Imagine spending 44 billion dollars to buy an unprofitable service and then announcing a year later that you are rebranding and ditching the IP you paid 44 billion dollars for. Madman genius or dude with toilet water in his cranium?
Him spending $44B on Twitter is similar to someone worth $100k spending $18k on a car or a house remodel or something. Its proportionally a decent amount of money, but it’s not gonna break him if he totally loses it all.
Oh no, they might dip severely and he’ll only have $60B or as a little as $10 billion!
His problem seems to be more cash flow. As a prominent shareholder and executive, he can’t sell large amounts of his stocks without PR and legal risk. He could do what people like Bill Gates do and sell them slowly on a set schedule, though.
he has that much in stock, he doesn’t have that much cash. he also has to make huge payments on what he borrowed to buy twitter so that may affect cashflow and then value of his other companies…
Not having that much in cash is a good way to not pay more taxes. If any of his stock is valued 1 cent less than what it’s supposed to be worth in the stock market i’m down to buy all of them.
Hold on…. You’re saying I can take out a loan for $x amount of dollars against a company I don’t own yet and buy it with that money?
Yes
I take out a mortgage for a property before I buy it and I destroy the house; the bank still comes after me for the value.
Not the same, a house can’t be a legal person, the owner is the legal person of the house. The money Musk borrowed in twitter is owed by twitter, not by Musk. To do the same with a house, you need to do it through a company.
That is possible because companies can have limited financial responsibility, meaning the money they owe are not owed by their owners.
It’s a pretty nifty arrangement, to help the rich stay rich no matter what happens.
Am I being stupid or is the game more rigged than I thought?
We are stupid for not being rich enough, and still allowing the rich unfair advantages.
Not quite. The the $33 Billion of equity Elon Musk put up junior to the $13 Billion loan.
That means that if the company starts at $44 Billion then falls to $15 Billion, then Twitter still owes $13 Billion, but Elon Musk only has $2 Billion now.
Leveraged buyouts are… well… levered. It grossly increases the risk of losing everything.
Under screenshots of his tweets it must put also one the source. With him and trump i could never understand if it was a fake edited tweet or a real deranged tweet
Every single tweet is getting attention. It’s so weird. These guys have all kinds of disorders and mental issues but the world loves their every comment. I guess we don’t have anything better to do than discuss what they are saying. Sad.
I mean, it’s worth a try… what else could have possibly caused such a steep downturn in Twitter’s fortunes since Musk took over and started enacting his policies?
This makes you wonder what their real plan is. They have everyone data, they know what people do and their preferences, they act after these not before
Twitter was in big trouble before he bought it. Stop acting like did all of the harm ! he did little of the chaos . They had huge amounts of people getting paid for doing nothing ! Thats why they pushed so hard to sell
I think you might be missing the $44 billion issue here.
Yes, Twitter was in trouble and was having issues staying anywhere this side of the black line. With free flowing capital and threats of ever increasing interest rates, the fire was absoultely in the building, no doubt.
What this donkey called Elon Musk thought would be a great idea is to build a fucking oil refinery, jet fuel distribution hub, and solid rocket fuel production plant beside the building that was on fire. Like when you burn $44B, whatever fucking debt and issues was the matter, all of that ceased being THE PROBLEM. They stayed problems no doubt, but they were no longer THE PROBLEM.
Like if I paid some person $100k/yr, 100 of those people is just $10M, a thousand of them is just $100M. That's just 0.2% of the crater that Elon just created. You could literally have a thousand people getting $100k/yr doing absolutely fuck-it-all, and you could pay them for a century, and that's just 20% of what Elon just did.
Yes, Twitter had problems. None of those problems are within the same galaxy as the problem Elon just made.
They wanted to sell because he stupidly offered a huge amount in a binding agreement. Musk had already bought a portion of Twitter. He wanted to drive up the price with a fake offer, then find a “problem” so he could sell at the higher price. It was just a pump and dump scheme.
The problem is, it’s very hard (and illegal) to do that with someone else’s company. Twitter’s lawyers wrote the purchase agreement pretty well. They basically forced Musk to either buy the company 100% or go to jail, courtesy of the SEC.
After he bought twitter shares he only had to disclose that he did so with the SEC that was it. He did that late.
None of this requires making an offer for acquiring twitter. But that’s what he did he made an offer to the Twitter board for 44B$, after the Twitter board realised it didn’t appear to be a joke they accepted the deal.
At this point nothing was signed, this was the time before confirming the merge deal to do his DUE DILIGENCE which he didn’t do, he was in his right to back out at this point.
Instead he signed the contract and only afterwards realised he didn’t want to pay 44B$ for twitter after all. This was already too late and nearly impossible to do, the deal was signed…
The amount of money it's losing now is a LOT more. Advertising is down 70%, so someone definitely noticed a difference. Also they are now $13 billion in debt, owing a billion a year just on interest.
And like Reddit, they shut down the 3rd party apps that made it more pleasant to use, especially on mobile. I didn’t realize how shitty native Twitter is until I lost Tweetbot.
Sorting Elon stans to the top of reply chains is a negative change. Hate speech is now only regulated for Liberals. Also, they ruined the entire concept of verification.
It’s interesting how everyone keeps saying it’s ruined while I personally don’t notice any difference. If I didn’t read posts about it on reddit/lemmy I wouldn’t know any changes have been made
I wonder if there’s some add-on that automatically filters out comments from blue checks. That way they’d be self-selecting themselves out of our feeds
Just like a year ago it was considered an essential part of modern discourse and society. The media was heavily dependent on Twitter. Now, Twitter has lost a lot of influence.
If Elon had simply kept his stupid mouth shut, he wouldn’t have been forced to buy the company, let alone for such a high price. Once purchased, if he had been less of a maniac and just managed Twitter in a boring way that maintained the status quo, then it would still be better off today than it currently is. Everything Elon has done has made the company less valuable and driven away users.
He’s one of the richest men in the world, you are not even a billionare. Can you really point out that his business is off?
The guy is doing exactly what they want to do, if they are letting the platform fall off like that is because that’s what their goal is. They build monopolies.
It's possible that Musk is good at some things and not good at others, but his success at those things he's good at have caused him to think he's good at everything.
You don’t think it takes a fucking idiot to be forced into spending 44 billion dollars, some of it other people’s money, to purposely destroy a social media platform because you (and the people who’s money you used) were upset how critical said platform was of you?
Ever since he bought it and started basically wrecking the place, I've suspected that his goal has been to reduce the usefulness of Twitter to non-conservatives. Obviously he has a incredibly massive stick up his ass regarding politics, and Twitter failing would mean basically nothing to him personally.
Some people would call that a conspiracy theory or cite maxims such as 'never attribute to malice what could be attributed to incompetence" but I could find some counter-maxims I bet.
I dont understand this sentiment. When Jack Dorsey sold twitter he wanted it delisted so someone could make it more publicly owned. He thought Elon could do that and so it was sold. Its essentially the opposite of what Reddit is trying to do.
If Elon comes in amd says “this company needs to change or else it wont survive” i would believe that. People are essentially mad that the company doesnt have investor funding.
Twitter wasnt profitable and had net losses as it was losing hundreds of millions a year. Dorsey wanted to make twitter profitable while making it more inclusive and trusted. At the time he saw Elon as the best leader based on how he had led Tesla.
Dorsey only held about 2% of the company. The only winners on that sale were the investors. All i was trying to say is if Elon had done nothing, the only winners would have been investors.
You are implying that Dorsey picked Musk to take over Twitter. He didn’t. Musk tried to do a pump-and-dump like he always does and he fucked around and found out. He even tried to back out of buying it. You’re basically telling me to ignore the whole history of the lead-up to Musk’s purchase in exchange for some conspiracy theory involving Jack Dorsey that doesn’t even make sense.
Sure Dorsey didnt single Elon out but he did say during the takeover that he believed he was the right one. Maybe that was for money but who the hell knows.
Also, Elon tried backing out because the board refused Elons plans to get rid of spam bots. This was one for Elons major plans to revitalize twitter. Not a conspiracy theory here.
If Musk just shut his face and kept doing his thing, he would have been a historic figure. Not Edison or Tesla famous, but like an Alexander Bell tier name sure. Especially if his Mars plans panned out. But dude wanted to be Tony Stark and forgot that Stark was charming and likable (in the movies at least) and he… is not.
That’s kinda the point of his character ark. It takes till the end for him to really show us who he is deep down. Also, RDJ nailed the balance of ego and redeeming qualities.
But Elon is not the hero of any story. He’s the evil child playing with a magnifying glass on an anthill and he views everyone but him as an ant.
Fuck Elon and I can’t wait till the Saudis come to collect on that $44B they loaned him.
Saudi Group is the 2nd largest investor in Elon’s buyout and the largest single entity investor.
Basically America’s billionaire class (aka Elon’s alt right clubhouse gang), now are in the pockets on the evil empire with the single worst human ethics record in modern day society.
If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you, I don’t know what will.
Not really. Not by any stretch of the imagination. He’s more of a Carnegie type. except Carnegie managed to convince people he was actually a good person. (his philanthropy is responsible for a LOT of the libraries. But also, he came down hard when it came to union busting, and a lot of his dirty work was done by Henry Frick.)
In any case, the reality is, his prior ‘good’ reputation- including for all things you’re saying he’s going to be famous for doing- is more the result of having a good PR staff keep him looking … like that. he’s not a founder of Tesla. he’s not a brilliant engineer (or a brilliant anything else.) he’s just a rich guy tossing money around to make it grow.
I mean, he had a genuinely good reputation prior to the big money and PR back in 2012-ish. I followed him because I love space stuff, and he was this awkward nerd pushing for electric cars, solar power, and reusable rockets, which were so insane it was basically considered impossible. Most of his early twitter conversations were discussing rocket details with other space nerds, pulling videos of RUDs on request, and sharing some of the hidden numbers that we’d normally never have access to. He was genuinely involved in the early years at SpaceX.
Up until he called the guy who saved the cave children a pedo, he was basically held up as one of the individuals who would be responsible for changing the world for the better. An actual example of capitalism being used to push society forward. Then it was a steady downward spiral, but early Elon was basically just a nerd that liked rockets and green tech. Had he stuck in that lane, and not been greedy about squeezing every penny of profit out of Tesla workers, he’d probably still be considered the “real life Iron Man” instead of another classic example of how capitalists are consumed by greed.
So, don’t get me wrong, I am deeply disappointed in what he’s decided to do with himself, but he was a legitimately popular figure and led SpaceX to face off against the military-industrial space industry and break a monopoly that’s been in place for half a century. The myth was exaggerated, but his initial popularity was earned before being wasted.
Lol, I’m glad you were too cool for school, but his twitter conversations were actual sources used by Ars in the early days, which regularly called on actual rocket scientists. More than that, they were correct, so I’m not entirely sure what you were seeing through. He definitely became an attention whore by the time he started posting memes, but just because somebody became a garbage human being doesn’t mean everything they touched is trash.
SpaceX is a treasure, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.
Yep, I remember years ago when at a national student aerospace conference, attending a small talk by some guy named Elon Musk about his fairly new company, SpaceX. At this point I think they had only launched one (failed) rocket. He was a bit awkward, but seemed passionate about his Mars vision, and did a great job answering a bunch of technical questions by a group of aerospace engineering students. A lot of us were skeptical of him and his company, but more from the standpoint of aerospace being hard for even the least aspirational companies to succeed in.
Later when I starting hearing more about SpaceX I learned that Elon was also an asshole as a manager, but he still came across at least as being technically competent. And he was great at getting funding and driving excitement in an industry that desperately needed it. While there were already some cracks showing in his public image, it was only around the time of that sub rescue pedo incident where that erratic edgelord and asshole behavior became too much too ignore for myself and other people I know.
Yeah? Then why didn’t all the engineers decry him right then and there? Didn’t see much talk calling him out. Ya’ll just let that shit ride? Especially seeing the popularity he was building?
You ever look at his Hyperloop proposal from 2014?
Its not even an engineering CAD drawing. Its three lolipops drawn on FEA (I don’t think even with ANSYS but some cheaper program instead…) with Elon Musk saying that its simulations for an earthquake.
It was hilariously bad. All the engineers I knew of the Hyperloop proposal told me that Elon Musk was an idiot back then.
Squeezing every penny of profit from workers is awful of course, but pretty much par for the course. Where he went wrong was in being a sad and desperate acting attention whore and never shutting the fuck up, while pushing ideas, people and viewpoints that a large amount of people find objectionable. It’s what make people like Zuckerberg or Spez not seem quite as douchey. If they tried to make themselves the #1 star on their platforms they’d probably end up embarrassing themselves too, but they mercifully don’t.
This is a great summary of the fall of Elon Musk. I admired him too years ago until he went off the rails. RIP to the better decisions and the their benefits that this man could have made.
His Mars plan cannot pan out, no more than using rockets in place of airplanes for international travel.
The man is a compulsive attention seeker. He owns some companies that legitimately are good at what they do, arguably pioneers in their field. It’s not enough for him. SpaceX being the leading rocket launcher is not enough for him. Doing something already possible, even if done many times better or cheaper is not flashy enough for him. He needs to go to Mars.
The problem with that is that he is probably going to at least destroy the companies having them chasing his pie in the sky ideas as well as possibly having people die (depending on how far along he manages to take some of his plans).
I thought what he said about his new AI company was hilarious. His new AI company seeks to ‘understand the true nature of the universe’. Just jaw droppingly pretentious, and it is so on-brand for him, as techno-Jesus. Just having a normal AI company isn’t enough - it has to be accomplishing something ridiculous.
There’s nothing wrong with SpaceX’s Mars launch plan, and while the rocket travel plan is niche (read: ultra rich), it’s viable assuming Starship winds up hitting the same reliability levels as airplanes. Course, worst thing that happens is a couple hundred millionaires and billionaires die, so… I see no downsides lol.
Obviously, I’m not gonna defend Elon himself, but sending a Super Heavy to Mars isn’t some grand project like it would be for NASA. For one, other than the engines it only takes a couple of months to build a new booster and Starship, and for two it would take a minimum of 6 months for the Starship to reach Mars after launch (from the optimal window), essentially tying up a single Starship. It also tests low gravity propulsive landing, which is being designed for one of the Artemis landers, as well as the fuel conversion process using solar power to convert CO2 into methane rocket fuel. Which would greatly simplify future NASA projects for Mars.
I doubt there would be a NASA mission on an untested launch platform, but the lack of payload is also what makes it so cheap. They might toss some projects as a just in case, but it’s otherwise an interplanetary proof of concept. I might hate Elon, but SpaceX is currently the best rocket company around, with the Super Heavy likely to make the Space Launch System obsolete the moment it’s certified for government launches.
If you mean launching a rocket to Mars, yes eventually they will be able to do that. That is not what Musk’s bullshit. It’s a permanent base with people on Mars.
The rocket travel plan is not niche, it’s impossible. Sound (environmental) concerns, refueling time cutting into the flight time benefit on turnover, Gs exerted on launch etc. Moreover Musk billed it as a regular service not a “dive to Titanic” kind of activity for billionaires.
It’s also impossible to make a rocket as reliable as a plane. If you seriously consider that possible I cannot argue with you on any other point. Just the planes ability to land and maneuver unpowered makes it much more safer and reliable. The nature of it’s fuel itself makes it much safer and reliable.
Starship/SuperHeavy is not ready. Engine production rate is a huge problem and they need a lot of them per vehicle. They also currently are unreliable with quite a few failures on the last launch. Some might be a result of the first failing but there were at least two clusters of failure, suggesting at least two independent failures.
So when they get SS/SH working the best thing to do would be to take government contracts, or fly Starlink satellites up if it’s profitable. But yeah sending a rocket to Mars for free is exactly the kind of stunt I would expect Musk to do. Like demanding the launch to be on 4/20.
That is not what Musk’s bullshit. It’s a permanent base with people on Mars.
I once watched a press conference with him talking about his plans for SpaceX. The responses he gave about human factors were making cuckoo clock sounds. When asked about the issue of solar radiation exposure his response was along the lines of we don’t need to worry about that. What!? That’s one of the major engineering and safety issues in long duration space flight and habitation. You’ve not even thought about it? So basically he’ll be sending people into space with no concern about turning them into crispy critters.
No, once purchased, the problems were already insurmountable. The company was bought on company debt, meaning that it was in deep shit on day 1 of him owning it. It wasn’t profitable before that move, and adding a ton of debt didn’t improve the situation.
All moves Musk did are essentially cost-cutting measures (except for the ones where he’s trying to establish it as a social network for Nazis).
Firing 75% of the staff works as cost cutting but is very short-sighted. Acting like an attention-starved “fellow kids!!” edgelord and ruining the Verified program wasn’t cost cutting. And then, his edgelordness led to losing 60-70% of ad revenue, which surely nullified any legitimate cost cutting attempts.
There was a method behind these things, which are the exception I mentioned. He removed the moderation staff, because he wanted to encourage Nazi content on the platform, and moderators are bad for that. The paid verified program meant that only fans of him and Nazis would pay money and thus be verified, so he could legitimately amplify their voice on the platform.
The problem he ran into is that advertisers don’t like their ads next to Nazi propaganda, so now revenue is down.
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