I did not think chaos would spread so quickly. This is a hard thing to own. TWITTER IS GOOD again. We are no longer locked in with Musk, but he is.
Musk took control of the micro-blogging site. It has been since then.
Okay, that's right. I have some thoughts about what's happening. When Musk decided that he was going to close all the brick-and-mortar stores of the company, he reversed himself, or when he decided that the company was going to accept Bitcoins, he did not. The dreadnought was going to be used to build the teslas. Musk's quick reversals are not new. Musk built his business around his fan base, who are more understanding of this type of behavior.
Although it is an acquisition, it isn't always full of Musk fans. It is a less tolerant environment for Musk. The most prominent of the Something Awful forum goons is Dril and he loves fuck with people. A group of people who didn't like Musk going out with a bang by pretending to be him were motivated by the idea that it would make him angry. It most likely did. That would explain why his first policy change was to make it a crime to impersonate.
Shenanigans are a lot of fun, but they need to keep in mind that they need to pay over a billion dollars a year for the acquisition. The company made $5 billion in revenue and didn't make a profit. Mike Roberts is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He owes a lot of money, and he needs to raise money. I wonder if it is possible for the social network to pay this debt.
He has to figure out how to make money while people impersonate him. It was a fun job.
It is possible to free up cash by firing a lot of people. The problem with that is that you lose a lot of the engineers who could build cool shit. All tech companies are cutting people loose right now so Musk can hire new talent on the cheap.
Revenue is a bigger problem than this. Advertising was the main source of revenue last year. Data licensing accounted for the rest of the company's income.
The advertising problem needs to be focused on for a second. A lot of brands have paused their spending, and one ad executive called Musk's behavior "petulant and thoughtless." The fourth quarter is the most important time of the year for advertising, and this is an immediate problem. During a crucial time for the company to make money, a lot of major advertisers are pulling out of the site. He said that there had been a huge drop in revenue.
This part of the problem isn't Musk's fault. Companies don't spend as much on advertising when the economy slows. Even if Musk wasn't doing crazy things to get advertisers, he might have been in trouble anyway. Musk has identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend might be inclined to cutTwitter first
It doesn't take a cut of the money that is sent to people you like via tips. It takes a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but it isdwarfed by the fees taken by Apple.
There is drama on the internet.
In terms of revenue, the action at the moment is mostly around the premium-tier version of the social networking site. The product's price was raised to $8, which may not be enough to cover its costs. Let's do some back-of- the-envelope math. I'm going to round the price of a year of blue to the nearest hundred dollars. It would take 10 million people to bring in $1 billion in revenue. I think it's easy.
The blue users get a blue check mark, which looks exactly like the check mark verified users get, but they don't have to verify their identity. An unwary user would think that it looked like the actual Nintendo account.
Musk doesn't care. A user replied, "The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid eight dollars." The account is suspended and the money is kept. I hope more people do this. It is free money for the social networking site. Musk replied to the user with a bunch of things, including a bag of money and a face with sunglasses.
Even without an economic downturn, a lot of advertisers wouldn't want to return to someone with that attitude. I don't know if users want to stay in that environment, one that's just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scam. The influx of new users has made Mark Cuban's mentions miserable. One of the reasons people stay on the platform is because of Cuban's musings.
You can see how that spirals out of control.
The federal government requires full documentation when it comes to any foreseeable risks of "any product or service affecting commerce." It took less than two weeks for the changes to be implemented. Is there full documentation about its risks? It sounds like the lawyers are concerned.
We will get to Musk's ambitions before that. He told advertisers that he wanted to make users pay for reach and de-rank them. The average person won't pay for reach but people will. That might get Musk the revenue he wants, but it also degrades the site and potentially means fewer users stick around, making it less valuable for marketers.
He is not known for sticking to plans. I know that Musk has a lot of money, and that he can use it to pay off his debts. I think Musk put some of the money from the sale of his shares in the company into the loans of the social networking site.
There is a world in which Musk just keeps selling his shares to raise money for his experiments. This may not be a good outcome for shareholders of the company. No one cares where the money comes from if he pays interest. He has the ability to remake the app into what he wants it to be as long as he has the money to do it.
The user base of the hellsite has been giving Musk tools to troll him out of billions of dollars.
For a hot minute, let's discuss the loans. The banks that helped facilitate this deal hold the debt, which is unusual since they usually try to find buyers for the debt. They're stuck with the loans on their balance sheets because of Musk's lawsuit. Interest rates were lower when they entered this situation. Anant Sundaram is a professor at the Tuck School of Business.
The B1 rating is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. Four months ago, investor appetite for this debt was much larger. According to Moody's, governance is a major driver of risk.
Taking an immediate loss is what the banks are going to have to deal with. If the market conditions change, banks may decide to hold on to the debt. It gets even harder to unload that debt if it is obvious that the person is on the phone. Musk is the richest man in the world, so banks might be willing to negotiate with him about his debt repayments. I don't know if they want to hold these loans for a long time. If banks can't place the debt, that makes it hard for any other buy-out in tech to get done.
He always seems to live on the financial edge with every business he gets involved in, and that may be why people underestimate him. I would give him the benefit of the doubt. We don't know what Musk's financial model is, maybe he factored in the loss of a third or more of his users. The worst case scenario is Moderation problems that make a ghost town like Truth Social or Parler happen. "Then he's done."
I am sorry, but this is very personal for a person who loves the social networking site. It is one of the funniest things that can be done. The user base of the hellsite has been giving Musk tools to troll him out of billions of dollars. Jack Dorsey was not the kind of person you could troll and his slow approach to product launch made it difficult to tank the site. Every poster knows it is possible to make him mad online, and that is one of the reasons that Elon Musk is the greatest show on Earth.
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