Elon Musk Buys Twitter

[Draco-Onis]

In other news Musk plans on building his own plantation I mean town.

Elon Musk is planning to build his own town

I might be wrong but I can't remember any instance of companies or rich guys doing this and it not going to complete shit. I know Disney has made a few bad attempts other worse examples were overseas.

[Breccia]

I can't remember any instance of companies or rich guys doing this

Rapture.

Which is highly appropriate, because Twitter is also underwater.

Twitter Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the company had "a shot" at being cash flow-positive next quarter, as the social media platform has been aggressively cutting costs.

Musk, speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference that was webcast, said it was "startling" how poorly Twitter managed to make money off its messaging service.

The company has reduced its non-debt expenditures to $1.5 billion from a projected $4.5 billion in 2023, helped by cutting its cloud services bill by 40% and closing one data center, Musk said. Twitter has also laid off thousands of employees.

Musk, who is also CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc, acquired Twitter for $44 billion in October. The company also faces annual interest payments of about $1.5 billion as a result of the debt it took on in the take-private deal, Musk said.

He added that Twitter has been hit by a "massive decline in advertising," some of which he said was due to the cyclical nature of ad spending and some of which was "political."

For the record, it's only political if you use the term "leader of the Republican Party" instead of "person who blatantly defiled the rules, but we kept him on anyhow". Or "insurrectionist" I suppose.

Musk said in reference to Monday's outage that what had been intended as a small change to 1% of users ended up being a "catastrophic" change for all. He added that engineers were doing a lot of "clean up" in general of the Twitter software code.

Concerns over Twitter's stability have been widespread since the Musk deal. Among the mass exodus were many engineers who were responsible for fixing and preventing service outages, sources told Reuters.

The billionaire said he expected it would take a few years to build a management team at Twitter. Musk, who has faced scrutiny from Tesla investors about the amount of time he spends running the social media platform, had previously said the end of this year would be "good timing" to find a new chief executive to run Twitter.

He also reiterated his plans to introduce payments on Twitter, and said he envisions users could eventually send money to each other with one click.

"I think it's possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world," he said.

Just a heads-up: paying $8/month or whatever to access this feature, then a tithe from each, is all but assured. In other words, it's possible, but it won't happen.

The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that European Union regulators told Musk to hire more content moderators at Twitter in order to comply with an upcoming law.

Musk said at Tuesday's Morgan Stanley event that both Democrats and Republicans now trust Twitter to the same degree. The platform had 253 million daily active users that were "monetizable" in the fourth quarter, according to a slide displayed during the webcast.

Musk said Twitter currently earns 5 to 6 cents per hour with users spending a combined "130 million hours of their time per day" on the platform. He said the company could increase it to 15 to 20 cents.

Oddly enough, that math literally works out to "let me put my two cents in".

I don't know specifically how Musk means to triple income per person during outages, layoffs, service cuts and paid accounts. In fact, I think he's just outright lying to investors. If my amateur ass can spot that, professional investors will also. If I'm wrong, well, shame on me I guess, but I don't think it's realistic for Musk to triple income per person (if that happens) without also losing people due to the influx of ads and charges.

Meaning, I don't think he's going to increase total revenue, and I don't think he's going to make all his payments. THe last 184 pages have more or less pointed in that direction anyhow, so it's not like I'm predicting something unheard of.

[Paranoid Android]

Taibbi says the Twitter files are bigger than anything he's covered in his career, including the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1...X6ds8LP5Q&s=19

Yes Matt, more people were affected by Twitter than 2008 housing crisis and the almost Great Depression.

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1...X6ds8LP5Q&s=19

Yes Matt, more people were affected by Twitter than 2008 housing crisis and the almost Great Depression.

rofl, see this is the kinda shit where conservatives go, "HES THE ONLY ONE BOLD ENOUGH AND BRAVE ENOUGH TO SPEAK THE TRUTH" meanwhile literally every journalist in the world is doing the "Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?" meme and modern historians slamming the heads into the wall in the hopes they can induce short-term memory loss from what the absolute fuck they just read.

[postman1782]

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1...X6ds8LP5Q&s=19

Yes Matt, more people were affected by Twitter than 2008 housing crisis and the almost Great Depression.

What's really funny is, that nothing he has posted or testified about, made anyone look bad but Elon Musk, the Trump Administration, or him. It didn't hurt the media, it didn't hurt Democrats, and it definitely didn't hurt Biden as they had nothing to do with it.

[Flarelaine]

Did he? I maybe mistaken but I think Edison basically just stole from smarter people or "improved" the design and buried them using his family connection, copyright and money some he allegedly had killed by his goons. The inventors of most of the things he claimed for himself ended up dying broke and relatively unknown or had "accidents".

Edison's name is registered on 1093 patents and some of those are from before he was rich and famous enough to suppress others; inventing stuff is how he became rich and famous. Obviously, not all of these were groudbreaking new concepts, but finding better ways to do (or make) something also counts as invention.

[Draco-Onis]

Edison's name is registered on 1093 patents and some of those are from before he was rich and famous enough to suppress others; inventing stuff is how he became rich and famous. Obviously, not all of these were groudbreaking new concepts, but finding better ways to do (or make) something also counts as invention.

That number was at the time of his death, I couldn't find any indication that he had those patents when he was relatively unknown.

[Rasulis]

He also reiterated his plans to introduce payments on Twitter, and said he envisions users could eventually send money to each other with one click.

"I think it's possible to become the biggest financial institution in the world," he said.

Basically, he wants to compete with Meta Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay?

He needs to hurry up. Because the clock is ticking. Meta just confirmed that it is launching its own text-based social network similar to Twitter. Code name "P92." It will be decentralized and use the same protocol that powers Mastodon, known as ActivityPub. Users will be able to sign into "P92" with their Instagram logins. The same Instagram that has 2.35 billion active users as of 2023.

[LilSaihah]

Basically, he wants to compete with Meta Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay?

He needs to hurry up. Because the clock is ticking. Meta just confirmed that it is launching its own text-based social network similar to Twitter. Code name "P92." It will be decentralized and use the same protocol that powers Mastodon, known as ActivityPub. Users will be able to sign into "P92" with their Instagram logins. The same Instagram that has 2.35 billion active users as of 2023.

Honestly this comparison really strikes me as apples-to-oranges.

Twitter adding a payment platform to its portfolio seems like it does two things; it serves a native population that seems to actually quite like Twitter (artists) and opens a new market for Twitter, which'd be crowdfunding. Crowdfunding along with Elon's laissez faire attitude towards censorship looks like easy money to me, and he has the capacity to loss-lead against other crowdfunding platforms.

Meta making a Twitter clone doesn't make much sense to me. I don't know how they're going to monetize it, other than advertising, and I don't see how that would generate more than what they get from Instagram. There's also the elephant in the room of Meta already owning Facebook, and Twitter's fundamental premise has always been "Facebook, except you can only post 144 characters at a time". There are other problems with it, like how much of the audience will actually cross over from Instagram. I suspect that Meta's fundamental problem is not user count, but monetization, and I don't know how another platform solves that problem.

They also strike me as two different moves, and the list of payment options you use really gives me that smell. Twitter's always been a relatively small dog compared to the giants of Apple, Google and Meta, and this is a step-up in capacity that brings Twitter up to meet that capacity.

Maybe I'm being way too kind to Twitter; even if he has plans, plans are not reality, and Elon likes running his mouth. I know I'm not being too mean to Meta, seeing as its pissed away more than a quarter of its value on Zuckerberg's pet VR project.

[Breccia]

Basically, he wants to compete with Meta Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay?

Yes.

He needs to hurry up.

Yes...but it might also be too late. I could be projecting, but a lot of people like picking something they're okay with and sticking with it. It's why McDonalds sells so well. Getting someone to swap from, or add to, their existing ways of transferring money has a fair amount of inertia against it already. I don't think adding such a system will bring in customers. I really don't think adding such a system with a monthly fee will bring in customers. And Twitter has been making the news for outages.

I also agree with @LilSaihah in that Musk might not have anything other than improvised words at this point. I think his quarterly earninggs are down and he needs investors to make ends meet. I also think his issues are legion and that promising a bunch of new things, when he hasn't finished solving the old things he promised to fix, won't work. Are there really investors saying "well I see traffic is down, advertising is down, he's taking a bunch of controversial stances which are bad for business even if I agree with them, and the servers are still ridden with bots. But he added a dollar-store Venmo, so now I'm in!"

EDIT: Correction: said he'll add a dollar-store Venmo.

[Ivanstone]

Edison's name is registered on 1093 patents and some of those are from before he was rich and famous enough to suppress others; inventing stuff is how he became rich and famous. Obviously, not all of these were groudbreaking new concepts, but finding better ways to do (or make) something also counts as invention.

Edison's first useful invention was the Quadruplex Telegraph. Diplex and Duplex systems already existed but Edison managed to improve the idea. After getting payed for this device he established Menlo Park. Anything invented afterwards could arguably be attributed to his employees.

[Breccia]

Trump's ability to reward his cronies is clearly running out, and they know it. Steve Bannon is going after Elon Musk in an attempt to be entitled to the few crumbs left off Trump's plate.

Former White House strategist Steve Bannon has called Tesla founder Elon Musk "a complete phoney" and accused him of being in hock to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Bannon made the comment on the Tim Pool Daily Show podcast after Musk tweeted that he was "open to the idea" of acquiring Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). The tech lender went under on Friday, stranding billions of dollars of investors' and companies' money, in the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

Amid the chaos of the bank's collapse, Min-Liang Tan, CEO of Singaporean technology company Razer, wrote on Twitter that Musk should consider buying SVB and turning it into a digital bank. Musk retweeted the message, adding, "I'm open to the idea."

When asked for his reaction, Bannon said that Twitter, which Musk bought for $44 billion in October 2022, had blocked "anti-CCP" voices. He accused the social-media platform's CEO of being "owned by the Chinese Communist Party."

Arguing that Tesla was the only thing of Musk's "of real value," Bannon said "he uses it for margin loans. He sells the stock. The Shanghai joint venture is a hundred percent controlled by the CCP.

"This is why he never goes after the CCP," added Bannon, "This is when they had the protest. They had the protest about the lockdowns of COVID. He will not do it.

"Elon Musk is a total and complete phoney," Bannon said. "He is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Chinese Communist Party."

Well, I guess the Trump supporters in these forums (and elsewhere) will have to decide which is the case: ally of Trump Steve Bannon is lying about Elon Musk, in public, on purpose -- or ally of Trump Elon Musk is a Chinese asset, and therefore so is Twitter.

Either way, Trump sure does keep interesting allies, doesn't he?

[Elder Millennial]

If my amateur ass can spot that, professional investors will also.

I think you're VASTLY overestimating the "professional investors".

[Cthulhu 2020]

So once again, everyone's "for you" is absolutely fucked to hell. Mine and most of my friend's timelines are filled with transphobes, MAGAts, and pedo loli nazi vtuber bullshit crying that their fetish is okay "because it's anime girls and they're fake".

[ringpriest]

I think you're VASTLY overestimating the "professional investors".

A large segment of "professional investors" operate on the basis of "the other investor must have done his due diligence, so I don't need to".

That can still kill a company's value quickly, though. There will be a lot of after-the-fact back-patting and excuse-making ("I knew the fundamentals were unsound!" and "Market capitalization over the last quarter was moving in an unfavorable direction.") but the real process is often "all the other fish in the school were going somewhere else, so I did, too".

[Rasulis]

Elon Musk mocks Zuckerberg, calls him ‘copy cat’ for planning to launch Twitter-rival

Yep. He is worried. Twitter won't be the first company bankrupted by Facebook. Citizen Zuck may look like a dork. However, he is a ruthless dork.

[jonnysensible]

Elon Musk mocks Zuckerberg, calls him ‘copy cat’ for planning to launch Twitter-rival

Yep. He is worried. Twitter won't be the first company bankrupted by Facebook. Citizen Zuck may look like a dork. However, he is a ruthless dork.

im always impressed by zuckerbergs lack of innovation. Never been able to create anything since facebook and it was a rip off already.

[Rasulis]

im always impressed by zuckerbergs lack of innovation. Never been able to create anything since facebook and it was a rip off already.

It's not about who has the most original ideas. It's about who executes them better.

[Cthulhu 2020]

It's not about who has the most original ideas. It's about who executes them better.

Pretty much. Some of the most popular products on the market throughout US history weren't the originals, they just iterated better than their creators.

Ten bucks says Elom is going to try to get Zuck bogged down in some giant court case about copyright infringement on twitter. Because nothing says Elon Musk like taking someone else's invention, claiming it's your own, and then bogging down competitors in copyright lawsuits til they fold due to heavy legal fees.

[Breccia]

Ten bucks says Elom is going to try to get Zuck bogged down

I hope you're right, because it's a legal battle he can't possibly win. Nobody has the copyright on "use the internet to message people" etc.

Incidentally, apparently Musk heard about Bannon calling him owned by the Chinese Communist Party.

I used to think Bannon was brilliant & evil, but now I see I was incorrect about the first part.

-- attributed to Musk