With the way he's running this, I'm a bit confused as to why he didn't just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn't have cost him nearly as much.
He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.
-50% ad revenue says otherwise
Twitter could have 200% more users, if no one want to show them ads, then ad spots will be dirt cheap. Printing 5 millions of 1cent ads vs 1 million of 10cents ads is not the same. Both on income and expenses...
This, so much this. I also find it rather coincidental that fb cam out with threads soon after the twitter implosion. Opportunistic feasting on a dead carcass perhaps?
Twitter has been on the outs since musk bought it. If Facebook was smart they'd have started right then.
Threads looks like they started development as soon as Musk bought twitter.
According to Adam Mosseri, IG had been working on Threads in various forms since 2021. Apparently they struggled to make it a native part of IG, then started working on the stand-alone version in 2022. So if he is to be believed, Threads development predates Twitter’s sale to Musk.
my guess is that they were working on it in the background and when musk bought tw they started pouring way more resources into it and turned it into a standalone app
Threads still doesn't have #hashtag searching IIRC. It's missing a huge number of features. It's clear that they only came out as early as they did because they saw an opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch.
They really needed a few more months of dev time.
Bluesky is the same way. There are a lot of features there that still need to be implemented.
I’m glad Masto at least has hashtags and video and gifs and editing. For me right now it has the best features and the best experience. I’m pretty happy with it.
Indeed, it looks like they hurried the threads launch because Twitter was having outages.
Still exciting to be on the ground floor, when every day out week could bring a new update or feature. Wonder how they'll improve over the next 3 months
Considering development time, server setup, testing time, etc… They probably did. It probably took several months to develop, deploy, integrate with the rest of their systems, and test. And then it’s simply a matter of waiting on Musk to do something stupid before they announce the launch, so all the freshly spurned users are happy to switch.
To be fair I don't think that can be entirely prescribed to drop in user base; the internet ad market in general is absolutely tanking at the moment.
"users" - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL
Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.
Threads has like 100 million sign ups. It could replace Twitter.
That saw an overnight 50% drop in activity. People were kinda pissed to find out that Meta created them a Threads handle from their Facebook/Instagram and immediately deactivated their Threads accounts. I don't know what it means, but I like it
is it possible to deactivate your account without downloading the app?
You don't have an account unless you activate it, but they do hold your Instagram handle if you were to sign up that would be your Threads handle. The 50% drop in activity is because the app is lame as hell, and once people saw it they were done. No chronological sorting option, not even an option to only see threads from the people you follow.
Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?
I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Let's be honest Elon doesn't care about Twitter.
He bought it with money he doesn't have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.
Everyone of them won.
I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It's the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.
I'm still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well
As much Saudi money as he burned though, I'm expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.
The simpler explanation is he's a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn't have any lifelines left, and he's failing miserably.
I think he thought the "Twitter files" were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
Simple. He didn't shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.
He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.
But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.
If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He's comfortable telling us about Twitter's financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let's him focus on his other vanity projects.
It's not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It's not like he's going to pay his bills. It's not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?
The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.
Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.
When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.
When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.
Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.
From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.
By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.
Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.
But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.
Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.
So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.
The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.
The d*ck contest. It's all about who has the biggest.
Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.
He wanted to prove he doesn't care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost
Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public
We have no reason to believe his public statistics
100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn't the "ad" tag I couldn't distinguish that.
They can't cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap
Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.
He thinks it gives him an excuse to escalate his erratic decision-making.
I think it's either better than 50, or he expects it to be better shortly so when he says it's 40, he can celebrate how good he did for the +10.
If your losses are at 80% and you tell everyone they’re at 50% you can try to spin the story in your favor.
Maybe.... I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.... you shouldn't have Musked all over Twitter nor fired its core developers? Again, just thinking out loud....
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros...
Not even just that...
Alienates all potential leftwing/brand friendly advertiser's through changes and being the spokesperson for the platform.
"We're down 50% how could this have happened?????" - Elon Musk
Dude needs to stfu, make an alt account. He has chosen to be the spokesperson for the platform. Spouting off conspiracies and controversial takes. You can't be surprised nobody wants to associate with him.
He is a liability and a brand risk. Sure he can have his opinions but here is the problem...
He has chosen to be extremely public and force those opinions onto the average consumer feed due to his narcissistic tendencies and it is biting him in the ass.
No sympathy. He wanted free speech, (albeit it isn't because he is okay as long as it doesn't criticise him or his affiliates.) now he has his free speech platform but in the same way advertisers can chose not to engage with it.
make an alt account
But then nobody would know it's him and the tweets would get no attention
Genius at work coming through!
Let that sink in!
Your Google search result redirects to Twitter
you click and open the link
Twitter asks you to login to see the tweet.
You close that tab and move on to next search result.
Best way to avoid traffic to your site, then complain about revenue loss from advertisements.
medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I'd like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.
Hell, medium should be paying me to read them
If it's something interesting I would really like to read, I put it through https://archive.ph first.
Honestly my wild guess is that he’s trying to make Twitter profitable from subscription based services and not so much from ad revenue.
Can’t really have free speech if platform depends on advertisers and investors.
Perhaps. But a rather large issue arises when your content is generated primarily by users who wouldn't want to pay for a service.
There is also the issue where if you are having to pay to get around interaction limits is it really free speech? Or just limited to those that can afford to pay?
Weird, users can't access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that's literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?
Maybe it’s the advertisers. They’re racist and hate Musk because he’s African. That must be it. Couldn’t possibly be anything else.
I'm not waiting to see Twitter fail. I'm just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream.
And I must say that I'm happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.
That’s actually a better outcome, quarantine the crazies in twitter and/or reddit while the mainstream happens in the fediverse.
The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.
That’s a sad commentary of our society as a whole. :( but still, the optimist in me wishes it were reversed.
I don't see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.
You just described Truth social
That's exactly what I had in mind but I'd rather not give it any sort of mention. I hope it dies in obscurity.
Hmm maybe putting in rate limits, thus greatly reducing the amount of time people spend on the app, isn't the best strategy for a platform whose main source of revenue comes from advertising?
I think there is like a 1% chance rate limits were an actual thing. It really feels like someone fucked something up, caused the issue and the "rate limits" were how Elon decided to try and play it. Then "increasing" the limits multiple times to completely illogical values was the system slowly coming back up. Elon increasing that limit makes him look like he is listening to the users and thus the good guy.
I have not seen anyone complain about rate limits since the day it happened. Other than jokes has anyone seen or heard of the issue?
I would say a company suddenly introducing a major policy change like view limits with no warning is beyond stupid but then again it is Elon who seems to believe he is God's gift to tech.
The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.
Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.
Elon complaining about this just reminds me that he can afford to lose ~50 billion dollars and still be one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived.
He's below his height of wealth, but he's still #1 and has 250 billion
I remember a fellow saying Elon is a very business savvy person, because of his 2 other successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX. I guess ruining communications with potential advertisers on a platform that depends entirely on advertisers wasn't a very intelligent move.
If I recall correctly, Tesla was actually cash-negavite for like half a decade after Musk bought it, surviving off investors and SpaceX's success, I remember it was very big news when it finaly went cash-positive and subs like WSB were all over r/all
SpaceX became profitable not all at once as well.
I think we should all remember that company's success is also a function of investors' money AND public trust. SpaceX for some people was a symbol of all things modern. Tesla as well to some extent.
With such amount of trust no wonder these finally became profitable.
Ah, also companies engineering vehicles and spacecraft are rather different from a company the whole purpose of which is matching people (readers to posters, advertisers to customers, so on).
Almost all companies are "cash negative" in their first years.
Of course, but many, many companies never leave that state in the age where the biggest investment strategy is dumping hella cash into a startup in hopes that it overtakes (monopolizes) the industry but may never be profitable. And many people thought that Tesla would never be profitable, it sure looked like it for a very long time.
The same people would say the same thing about Trump and everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. I think they're legitimately delusional.. all of them.
I think they're just brainwashed by our capitalist system which says that if a person is wealthy it's because they worked for it and we're successful. We are indoctrinated from very young ages to believe that capitalism is a strict meritocracy where only the best, most intelligent, most deserving people become wealthy.
In reality most wealthy people inherited some or most of their wealth, and used that inherited wealth to create more wealth- because it turns out that once you are wealthy it's really easy to get more wealthy. They aren't wealthy because they are skillful or intelligent or good at business. Most of them are good at precisely one thing: giving some of their money to a professional who knows how to grow it so that they will never run out.
Then they throw money at whatever catches their eye, and when you have billions to throw around you can cast a very wide net that will almost certainly catch something.
Of course! It's because of Threads! Don't you guys get it? They stole their secrets!! It has absolutely nothing to do with how things are being run on twitter or because Elon Musk is a genius!!!
…
Fuck Musk and fuck twitter and all that goes with it.
The heavy debt load was caused by his purchase... He paid $26 bn, a couple other investors (including a Saudi prince) together paid $5 bn, the remaining $13 bn is a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf.
The purchase was always a financial death sentence. Either Twitter steps into line and becomes the propaganda tool he and his old friend Peter Thiel want, then it can have some extra investment, or Twitter dies.
I still don't get how it's legal for Twitter to take out a loan on itself on Musk's behalf.
It's a common trick the wealthy have. The idea is, if the business was under the control of its new owners, they could direct the business to get the loan. It's what happened to Toys R Us and many other businesses.
Somewhat similarly, the UK have a way of turning a business into an "Employee Owned business". Basically, if the business has enough cash, it can buy itself from its owners. The real shady part, though, is that the owners don't pay any capital gains tax on the sale whatsoever. They get all their money out of the business, tax free. But yay, employee owned businesses (that are still run the same as before).
And if you try to read the financial regulations to understand it all, you'll very quickly lose the will to live. Reading law is one thing, financial regulations are a completely different ball game.
That's the part which is the most absurd. Extending a hypothetical to justify a 13 billion dollar loan is bonkers.
I wonder if there's a study of how many companies this has happened to, and how many have come away from it not bankrupt after 5 years. I assume the only reason this is still legal is because the original shareholders get their payday when the company is sold, the new CEO gives themselves a great salary, bleeding the company dry and it's just the employees who suffer when their jobs are cut, which is valued less than the shareholders and CEOs in America.
This practice destroyed several century old retail chains in my country. Got sold to some American investment fund,, via a loan placed on those company's account. Then immediately sold the real estate in prime locations these chains held, so the companies became tenants in buildings they previously owned (and had paid off 80 years ago). Waif a few years, then they die even with decent revenue.
It's not really that different from buying a house or car. The money Musk put forward is the down payment, the loan is the mortgage, the company assets are the collateral. Where it's sketchy is that a house or vehicle is generally worth repossessing and selling if you default, but by the time Musk is done with Twitter, it'll be worthless.
Think of him like a crackhead who strips the plumbing and wiring from the house he has a mortgage on, before skipping town
Companies taking loans out to have someone buy them doesn't make sense. Shouldn't that cost just be truncated out of the purchase?
But if they didn't do that then the purchase wouldn't happen, and the wealthy wouldn't be able to consolidate more wealth so easily!
There's also probably tax benefits if the business is paying some of the cost, rather than the buyer.
The Saudi prince was already invested in Twitter, and opted to roll over his shareholding when Musk bought out everyone else. Wonder if he's happy or sad about that decision now.
Nobody is talking about it, but does that advertising exec that Musk hired for CEO take a massive hit to her career for any of this?
It seems surreal to have a ghost CEO who isn't responsible for anything such a large company does. But that's exactly what's happening here.
Maybe, but there's a market out there for CEOs who are willing to take the blame for some unpopular decisions and then walk away. There's also something to be said that "-50%" might actually be an improvement over where it was before she was hired, and the bad decisions weren't hers.
But that's the thing. She isn't taking the L on this. That's my point. She seems to just be chillin', doing fuck all. Everyone knows it's Musk running it.
This isn't a case where he needed to bring in a fall guy CEO for a difficult business choice. This is a case where he brought in a new CEO to literally save the corporation, and she's doing nothing and nobody is blaming her. It's surreal.
Much of what she was brought on to do (negotiating with advertisers I guess) isn't really public facing, so from that respect it's not that surprising that she appears to be doing nothing. I also think she's not taking the L yet, if things get even worse Musk may blame her as an excuse to walk things back ("I was following her advice" or whatever).
Fair enough, I suppose we'll see soon enough. And it may or may not be extremely cathartic. :D
BTW, fuck him and MS so bad for ruining a tech company I could really make no complaint about.
Especially if you think that Nokia didn't only make good phones, they also were the major force behind Qt toolkit. And that was in Qt3 times, when Qt was unarguably cool.
And no interest in thinking about why they're down ~50% in advertising revenue.
I still think the "saudi's paid elon to nuke it" was a solid conspiracy theory.
When you think about it, there were a lot of populist movements growing through Twitter. It probably pissed a lot of wealthy, powerful people off.
Then Musk and Zuckerberg were called to private meetings with the president, weren't they? And Twitter was taken over and shut down. Then Threads, owned by Facebook who is known to help out law enforcement quite happily as well as track everything, takes off as an alternative.
Didn't you know? Acknowledging any cause would be censorship /s
Gasp. Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads! Poor Elon!
Also doesn't help that the site was basic private for a while. I know I never bothered to log in while it was log in only.
Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!
Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who's advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.
Pravda Social? I thought that was Twitter.
"Pravda" is Russian for "Truth". I find it ironic that TFG named his social media site after a newspaper that's synonymous with "shameless propaganda'.
Not so much ironic as the Spider-Man pointing meme. Al-qaeda literally means “the base” and who exactly do you think all the Jesus freak stochastic terrorists are trying to rile up? Their base. Two sides of the same shit coin.
There is a extremist group in the states called The Base. Ultra right wing fascist shit.
But I thought free speech meant no consequences?! /s
Has he tried not fucking up the platform yet?
He probably only wants to try that after exhausting all ways of fucking it up. You'd think that will be soon, but he's pretty creative in this regard.
On the other hand, I think the people at Tesla/SpaceX are probably very happy that Elon has his hands full with Twitter right now.
why is this man like this
Grimes left.
tbf, grimes is not better
would expect both of them to be less like this if that were the case
Rich people are so disconnected from reality. I mean, when I tell you disconnected people really don't understand. The best way to put it is ths: we have a hard time intuitively understanding the vast distances in the universe. Musk is like that. He is a person with such level of disconnect. He truly lives in his own reality, most likely because a man like him does not understand the concept of poverty or struggling to make ends meet. The narcissism displayed in that interview in which he says that "if speaking his mind means losing money then so be it" should tell you how this man truly lives in an alternative reality. I am so glad most of us realized the kind of scum he is.
fr fr
but like, why did it take him tanking Twitter for many to realize that he's just a manbaby with a diamond-encrusted platinum pacifier
like it's really weird that it wasn't clear when he called that one guy who saved those kids in that cave a pedophile because the guy told Musk that his invention wouldn't be useful for the rescue effort; like people didn't see how shitty he was after he said that
Remember that time he said he was going to solve the COVID ventilator crisis and sent out a bunch of obsolete overstock sleep apnea machines that nobody wanted and weren't actually useful for the purpose? That was a good time.
Seems like buying the media silence to keep him a "pure" image it's a thing that he cannot contain on Twitter. But people can then correlate history. And the multiplier effect can get devastating
Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.
50% is just what he's admitting to. Not sure how easily that number can be verified, but if someone told me that the actual numbers were much, much worse... I wouldn't bet against them.
My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.
Just shut it down already.
Let’s see: Alienate the users. Fire everyone who knows how to keep the place running. Fill the site with bots and white supremacists.
FA complete. FO now underway.
Can't wait when he lays off another 50% of whatever the company remains, his fanbase will go nuts for it and say he's a business genius.
I was looking at Twitter earlier, and my feed was full of antivaxxers, election deniers, some anti-abortion activist that claims that Planned Parenthood is involved in sex trafficking, and even 9/11 deniers.
Twitter is a dead man walking
Good. Fuck em
due to ~50% drop in advertising… because I'm not very good at this. ftfyE.
one leads to the other
Welp that happens when all your changes have been questionable at best Musk...
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even worse than he's describing, but at the same time, it's not like we didn't expect it. The platform has seen a colossal influx of bigots, and all kinds of completely unhinged people, because Elon has clearly shown that he's okay with them posting what they want
I just don't get what's so problematic with casual bigots when one can encounter Turkish and Azeri Nazis (and bots) in numbers and nobody is really trying to fight them, on any platform.
But then nobody's trying to fight them IRL.
In terms of these people Twitter was sort of better than Reddit, or so my sister says (she hasn't used Reddit, I haven't used Twitter).
What you've described is a problem anywhere, not just Twitter. It doesn't matter where it is. It's just wrong either way
Music to my ears
It's impressive how quickly and severely he fucked up what was once a successful tech giant!
I disagree. Twitter was already going under even before he took over. In fact, it was doomed from the beginning as one of the uber era "grow valuation, think about revenue later", hoping to exit someday by selling it to some rich megalomaniac, and actually, they're the ones who succeeded.
well, it was actually about ready to start breaking even, and even paying off some debt. there was a path to profitability with twitter, but it was tenuous at best.
king of the idiots was forced to by it, saddling it with so much dept that that profitability dream was over the moment he became involved.
But he's not. He'll be fine. He'll always be fine.
It's hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk's net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
He's not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he's not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.
Yeah he personally isn’t broke and no matter how much debt Twitter racks up, it can’t put him in the red. That’s just how corporations work.
Still, he borrowed that $44bil and will have to face the people who lent it to him. Apparent the service on that debt is already equal to Twitter’s total operating expenses. That’s real money.
WhY he’s lost by this is prestige. He lost the court case and demonstrably got taken to the cleaners. He hasn’t been able to turn the business around and in fact has made it worse. And his creditors are left holding the bag. That’s some real humiliation for someone like him.
I have to believe that those who gave him that loan knew exactly the kind of shit show he would bring to Twitter and that was their goal - to make it wholly less relevant and less able to undermine them.
Maybe to make it more conservative friendly. I can’t believe capitalists feared Twitter’ great journalistic power to hold them to account. But you’re right.
@scarabic I was also thinking about foreign illiberal governments
Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let's say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let's say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.
Luxury? What luxury, twitter is just a feed of memes, short remarks and porn
What feature could they possibly have held back???
The way he talks is so fucking stupid. He's trying so hard to be a "tech bro". You'd think money would give someone some amount of self confidence, but clearly not.
Advertisers don’t want to advertise on Twitter anymore even after Elon fired all the talent and essentially drove the platform into the ground? Noooooo…
Only 50 more percent left to go!
Was it ever positive?
Nope
Yes and no.
It wasn't positive because they didn't want to be.
It had about 2.7 billions in cash reserves at the time it got bought, for example.
I saw one of his interview where he said he doesnt care about money. May be thats why he spills all that shit on twitter. Does twitter even post their cashflow , I know its publicly traded but never saw cashflow being posted. Idk if Elon cares but We 9-5 plebs do care about money coz we got mortgage and shit , may be that why we hate all billionaires.
He doesn't care about money because he never had to be accountable for all his shit-decisions resulting in financial disasters.
True that's the beauty of being rich. What I have learnt is 9-5 plebs are really important for the economy, if all 9-5 stop working , the economy will crash but if billionaire or millionaire stops working, not much affect on economy.
You see all these billionaires and millionaires control the 9-5 plebs and that's how they know they dont have to be held accountable.
Twitter is no longer publicly traded. One of the first changes Musk made upon purchase was pulling it off the market. Ostensibly so he could ruin it faster.
That's just what happens when you buy the entire company. There aren't any public shares.
Publicly traded companies must post financial statements that show all that information. There is no getting around it to be publicly traded. But they are no longer traded, so have no disclosure rules.
More nazis should fix the revenue issues. Advertisers love associating themselves with hated people. Advertisers hate making a profit. Forever Elone, Musk will need to share sucking dick to turn a profit. If you look on twitter you'll notice his lips are chapped.
Are you on tiktok? There's a genre of livestream where the streamer picks a controversial topic and then invites the audience to send gifts to vote for one side or the other. Of course the outcome of the vote has no effect on the world, and whether you're voting for one side or the other it's the streamer (and twitch) who get paid, but people are willing to pay good money for that little dopamine hit of seeing their side of an issue they care about win something. I feel like they're trying to turn Twitter into; a place where people pay some small monthly token to be agreed with and to feel like they're in the majority. Of course, an environment like that is almost always going to end up right wing because if Trump taught us anything it's that right wingers will buy literally anything that validates their beliefs.
That dude straight up has no fucking idea what's going on.
Maybe send another car to space. There's just not enough trash floating around.
"~50% drop in advertising revenue"
Hmm... What could've caused it (?) elon (?)
Maybe if he would stop fucking ruining everything about the site...
Oh cool daily Twitter news updates are on Lemmy too. I have never had a Twitter account and I will never have a Twitter account.
I never used my account. I hate twitter. However, I love hearing about the failures of Elon Musk.
While I'm the same and agree, I'm certainly loving the drama and downfall of that toolbag.
Seriously. I didn’t join Lenny to get updates on twitter and Reddit. Apollo had a keyword filter I used to block musk trump and kanye. Desantis reddit and twitter are first on the chopping block when I get that ability.
A spokesperson for everyone who isn't a sociopathic spoiled rich kid in adult pants was quoted as saying, "Gee, that's too bad."
🤣
Only 50%? That's far from his apparent goal of destroying his company.
He’s not selling it to me well
Maybe if the remaining users that are still on twitter need to jump ship just to really set in stone the amount of user drop off they might have. That or upload tones of photos and videos to try and overload there servers.
Awesome. I didn't doubt he was stupid enough to write it, just couldn't find it. According to article you linked ~50% might actually be closer to 89% which is extra hilarious.
The moment Threads properly implement hashtags and trending topics, Twitter is finished.
Zuckerberg doesn't even need to federate to achieve this. He got well over 100 million signups. He's good.
That were ghost account of insta
Even if its 50million ghost accounts, hes got 50 million sign ups
the whole point of a ghost account is that no one had to sign up for it, it's created automatically without the knowledge or consent of the account owner
That’s just numbers they throw out to please investors. These companies live from that, most likely a huge chunk of those were bots and forced sign ups from Instagram.
I wonder how the revenue would have look liked if he hadn't gone out of his way to cater to right-wing nutjobs with all his might. Who knows, maybe he would've been able to turn a profit through his numerous schemes like the paid verification and such.
Muskie-baka can't figire it out. I feel obliged to help him.
Good, fuck him
Didn’t……didn’t Twitter users have the “luxury of anything else” before he showed up? Lmfao.
It's funny how he's publicly confirming that he's failing.
Nobody with more than two funcioning brain cells would not even pay a single dollar to start ads on this cesspit anymore.
keep it up guys, we've got this lmao
Hm.
I wonder if that could be due to the checks notes changes that made your platform undesirable?
Glad to hear it, too. He hired the former ad chief from comcast and that’s a well hated company.
I blame cancel culture! The true test of a free society is that people can say whatever they want with no consequences! /s
So is this just according to musk? Because that guy is untrustworthy and stupid.
It's okay, I'm sure Elon will figure out what the problem is eventually, not sure if Big Blue Bird will still be alive by then but he might just get it!
lol I hope he loses it all. But I’m sure he’ll just find another rich loop hole to kick the can with another company. He got lucky with spaceX. Found the right people; and the right people that don’t put up with his shit.
He got lucky with spaceX.
I think we should acknowledge his strengths. Inspiring and empowering smart people to prototype something audacious is something he is very good at. He didn't get lucky with SpaceX, he did what he is good at.
What he is bad at is the next step. And because his ego doesn't allow him to step away and let somebody else do the next step:,take a prototype and turn it into a business, his companies are doomed to be just fluff.
I'm worried SpaceX will suffer the same fate under his leadership. There's no escape from a leader with bad leadership skills.
"Inspiring and empowering" aka he's rich and gonna get richer, nothing unique to the man himself. Those smart people could do leauges better out of a coperate environment - he doesn't even let non-teslas park in their parking lot as their Cali research locations. Lotta empowerment there
With the way he's running this, I'm a bit confused as to why he didn't just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn't have cost him nearly as much.
He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.
-50% ad revenue says otherwise
Twitter could have 200% more users, if no one want to show them ads, then ad spots will be dirt cheap. Printing 5 millions of 1cent ads vs 1 million of 10cents ads is not the same. Both on income and expenses...
This, so much this. I also find it rather coincidental that fb cam out with threads soon after the twitter implosion. Opportunistic feasting on a dead carcass perhaps?
Twitter has been on the outs since musk bought it. If Facebook was smart they'd have started right then.
Threads looks like they started development as soon as Musk bought twitter.
According to Adam Mosseri, IG had been working on Threads in various forms since 2021. Apparently they struggled to make it a native part of IG, then started working on the stand-alone version in 2022. So if he is to be believed, Threads development predates Twitter’s sale to Musk.
my guess is that they were working on it in the background and when musk bought tw they started pouring way more resources into it and turned it into a standalone app
Threads still doesn't have #hashtag searching IIRC. It's missing a huge number of features. It's clear that they only came out as early as they did because they saw an opportunity to eat Twitter's lunch.
They really needed a few more months of dev time.
Bluesky is the same way. There are a lot of features there that still need to be implemented.
I’m glad Masto at least has hashtags and video and gifs and editing. For me right now it has the best features and the best experience. I’m pretty happy with it.
Indeed, it looks like they hurried the threads launch because Twitter was having outages.
Still exciting to be on the ground floor, when every day out week could bring a new update or feature. Wonder how they'll improve over the next 3 months
Considering development time, server setup, testing time, etc… They probably did. It probably took several months to develop, deploy, integrate with the rest of their systems, and test. And then it’s simply a matter of waiting on Musk to do something stupid before they announce the launch, so all the freshly spurned users are happy to switch.
To be fair I don't think that can be entirely prescribed to drop in user base; the internet ad market in general is absolutely tanking at the moment.
"users" - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL
Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.
Threads has like 100 million sign ups. It could replace Twitter.
That saw an overnight 50% drop in activity. People were kinda pissed to find out that Meta created them a Threads handle from their Facebook/Instagram and immediately deactivated their Threads accounts. I don't know what it means, but I like it
is it possible to deactivate your account without downloading the app?
You don't have an account unless you activate it, but they do hold your Instagram handle if you were to sign up that would be your Threads handle. The 50% drop in activity is because the app is lame as hell, and once people saw it they were done. No chronological sorting option, not even an option to only see threads from the people you follow.
Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?
I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Let's be honest Elon doesn't care about Twitter.
He bought it with money he doesn't have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.
Everyone of them won.
I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It's the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.
I'm still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well
As much Saudi money as he burned though, I'm expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.
The simpler explanation is he's a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn't have any lifelines left, and he's failing miserably.
I think he thought the "Twitter files" were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
Simple. He didn't shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.
He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.
But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.
If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He's comfortable telling us about Twitter's financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let's him focus on his other vanity projects.
It's not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It's not like he's going to pay his bills. It's not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?
The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.
Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.
When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.
When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.
Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.
From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.
By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.
Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.
But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.
Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.
So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.
The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.
The d*ck contest. It's all about who has the biggest.
Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.
He wanted to prove he doesn't care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost
Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public
We have no reason to believe his public statistics
100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn't the "ad" tag I couldn't distinguish that.
They can't cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap
Indeed. Elon is a pathalogical liar.
Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.
He thinks it gives him an excuse to escalate his erratic decision-making.
I think it's either better than 50, or he expects it to be better shortly so when he says it's 40, he can celebrate how good he did for the +10.
If your losses are at 80% and you tell everyone they’re at 50% you can try to spin the story in your favor.
The ~ has an error of +/- 50 percentage points.
Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!
Maybe.... I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.... you shouldn't have Musked all over Twitter nor fired its core developers? Again, just thinking out loud....
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros...
Not even just that... Alienates all potential leftwing/brand friendly advertiser's through changes and being the spokesperson for the platform.
"We're down 50% how could this have happened?????" - Elon Musk
Dude needs to stfu, make an alt account. He has chosen to be the spokesperson for the platform. Spouting off conspiracies and controversial takes. You can't be surprised nobody wants to associate with him.
He is a liability and a brand risk. Sure he can have his opinions but here is the problem...
He has chosen to be extremely public and force those opinions onto the average consumer feed due to his narcissistic tendencies and it is biting him in the ass.
No sympathy. He wanted free speech, (albeit it isn't because he is okay as long as it doesn't criticise him or his affiliates.) now he has his free speech platform but in the same way advertisers can chose not to engage with it.
But then nobody would know it's him and the tweets would get no attention
Genius at work coming through!
Let that sink in!
Best way to avoid traffic to your site, then complain about revenue loss from advertisements.
medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I'd like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.
Hell, medium should be paying me to read them
If it's something interesting I would really like to read, I put it through https://archive.ph first.
Honestly my wild guess is that he’s trying to make Twitter profitable from subscription based services and not so much from ad revenue.
Can’t really have free speech if platform depends on advertisers and investors.
Perhaps. But a rather large issue arises when your content is generated primarily by users who wouldn't want to pay for a service.
There is also the issue where if you are having to pay to get around interaction limits is it really free speech? Or just limited to those that can afford to pay?
He doesn't really care about free speech. Just his opinions. (He is shadowbanning Ukrainian accounts btw)
Didn't work when they blocked non-registered visitors.
It is working now though, the login restriction on the official Twitter website is still in place
Oh damn, I did realise it's working again a few days ago, so I just assumed Twitter is open too.
Step 3: Profit!
Weird, users can't access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that's literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?
Maybe it’s the advertisers. They’re racist and hate Musk because he’s African. That must be it. Couldn’t possibly be anything else.
I'm not waiting to see Twitter fail. I'm just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream. And I must say that I'm happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.
That’s actually a better outcome, quarantine the crazies in twitter and/or reddit while the mainstream happens in the fediverse.
The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.
That’s a sad commentary of our society as a whole. :( but still, the optimist in me wishes it were reversed.
I don't see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.
You just described Truth social
That's exactly what I had in mind but I'd rather not give it any sort of mention. I hope it dies in obscurity.
So its failing.
Hmm maybe putting in rate limits, thus greatly reducing the amount of time people spend on the app, isn't the best strategy for a platform whose main source of revenue comes from advertising?
I think there is like a 1% chance rate limits were an actual thing. It really feels like someone fucked something up, caused the issue and the "rate limits" were how Elon decided to try and play it. Then "increasing" the limits multiple times to completely illogical values was the system slowly coming back up. Elon increasing that limit makes him look like he is listening to the users and thus the good guy.
I have not seen anyone complain about rate limits since the day it happened. Other than jokes has anyone seen or heard of the issue?
I would say a company suddenly introducing a major policy change like view limits with no warning is beyond stupid but then again it is Elon who seems to believe he is God's gift to tech.
Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169
The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.
Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.
Sure, but how else is Elmo going to keep Amazon and Google from suing him for nonpayment? Geez man, use your noodle.
Elon complaining about this just reminds me that he can afford to lose ~50 billion dollars and still be one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived.
He's below his height of wealth, but he's still #1 and has 250 billion
I remember a fellow saying Elon is a very business savvy person, because of his 2 other successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX. I guess ruining communications with potential advertisers on a platform that depends entirely on advertisers wasn't a very intelligent move.
If I recall correctly, Tesla was actually cash-negavite for like half a decade after Musk bought it, surviving off investors and SpaceX's success, I remember it was very big news when it finaly went cash-positive and subs like WSB were all over r/all
SpaceX became profitable not all at once as well.
I think we should all remember that company's success is also a function of investors' money AND public trust. SpaceX for some people was a symbol of all things modern. Tesla as well to some extent.
With such amount of trust no wonder these finally became profitable.
Ah, also companies engineering vehicles and spacecraft are rather different from a company the whole purpose of which is matching people (readers to posters, advertisers to customers, so on).
Almost all companies are "cash negative" in their first years.
Of course, but many, many companies never leave that state in the age where the biggest investment strategy is dumping hella cash into a startup in hopes that it overtakes (monopolizes) the industry but may never be profitable. And many people thought that Tesla would never be profitable, it sure looked like it for a very long time.
The same people would say the same thing about Trump and everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. I think they're legitimately delusional.. all of them.
I think they're just brainwashed by our capitalist system which says that if a person is wealthy it's because they worked for it and we're successful. We are indoctrinated from very young ages to believe that capitalism is a strict meritocracy where only the best, most intelligent, most deserving people become wealthy.
In reality most wealthy people inherited some or most of their wealth, and used that inherited wealth to create more wealth- because it turns out that once you are wealthy it's really easy to get more wealthy. They aren't wealthy because they are skillful or intelligent or good at business. Most of them are good at precisely one thing: giving some of their money to a professional who knows how to grow it so that they will never run out.
Then they throw money at whatever catches their eye, and when you have billions to throw around you can cast a very wide net that will almost certainly catch something.
Of course! It's because of Threads! Don't you guys get it? They stole their secrets!! It has absolutely nothing to do with how things are being run on twitter or because Elon Musk is a genius!!!
…
Fuck Musk and fuck twitter and all that goes with it.
The heavy debt load was caused by his purchase... He paid $26 bn, a couple other investors (including a Saudi prince) together paid $5 bn, the remaining $13 bn is a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf.
The purchase was always a financial death sentence. Either Twitter steps into line and becomes the propaganda tool he and his old friend Peter Thiel want, then it can have some extra investment, or Twitter dies.
I still don't get how it's legal for Twitter to take out a loan on itself on Musk's behalf.
It's a common trick the wealthy have. The idea is, if the business was under the control of its new owners, they could direct the business to get the loan. It's what happened to Toys R Us and many other businesses.
Somewhat similarly, the UK have a way of turning a business into an "Employee Owned business". Basically, if the business has enough cash, it can buy itself from its owners. The real shady part, though, is that the owners don't pay any capital gains tax on the sale whatsoever. They get all their money out of the business, tax free. But yay, employee owned businesses (that are still run the same as before).
And if you try to read the financial regulations to understand it all, you'll very quickly lose the will to live. Reading law is one thing, financial regulations are a completely different ball game.
That's the part which is the most absurd. Extending a hypothetical to justify a 13 billion dollar loan is bonkers.
I wonder if there's a study of how many companies this has happened to, and how many have come away from it not bankrupt after 5 years. I assume the only reason this is still legal is because the original shareholders get their payday when the company is sold, the new CEO gives themselves a great salary, bleeding the company dry and it's just the employees who suffer when their jobs are cut, which is valued less than the shareholders and CEOs in America.
This practice destroyed several century old retail chains in my country. Got sold to some American investment fund,, via a loan placed on those company's account. Then immediately sold the real estate in prime locations these chains held, so the companies became tenants in buildings they previously owned (and had paid off 80 years ago). Waif a few years, then they die even with decent revenue.
It's not really that different from buying a house or car. The money Musk put forward is the down payment, the loan is the mortgage, the company assets are the collateral. Where it's sketchy is that a house or vehicle is generally worth repossessing and selling if you default, but by the time Musk is done with Twitter, it'll be worthless.
Think of him like a crackhead who strips the plumbing and wiring from the house he has a mortgage on, before skipping town
Companies taking loans out to have someone buy them doesn't make sense. Shouldn't that cost just be truncated out of the purchase?
But if they didn't do that then the purchase wouldn't happen, and the wealthy wouldn't be able to consolidate more wealth so easily!
There's also probably tax benefits if the business is paying some of the cost, rather than the buyer.
The Saudi prince was already invested in Twitter, and opted to roll over his shareholding when Musk bought out everyone else. Wonder if he's happy or sad about that decision now.
Translation: "I'm terrible at business, and I'm making it everyone else's problem"
Not losing money, just having "negative cash flow".
I had to search the euphemism to see if I was just out of the loop on the economics terminology, and if those legit were different concepts.
On the downside, they're not. On the upside, Musk is setting a great example for how to stop getting accused of hoarding wealth
Aww. That's super duper sad and I am sad for him.
Anyways.
Go Fasc, lose cash!
Fuck you, Musk. Piece of shit.
OK ill have to steal this one
Heavy debt load? Where could that have come from.? A leveraged buyout at an overvalued price or something?
So, we still 50% to go. I believe in you, Elon /s
Nobody is talking about it, but does that advertising exec that Musk hired for CEO take a massive hit to her career for any of this?
It seems surreal to have a ghost CEO who isn't responsible for anything such a large company does. But that's exactly what's happening here.
Maybe, but there's a market out there for CEOs who are willing to take the blame for some unpopular decisions and then walk away. There's also something to be said that "-50%" might actually be an improvement over where it was before she was hired, and the bad decisions weren't hers.
But that's the thing. She isn't taking the L on this. That's my point. She seems to just be chillin', doing fuck all. Everyone knows it's Musk running it.
This isn't a case where he needed to bring in a fall guy CEO for a difficult business choice. This is a case where he brought in a new CEO to literally save the corporation, and she's doing nothing and nobody is blaming her. It's surreal.
Much of what she was brought on to do (negotiating with advertisers I guess) isn't really public facing, so from that respect it's not that surprising that she appears to be doing nothing. I also think she's not taking the L yet, if things get even worse Musk may blame her as an excuse to walk things back ("I was following her advice" or whatever).
Fair enough, I suppose we'll see soon enough. And it may or may not be extremely cathartic. :D
the "pain sponge" storyline from Succession
I'm thinking Stephen Elop.
BTW, fuck him and MS so bad for ruining a tech company I could really make no complaint about.
Especially if you think that Nokia didn't only make good phones, they also were the major force behind Qt toolkit. And that was in Qt3 times, when Qt was unarguably cool.
And no interest in thinking about why they're down ~50% in advertising revenue.
I still think the "saudi's paid elon to nuke it" was a solid conspiracy theory.
When you think about it, there were a lot of populist movements growing through Twitter. It probably pissed a lot of wealthy, powerful people off.
Then Musk and Zuckerberg were called to private meetings with the president, weren't they? And Twitter was taken over and shut down. Then Threads, owned by Facebook who is known to help out law enforcement quite happily as well as track everything, takes off as an alternative.
Didn't you know? Acknowledging any cause would be censorship /s
Gasp. Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads! Poor Elon! Also doesn't help that the site was basic private for a while. I know I never bothered to log in while it was log in only.
Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who's advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.
Pravda Social? I thought that was Twitter.
"Pravda" is Russian for "Truth". I find it ironic that TFG named his social media site after a newspaper that's synonymous with "shameless propaganda'.
Not so much ironic as the Spider-Man pointing meme. Al-qaeda literally means “the base” and who exactly do you think all the Jesus freak stochastic terrorists are trying to rile up? Their base. Two sides of the same shit coin.
There is a extremist group in the states called The Base. Ultra right wing fascist shit.
But I thought free speech meant no consequences?! /s
Has he tried not fucking up the platform yet?
He probably only wants to try that after exhausting all ways of fucking it up. You'd think that will be soon, but he's pretty creative in this regard.
On the other hand, I think the people at Tesla/SpaceX are probably very happy that Elon has his hands full with Twitter right now.
why is this man like this
Grimes left.
tbf, grimes is not better
would expect both of them to be less like this if that were the case
Rich people are so disconnected from reality. I mean, when I tell you disconnected people really don't understand. The best way to put it is ths: we have a hard time intuitively understanding the vast distances in the universe. Musk is like that. He is a person with such level of disconnect. He truly lives in his own reality, most likely because a man like him does not understand the concept of poverty or struggling to make ends meet. The narcissism displayed in that interview in which he says that "if speaking his mind means losing money then so be it" should tell you how this man truly lives in an alternative reality. I am so glad most of us realized the kind of scum he is.
fr fr
but like, why did it take him tanking Twitter for many to realize that he's just a manbaby with a diamond-encrusted platinum pacifier
like it's really weird that it wasn't clear when he called that one guy who saved those kids in that cave a pedophile because the guy told Musk that his invention wouldn't be useful for the rescue effort; like people didn't see how shitty he was after he said that
Remember that time he said he was going to solve the COVID ventilator crisis and sent out a bunch of obsolete overstock sleep apnea machines that nobody wanted and weren't actually useful for the purpose? That was a good time.
Seems like buying the media silence to keep him a "pure" image it's a thing that he cannot contain on Twitter. But people can then correlate history. And the multiplier effect can get devastating
lol good.
Twitter has/is/was always a cesspit.
Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.
50% is just what he's admitting to. Not sure how easily that number can be verified, but if someone told me that the actual numbers were much, much worse... I wouldn't bet against them.
My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.
Just shut it down already.
Let’s see: Alienate the users. Fire everyone who knows how to keep the place running. Fill the site with bots and white supremacists.
FA complete. FO now underway.
Can't wait when he lays off another 50% of whatever the company remains, his fanbase will go nuts for it and say he's a business genius.
Colour me surprised that Mr Musk and lowering moderating standards would lower advertising revenue.
I am mostly surprised that he actually admits worse numbers
Boycott twitler
Good. Twitter is a cess pit.
I was looking at Twitter earlier, and my feed was full of antivaxxers, election deniers, some anti-abortion activist that claims that Planned Parenthood is involved in sex trafficking, and even 9/11 deniers.
Twitter is a dead man walking
Good. Fuck em
due to ~50% drop in advertising…because I'm not very good at this. ftfyE.one leads to the other
Welp that happens when all your changes have been questionable at best Musk...
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even worse than he's describing, but at the same time, it's not like we didn't expect it. The platform has seen a colossal influx of bigots, and all kinds of completely unhinged people, because Elon has clearly shown that he's okay with them posting what they want
I just don't get what's so problematic with casual bigots when one can encounter Turkish and Azeri Nazis (and bots) in numbers and nobody is really trying to fight them, on any platform.
But then nobody's trying to fight them IRL.
In terms of these people Twitter was sort of better than Reddit, or so my sister says (she hasn't used Reddit, I haven't used Twitter).
What you've described is a problem anywhere, not just Twitter. It doesn't matter where it is. It's just wrong either way
Music to my ears
It's impressive how quickly and severely he fucked up what was once a successful tech giant!
I disagree. Twitter was already going under even before he took over. In fact, it was doomed from the beginning as one of the uber era "grow valuation, think about revenue later", hoping to exit someday by selling it to some rich megalomaniac, and actually, they're the ones who succeeded.
and now he's doing the same grift with bluesky
well, it was actually about ready to start breaking even, and even paying off some debt. there was a path to profitability with twitter, but it was tenuous at best.
king of the idiots was forced to by it, saddling it with so much dept that that profitability dream was over the moment he became involved.
Idgaf Elon.
Lol. "Negative cash flow."
You're broke. You're f*cking BROKE.
But he's not. He'll be fine. He'll always be fine.
It's hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk's net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
He's not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he's not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.
Yeah he personally isn’t broke and no matter how much debt Twitter racks up, it can’t put him in the red. That’s just how corporations work.
Still, he borrowed that $44bil and will have to face the people who lent it to him. Apparent the service on that debt is already equal to Twitter’s total operating expenses. That’s real money.
WhY he’s lost by this is prestige. He lost the court case and demonstrably got taken to the cleaners. He hasn’t been able to turn the business around and in fact has made it worse. And his creditors are left holding the bag. That’s some real humiliation for someone like him.
I have to believe that those who gave him that loan knew exactly the kind of shit show he would bring to Twitter and that was their goal - to make it wholly less relevant and less able to undermine them.
Maybe to make it more conservative friendly. I can’t believe capitalists feared Twitter’ great journalistic power to hold them to account. But you’re right.
@scarabic I was also thinking about foreign illiberal governments
Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let's say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let's say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.
Negative cash flow means they are spending more than they are earning.
It doesn't mean they don't have money already.
Bye Twitter, you will not be missed.
Luxury? What luxury, twitter is just a feed of memes, short remarks and porn What feature could they possibly have held back???
The way he talks is so fucking stupid. He's trying so hard to be a "tech bro". You'd think money would give someone some amount of self confidence, but clearly not.
Guys! Guys! Don't you get it? He's "Winning"! /s
Oh it’s from Elon’s mouth. Don’t believe it, he’s trying to short twitter still
Pretty sure he can't do that since it's not publicly traded anymore
The other thing, Threads, just came out. I guess they offered promos.
I don't think Threads has ads yet.
*ThreADs
Hahaha good one!
No, they're going to start with some kind of sponsored post arrangement similar to Instagram's, iirc, and put in ads when they get a bit bigger.
What's the difference between "sponsored post" and "ads"?
@ramjambamalam
@Bozicus @technology
Symantecs, probably tax law too.
Advertisers don’t want to advertise on Twitter anymore even after Elon fired all the talent and essentially drove the platform into the ground? Noooooo…
Only 50 more percent left to go!
Was it ever positive?
Nope
Yes and no. It wasn't positive because they didn't want to be.
It had about 2.7 billions in cash reserves at the time it got bought, for example.
I saw one of his interview where he said he doesnt care about money. May be thats why he spills all that shit on twitter. Does twitter even post their cashflow , I know its publicly traded but never saw cashflow being posted. Idk if Elon cares but We 9-5 plebs do care about money coz we got mortgage and shit , may be that why we hate all billionaires.
He doesn't care about money because he never had to be accountable for all his shit-decisions resulting in financial disasters.
True that's the beauty of being rich. What I have learnt is 9-5 plebs are really important for the economy, if all 9-5 stop working , the economy will crash but if billionaire or millionaire stops working, not much affect on economy. You see all these billionaires and millionaires control the 9-5 plebs and that's how they know they dont have to be held accountable.
Twitter is no longer publicly traded. One of the first changes Musk made upon purchase was pulling it off the market. Ostensibly so he could ruin it faster.
That's just what happens when you buy the entire company. There aren't any public shares.
Publicly traded companies must post financial statements that show all that information. There is no getting around it to be publicly traded. But they are no longer traded, so have no disclosure rules.
Big brain business time lol. Musk is fuckin dumb
Oh no! 🙃
Oh no...!
anyway...
What no government subsidies for social media?
Good
More nazis should fix the revenue issues. Advertisers love associating themselves with hated people. Advertisers hate making a profit. Forever Elone, Musk will need to share sucking dick to turn a profit. If you look on twitter you'll notice his lips are chapped.
Are you on tiktok? There's a genre of livestream where the streamer picks a controversial topic and then invites the audience to send gifts to vote for one side or the other. Of course the outcome of the vote has no effect on the world, and whether you're voting for one side or the other it's the streamer (and twitch) who get paid, but people are willing to pay good money for that little dopamine hit of seeing their side of an issue they care about win something. I feel like they're trying to turn Twitter into; a place where people pay some small monthly token to be agreed with and to feel like they're in the majority. Of course, an environment like that is almost always going to end up right wing because if Trump taught us anything it's that right wingers will buy literally anything that validates their beliefs.
That dude straight up has no fucking idea what's going on.
Maybe send another car to space. There's just not enough trash floating around.
"~50% drop in advertising revenue" Hmm... What could've caused it (?) elon (?)
Maybe if he would stop fucking ruining everything about the site...
Oh cool daily Twitter news updates are on Lemmy too. I have never had a Twitter account and I will never have a Twitter account.
I never used my account. I hate twitter. However, I love hearing about the failures of Elon Musk.
While I'm the same and agree, I'm certainly loving the drama and downfall of that toolbag.
Seriously. I didn’t join Lenny to get updates on twitter and Reddit. Apollo had a keyword filter I used to block musk trump and kanye. Desantis reddit and twitter are first on the chopping block when I get that ability.
A spokesperson for everyone who isn't a sociopathic spoiled rich kid in adult pants was quoted as saying, "Gee, that's too bad."
🤣
Only 50%? That's far from his apparent goal of destroying his company.
He’s not selling it to me well
Maybe if the remaining users that are still on twitter need to jump ship just to really set in stone the amount of user drop off they might have. That or upload tones of photos and videos to try and overload there servers.
Tons* or tonnes*
Is this even a real tweet? I cannot find the source.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/15/elon-musk-twitter-negative-cash-flow-ad-revenue-debt-load/
When I googled “twitter negative cash flow” a bunch of articles came up from today citing this tweet.
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sa=X&hl=en-us&sxsrf=AB5stBiia87TPZjDU_7S0bbo4LTY2WprSg:1689459176459&q=twitter+still+in+a+negative+cash+flow&tbm=nws&source=univ&tbo=u&ved=2ahUKEwif88zw3ZGAAxVePUQIHfuBCrsQmZ0DegQIDRAH&biw=428&bih=827&dpr=3
Awesome. I didn't doubt he was stupid enough to write it, just couldn't find it. According to article you linked ~50% might actually be closer to 89% which is extra hilarious.
The moment Threads properly implement hashtags and trending topics, Twitter is finished.
Zuckerberg doesn't even need to federate to achieve this. He got well over 100 million signups. He's good.
That were ghost account of insta
Even if its 50million ghost accounts, hes got 50 million sign ups
the whole point of a ghost account is that no one had to sign up for it, it's created automatically without the knowledge or consent of the account owner
That’s just numbers they throw out to please investors. These companies live from that, most likely a huge chunk of those were bots and forced sign ups from Instagram.
Elon did a business
who could have seen this coming?
I wonder how the revenue would have look liked if he hadn't gone out of his way to cater to right-wing nutjobs with all his might. Who knows, maybe he would've been able to turn a profit through his numerous schemes like the paid verification and such.
Muskie-baka can't figire it out. I feel obliged to help him.
Good, fuck him
Didn’t……didn’t Twitter users have the “luxury of anything else” before he showed up? Lmfao.
It's funny how he's publicly confirming that he's failing.
Nobody with more than two funcioning brain cells would not even pay a single dollar to start ads on this cesspit anymore.
keep it up guys, we've got this lmao
Hm.
I wonder if that could be due to the checks notes changes that made your platform undesirable?
Elon explaining reasons of twiter downfall
Love to see it
Good, fuck him.
Oh no!!!!
Anyway.
Yes please
Lol, lmao even
Glad to hear it, too. He hired the former ad chief from comcast and that’s a well hated company.
I blame cancel culture! The true test of a free society is that people can say whatever they want with no consequences! /s
So is this just according to musk? Because that guy is untrustworthy and stupid.
It's okay, I'm sure Elon will figure out what the problem is eventually, not sure if Big Blue Bird will still be alive by then but he might just get it!
lol I hope he loses it all. But I’m sure he’ll just find another rich loop hole to kick the can with another company. He got lucky with spaceX. Found the right people; and the right people that don’t put up with his shit.
I think we should acknowledge his strengths. Inspiring and empowering smart people to prototype something audacious is something he is very good at. He didn't get lucky with SpaceX, he did what he is good at.
What he is bad at is the next step. And because his ego doesn't allow him to step away and let somebody else do the next step:,take a prototype and turn it into a business, his companies are doomed to be just fluff.
I'm worried SpaceX will suffer the same fate under his leadership. There's no escape from a leader with bad leadership skills.
"Inspiring and empowering" aka he's rich and gonna get richer, nothing unique to the man himself. Those smart people could do leauges better out of a coperate environment - he doesn't even let non-teslas park in their parking lot as their Cali research locations. Lotta empowerment there
Like offices?
Except shitposting apparently.
But didn't Elon sack 80% of the employees?
Just a Matter of Time