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.
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.
Honestly it's probably not... Estimates aside, who would even want to buy Twitter in its current incarnation?
It still has a big enough user base and brand recognition that they could put things back on course if they really went for it. The only permanent damage is the brain drain from firing a lot of people that has experience in running twitter.
The only permanent damage is the brain drain from firing a lot of people that has experience in running twitter.
That's like saying "he suffered no permanent damage except the removal of his spine"
Brand recognition? That's ironic. The Twitter brand had recognition. But you can't say X, you have to say "X, formerly Twitter."
Otherwise you're right, of course, But I can't see it being resurrected.
Yes, twitter is the brand. The first action of a sane buyer would be to put the bird logo back. 20 billions of its current value comes from the fact that they still own that name.
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.
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?
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.
Don’t forget him allowing all the banned Neo-Nazis back on! Advertisers just loved that.
Bring back shadowbanning.
Uses user data to train AI models.
Limits replies to verified users only…
Elon has made so many terrible changes to Twitter. I’m happy to be out and migrate to Mastodon and WireMin since last December. Using Mastodon to track up to date news and WireMin to stay connected with a few friends who also left Twitter.
Now I just look at Twitter like it’s the house burning down across the street.
'Freedom of Speech Not Reach', I was like isn't the same thing with Shadowbanning? It's so disgusting that he keeps claiming Twitter is the place for online Freedom of Speech but look at what he did.
Controlling the narrative is why he bought it.
44 billion is chump change to him. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find his sole motive was to silence critics now that he got outed as a massive douche.
I rememy when i could call him a massive douche and a faux-engineer and people would pile on as though he actually built the cars himself. (Fact: he’s not a Tesla founder. He bought Tesla. And made them call him a founder.)
He didn’t want to buy it, remember? A court forced him after he set wheels in motion as “le epic trolololo” and now that he was forced to buy it, he and his authoritarian backers figure they might as well tank it in order to combat the “woke mind virus” aka people waking up to the feudal lords of late-stage capitalism keeping the scales tipped in their favor eternally.
The worst thing he did was change the name. I mean, everyone knew twitter. Now you have to qualify it with "Musk's X"
I just call it Twitter.
Now it's shitter™.
i believe the full name is
“the company formerly known as Twitter aka Birdsite, Xitter pronounced Shitter aka X”
While true, I prefer not to dedicate the time to Musk it'd take to type that out.
...also, the guy deliberately misgenders his kid and gets upset when people mislabel the platform he's burning to the ground, so do with that what you will.
X (formerly known as Twitter)
"X, the social networking website formerly known as Twitter".
Maybe we should call it TSNWFKAT, like Prince did for a bit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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