A year after he bought Twitter for $44 billion, Musk thinks the company is now worth $19 billion, a 55 percent drop.
Let’s recap what he did to Twitter, I will go first:
- Changed the original name Twitter to X.
Is anyone else surprised it’s even worth that much?
A lot of journalists, politicians and influencers are really reluctant to let it go. I guess those are the ones still keeping it somewhat afloat.
It should be more publicly shamed if you keep being a part of his insanity.
It’s because no other social media platform currently meets their requirements. Other platforms either functions significantly different from twitter or it lacks the reach that a politician needs in order for it to be worth their time.
“Worth their time” ? Copy\paste the text into Mastodon. Post Done
I can empathize with the reluctance to completely jump ship but it costs nothing (both money and time) to cross post to another platform.
Last time I was on mastodon during one of the many twitter migrations there was a long post saying that people should hold of on auto-blocking people that don’t caption the images they post because new user haven’t learned the cultural rules of mastodon. Is that a thing? I don’t know, could be a particular part of mastodon, I don’t know. Point is that serious public figures have been trained to be careful when adopting new social media.
yeah but nobody uses mastodon
Hi. Nobody here 👋 I enjoy Mastodon and although nowhere near the same engagement as Shitter, I enjoy the content more. Some people like different things
That requirement is just attention whoring
It is their job to gain attention, yes. Did you think all those journalists and politicians where hobbyists or something?
It’s their jobs to be published at their places of work. Not attention whore. And how many journalists are on there anyway? What percentage of Twitter users are full time professional writers?
I bet it’s less than 1% of all traffic on that site.
I think they know how to do their jobs better than us. That is why we are talking about them and they are not talking about us.
Yeah how did all those journalists survive before twitter?! Your not convincing me of anything. Twitter is for attention whores.
Yep. I mean in the end it has no product. It’s just billboard/ad space, in the world of commerce. Sure, it’s a lot of ad space, but ad space in the digital world is also effectively endless, so the percentage still isn’t actually that relevant as it can shift in a moment’s notice.
Say… if a neonazi buys the platform and brings all his friends with him.
But beyond an office he’s not even paying for and so on, Xitter got… nothing. They have no actual product that can be liquidated, no supply chains worth any money, nothing to rent/sell out beyond said adspace. Like many digital companies they rely entirely on hype for all their perceived value.
Pretty sure it’s worth fuck all.
It was never about the money. Musk is turning a once-valuable information space into a fascist shithole. That was always the goal.
Yeah, I don’t believe that. Turning it into a fascist shit hole might have been a goal, but losing billions doing it isn’t.
He’s an arrogant fuck who wants everyone to believe he’s a genius. Blowing that much money makes him look like a moron.
He is rich enough that it literally doesn’t matter. This was “expensive” for him on paper, but hardly life changing.
Yeah it’s definitely life changing. The public sentiment over the last couple of years has gone from
“wow Elon musk is a genius who will electrify the world and get us to mars”
to
“Wow Elon Musk is a massive moron who clearly isn’t anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is”
and the more he spreads right wing conspiracy shit the worse it’s getting for him.
Let’s not even talk about the public image but the private one now- he borrowed something like $20b? from several banks to make the deal who are now saddled with the debt. They have also been discussing (publicly) selling it at a loss because they’re done with Elon. Other banks will not lend him money, ESPECIALLY with interest rates being what they are and what he’s done this last year. The time of free money (which is how he built all of his companies) and unlimited government subsidies is done and that’s the only way he’s been successful- when there’s virtually no risk.
He cannot pay his interest payments because he’s only rich on paper. He’s likely cash poor and hasn’t even been paying normal Twitter bills let alone interest payments for his $20b loan, which IIRC gains like a billion in interest every year. Dude dug himself into a hole with no way out
Sounds like he’s only a constitutional amendment away from being President of The US.
lol that would never happen, the GOP would NEVER allow anyone but natural born citizens to serve
Both of you to assume they wouldn’t change the rules to serve their purpose before changing it right back, if they even bothered at all.
I mean he’s a white male, for them he’s more American than most of the country.
This still makes him look like a moron and his image is really important to him.
Once valuable? Fuck that. Twitter has always been and always will be Jerry Springer for the Internet. It’s fun to watch some toothless hooker throw a shoe at a priest until Grandma finds out you are on their as 4chan gaslighting the priest and the hooker.
The value is pure entertainment. Anyone that takes it more seriously has not seen it for what it is.
This is why it bothers me that so many government agencies and officials use it to communicate with the public.
It’s almost as if there should be an official government service / platform specifically for that purpose. A state run Twitter. (Maybe they could use mastodon under the hood.)
If I recall correctly, some EU government bodies are doing just that! They host their own Mastodon instance.
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Even people I know who use Twitter a lot don’t think this, I’d hate to meet someone with this level of Twitter brain.
It’s obscene that someone can destroy so much value and not go bankrupt. It should not be possible.
The value only exists on paper. He halved it, he can double it. Happens all the time.
he can double it.
You must be buying all the shares you can then!
Narrator: he wasn’t
he can double it
Can he, though? Or was the worth inflated beforehand?
He absolutely paid an inflated price. It was hovering around $40/share before he put in the offer of $54/share. So he and the other investors overpaid by quite a bit.
Even without the worth inflated, can HE, though?
Let’s put this another way.
That ~25 billion, heavily absorbed by foreign investors, has bought influence on worldwide events/elections and allowed those that previously hated the platform to sabotage it internally, likely to a post-election failure.
Makes you wonder to what degree we have a “useful idiot billionaire” situation, with other interests (countries?) steering the out of control train to their benefit.
You forgot quite a significant thing when it comes to Twitter’s devalutation. Musk delisted Twitter on Nov 8 as part of his acquisition. The worth of a private company is a bit more difficult to figure out compared to the worth of a public company.
I’m sure the value will come back. Valuing X at $19B puts the value of the whole alphabet at $500B, which seems low for an established technology which has been in continuous use since before the time of the Roman Empire.
The US GDP is $24 trillion, and all the financial reports supporting that valuation use the Roman Alphabet. The Alphabet is essential to justifying the value of the entire US Economy. I think it’s reasonable to value the worth of the alphabet at 8% of GDP, which would give X a fair value of $74B.
See, haters? Elon really is a financial genius. Numbers don’t lie.
Actually, Alphabet is currently valued at 1.56 trillion dollars.
Wow X, you suck: Pull your weight! Look at how much the other letters are worth!
Come on. Obviously not all letters in the alphabet are worth the same. X is not that popular even if you take into account its different uses like ‘:x’, ‘xoxo’ or ‘xxx’. Not that many words use x and if one day it collapses and becomes unavailable you can just substitute it with ‘ks’ like ‘seks’ or ‘meksican’.
The meat of those financial reports rely on Arabic Numerals and everything is OK over there, right?
That’s the value he think it’s worth, not what someone would actually pay for it.
He doesn’t even need someone who is willing to actually pay for it. Just someone to say they will, even if they have intention to…
I don’t think it was even worth half of what he paid for it when he paid for it. Musk is a complete god damned moron. I’d be surprised if the company was even worth $19 billion when he bought it for $44 bn. And there’s no way in fuck that it’s worth $19 bn now. Absolute dogshit assessment. Not that I’m surprised, mind. It’s Musk’s assessment, after all.
He could have just donated all of that to the Signal foundation if he wanted to protect free speech.
It’s about the attention. Narcissism.
read page 83 and following pages: text messages from Elon around twitter 😂
I just read the news somewhere that they introduced two payment tiers for monthly subscription. Good luck keeping users. There’s not a single social network that charges people use. No matter how cheap.
Many of his decisions have not been good.
How many times will they reuse this image where his jaw is doing something super weird? This time it’s gotten some fancy graphics but it’s the same flipping image. I must have seen it on 10 different articles.
Probably his fillers shifting around so you might as well make fun of him, for that and his ass to head hair transplant.
Not saying you shouldn’t make fun of him. Just tired of seeing the same photo on every Musk-critical article.
It was never worth what he paid for it, and his “enlightened” changes have only made things worse in terms of value.
One big thing that must be bad for advertisers is that generally, even people without a Twitter account (I’ve never had one) generally needed to view posts from some businesses or services. So they still had people coming by and serving ads to them without an account.
But now that you cannot even see comments on a tweet and if you’re somehow able to get to a list of tweets (it usually just forces you to the login screen) you cannot get ANY useful order from it when not logged in.
Believe it or not, I think the majority of people won’t create an account with a gun to their head like this. As such, the advert revenue is already down from people like me.
Furthermore, though, I suspect businesses will eventually work out that Twitter is no longer a suitable bullhorn to use to deliver promotion information or to offer customer service, and will start to move away. That’s not going to help Twitter or their advertisers out either.
But, I don’t think he ever planned to make it profitable. I think this weird anarchy he’s iteratively implementing was what he decided to do, as soon as he was forced to finish the acquisition.
Act like a child and you get a toy, Elon.
