Elon Musk

its kinda true but also if twitter ceased to exist everything would be ok

I see it now.. this is The Producers of social media

I think it's quite possible that the only thing on Musk's mind right now is finding a way to make his money back, future of Twitter be damned, like a one-man private equity group.

contrast elon trying to deny people their severance with how stripe is handling its layoffs https://stripe.com/en-gb-nl/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email-to-stripe-employees

There are roughly 75 million cable subscribers in the US, which is about equal to the numbers of supposed US Twitter users. The argument that something like that should be treated as a utility is absurd.

we can treat it as a utility if we want

It’s not about the direct users though, it’s about how many things start there and spread to conventional media. Its influence surpasses its popularity and makes it problematic to have in the hands of a single person.

I mean it seems like he is mostly going to wreck it, which would be fine, but in principle

“this mind rot is so influential on the other mind rot, surely we must make it a public utility “

its a reasonable argument

however i do think twitter was kinda toast before musk ever got ahold of it and now its really toast

He's going to turn it into some kind of unusable myspace junk and then sell it off for like $15 million or something. He's probably the only person in the world who could afford to burn through $44 billion, and he's going to do it.

thats my guess too

I wonder if that will deflate the cult of musk that has emerged on the right. Some ppl are very worshipful in how they talk about this guy

what could really deflate it is if he doesnt let them organize murders on his site

Well the oath keepers and such, yes. But even your average rogan listener sees him as a brilliant visionary

If the Cult of Trump is any indication, every failure will only boost his standing among the faithful.

Kanye seems to have actually lost his fans though.

It’s very hard to say how these things shake out.

i mean joe rogan spread the litter boxes in classrooms conspiracy the other day, this shit is way off the rails

Would replacing toilets with litter boxes at twitter save money on water? Could be a good idea

But yeah i get your point. The whole right wing and alt media space in america is extremely radical and irresponsible. These are the people who seem to love elon, even though i don’t think right wingers drive electric cars…

theres another problem for him

there's definitely a right wing type that drives teslas, i know a guy through work who is exactly that

The fail whale! Hahah this whole situ gets more fkn hilarious every 12 hours or so. Except the staff layoffs part, that isn't funny.

there is def a conservative ev driver but i wouldnt say its the most common guy

Lmao at charging $8 for a check mark with no authentication the day before the us elections. What could go wrong.

they're free market libertarian types who think elon is a genius and are also getting socially conservative as they age

i know ive said it before itt but elon used to have a just perfect public image and he threw it in the trash for what to post some memes

one theory i heard was that elon went right in order to court that demo to buy teslas cause he used up all the liberals by selling them shitty cars, i do not think thats true but its a nice theory anyway

True

once upon a time only a different set of weird nerds understood this meme now everybody does. pic.twitter.com/AoR763T1oB

— Atrios (@Atrios) November 3, 2022

What's strange is that there are a lot fewer weird nerds in my mentions when I criticize Musk than there were before he bought Twitter.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 3, 2022

one theory i heard was that elon went right in order to court that demo to buy teslas cause he used up all the liberals by selling them shitty cars, i do not think thats true but its a nice theory anyway

― lag∞n, Thursday, November 3, 2022 9:05 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah this strategy is too coherent for elon

i don’t think right wingers drive electric cars…

The Trumpy neighbor across the alley from me drives a plug-in hybrid and just got solar.

sales are already pretty even (you have to be rich enough to buy a Tesla in the first place and thus...) but Elon's not hurting Tesla as a brand with conservatives
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/03/cars/tesla-buyer-politics/index.html

Lol pic.twitter.com/fIpbLlis0k

— Citizen Shane (@ShaneSheehy) November 1, 2022

repost this one Elon

https://i.imgur.com/4o87E2W.jpg

Employees in Twitter just got an email from their bosses saying layoffs are coming tomorrow.

Those who are staying will get a note tomorrow in their work email. Those who are let go will get an email sent to their personal address.

Slot machine-style layoffs.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 4, 2022

Lol Twitter offices closed to ensure safety. This is like being ghosted by your job.

holy shit they're firing coders based on how many lines of code they wrote

an idiot like me wouldve stayed on for sure lmao

has any big company ever fired half its workers WITHOUT immediately going into a death spiral? like within the last 40 years

Why do people think Twitter isn’t worth 45 billion? Recall, Microsoft is currently acquiring Blizzard for 68.7 billion! A handful of companies could and would make that deal. The trickiest bit is getting regulatory approval but I feel like that becomes a lot easier if regulators perceive Musk as sinking the ship.

Blizzard makes a lot of money though don't they

I don't really know anything about coding, but that doesn't seem like the best performance metric?

2021 Twitter revenue was 5 billion. 2021 Blizzard revenue was 8 billion. They both make a lot of money!

microsoft only bought blizzard because they love video games

I kind of think the opposite — people love believing that rich people they have political disagreements with are secretly unimpressive morons, but even if Musk’s Twitter investment goes to $0 he’s still had a tremendous world-changing career with impressive achievements. https://t.co/Jf08I17my7

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 4, 2022

Ah see, Mr. Yglesias proves himself thoroughly wrong by being an openly unimpressive moron.

If cost monitoring (or lack thereof) is what I think it’s like, laying off even half a data science department is going to stop hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in random, non-intersecting experiments in figuring out user stats of whatever per month

I haven’t found a company yet who has figured out how to do this intelligently at scale it’s all “gpu machine go brrrrrr”

Why do people think Twitter isn’t worth 45 billion? Recall, Microsoft is currently acquiring Blizzard for 68.7 billion! A handful of companies could and would make that deal. The trickiest bit is getting regulatory approval but I feel like that becomes a lot easier if regulators perceive Musk as sinking the ship.

― Allen (etaeoe), Thursday, November 3, 2022 10:42 PM (yesterday)

twitter's peer companies (meta, snap, goog (via youtube)) are down ~50-80% since april, when elon made his offer. what's sort of neat is that because of musk's lawsuit, you can see what the market thought twitter was worth when they thought the deal would be renegotiated or wouldn't close entirely - and that number wasn't 44 billion! now, noone's saying it won't be worth 44 billion someday in the future, but my personal take is that if that ever happens, it will be due to some rising-tide-floats-all-boats forces such as a return to a ZIRP environment and the exuberance/frothiness of 2020/2021... and that's only if musk hasn't run it into the ground by then!

fyi, activision posted $2.7 billion in profits for 2021, while twitter posted $221 million in losses. so there's part of your answer? also, activision is the one that faces regulatory scrutiny here (via microsoft already being heavy in the gaming business / needing antitrust approval globally), not musk (twitter is not synergistic with electric vehicles nor is it synergistic with launch rockets, although maybe musk thinks one day it could be?). also, the deal already closed so there's not really any more regulatory risk!

Wait so there’s no verification of who is paying for a blue check? Isn’t the entire value of having a blue check is that the person behind it is verified? So if anyone can pay for it, and it no longer means you are verified, what is the value? Why would anyone get a blue check? Just hoping that some dumb people who somehow hadn’t heard about the new blue check policy will think you are the real Joe Biden or something?