So it’s confirmed that the sale has gone through. I have deleted my Twitter account (not that I ever used it, I didn’t, but it was still there), my tiny voice of protest against the loathsome Elon Musk.
Whelp, i guess it’s a hostile takeover if the CEO, CFO, and other top brass are immediately fired.
I’m really annoyed, because I use Twitter a lot. If I start to get a lot of right wing political spam I’ll be enraged.
It may help to remember that Musk is going to lose billions on the deal. For one thing, the purchase price was well above what the market valued the company. Plus owning it is going to be a distraction on his management of Tesla (though perhaps that might be a good thing for Tesla).
And I’ve deleted my account.
Ditto, rarely used it. A total of 12 tweets in 6 years.
I’m not giving up on it yet, but Elon is a thin skinned fucking tool and I plan to say so on Twitter so he might ban me anyway.
Personally, I’m hoping for enough of a mass exodus that the site turns into a white elephant and he has to offload it for a lot less than he paid for it in order to satisfy the Saudi royals he borrowed from to make the purchase.
As far as people deleting accounts, I’m sure there’ll be a lot of that in the next few days. Will there be enough other people who create accounts (because Musk) to balance that? I don’t know if Twitter publishes their account numbers, but Musk will almost cetainly tweet about it if the numbers are good from his perspective.
I don’t really see any large pool of people not on Twitter to draw from. Even those complaining about Twitter being too woke or whatever tend to already have an account.
I just received a notification that today is my 12 year anniversary on twitter.
Sigh
I think I joined there right before I joined the dope. I don’t like losing things I enjoy.
I’ve really enjoyed the last couple of years in which Individual One was banned from Twitter and (amusingly) couldn’t figure out how to reach the general public in any other way. It was like when the neighbor from hell is finally evicted. I hope we don’t lose our peace and quiet again.
I have a Twitter account. It got noisy, and started notifying me every day about stuff i had no interest in. So i revoked it’s authority to notify me. And…i guess it’s still on my phone.
Maybe i should delete the account?
I’m not going to delete. I don’t want to follow the example of the MAGAs who left to go to parler or truth or whatever.
I don’t use it much. Mostly I check to see if tweets that are posted somewhere else were actually real.
Didn’t he use other people’s money to buy it? He may be an idiot but he’s not stupid.
I pretty much only use twitter if someone here links to a story on twitter. I think I have an account, I’d probably delete it if I could be bothered to try to work out the credentials, I haven’t used it in many, many years.
I can’t find a breakdown of exactly what proportion comes from where, but it is financed by personal assets, investment funds, and bank loans.
He’s personally on the hook for those assets and loans, and what obligations he has towards the investors is unknown, but they probably don’t want to see their investment wiped out.
Even if I had billions of dollars, I’d be leary of crossing the Qatar Investment Authority.
This morning NPR was talking about the fundamental disconnect between “absolute free speech” and “safe space to share ideas.”
If Musk wants any hope - even a snowball’s chance - of turning a profit on this deal, he’s going to have to continue to implement content controls. Otherwise he’s going to hemorrhage advertisers who start pulling out when their feeds are flooded with hate speech and pornography.
I deleted my account. I never really used Twitter much, so it is just to be a number in the “how many users deleted after Musk took over?” I also won’t be clicking any links to Twitter. Overall, I see Musk taking over Twitter as a probable good thing because he’ll almost certainly destroy the company. It will cost him some money, and that’s one less social media platform. Social media has largely been a terrible curse on humanity, so seeing it die is a good thing.
As an active Twitter user, I am forced to concur. The good bits are vastly outweighed by the bad. Will probably delete my account.
I heard that he was relaxing rules against abuse and harassment. How long are the content creators that people go to twitter to follow going to stay on the platform when they start getting death threats with no recourse from twitter?
Thanks for the link. Still a bit vague on some details, but it does appear as though he’s going to be personally on the hook for most of it.
Sounds like 13 billion of it is coming as loans with twitter itself as collateral. I wonder how long till it gets foreclosed and twitter is now owned by Morgan Stanley and Bank of America?
I think that if I see stories bashing Musk on twitter, I’ll click on them just to raise their relevance.