It’s stupid if you think Twitter had a viable business model prior to his purchase, which isn’t entirely clear. Less stupid if Musk is trying to promote Tesla and his other projects to right wing shitposters. Or if his initial twitter bid was a method of cashing out his Tesla stock (still a terrible move, but less dumbass).
I don’t know whether this hypothesis of mine -that Elmo is far smarter than he appears, though still a monumental screwup- would survive scrutiny. But you can’t fairly evaluate Musk without acknowledging that he is heading an organization that he was forced to purchase after he impulsively signed a binding contract that he falsely figured he could wriggle out of.
I’d be interested in looking at the evolution of Tesla Inc’s performance and demographics over the past couple of years.
More context: I don’t know whether this has been posted upthread.
Okay, but: even starting from that point, once he’s purchased it, what has he done with an eye to making it more profitable, or less unprofitable, or whatever? And — how’s he doing?
At the moment, the continuing usage of Twitter and the failure to move somewhere else, by the audience, has to have Musk beat on the idiot scale by a factor of 2. This is like all the people still backing Trump.
Musk has done an amazing job of driving Twitter into the ground. Ad revenue plummeted, and the rebranding to X will only entrench his problems. His $8 per month plan generates only a small amount of revenue.
So Musk can kiss his purchase price goodbye. But that’s a sunk cost. Musk was never going to turn around this ship: the most twitter can do is expand Tesla’s market to include conservatives who under normal circumstances would never buy an electric vehicle.
With each terrible decision by the owner, twitter has provided solid entertainment value for the past 10 months or so. $44 billion. Up in flames.
My take is that twitter won’t last another year and people will migrate to threads. Which is a shame, as Meta is a bad actor and will ensure that misinformation reigns, albeit in a more ad-friendly way. I still can’t get a Blusky account. Twitter’s old management were mostly jerks, but there’s a thin chance that they’ll reform a little. Maybe. Ah, who am I kidding? What we need is a gazillionaire like Bezos to create a for-profit Mastodon server and run with it.
The idea that Teslas are somehow a Democratic purchase is completely foreign to me. I’ve said this in another thread, but in my reality a majority of Tesla owners are actually Republican or conservative. Those also tend to be the wealthy people I know. So, in short, rich people have Teslas. That article shows a slight Democratic preference for Teslas, but not by much.
They have ALWAYS loved electric cars (now that they can own the libs by buying one).
There is no illogical argument they cannot use, no hypocritical switch in world view they will not embrace… as long as they perceive they are pissing someone else off.
Funny hypothetical: Musk really IS a genius at knowing how to manipulate people. In the future, it’s found that he did this on purpose in order to get the right wing assholes on board with saving the planet. They just needed the proper motivation - hating others.
It’s not his $44 billion. " Banks, including Morgan Stanley (MS.N) and Bank of America Corp (BAC.N), committed to provide $13 billion in debt financing.
Experts have said commitments from banks to the deal were firm and tight, limiting their ability to walk away from the contract despite the prospect that they may face major losses.
Musk’s $33.5 billion equity commitment included his 9.6% Twitter stake, which is worth $4 billion, and the $7.1 billion he had secured from equity investors, including Oracle Corp (ORCL.N) co-founder Larry Ellison and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
That had left Musk in need for an additional $22.4 billion of funds to cover the equity financing portion of the deal.
Since the co-backers were revealed, Apollo Global Management Inc (APO.N) and Sixth Street Partners have pulled their offers from the table."
“…he used a tactic called a leveraged buyout and spent $13 billion of borrowed money on the acquisition. And now Twitter—not Elon—is on the hook for that loan.”
He had Twitter buy itself. That left him with about $9 billion from his own pocket, not insubstantial, but not $44 billion.
For some things, sure. But Twitter used to serve certain roles that nothing else did, and nothing has actually provided equivalent services yet. For example, my primary use of Twitter is to follow a variety of sources on the Ukrainian war. The only equivalent source of that information is Telegram (which is where most Twitter sources actually derive their information), but that only if you speak Russian and Ukrainian. Some sources are crossposting to some of Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, but most are not. There’s a lot of inertia to overcome to migrate. Mastodon is about as likely to take over this niche as Linux is to displace Windows. Bluesky is still invite-only so far as I know, and Threads is still brand new and Zuck is only just barely preferable to Musk.
When you already have more money than you could spend in a lifetime (and your daddy had a jade mine and a private plane), does the profit motive even still apply? What’s that compared to feeding Elmo’s ego, making 420 jokes and setting piles of money on fire just to watch it burn?
Unrelated Observation: Everyone loves bacon. This is the only thing responsible for the success of Kevin Bacon. It explains why people try to get so close to him. But it also explains the success of the Bank of America Corp. (BAC.N). “Even the sound of bacon frying sounds like applause.” (Jim Gaffigan).
Assuming that is valid, do you suppose that he’ll be able to find a comparable workforce to staff it? 'Cos I don’t find it plausible that he’d foot the bill to move 1300 workers.
), especially with a lower-case “S”.
