Elon Musk Buys Twitter

There's $44B down the shitter.  It'll be worth dog crap in a year.

And, as a privately-held company now, I believe they can be sued?

I've never understood the fascination with Twitter. I mean, I understand that it currently has strong influence over the public, but I don't understand why. I have never been inclined to attach importance or significance to anything that is mentioned there. I don't have a Twitter account, have never had one, and have never been tempted to get one.

Well, neither you or I but Twatter does have 206 million subscribers.  A good percentage of them are the sort of lazy half-witted dimbulbs to whom "user-created content" appeals.  A good percentage of them get all their news and knowledge of current events exclusively from that platform.

In other words, Elon Musk now holds enormous power over millions of minds.  What could possibly go wrong???

I'm not so worried, actually, about Musk's influence over the content of Twitter.  He'd be hard-pressed to do a worse job than the current corporate board.

When I said his investment will lose almost all its value, that's because Musk is an entrepreneur with a miserable record as a manager.  He's in way over his head with this purchase. If he opens the platform up to right-wing zealots like Trump and Jones and Taylor-Greene, he'll lose a substantial portion of his user base.  And the Trumpnuts have proven with the abject failures of their various "alternative news outlets" that they're not interested in broadcasting to each other.  If they can't rile up progressives they're not interested.

And if Musk wields too heavy a hand in trying to change the corporate culture, he'll lose all the talent behind the technology.  Employees will flee in droves, and some progressive venture capitalist will scoop them up and create a competing platform.

Either way, I don't think Musk has the demeanor to run a successful user-centric business.  He's too stubborn, too used to getting his own way, too egotistical.  He'll be bankrupt, tied up in court and obscured by the dust of everyone leaving.

If Perjury Taylor-Greene starts posting big-time, the sane people will be leaving like wildebeest during the great migration.

Tracking tweets about leaving Twitter (Map courtesy of betonline.ag)

So... if only the toothless Bubbas remain, will they stick around to poke each other in the eye?  History says no.

Wikipedia wrote:

The Truth Social platform has suffered from severe and persistent scaling problems from the outset, limiting the platform's growth.[7][8]

In early March 2022, multiple sources reported that Truth Social usage remained low, with Trump himself not having posted to his account since his first message two weeks earlier, with his account only having 140,000 followers—less than 0.2% of the 90 million followers he had on Twitter before his account was banned.[45][7] The Daily Dot reported that the Truth Social iPhone app had fallen from the #1 slot for downloads on the Apple App Store to #84.[64] The Daily Beast reported that Trump was dissatisfied with the social network's progress.[8][2]

At the end of March 2022, TheWrap reported that weekly installations of the Truth Social app had fallen from 872,000 in its launch week to around 60,000 per week, a reduction of over 90%. Visits to truthsocial.com had also fallen, from 6 million per week to 1.9 million. According to Sensor Tower, Truth Social has been downloaded 1.2 million times.[65] Bloomberg reported that shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) had fallen 31% from the time of the app's launch in late February[66] and 64% from its all-time high.[67]

Trump is not an active user of the site. As of early April 2022, his official account (which made the platform's first post on February 16) had not posted again.[37]

In early April 2022, Business Insider described Truth Social as "like a conservative ghost town that had been overrun by bots".[68] The network is only available on ios, to users in the United States. A U.S.-based reporter for the BBC attempted to sign up in early April and was placed on a wait list with about 1.4 million requests ahead of him.[69]

On April 4, it was reported that Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, the platform's chief of technology and chief of product development respectively, had left the company.[70][71] A report in The Washington Post stated that Truth Social was "falling apart", with problems mounting on multiple fronts.[72] A Guardian article compared Truth Social with Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka.

Axios also reported that there were official-looking accounts for @FoxNews, @NFL, @FoxSports, @ESPN and other brands, with legitimate-appearing links and logos, which had not been created by the named entities.

Here are some of the things Musk promised to do with his immense wealth, before deciding getting The Donald back on Twitter was more important.

Quote :

Of the world’s 2,668 billionaires, he is the billionairiest, with an estimated $242.4 billion as of Wednesday morning, according to Forbes. The next closest rich person is somewhat far behind him, although still in possession of an unimaginable sum that could probably solve at least some of mankind’s ailments on a global scale; Jeff Bezos has around $165.1 billion.

Even with that kind of obscene wealth, not everyone thought Musk would be able to pull off his hostile takeover. Like other megabillionaires, a lot of his money takes the form of illiquid stock. His unsolicited offer was on somewhat shaky ground just a week ago, until he revealed that he’d secured loans from banks including Morgan Stanley.

It appears that, when he wants to, the wannabe space explorer can summon the will to spend vast amounts of his money on what he perceives to be a benefit to society: loosening the rules on what people can post to Twitter.

If Twitter goes south, as it is widely predicted to do, Morgan Stanley could end up owning Tesla.

Which... on balance, doesn't sound like a bad thing actually.

The deal closed today, and immediately Musk fired the CEO, the CFO, the CLO and some others. His new company is bracing for 75% personnel cuts.

Good thing? Bad thing?

I really don't care. I still think he'll lose over half the customer base, making his investment worth a handful of warm dog crap. Nobody deserves it more.

Elon's having to pay out crazy mad money.

Trump says he may stay off Twitter, but I suspect the temptation to get on real social media will be too much. When he does, he'll crash the place.

If you remove the dam holding back the bilgewater, the effluent flows in.

Pretty soon, it displaces the clean water.  Any idiot could've seen this coming.

And celebrities.

And spawns competition.

Quote :

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged.  These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote

The Venn diagram between free speech, disinformation, hate speech, defamatory speech and bonkers conspiracy theories provides a thorny path to separating them. But at the same time, demonstrable falsehoods should have some warning labels in public.

As a private company now, Twitter may be freer to lie about stuff, but at the same time should be exempt from any legal protections against slander or lawsuits for causing public harm. I think Klobuchar is onto something here.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-pushes-conspiracy-theory-paul-pelosi_n_635eaa7ce4b01c1b94e78407

NoCoPilot wrote:

But at the same time, demonstrable falsehoods should have some warning labels in public.

Report on the radio this morning said that Musk is laying off the very people tasked with content moderation. How's that for forward-thinking?

Gave me an idea. Incentivize the membership to tattle on transgressive posts. Like they do in Texas with abortion, offer a monetary reward to members who forward hate speech, disinformation and threats. Create a "garbage can" account. If, say, more that 5 people forward the same post to the garbage can it is automatically deleted, without any human intervention at all.

What could possibly go wrong?

And just that fast, Musk is talking about bankruptcy.  What a fucking moron.

So, Musk closed down the procedure by which users are verified to be who they say they are, and immediately "Geo W. Bush" posted about missing killing Iraqis.

Advertisers are understandably leaving in droves.

Musk's solution? Charge $8 to users to "verify" them without really verifying them.

Look for a stampede of users out the door next.

Result: warm dog crap.  Bankruptcy for Twitter.


Musk can actually afford to throw away $44b. The market cap on Tesla is $597.62b, and its revenue is $18.76b/yr.

But, oh what GOOD he could have done with $44b....

As inevitably as night follows day.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-hardcore-deadline-twitter-workers-leave_n_6376cfd6e4b08013a8b4d498

At last a solution emerges for Elon's massive problem:

Replace all of his Twitter subscribers with chatbots!

On Quora, someone asked a dumb question about how realistic is the scenario in Atlas Shrugged. I commented that we seem to have an experiment going on in a reverse scenario. A hyper-competent leader has taken over and fired all the worker drones. According to Rand, Twitter should be becoming more successful by the minute.

I don't think it's working.

Teslas are built by robots. I don't think Twitter can work that way.

NoCoPilot wrote:

There's $44B down the shitter.  It'll be worth dog crap in a year.

It's worth 1/3 of what he paid for it, a year later. He's been hemorrhaging users and advertisers like a stabbing victim. A self-inflicted stabbing victim.

So what is Musk's solution?

Change the name. "Twitter" and now "X" and instead of "tweeting," I guess people now "x"? Instead of a retweet, you have a "re-x"?

Oh yeah. That's MUCH more intuitive than "Threads" ....

Money ≠ brains

I watched some YouTube video about the downfall of Twitter, and was reminded all over again what a bonehead move Musk made.

Ever since watching it, I've been pondering a question, and have not been able to come up with a cogent response.

Question: What "good" is served by allowing hate speech on a public forum?

Yes, "free speech only matters for speech you disagree with," but hate speech is kinda a separate category, because it is corrosive and self-encouraging. Use of the word "nigger" jumped 400x on the day after Elon bought Twitter, and has steadily climbed ever since. Free speech? Yes, haters have a platform now to encourage each other to espouse politically-incorrect views, in public, behind made-up user names.

This is good... how?

The ONLY benefit I've been able to come up with is this: by making users pay to be verified, Musk has found a way to monetize hate speech. That is good for one man and one man only.