You don’t buy a company for their servers or employees, those can be found elsewhere for the same price. You buy a company for its users and its brand. To throw away one of the most icon brands in the world, which is present in the footer of every major website in the world, is baffling.
At this point it’s foolish not to consider this as possibly the greatest tax writeoff in history. Elmo is setting himself up to never pay another dime in taxes the rest of his life. Not that he probably pays that much as it stands, but still.
You don’t buy a company for their servers or employees
Clearly he didn't buy it for that either, since he chucked those out the window shortly after purchase. Pretty sure he spent billions of dollars to shitpost and create a safe space for nazis.
He bought it to destroy it for his Saudi backers. Billionaires like Musk and the Saudis make more money with Republicans in charge. Twitter and Reddit were too good at educating voters that would keep Republicans out of power, and hold murderous Saudi princes accountable, so they had to be destroyed.
I don’t think that was his goal, but it was probably why the Saudis were so eager to loan him the funds to buy it. This reminds me of a time I was talking to a climate-denying friend who cited something about NY using “methane causes global warming” to push anti-small farm bills on the basis that they had cattle (or something, I can’t remember exactly). The point being, sometimes it’s not a grand orchestrated conspiracy (eg “global warming is fake”) but rather malicious, opportunistic actors taking whatever advantages they can get. Billionaires don’t cause recessions on purpose, but their wealth certainly does increase during them anyway because of how the system has evolved to optimize for wealth consolidation through the independent actions of the capitalist class, and they’re not hurting enough to want to change it for the better.
Not only wacky but hideous? I mean if you are going to re-logo (forget that it be for idiotic reasons…) the least you could do is make the design look decent… this?? 😂
You can do that, and companies like Google have been doing it for years. The difference is that those companies are small teams of engineers, working on niche applications, that the big company wants to incorporate into them.
He realized pretty fast that he offered WAY too much money for Twitter. Like, we’re0 seeing maybe 5x what it was really worth at the time. But, because he did everything out in public like the narcissist he is, he knew there was no way he was getting out of the sale in court.
So he got as much of the cash from banks and other investors as possible. An amount of debt that could ruin someone with even his net worth. Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.
Lenders are not as stupid as you think. 75% of Twitter’s purchase price was paid by Musk himself or loans secured against his Tesla stock. None of that will be “written off”.
The number I’ve seen it closer to 55% but, regardless, all the Tesla money was acquired exactly the same way and will be written off the same way too.
Tesla has positioned itself as a tech company instead of a car company, and if its investors decide one day that it’s a car company it’s value will drop 60 - 80% overnight. Of course the investors will never do that because 1) it will leave a lot of them in ruin and 2) the gigafactories for batteries are probably actually valued pretty accurately. But remember ever time Telsa talks about robots or super computers they’re trying to make everyone forget that their valuation multiples should be closer to Ford than Apple.
Tesla owns a huge and successful charging network, and most EV makers in the US are switching to Tesla charging ports in order to take advantage of it. In the process, this will make the smaller charging networks (like EA) even more irrelevant.
If Ford happened to own all the gas stations in America, you’d have an idea of what Tesla is about to become. There’s a good reason why Tesla stock is priced so high.
Ford used to own gas stations. They didn’t totally leave the business until the 70’s gas shortages, though they had been in decline since the 30s. History does tend to repeat itself, and there’s nothing proprietary about electricity (there are adapters to go from one plug type to another). The US switch to using NACS has just started in the last couple months and will not be seen in most of the rest of the world, since Europe and much of Asia codified standards like CCS into law while Tesla was still trying to keep their tech private.
Smart money says Tesla will spin off the charging network (and solar stuff) into independent entities due to stagnate markets during the next recession and then devest entirely after their next major stock slump.
Ford never dominated the US market for gas stations like Tesla does for chargers. Even if Tesla never builds another charger outside the US, it can thrive by dominating the US market alone. And the experience of EA and others demonstrates that it’s not so easy to set up a competing network.
Of course Tesla might spin off its charging business, but that won’t worry investors. It just means that your Tesla share would turn into a share of TeslaCars plus a share if TeslaChargers.
I hope the cash he got from banks is backed by his stocks in Tesla. But what do I know, look what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. Banks aren’t smarter in investing than the rest of us apparently.
Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.
Maybe I’m financially illiterate, but I don’t understand how that works. Like… if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn’t get me off the hook. If anything, I’ll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk’s debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?
Most of the money in the world economy is known as “Book Money.” It exists only because an investor somewhere decided it did and invested based on that number. When a bank or investor stops thinking it’s worth that much one of the things they can do is a Write Down. The money (which never really existed anyway) ceases to exist, the banks books (and possibly their rating as a lender) are affected, the investee should become considered a bad investment, and the money is deleted from the world. But there are no other real consequences unless the investor or investee destroys enough of their wealth that they become insolvent.
You bought your house with earned money. Real money. It can’t just be erased in the same way because you played by the rules the whole time.
which is present in the footer of every major website in the world
OMG, I just realize that the little blue bird will be replaced with an X everywhere. A generic looking, forgettable X.
I also realize that instead of saying "follow me on Twitter" or "I'm on Twitter," people will say "follow me on X" and "I'm on X," which sounds like you're talking about Ecstacy or Molly. Very 1990s club kid. (He's Gen X so I'm sure he's well aware of how this sounds.)
I am seldom a conspiracy theorist but I am really starting to think that he is deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, I mean X.
I don’t think so, his “X” idea has been around for a long time, he really thinks it’s his next big idea. I’m sure people have raised all of these concerns with him, but I doubt he’s listening. Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are ideas that he bought, this one is his baby. I don’t think he’s open to ideas or criticisms on it.
Speaking of SpaceX, makes me wonder why he doesn’t just brand everything <name>X, eg TwitterX. Keep the X theme but don’t water down the brand. Then, if he hits the jackpot and becomes a multi-industry monopoly he can rebrand everything to just X.
He bought the company to bootstrap his idea of his “X” app which he envisions becoming something like WeChat for the world outside of China.
I think it’s a terrible idea that’s a solution in search of s problem. WeChat works in China because the government literally enforces it’s usage. The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
It’s the problem of trying to be everything for everyone. You end up with mediocre or bad solutions for many problems instead of great solutions for a couple of problems. It works when there’s no competition, see WeChat, but when there is competition that competition is going to beat you at their game because you’re too busy playing a dozen others.
The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.
I’m not entirely sure this is true. Look at the constant posts and commenting on how people hate to deal with the complication of additional apps / sites. It’s a major negative of the fediverse, it’s one reason I think Signal shot themselves in the foot getting rid of SMS. It’s why people keep using Amazon or Netflix even as they get worse and worse and more expensive. Heck, I’m not even immune - I wish we had one fast and cheap way to transfer money rather than Zelle, Paypal, various bank schemes, venmo and on and on. I wish we had a universal shopping cart thing like Paypal checkout more widely adopted vs making ever more accounts and typing in all my details for a one time order from a different website (and this is one reason why people gravitate to Amazon vs individual sites).
I’m not saying I’d like an all in one app, but I can see it potentially being interesting to people if it simplified their lives. I don’t think Musk and X are likely to be able to do it, but I don’t actually think there’s no interest.
It’s funny if that’s his endgame, since Meta is already closer to that achievement than he is, and their Twitter alternative exploded in popularity immediately thanks to Musk’s own incompetence.
It’s not even enshittification. If it were that at least would be understandable through a capitalistic lens, a natural part of an investor-owned process. It’s the actions and thinking of a man-child with all the brilliance of a 40 watt bulb. No logic is to be had here.
Twitter gets their iconic branding enshrined in the dictionary as a verb - one of the very few companies that have achieved the feat - and Elon chucks it all in the bin.
Your wording needs some work there. If you're trying to say that the "pile" would reach 1/4 low earth orbit and cover half the continental US, you're absolutely incorrect. If you are saying it is a "pile of money" that "when laid out as a single layer can cover half of the continental US" or "when made into a single stack would reach 1/4 of the height of LEO", that would be mostly accurate. For perspective, 44 billion would be 44k briefcases, or 440 pallets. That's about 17 semi trailers (single high) or 9 trailers double-stacked. As a "pile" it could easily fit in a single Wal-mart parking lot and wouldn't even be that high. Still a lot of money though.
Edit: Actually, I don't even think the continental US number is accurate. A single bill is 16 in^2. Laid out as a single layer of single $1 bills, that covers ~7e11 in^2 which is about 175 square miles, not even 1/2 of Rhode Island.
That doesn’t sound right. I get a volume of about 1.13 cubic cm per 100 dollar bill. There are 440 million 100 dollar bills needed for 44 billion. That gives us a volume of about 500 cubic meters. That’s not even a large warehouse. Even for 1 dollar bills we would then only have roughly 50000 cubic meters, which is a far cry from 500 cubic kilometers, which would be about 5*10^11 cubic meters. A single stack of 44 billion 1 dollar bills would be about 4800km high.
Putting it this way makes me kind of sad. It’s weird because Twitter has been an undeniable cancer on society too, so I’m split between being glad for their demise and feeling sorry for the ruin of their achievements.
The only reasonable answer is that Musk is intentionally killing Twitter, which is conspiracy theory levels of dumb.
The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.
I wouldn’t say stupid, just narcissistic control freak who can’t stop touching it. That way it doesn’t dismiss him outright. It’s a matter of essentializing language - “someone is stupid” isn’t so dangerous vs “someone does something stupid” lets you recognize the emperor has no clothes but can still be dangerous. Reality is more complex than “xyz is stupid/evil”, and falling into those patterns of thought does a disservice to yourself.
I have a suspicion that all of the layers of “Elon management” at Tesla and SpaceX have given him the idea that he’s a brilliant innovator; he gives them all his outlandish ideas and they get filtered into (normally) reasonable plans, and they guide him down the path they want him to go down while he thinks the good idea is his. And those companies are both doing well, so clearly his style works, at least in his mind.
But then he bought twitter, which didn’t have anyone devoted to protecting the company from him, and it’s all going to shit.
Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.
The only other solution is that the richest person in the world (officially) is this stupid. This is almost harder to believe than a conspiracy to destroy twitter.
Why is that hard to believe? The mega-rich are not notably more intelligent than anyone else, they just started decades ago with inherited wealth and got lucky early.
Oh this isn’t meant to imply that rich people are smarter than anyone else. More hard to believe in that I don’t want a man with such immense power and wealth to be absolutely stupid. The obvious best choice is no one having a billion dollars.
Xs obviously and if you remember back to your grandmother’s birthday cards Xs are kisses! So tweets are now called kisses and tweeting something is Kissing obviously.
Trump has accidentally created an evangelical cult convinced he’s the literal “son of man” (aka new messiah) and everything he does/says is ordained by God. Cults of personality shed anyone with even the barest amount of reason and retain only the most deluded.
This is just proverbial middle finger from Elon to the PayPal shareholders because he couldn't get his way, now he is in a position where he can do this and no shareholder can criticise him for doing so.
The brand 'X' doesn't have any meaning behind it. 'M' maybe so but that would be a stretch.
This is a stupid move. It’s like Google changing its name to something else. Now everyone says “you need to Google this” instead of “you need to search this on the internet”. Twitter has become a recognised brand and tweeting has become a verb in the dictionary. He’s destroying years of work. At this point, we can safely say that his behaviour is not rational.
@mastermind White X on a black background. It couldn't have less character and personality. The branding wasn't the issue with Twitter. Let's recap: Twitter is struggling, Elon buys Twitter, makes it a worse platform for users, introduces authentication by payment, restricts the access to the platform, and then changes the only good thing about Twitter, the branding.
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