I’ve run into these sites and read people talking about it, but they’re usually quite small. What’s the largest few sites you can think of?
Most recent was some major American newspaper site. Can’t remember which. LA Times or Chicago Tribune or something. I’d have to check.
Unfortunately:
Crazy hypothetical, here… But if, let’s say, Musk had decided that Twitter, with its context-free soundbites and thought-free slogans, represented a clear danger to humanity, and that it needed to be destroyed at all costs…
Would what he would do in that hypothetical be in any way distinguishable from what he’s actually doing?
Well, if that was the goal, the simplest thing would have been to simply shut down the website and the company after taking control. That’s not what he appears to be doing.
Yeah, but then it seems like he’d be liable for the billions he’s pissing away. If he just runs the company into the ground, he’s got some plausible deniability to his creditors, at least.
I’m not saying he’s intentionally doing that, but from the outside it’s hard to see how what he’s doing really would differ from that scenario.
He wouldn’t keep saying and doing things that make him look bad. His spouting conspiracy theories and PR mismanagement harms him.
He’s a billionaire, and got that way on his own efforts. He clearly values not tarnishing his own brand. He’s also very egotistical, and doesn’t like that people mock him or think poorly of him.
And, finally, he’s just not that good of an actor.
He’s not that stupid, and he’s not that smart, either. This is not a scenario from The Producers. He’s just a real fucking asshole.
Sorry, is that not appropriate for MPSIMS?
Hehehe, I’m explicitly not saying it’s what he’s doing. I’m surely not suggesting he’s figured out a way to profit from running it into the ground.
I’m about as far away from a mod as you can get, but I’d allow it. 
The site may be starting to gradually break technically:
And for those hardcore Twitter employees staying overnight at the office:
Hmm. I thought these big companies demanded brand safety.
[MSN repost so not paywalled]
Even white nationalists need to order crap off Amazon and get a lift from Uber I guess.
I saw a paid account complain that, when they deleted some old tweets, all of their followers disappeared. I guess it could be someone who paid to badmouth Twitter and add credibility. But they seemed quite sincere, and didn’t take any swipes at Musk or anything.
Maybe the folks behind ad sales, who control what ads get shown on what tweets, were among the ones axed.
Interesting details on the buyout financing and the difficulties reselling the debt.
The whole article is behind a paywall and I have access only on a two-day lag so I can’t read the whole thing but I don’t understand what Musk is doing. Musk choosing to replace debt on Twitter’s books with debt that he would be personally liable for and secured with his own assets would seem like a terrible decision to me. I’m not sure what percentage of Twitter he even owns right now but it’s less than all of it, right? Why would he take on Twitter’s debt? His Twitter shares would benefit from some of the upside of Twitter’s reduced leverage but there would be free-riders, i.e., every other shareholder, who wouldn’t be taking on that debt and would reap the same benefit. Tesla shares would have a cloud over them. If the Tesla share price dropped, Musk’s shares could be liquidated, which could put further downward pressure on them. I just don’t understand the upside for Musk. This is throwing good money after bad. If Twitter can’t handle its debt (and with a shrinking advertiser pool, it probably can’t), the smart move is to abandon ship. Musk is instead transferring the crew and cargo from the rescue vessel to the Lusitania.
It’s also on yahoo
While the $13 billion of debt Musk took to finance the deal sits at the Twitter corporate level, any margin loans against Tesla shares would be taken by the billionaire in a personal capacity. The swap, however, could still make sense considering that Musk has a significant amount of his own money tied up in Twitter equity and given the margin loans would carry a much lower interest rate than Twitter’s unsecured debt, the people said.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-bankers-consider-tesla-025251486.html
It’s very preliminary, so it’s possible Musk has very little interest in it, but if he still thinks he can magically “fix” Twitter this would give him more time to do so before the money runs out.
This sounds like a wishful fantasy being pushed by his bankers, I suspect. They are all carrying more Twitter debt than they planned and even the 11.75% rate is too low to compensate them for the unsecured debt’s risk, which seems to be growing by the day as Twitter’s financial position deteriorates. Musk seems to be doing a lot of stupid things lately but handing a bunch of his stock over to somebody else’s creditors might be too stupid even for him. Sure, he has a lot of his money tied up in Twitter but he has even more tied up in the stock of Tesla that he owns outright. Nothing in those bankers’ proposal, as described in the article, makes much sense for Musk.
Musk could buy billions of stock from Twitter, financed by the margin loan on Tesla shares, and Twitter could use the money to retire the debt. This is slightly less stupid but it would still be Musk throwing good money after bad. Musk already knows he paid too much to get control of Twitter. Spending billions more to get some small extra bit of Twitter’s financial upside is dumb when the financial upside is looking increasingly like it will be zero.
One possible way to profitability: turn Twitter into OnlyFans.
One leaked Twitter development disappeared quickly from the news, however, and it merits more attention: the one where Twitter starts making money from porn.
On Nov. 1, the Washington Post reported that the newly Musk-owned Twitter was considering adding a feature that would allow users to charge their followers to unlock video, with the company taking a cut. According to documents obtained by the Post, the social media company saw the feature as potentially high risk because of the copyright, user-trust, and legal-compliance issues it might create. It was also clear that the feature’s most obvious use case would include charging for adult content.
serious Q:
who and why should somebody pay for porn … if its free versions are ubiquitous and … free?
and wouldn’t that taint the brand?