“Fidelity is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion”
I found this funny.
Twitter was useful.
X is just useful idiots at this point.
It was never worth 44 billion USD
False, because someone paid that much for Twitter.
It was worth 44bn to it’s former owners.
So basically it is more what twitter was really worth anyway
My first thought is ‘I can’t wait for it to turn zero’ but then I realize that 79% decline from 44 billion still means it is worth 9.24 billion.
And that is still a shitload of money.
its worth comes from being able to influence world politics. Does he seem like someone who cares or needs money?
Twitter currently has $1.5 billion/year deficit which is a lot, even for Musk, to bankroll.
that brightens my day a little to hear
Source? Where is that money going?
He didn’t bilk Tesla shareholders into his huge pay package because he doesn’t care about money.
True, but that power is also diminished greatly as more and more regular users abandon the site. No eyes on the propaganda makes it worth a lot less.
Yeah I’m sure I’m not the norm but I’m actually shocked when I see companies advertising their talent’s twitter accounts on tv broadcasts. I truly can’t believe that site is still mainstream after everything that’s happened.
Idk then I look over and see trump as a presidential candidate and ugh… I guess I’m just still not comfortable/accepting of how far off the rails things have gone 🙁
And may it continue to crash and burn. It’s just 4 chan at this point.
It’s like 4chan but it didn’t know where the line was for the amount of right wing people to be on a social media and ran a marathon
he himself is worth less than that at least morally
He is a net loss for humanity is the currency is moralistic.
We be deep in the red between Trump, Bezos, this clown and many other “captains of industry”.
Idk, he popularized electric cars, it has to count for something. But yes, net loss.
I don’t have the whole context so I might be missing some things, but the whole thing looks to me like “look at how much money I have to burn and how much I don’t care”.
He didn’t even want to buy Twitter, just manipulate the stock price by talking about buying it. Dumbass signed too much paperwork and waived too many rights, though, and found himself obligated to buy it anyway. Pretty sure he tried to fight it and lost.
So now he’s trying to not burn all his money, but he’s fucking terrible at it, so he’s just becoming a laughing stock.
Exactly this. He made an offer publicly, which was accepted and legally binding. He overpaid substantially and proceeded to run the company into the ground.
Except a lot of the investor capital wasn’t his lol
We knew this was going to happen before he made the purchase.
Everyone said, the best way for Elon to keep his money was to change very little, or even take a hands-off approach.
Masnick suggested this would happen
It was that and so much worse. Moral of the story: Running a huge social media service is hard. Maybe don’t assume that because you’re a billionaire you’re the best at doing stuff.
Masnick gives 20 levels of development. Elon stopped here:
Level Two: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM!”
And that’s about it. Ex-Twitter has copyright infringement, hate speech and doesn’t give a fuck about local laws unless the law actually has teeth (Brasil, anybody?).
and then he fires trust and safety and it gets riddled and plagued with csam
I mean the people at Twitter were very happy to sell it off. Remember how they actually sued to force him to go through with the deal and succeeded in stopping him from backing out?
Even if he’d managed it as well as the prior stewards, it was always a losing business.
If the price offered is actually a good price then I think they might have some obligation to shareholders to pursue it. (Many of the people making that decision likely also being shareholders.) Like if someone offered you more than what your stuff is worth but tried to changed their mind, wouldn’t you pursue that? I don’t think that’s any sort of indicator that they thought it was a sinking ship. It’s just in their best interest to take a good deal when they get one.
I think you make a good point. But we don’t have to guess whether they thought Twitter was struggling. We know it was.
Twitter never managed to develop an online ad business that matched the scale of its influence in popular culture and society at large. Twitter has lost money in six of the eight years since its IPO.
Source: CNBC
My point is that if someone offers you a good price for what you believe you have have, you take it. If they thought it was good and they got a good price for it they’d take it. If they thought it was bad and they got a good price for it they’d take it.
Yes I did read your comment before :)
You’re saying that accepting his offer is not necessarily a statement of low confidence in their own business. I get you.
But we can’t separate the notion of it being a good price apart from its being a bad business. It was a great offer in part because the business was so poor. By all estimates he vastly overpaid.
So yes, it was a good price.
And yes, it was a bad business and yes they knew it. With no other offers on the table, they pulled out all the stops to ensure it went through. It was their and their shareholders only chance for a payday with the business as bleak as it was.
All of these things are true.
Meanwhile he is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire
I think the purchase was more about welding power than any financial gain
Now, call me crazy, but if I was optimizing for maximum welding power, I’d start with oxy acetylene and at least try a few other options. How would buying a website even be a good start?
No wonder people are making fun of him!
Hasn’t his wealth kinda flatlined lately though? X is doing terribly, Tesla is struggling a bit, I think SpaceX is at least doing well.
I don’t think he’s going to be a trillionaire any time soon.
He tried to back out, I don’t think any of this was about anything. He’s just a dick with a weird sense of humor.
First step to becoming a billionaire: start with 1 trillion
Would you not agree that he has a tool of influence with X? I see that as the main aspect of why you’d still buy twitter, even though he knew he wouldn’t earn money with that.
Masnick’s post is well put, but also a disturbing reminder of how much power nation-states can exert over the Internet.
I mean, yeah we all knew he overpaid, but losing over 75%? I didn’t expect that.
Twitter wasn’t profitable right? So most of the “value” is in the name of the product. Elon changed the name and added his signature to everything the platform was doing, completely changing the platform Twitter is. So yeah, I do get why 75% of the money is gone now.
Changing the name of one of the most valuable brands isn’t something I’d expect even him to do.
deleted by creator
The way to make it hurt is to establish a replacement that keeps discussions away from trolls and hate propaganda.
same as my GameStop shares
Musk did not buy this as an investment. He bought it to flip elections and manipulate public opinion.
Tesla is writing him a check that will cover the entire purchase price, and Saudi Arabia and Russia will pay the operating costs.
Active users are what matters; if they lost 75% of their users then I’m paying attention.
I think it’s even pettier than that. He’s the loud guy on the forum who literally bought the site so he could be admin.
Honestly, everyone needs to listen to the episode of Search Engine about Elon. It’s such a clear narrative of what happened between the Iron Man cameo and now. It’s pure hubris - someone who is very unlikable desperately hungry for love to the point where his brain bust a fuse.
I think you’re giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn’t like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure he gave an outlandish bid for Twitter to manipulate it’s stock prices when he pulled put, but he was sued into following through.
I don’t think he ever wanted to buy it, or at least he wanted to crash it’s value to come back and buy it on the cheap.
Given his unlimited resources, and the world’s worst people on speed dial, do you not think that the powers that be could have orchestrated that?
then why not buy it normally like a human from earth and instead involve this lawsuit that to make himself look like an absolute moron
If he was that competent why would he resort to openly pumping and dumping meme coins in public just prior to this stunt.
He has some dangerous strings he can pull, but that doesn’t make him a good puppet master.
Broken clock and all that
Aren’t 75% of the users Russian bots? Lol
We’ll never know since Musk is nurturing a state-funded “user”-base that will always keep their numbers inflated
If he’s trying to flip elections, he needs to at least pretend it’s being operated in good faith.
I agree 100%. Liberals retweeting how Elon is losing money is actually making him money
Didn’t he pay too much for it in the first place?
paying too much is when you buy a ubisoft game. what he did is officially the worst deal since the financial crisis.
It is amazing how some people can fail upward
Yea. He made a baseless offer before investigating. And the. Got called on it.
Honestly terrifying that they still think it is worth that much.
they still own the twitter trademark, that might be their biggest asset
Since they don’t seem to care about it, start using “tweet” for every social media post to devalue them further.
Tweets are a specific type of a microblog post you do on twitters. Have you tried tweeting, make your own twitter at https://joinmastodon.org/ today!
Which has been crashed and burned to a fraction of its value.
If someone were to buy it, ban the Nazis and get advertisers to come back it’s still salvageable, I guess. The longer Musk owns it, the bigger the chance is that it’ll become the next MySpace.
At least the MySpace guy was able to run a fun site, cash out before social media became crazy, and spend the rest of his life having fun with that money.
Trump will lose, and Musk will be holding on to a useless site that serves nothing. He’ll probably sell for a fraction of what he paid (not that it was his money in the first place), but by that point it’ll be too late. Twitter will be long dead.
I doubt the saudis will be very happy if Musk doesn’t repay them their investment. I’m surprised they haven’t threatened him into stepping down and handing their investment to someone who can properly manage a social media platform already
That’ll probably be what happens if Trump loses. Musk didn’t spend “his” money so it’s no loss, and many from the Middle East have wanted control of Twitter ever since the Arab Spring.
I think MySpace is a more likely scenario that the former already.
It’s only worth as much as anyone’s willing to pay for it. Take a look at any of these tech start ups that do something very insignificant slightly differently than their competitor. VALUATION 100 BILLION DOLLARS!
I was going to say that they could have stopped the headline at “quarter” as far as I’m concerned.
I wouldn’t be surprised if part of this remaining value is because the Japanese internet still heavily relies on it as a platform, even if the west has begun moving elsewhere.
This is the stock market, the value is set by what investors think the value could be. Mostly, they’re probably assuming people would come back if he sold it. Literally everyone knows the name Twitter.
This actually isn’t the stock market, Twitter isn’t publicly traded since being bought.
Just because it’s not publicly traded, doesn’t mean that there isn’t stock nor that there’s no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.
There’s usually defined periods for sales as well. Gives employees and other stock holders a way to cash out and get new investors in.
I understand the basics. I still find it difficult to grasp why it is worth 9 billion.
And yet, he’s still one of the what, 5 richest people on the planet?
He doesn’t give a shit, and neither should you (as nice as the schadenfreude might feel). He got something worth more to him than plain old money - an established propaganda platform, which he is using as he intended - to war monger and otherwise interfere in politics to ensure fascism progresses as fast as he can help it. The “dent” (more like a surface scratch) it put in his finances is completely invisible and irrelevant to him.
And it should be to you, too.
He is NEVER going to end up without means or power, not even fucking close, unless we take them from him, and abolish the system that encouraged and enabled him to amass them in the first place.
What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.
Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.
Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price…
Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.
Well said, after losing access to twitter it’s really hard to get information on game companies for example, since they don’t have their own blog for you to RSS and get information about the newest game updates and what not, and they only post on youtube if they have a new trailer.
A cable subscription isn’t a depreciating asset, though.
To clarify, I was thinking of the depreciating asset part as a loss of value the same way that a subscription is.
It’s a fair argument, especially given how much… entertainment he seems to derive from owning it.
The average family’s cable subscription doesn’t cost 20% of their net worth.
I think the average family’s net worth is a negative number, so you’re technically right.
Yeah a lot of people miss the fact that the play for Twitter was never about money, but control. Owning one of the most popular social medias makes it easy to spread propaganda and amplify your voice.
Lots of people spout this conspiracy theory, but Ive yet to hear a good reason why he had to be sued into making the purchase (after making price manipulating statements) if it was some sinister plan.
Far more likely he’s just a fuck up.
Fucked up then adapted musk is a welpling but like every rich WASP be it from England or its colonies he is weirdly adaptable. Which is why the most effective method of WASP removal is via flamethrower.
Not only that, but the folks who helped bankroll him saw what social media could do to organize protests and evade censorship and wanted to reduce its power. The Saudis saw the Arab Spring and shit their collective thobe.
He’s the actual richest man on the planet with a net worth of a quarter of a trillion dollars. The next richest person on the planet is Jeff Bezos with $197B
And I’ll never own a house, yay
Thanks, that’s one race I definitely don’t keep up to date on. All billionaires need to cease to exist.
PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX been pretty big successes. But Twitter is a real fuckup for him. It shows that his judgment and temperament and perfect boy genius mystique have all jumped the shark in a big way.
But Twitter is a real fuckup for him
Except it clearly fucking isn’t, it’s doing exactly what he bought it for, including convincing people like you to feel sympathy for him and his “loss”, which is equal parts hilarious and really fucking sad. You’re looking at his life from the point of view of a poor person, something he never was and never will be, yet he’s still so easily manipulated you in to feeling bad for him (and the billions he’s lost, leaving him… still the motherfucking richest person on the planet), and even fucking (think you) relate to him and the idea that he can “fail” just like you can, using you as a living breathing mouthpiece to make his life easier. Not yours.
perfect boy genius mystique
I just threw up a little in my mouth, thanks.
I don’t know who you’re talking to. I have no pity for the man and don’t relate to him. I don’t have to argue with you over whether Tesla and SpaceX have been successful businesses because those are objective facts. It’s also pretty idiotic to deny that years ago, he had a boy genius aura about him - investors still throw billions at that image. Sorry it makes you throw up, especially because you already appear to be absolutely choking on Elon hate. I despise the man but I’m not slobbering all over myself with jealous disdain as you sound to be.
Posts about value are ads. Stop give exposure to this guy or his companies
