and that's a huge part of what crashed the stock price.

The only part I'm unclear on is who's responsible for the 1 billion loan twitter has, twitter, or him.

But 1 billion isn't of any concern to him, its too small an amount, and there's spacex he can get funds from too if he needed it.

Edit: what is likely to happen though is twitter fails and needs a huge cash infusion, and he sells nultiple billions more Tesla stock to prop it up, bringing the price down again.

He is bringing back a very carefully selected group of banned people, people he thinks caters to the only specific core audience which remains on twitter: hateful right wing bigots.

We'll see how the Saudis feel about him pissing away their money. Gonna be taking that Tesla stock from him

You say that like the Saudi's aren't cool with taking Twitter down. It was the cause of a lot of strife and issues during the "Arab Spring" years.

I suspect they're overjoyed it's tanking.

A small price to pay for them to be killing informational pipelines. It was good to be able to actually talk to politicians in my country, a bit of astroturfing for the greater good.

Yep those kinda of governments thrive best when there isn't an easy way for common people to spread news about them and organize.

I don't see the point of this whole charade, rebranding, slow death. Why not just buy it and close all servers if that's their goal?

Because that's a definite action.
If they wanted twitter destabilised, "giving" it to someone that is going to mismanage it (either deliberately mismanage it, or because they are an egotistical eccentric rich person who aspires to be a tech guru entrepreneur genius) is a much more subtle way to achieve it.

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Worst case, they have leverage over the company to remove/censor content. Even if that was their initial goal, having twitter collapse is still in their interest

I don't think they care, as long as it becomes a shadow of what it was.

And if it succeeded and made them money? Who are they to complain?

It's a win win in their books.

I don't Musk even knows he's being played as the fool.

He doesn't have money.

Here's a good comparison I've found: let's say you have a company and issue one million shares. You sell just a single one for $1. Now "technically" you own $999,999 worth of shares, even though you actually have one dollar.

His Tesla and SpaceX shares are worth a lot, but they're not cash. If he started selling huge amounts, then the value would drop rapidly.

So why does he throw fits when he loses advertisers? A person who doesn't care doesn't comment on it and say "Fuck yourself" to Bob Iger and call for him to be sacked.

He is bringin back banned ppl psychopaths and bigots, he is showing he doesn't care about hurt advertiser fifis and he has enough money not to care :P is a straight up bitch and wants all his incel followers to hate like he does.

Pissing off advertisers is not a great business strategy. It's not that their feelings are hurt, it's that ads for Pepsi and Apple were showing up next to neo-Nazi posts, giving users the impression that the advertisers actively endorse the posts. People generally don't like being associated with Nazis. Maybe you're comfortable with that association (if so, seek help), but most of us aren't down with genocidal maniacs who want to purge the world of non-white citizens and rule with an iron fist. I know, we're funny that way, not wanting to endorse and spread the sentiments of mass murderers.