I kinda wish what I said about him back in 2010-2011 when he started getting attention had come true. “Just wait, he’s gonna turn out to be a comic book villain, he already has the name.”
A comic book villain would have been so much better, sure he’d be out to rule the world, and probably be well on his way to do it, but he’d be intelligent at least.
Cheer up Elon - it wasn’t worth $44B when you bought it, so it’s lost significantly less value than you think!
Most valuations by actual economists and the like was in the 20-25B range. So it still lost a 5x in value, which is only marginally worse than 10x.
Meanwhile, you have the Elon fanboys still pretending Twitter is doing better than it ever has.
Meanwhile, you have the Elon fanboys still pretending Twitter is doing better than it ever has.
replyWell, it is, if you’re a Nazi.
Same person
Does he still even have fanboys? Like maybe a dozen or so?
I see a lotta Blue subscribers riding him, but they’re surely a loud minority
For that to be true, it would have needed to be worth $44B in the first place, which it absolutely was not. But there is no doubt that his mismanagement has tanked the value of the investment. He’s a narcissist so never see it that way, but the whole rest of the world knows that.
As a business? Probably not worth that valuation. As a propaganda machine to be able to influence a decent percentage of the population? I think it was.
Only because larger media outlets use it as “news”
Twitter has always been one of the smaller “social media” giants
I think he realized it wasn’t worth what they claimed but he couldn’t back out of the deal.
AFAIK he had to be sued into buying it once he tried to weasel out of the deal. So it wasn’t for lack of trying definitely 😂😂😂
There was a clause in the contract that said if he backed out he would have to pay $1 billion. Who knew that would actually have saved him way more to exercise that clause.
He overpaid for a piece of shit and ran it into the ground.
Everyone with a used BMW knows the feeling.
You leave my E89 Z4 alone!
No tears shed here. The people who built Twitter got a nice payout when they absolutely robbed Elon Musk in that deal. Anyone who chose to stay on the Elon train after his first weeks at the helm gets no sympathy from me.
Anyone who chose to stay on the Elon train after his first weeks at the helm gets no sympathy from me.
Except for the green card holders whose residency in the US was literally held hostage by Elon.
Pretty sure they were held hostage by the US government policy of getting deported if they lose their job.
Xitter was just a vessel on which that was presented.
Okay yeah one tear for them and the special hell they are in.
A lot of people say this, but there seems to be almost zero effort being put into resolving many of the systemic issues with the US visa system.
As a British person in tech, I’d love to work in the US for a year or two, but I have zero intention of dealing with the shitshow that is visa slavery in big tech, and how the visa system is lop-sided to deal with 2-3 countries and a handful of companies over others. In the UK, it’s much simpler to offer visas to Americans, and even mid-sized companies can sponsor visas.
Facts.
Elon tried so hard to back down from that deal. I’m not sure why it took actually signing that deal to realize he had been hosed.
If I was an executive at twitter, I would have absolutely done everything possible to get Elon to pay that $44 billion.
Elon: Fuck you Twitter!
Twitter: Fuck yourself, Elon!
Elon: Oh yeah? Maybe I’ll just BUY you.
Twitter: Ha! No you can’t….
Elon: No? Watch this!
Twitter: Gotcha, dipshit.
Elon: What? Wait no!
Twitter: Ahem… judge?
Judge: They got you, dipshit.
Elon: (unbans Trump) Nyah-Nyah!
Twitter: Ahahahaha (all the way to the bank)
Elon: Everyone see this? This is the ADL’s fault!
They robbed Elon in the deal? They accepted his deal. He robbed himself!
The only people there that get sympathy from me are the people trapped there on work visas if they want to legally remain in the USA.
The rest are either shit workers that can’t make the cut elsewhere, or bought into the Elon hype and are a lost cause.
$4B seems also a tad too high.
Best I can do is tree fiddy.
I knew it was you, lochness monsta!
There are network cables, servers, laptops from all those employees who were
fuckedlaid off.A macbook pro is less than 10000 dollars.
But lets assume it was 10000 dollars.
Thats 400.000 laptops…
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I really hope the original owners re-buy Twitter for a fraction of what they sold it for lol
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Simply reversing Elon’s decisions would bring back advertisers and engineers, and the media would paint them as the Messiah for saving “the Internet’s public square”.
And for 90% off the ticket price? Why not
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To make a shitload of money
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Yeah, it’s easy to forget but it was a leveraged buyout meaning that a lot (all?) of the debt is Twitter’s, not Elon’s.
Maybe they could use it to swindle some other mega rich bastard, just the way they robbed Musk.
The Twitter brand is still worth good money, just not in the hands of Musk.
He’s just that good at business. Truly an unstoppable force in the world of commerce. Capitalism really is the best system. No problems.
He’s just not that good at business
That is a very nice way of putting it. He’s a narcissistic worthless idiot asshole and a scammer who got really really lucky a number of times. He has charisma, I’ll give you that, but so did Hitler (and sorry for the comparison, its just to make the point that charisma alone isn’t worth that much)
I’ve seen him for what he is for years now and still there are huge swaths of people out there thinking he is some kind of saviour or something,blind of like people who think Tru o is the next coming of Christ.
People are idiots
The alternative to that is?
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And what’s the point of that if you can’t find a better solution? Blaming every own failure on “capitalism” is why some Lemmy users make me laugh.
Can’t find a solution without first pointing out and understanding the problem.
Socialism.
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This cancer made my country struggle for decades before it eventually went on the right tracks so fuck off with that.
According to real math, Elon always overestimates the value.
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to be fair, he didn’t just say it was worth that, he put up that much money to buy it (with backing). So it was worth that amount at the moment he swore he’d do it. Whether that was a stupid valuation is a different question.
Nobody ever said you had to be smart to be a billionaire… or a good person.
You strictly cannot become a billionaire and be a good person at the same time.
Never met a nice billionaire hell I’ve met some millionaires and 90% of them are assholes.
90% of all people are assholes if you give them enough time to show it.
Even if it isn’t exactly true, it definitely feels like it sometimes.
The internet love to rib on billionaires, but there are some who are genuine. Like Charles Feeney, who made billions from running Duty Free during the golden age of air travel. He secretly donated much of his wealth and his worth was only revealed during a legal battle when had to disclose his finances. Right now, Charles’ net worth is said to be now in millions since he donated much of his wealth. If I remember correctly, I think he always lived in a rented apartment too. But I think the type of billionaire like Charles Feeney qis far and wide among the group.
Sounds like he realized being a billionaire is intrinsically unethical and elected to be a millionaire
To be honest, I think saying that being a billionaire is unethical is farfetched. If someone made that much money running a business ethically (assuming that’s what Feeney did), then I don’t see why anyone should feel guilty for becoming wealthy. And the guy is old, in his 80s now I think, so he knows that there is no point hoarding all the wealth he accumulated if he knows that his time will come soon.
Chances are that he bought twitter to gain influence in mass media. BTW those 42 billions were investor’s money, he’s still the richest man on earth.
I could be remembering wrong but Twitter was only worth $15B at best, and Elon bought it for $44B because he’s that smart.
How are you defining worth? It’s value was probably in the 20Bs and it’s market value was well in the 30Bs. By value I am saying a world where owners just dumped all their shares until they were no longer owners, by market value I mean what another entity might pay to buyout twitter.
OK here’s some simple calculations.
Twitter was worth around $22 billion, when Elon bought it at $44 billion, but to help pay for it, half of that is borrowed by Twitter to pay for itself! Yes you can do that.😋
So now the company is worth about $22 bil less, because it has new debt.
In my book 22-22 = 0 = zero = nul = naught = zip
On top of that, the original value has declined dramatically, with about 60% decline in revenue that we know of. So the internal value is actually way below 0, but a limited company cannot be worth less than 0, so it remains 0.
The company is insolvent, which means it’s basically bankrupt, except it’s not declared yet. The only possible slight value it may have left, is for tax deductions on the losses.
Worthless =/= insolvent.
The value is determined based on a shareholder valuation, insolvent means having a negative cashflow and depleted reserves.
You can technically run a stock absolutely into the ground if everyone would place sell orders at market (i.e. without limit) and the only buyers would offer 1 cent.
That changes nothing about the profitability of the company though.
And while this is a very hypothetical scenario for a listed company, for an unlisted one you can freely adjust your list price. If he were to sell 1% for $1 to his neighbor, the company valuation would be down to 100 bucks.
Since it’s not a stock company, the valuation is speculative.
But the company being insolvent, and running on a deficit without prospective og turning a profit. Would by normal measures render the company worthless, except if there is a tax benefit to take over.
Musk can value it at whatever he wants, I strongly doubt he will find a buyer at any price.
Unlike others, I saw at least $20B of potential in Twitter. Advertisement and media alignment was basically Twitter’s P0, and why they had a bloated staff that managed corporate sales and media accounts. TV execs around the world wanted a slice of Twitter’s analytics to measure what people interacted with, and we’re willing to pay for it. It wasn’t $44B worth, but they had a “solved” solution for scalable social networks, and whoever could scale enough to be irresistible to advertisers would have come close to justifying that valuation over time.
Knowing a few people that worked there, it justified it’s reputation a bit before Musk came in. The tech side was fairly limited compared to the sales/accounts side, and there were a lot of people doing very little outside of making sure that an advertiser was happy. A smart CEO would have scaled that side of the business without scaling sales staff, but Musk did the exact opposite - and utterly gutted the thing that made any money, and made it about himself…
He’s obviously a fucking idiot, but I consider Twitter to be a vanity project above anything else. He leveraged his debt against the company, ran it to be barebones, and now it’ll just “exist” until he can sell it when he’s bored.
As a software engineer, the one company I really wanted to work for was Twitter. It’s sad to see it killed, but they also kinda deserved it too. At least they got a payout!
Social platforms are only worth what they are on paper. Elon is pushing ads and premiums more and more, but it’s 100% not enough to run a service like that. How much longer can this go on?
