Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

The Great Zaganza said:
not in the age of vulture capitalism: buying something on credit, and then laden that company with the debt.

almost certain to sink it.
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sure sure, i'm just more pointing out that because twitter carried debt before the purchase that doesn't mean it was failing or would have in and of itself. i mean, jack dorsey wasn't on the news telling advertisers to **** off and complaining it would kill the company, so it wasn't quite that dire.

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i think a bigger problem is that a lot of these social media sites don't have a very good option when the growth slows. twitter really couldn't get a whole lot bigger or grow at the pace it was forever. and what happens when it stagnates or declines?
 
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None of these companies that plan to sell their product cheap to grow quick using debt, and then charge once they have a market dominance, make any sense whatsoever - it worked for Amazon and Netflix and literally no one else.
 
and i think another big difference there too is amazon and netflix are at least offering a product. twitter is entirely funded by ads, and we sit through them because it's a cool site and we're having a good time. once i'm not having a good time, it's just watching a bunch of ads. that's a very difficult thing to keep going forever and almost entirely dependent on how they moderate the site.
 
Samson said:
Yes in the clip posted, he says X might be finished because of the media matters campaign.
X has the broadest reach in Western media, so is arguably the biggest player.
Soros or Musk for having in your foxhole, I favour Musk.
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Rubbish.
 
First a clarification: Twitter had debt before Musk took over, but I agree it was manageable and it didn't prevent Twitter from making a profit in 2018 and 2019. I think Twitter would have made a small profit in 2022 as well but for the Musk shenanigans even with what debt it had at the time.


dirtywick said:
and i think another big difference there too is amazon and netflix are at least offering a product. twitter is entirely funded by ads, and we sit through them because it's a cool site and we're having a good time. once i'm not having a good time, it's just watching a bunch of ads. that's a very difficult thing to keep going forever and almost entirely dependent on how they moderate the site.
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Twitter offers a product: advertising space. Twitter's most important customers are its advertisers. Revenues from users are tiny by comparison. When Musk says "advertisers go **** yourselves" he means "customers go **** yourselves". Musk is blaming his customers for taking their business elsewhere when it is he who has made his product unattractive to them.

I still come across people who don't understand the relationship between social media companies and their users (if you aren't paying anything for a service, you are not the customer, you are the product). I think Musk is one of those people. He fundamentally fails to understand the business model of a social media company.
 
i should have been more clear that i meant twitter doesn't offer a product to it's average users. netflix has original content, amazon as well as well as a huge online store and shipping cost savings. which is all (currently, mostly, although they're starting to get greedier and greedier as well) ad free since i'm paying them money.

but i agree and it's why i was making the mall comparison earlier in the thread. the stores pay the leases for the space, the mall keeps the place orderly and attractive customers, customers come to have a nice time and shop. twitter functions in a different but very similar way and a mall that turned into an anything goes free speech zone covered in swastikas probably would fare about as well as twitter does.
 
My wife and I enjoyed the TV show “Billions”. Fairly early on - the pilot as it turns out - one of the protagonists says, “But then again, what's the point of having **** you money, if you never say, **** you.”

Life imitating art?
 
jeremyp said:
I still come across people who don't understand the relationship between social media companies and their users (if you aren't paying anything for a service, you are not the customer, you are the product). I think Musk is one of those people. He fundamentally fails to understand the business model of a social media company.
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Some services and products survive on donations. Musk being the beloved tech guro that he clearly is should have just set up a non-profit free speech alternative to Twitter and let it run amok, or more likely, let it run according to his whims and turn it into a weird echo chamber.

But I assume any neuron suggesting a non-profit organisation is immediatelly vaporised by the rest of his highly evolved brain.
 
Olmstead said:
Some services and products survive on donations. Musk being the beloved tech guro that he clearly is should have just set up a non-profit free speech alternative to Twitter and let it run amok, or more likely, let it run according to his whims and turn it into a weird echo chamber.
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He probably could have done it for less than $44 billion too.
 
But Twitter was turning his daughter into a Communist.
I think many kids these days would stop being a Communist if you gave them $44 billion
 
dirtywick said:
i'll give you that i'm uninformed, like in general not just this, and perhaps the tesla safety report is accurate though i would immediately question it given the recent safety reports coming out of spacex and musks generally deceptive nature.

but i do have a problem with them calling it full self driving, it is poorly named in a really bad way. but mostly i was just listing things i don't like about musk, which is a lot.
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Even under the deceptive 5 stage classification used by car manufacturers Tesla's system is at Stage 2 or slightly more control than the speed control offered by traditional cruise control. It's about as far away from self-driving as chatbots are from true AI.
 
angrysoba said:
Here is the thing...

Unlike some people on this forum, I do genuinely believe Elon Musk has been responsible for some important or even incredible achievements. As much as it is sometimes alleged that he has no talent and no intelligence and that he is just a moron who has somehow managed to wrangle companies and engineers who do all the work and merely collects the adulation, he clearly is doing something right, and even if his skills were confined to wrangling then he's an even more impressive wrangler.

BUT...

He also clearly has an extremely petulant and needy side to him that results in all kinds of unforced errors that he then blames others for. When it comes to Twitter all of these problems have been constantly on parade for a few years now.

There's literally no reason to call that cave diver a "pedo" and he did so only because someone said something that he's presumably not used to hearing. He seems to delight in firing people and in some cases setting mobs on them on their way out the door. His bizarre championing of the worst scumbags on Twitter looked less like a principled clarion call for allowing the types of speech that we don't like to hear and more of a celebration of them. He seemed to have decided to pander to the worst people to look edgy, when most of the time it just looks pathetic.

I would have a lot more time for a reasoned defence of Elon Musk, and even would be happy to make one myself, but nobody doing so can just shove aside the fact that he is making the problems for himself and the company. If you can't admit that and just want to post endless You Tube clips of obsequious lickspittles brown-nosing the richest man in the world then it just looks like pathetic crawling. [For more on that, see Lex Fridman, who apparently can no longer meet anyone rich and famous without gushing all over them].
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Galaxy Brain has exactly one area of expertise, con artistry, and frankly he's not even good at that. Look at Tesla, the only thing he's done with that company afterhostilely taking it over from the actual founders is to a) manage to get away with a criminal fraud by using it to buy up the shares in his other company at the time, Solar City, at over inflated prices through telling porkies about the company's products and b) bring the prototype of an actual heap of junk, the Cybertruck, to a stage where a few early adopters and sycophants can overpay for one. Everything else the company has done was in train before he became involved or just him outright lying (examples, full self driving, the robot and the roadster 2).
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
Galaxy Brain has exactly one area of expertise, con artistry, and frankly he's not even good at that. Look at Tesla, the only thing he's done with that company afterhostilely taking it over from the actual founders is to a) manage to get away with a criminal fraud by using it to buy up the shares in his other company at the time, Solar City, at over inflated prices through telling porkies about the company's products and b) bring the prototype of an actual heap of junk, the Cybertruck, to a stage where a few early adopters and sycophants can overpay for one. Everything else the company has done was in train before he became involved or just him outright lying (examples, full self driving, the robot and the roadster 2).
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I mean, he might be a con artist. But if that is the case, we live in a peculiar world if you can be not very good at con artistry and still end up richest man in the world.

Again, even if I grant to you that Elon Musk is just a glorified hype guy, somehow he ended up hyping Tesla into being a game-changingly successful EV company and SpaceX into being the top rocket company in the world.

The idea that he is a failure doesn't pass the sniff test.

Yes, he has some ridiculous projects like Hyperloop, Solar City and the Boring Company. No doubt Twitter is going down the same toilet but we can't just make credulity-straining assertions that he's been a total failure and all-time worst evil person and expect them to get any traction with normal people.
 
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