So it looks like the Twitter deal is going to go through at the initial terms ($44 billion). What do you think the long term ramifications are for the company?
A couple of options.
Musk tries to make it a “free speech” paradise and sinks Twitter into the ground
Musk tries to make it a “free speech” paradise, realizes he really cannot, and quietly (yeah right) just leaves it alone.
Musk realizes he doesn’t really want to lose $44 billion dollars, and just quietly (yeah right) just leaves it alone from the outset.
Personally, I’m inclined towards #1. Musk is yet another billionaire with no real talent, and really seems to believe his own hype. He’ll try to free speech it up, he’ll start taking flak from certain countries where certain types of speech are not permitted, people will start leaving as it becomes a right-wing cesspool of misinformation, and no more Twitter.
And honestly, one less social media platform is probably a good thing.
Secondary fun question:
How long until Musk unbans Trump? And will Trump return to Twitter?
I say within a week of the sale finalizing, and yes he will. Because Truth Social sucks and he has no wide audience. Trump needs more fawning sycophants to from which to steal.
If it were me, I would hate to lose 44 billion, but apparently, he can afford it. I vote for him trying to make it a free speech platform and kill it in the process. Whether that takes a year or five depends on how quickly it becomes a cesspool of right-wing misinformation. And you can bet Donald will be back as soon as he can.
I’ll believe it when the money changes hands. Right now I’m inclined to suspect he’s just trying to worm his way out of a deposition or he doesn’t have the cash and thinks he’s found a way to get out of the termination fee.
“The far left haters and losers at Google were very unfair to Trump Social. Larry Google came to my office and begged like a dog for a job. I said no! INVESTIGATE?”
The trouble for the orange shit-gibbon is that he’s sunk a lot of money into Truth Social. If he abandons it for Twitter, TS will die instantly instead of dying slowly as it’s already doing. Besides, on TS he has the power to ban dissenting voices.
Most of Musk’s wealth is in the stocks of publically traded companies. Valuing it is a matter of multiplication and addition. He will probably not actually sell the stock, but borrow against it.
Iirc, he has some partners, so he’s not on the hook for the whole 44 billion.
He can buy Twitter. Whether it’s a good idea from a business or public policy sense is another question
He was, however, having trouble with that before. That is, as I understand it, why he bowed out. He was finding it hard to borrow enough to get funding (especially after he lost his crypto money, which he had leveraged his stock against). He had a plan to do so, and that didn’t work. It’s very possible whatever new plan he has will also not work.
Sure, he technically has the ability to get the money, but it’s all based on what he’s willing to do to get access to it, and whether the people he will want to borrow from will think it worth the risk. And what holders of his other companies think.
I made the mistake before thinking this was a done deal when it was announced, and I don’t want to make that mistake again. We’ll see if it actually goes through, or if other complications arise.
I enjoy twitter, but I’ll probably leave once Elon own’s it. His support of Russia turns my stomach.
But I will miss it. I like that most people are not anonymous. I like that you can interact with people you’d likely never in a million years otherwise have the chance to.
I follow Rosanna Arquette and she was asking where everyone is going to go when Elon buys it. Maybe we should point her (and others) in this direction.
I am probably out of the loop, but I haven’t heard that Elon supports Russia. The only thing I heard about Elon and the war was him giving Starlink terminals to Ukrainians.
From here it sounds like he offered to complete the purchase IFF the lawsuit was dropped. Seems more like a gambit than a good-faith offer.
Additionally market conditions have changed a lot since April and the banks that are financing $12.5B may struggle to re-sell that debt. This link and others assert that the banks are on the hook for this financing and cannot back out.
However that is only part of the financing. Looking at the breakdown of the financing as of Jun-2022 I’m not sure if Larry Ellison is committed to his $1B support or if Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal can un-pledge his 34M Twitter shares.
Maybe the plan is to agree to buy Twitter, get the case dropped, have the financing fall through, pay the $1B fee, and hope that Twitter doesn’t sue again? It doesn’t seem like a plan that could work.
I would be shocked beyond measure if Trump has allowed a dime of his own nest egg to go into this boondoggle. His real talent, all along, has been finding people he can con into putting their money into his projects; he says he’s giving them the opportunity to join his effort, which will of course be successful because of the power of his brand, but in reality he uses outside funding to eliminate his own risk. If the project works, he siphons out his profits. If it doesn’t, he walks away and leaves other people holding the bag. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Truth Social will be the same, and Trump will happily jump ship for Twitter the first chance he gets.
Trump will go where the biggest audience is. There were complaints for a long time that he wasn’t using Truth Social himself - probably because the small audience would make him look like a loser. He basically got shamed into using his own service.
The risk for Musk and Twitter is that in my opinion it doesn’t have nearly the audience ‘lock in’ as something like Facebook does. A very small number of Twitter users actually post there. Over 70% of Twitter users have never posted a single tweet. It seems to attract posters that are mostly media types, academics, politicians, activists and bots. They aren’t part of large family and friend networks like facebook’s user base, and they could easily move to a new platform and take all the lurkers with them. Musk has a fine line to walk.
I do think there are likely more than 5% bots on the platform. I’ve been regularly checking comments that seem a little too boilerplate, and most of the time they are from accounts that have very sketchy things about them, such as having been created in the last few months yet having many thousands of tweets.
Even if bots only make up 5% of the user base, the frequency of bot postings probably means they make up a hell of a lot more in traffic. The risk for Musk is that if he kills all the bots he might make Twitter look much less active and perpetuate the notion that it’s failing under his ownership.
The bots are also good at driving traffic, because they are calibrated to get people to respond.
What they are saying is that Twitter is not dropping the lawsuit unti the firm is bought: once it is purchased, Elon can drop it himself, but until then they will keep it going.
Now Elon is trying to spin this as “Twitter doesn’t want to make the agreement”, but they do, they are just not going into this with no leverage.
I’ve mentioned this before, but a huge amount of Twitter postings are sports-related. This past Sunday, for example, the top 25 trending items in the US all had to do with the NFL. And another large chunk is related to pop culture, especially TV and music. Although politics seems to play an important role whenever people talk about Twitter, actual political discussion is a much smaller part of the conversation on the platform than those other two areas.
