Have you considered that Elon Musk is a dumbass rather than a super genius?
The guy didn’t plan on buying twitter. He was made to after he tried gaming the system and fucked it up.
gregorum@lemm.ee
on 07 Sep 2023 19:35
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Both things can be true
ThePenitentOne@discuss.online
on 08 Sep 2023 21:52
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Incredibly inflated ego and self-image combined with poor emotional maturity and self-control after a life of entitlement. He said it to piss people off and then came back to eat shit, but unfortunately is also so rich he can throw his money away and have it barely matter.
phillaholic@lemm.ee
on 07 Sep 2023 21:32
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Yea it’s this. If he was smart he wouldn’t make himself look like a total idiot every week.
And? I seem to recall that he fantasized about doing it loudly enough and in enough detail, that he was legally obligated to follow through to avoid being charged with securities fraud. The reason he wanted to do it was to take a communications medium away from the liberals and give it to the Nazis.
This is marvel-brained fantasy. The guy played games and ended up with a business he doesn’t understand and never should have been in charge of. He’s not a super-villain, he’s an ordinary villain, dumbass nepotism case.
CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 02:46
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To see him explain it on Xitter or with a cartoon meme or whatever, he was in the “center”, and the radical left was so extreme that they brought the Overton window to the left and ruined his day, and were super mean to him, too, I guess. In other words, look at what you made him do, all normal Americans!
Or something. I guess the super-mean liberals also stole his hair, too.
0000011110110111i@lemm.ee
on 08 Sep 2023 08:43
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Xitter
Is that pronounced “shitter”? Very appropriate.
CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 14:00
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That’s the best pronunciation, IMHO.
Uncle_Bagel@midwest.social
on 08 Sep 2023 09:48
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Honestly, i think he wanted to oump and dump the stock and was flabbergasted when Twitter forced him to purchase it for the full price he states.
Someguy89@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:21
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Can this man baby just go away? No one cares dude. Enjoy your overpriced echo chamber.
dojan@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:36
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Him buying twitter was just some sort of narcissistic flex on his daughter.
Considering the fuckupery at Tesla (especially as of late), this may not entirely be true. It seems that he has slightly more influence at Tesla than he does at SpaceX, which has been doing a pretty great job.
Glenn Shotwell runs SpaceX and is a competent adult. Nothing to worry about on that front, thankfully.
TheObserver@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 2023 08:02
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Ah ok i thought it was musk boy. Tbh I don’t look too much into who the ceo of a company is. Mostly just what they do which i why i love spacex. I take it all my downvotes are the musk haters lol. I’m neutral on that whole thing with him. Can’t say anything about the whole twitter situation as i have never used it.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Sep 2023 23:20
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I don’t want to be stuck on this rock forever
I have some sad news…
you’re stuck on this rock forever
anyone alive today who sets foot on mars will likely regret it before they die
robots will conduct all worth while exploration and discovery this millennium
TheObserver@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 09 Sep 2023 12:18
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This guy must be from the future. Oh wise one tell us all your secrets.
Ever heard of having some hope my guy? Hate to break it to you but I hope humanity leaves this rock and isn’t stuck here forever. If humanity stays on this planet forever we will 100% go extinct either by war, virus, or the most obvious asteroid impacts or the guaranteed one the sun expanding over a few billion years. If we want to live till the end of time and space itself we HAVE to leave.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
on 09 Sep 2023 22:04
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The tech we will rely on for interplanetary travel is pretty much settled science, it just takes time and money to implement.
Hoping for unexpected breakthroughs isn’t going to help much.
Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:21
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This is the 4-D chess at play actually - now that it’s been delisted, there can’t be any securities class action against him. taps forehead
dustyData@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:44
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The Saudi loaners will be satisfied. The banks might not.
ArugulaZ@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 17:50
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This is dee-dee-dee chess, I think.
IronHighway@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:23
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On one hand, I can’t wait for his empire to crumble and on another hand, I don’t want to see this many Elon/X/Tesla links about something so seemingly useless.
darq@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 17:27
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When you have a net worth measured in the billions of dollars, it's genuinely impressive to be able to lose money. With that kind of sum behind your name, you could just do nothing and out-earn most people on the planet with just interest alone. To actually be able to lose money? Now that takes work!
Daft_ish@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 18:09
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Since Elon is just flushing money down the toilet do you think he might do me a solid and slice me off like 50k? Brah, that’s like if I dropped a penny on you from my last paycheck, right? I ain’t even getting greedy.
Like he could do that for 800,000 people and it would just be buying twitter, right?
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
on 07 Sep 2023 20:07
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With $40 billion you could give a random person $1 million today. Then give another person $1 million the next day. And so on, for 100 years.
And you’d still have a private jet, a bunch of mansions, a fleet of luxury cars, and a bunch of yachts.
It’s completely bizarre that a billionaire that’s so desperate to be popular doesn’t just give money to people. They don’t want to give up the power that wealth gives them and so try to trick people into liking them.
CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 02:56
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I’m assuming he could still be accruing wealth if he did that.
Assuming he made at least 5% or so per year on investment income, that would be 2 billion, and if you assume a 20% tax rate on that, it would be 1.6 billion, still more than 365 million it would take to give away one million every day.
And so if he could live on less than ~1.2 billion per year, he’d still be gaining wealth…
uphillbothways@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 17:33
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I mean, it was never worth what he paid for it. But, he's definitely devalued it by a lot.
eltimablo@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 18:44
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It was also on a severe downward trend for about a year prior to him buying it.
Talaraine@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 17:35
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I swear this is playing out like Brewster's Millions more and more each day
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 18:05
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Imagine being so conceited that you think you’ll walk away from defaming the ADL.
Astroturfed@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:52
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Nothing says definitely not a racist Nazi like blaming the Jews for your failings. Nazis would never blame the Jews for everything.
macisr@unilem.org
on 07 Sep 2023 17:37
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And now that it’s more like a shitty and smaller version of reddit (i don’t see real people posting there anymore), i don’t see how it can recover.
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 17:44
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At this point I’m starting to think he wanted to topple Twitter. Nobody is this careless.
bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Sep 2023 18:45
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My guess is he launched Tesla in China and wanted a WeChat clone, and as he has bought pretty much every company rather than founded them, he just thought it was rinse repeat.
IHeartBadCode@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 19:35
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Twitter as WeChat is exactly what I’m guessing Musk is attempting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started linking Teslas and the Supercharger Network to Twitter.
He has mentioned that the three would have some interconnectivity via his xAI platform. Along with StarLink providing the networking to the platform.
What all it means and how it all works has yet to be seen. Pretty hard to work on new ideas when your company is hemorrhaging money faster than an executive at a top dollar strip club.
bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Sep 2023 19:41
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Yeah, good points. Maybe all his companies are like this, it’s just the first one that’s been so public and shown his true colours.
Him calling that diver a pedo was when I realised what a moron he is.
paper_clip@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 21:41
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Maybe all his companies are like this, it’s just the first one that’s been so public and shown his true colours.
I'm not going to look for it now, but there was a Twitter thread from last year that kind of talks about this.
Basically, SpaceX and Tesla are companies that grew up with Elon as an early investor, and have learned early on how to contain him. They institutionally have firewalls in place to keep him from wrecking the real work they're doing, like dedicated Musk-handlers that slow walk his bad ideas until he changes his mind a few days later.
Twitter basically had none of those institutional firewalls, and could not container him with company culture.
tburkhol@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 19:54
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Honestly, I feel like he’s incomprehensibly wealthy even relative to single-billionaires. Google says there’s about 2600 of them on the planet, so I’m putting Musk incomprehensibly wealthy compared to 99.99997% of us
I mean he did spend 44 billion prior to said nuking. Site isn’t worth as much now sure, but the volume of currency still traveled into the hands of others.
NoneOfUrBusiness@kbin.social
on 08 Sep 2023 08:26
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Good point actually.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Sep 2023 23:22
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Is the previous owner also a fuckhead though?
elvith@feddit.de
on 07 Sep 2023 20:25
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But he hasn’t realized his losses yet - HODL!
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 07 Sep 2023 20:50
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Twitter having overwhelming dominance may have had value to shareholders, but IMO that is at the expense of everyone else. Not having to use Twitter is valuable.
40 billion going into the bank accounts of investors that previously owned Twitter stock certainly is a redistribution of wealth, but I doubt it’s the kind you’re referring to.
Not really, and that’s the obscene part. Literally absolutely nothing changed about his standard of living by losing $40B.
He could have solved world hunger for years with that money, and wouldn’t even have had to give anything up for it.
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
on 07 Sep 2023 19:51
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He could have ended world hunger multiple times. But instead he bought a social media site so he could be popular with the Nazi crowd.
On the bright side, whenever anyone fucks things up now, they can think “well at least at least I didn’t fuck things up as badly as Elon Musk.”
DLSchichtl@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 20:32
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I mean, we were all looking. We’ve been enjoying mountains of popcorn to twitters slow collapse.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 23:06
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40,000 millions. Most people could live without working ever again with one million dollars (provided they managed them wisely.)
StinkyRedMan@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 23:48
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While one million is a pretty good amount of cash, you’re delusional if you thinks it’s a “never working again” amount of money. I had this talk pretty recently with a friend of mine, if he used it to finish paying his house (150k) at 24k a year it would not even last 40 years.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 07:19
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You’re assuming that everyone living today will live for more than 40 years. Ageist much? (I’m kidding.)
No, I’m not delusional. I’m not saying “never work again and live in luxury.” I’ll gladly live in a studio apartment for a few years while I put some of that money work for me (instead of me working.) It’s doable.
Edit: you can also move to a relatively safe country where 20K a year gives you the same standard of living as a middle-class westerner - minus the 9 to 5 grind.
At a 4% return, a million nets you around 4000k/month without affecting the principle. After taxes, youre likely walking away with 40k/yr.
Plently of places in the US you can live for around 40k/yr. Not luxury, but if youre fine with rural to semi rural, you can do well on interest alone.
Gaspar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 2023 03:40
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Last time I looked into it, it was closer to 4 million to “never work again” if you were in your mid-30s. Nowadays, even that figure is probably not enough. Your point still stands, however.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 07:26
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Let’s run an experiment. Someone give me 1 million dollars, post-taxes, and I’ll try my best to never work again. Any takers?
bluestribute@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 19:16
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Didn’t Elon have the opportunity to end world hunger for 8 billion dollars a couple years ago?
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org
on 07 Sep 2023 20:31
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Almost. He said that if anyone could present a plan on how to end world hunger for $6B, he’d sell Tesla stock to pay for it.
The U.N. publicly presented a plan on how they’d use that $6B, but it fell way short of that goal. Which isn’t surprising, since they never claimed they could solve world hunger permanently for $6B. Musk’s challenge was rhetorical because the bar was impossibly high. He was really just trying to make the point that he does not have the money to truly end world hunger.
Friendly reminder, for context, that the U.S. military budget is $842B. For one year.
HerrBeter@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 20:47
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As much as I dislike Musk, I think your argument is a bit of a straw man. He responded to something or someone saying it was possible for $6bn. They stopped responding after Musk said “open books for accounting” or something. The UN shouldn’t have responded at all since it wasn’t feasible
I still think it’s interesting information, and feeding 42 million people for a year is a better deal than funneling that money to people like musk or the DoD.
xc2215x@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 19:26
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Elon has screwed up the site.
Clown_Tempura@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 20:11
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It astounds and amazes me that there was a time Elon could have feasibly been considered a smart, level-headed entrepreneur. The whole submarine thing with the trapped kids really was the beginning of his unraveling. I for one thank Elon Musk for proving once and for all to even the most shameless corpo-apologists that having a ton of money doesn’t magically make you smart or cool. The dude’s an idiot, and I love watching him self-destruct.
Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 20:46
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At one point they even had him cameo in iron man, and had him name dropped on star trek as a pioneer of human discovery. People used to jerk off to this dude’s PR image like he was a real life Tony Stark.
Uranium3006@kbin.social
on 07 Sep 2023 20:57
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He's mentioned in star trek discovery as if he took us to mars. Those lines aged so poorly
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Sep 2023 21:25
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I prefer to pretend that they’re talking about another person named Musk, one of his many kids perhaps…
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 23:02
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Or the story is happening in the other better timeline.
Putting aside that that whole show is pretty rough and I’ve mentally decanonized it, the guy who said it is technically a mega space nazi from the space nazi dimension so I choose to believe he just thought that Musk being an aspiring space nazi was as cool in our universe as it was in his.
keefshape@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 10:16
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Truth.
phillaholic@lemm.ee
on 07 Sep 2023 21:29
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If he stayed off Twitter he’d have a pretty impressive CV. Mainstream electric cars, actually usable Satellite Internet, Major Solar Panels etc. Even weird shit like Hyperloop would just be random neat things.
sushibowl@feddit.nl
on 07 Sep 2023 21:46
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Same with JK Rowling, Kanye West, Notch, etc. It’s literally so fucking easy for people like this to remain loved by everyone. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. Give nice polite interviews about your job, stay out of politics, let a boring publicity agent manage your social media for you, and enjoy your billions of dollars in peace.
Why is it so hard?
Palerider@feddit.uk
on 07 Sep 2023 22:32
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Ego.
instamat@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 01:21
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Every shitty thing can be traced back to ego.
SpaceDogge@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 03:25
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RekcuffuckeR@feddit.de
on 07 Sep 2023 22:32
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Why should they care about being loved by people they don’t care about? It’s normal to have the desire to express your political opinion.
instamat@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 01:24
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Or, you know, you could keep it to yourself and wait until someone asks for it.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
on 08 Sep 2023 23:15
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I would have a think tank. I would pay a hundred or so smart people obscene amounts of money to tell me my ideas are daft and come up with really great ideas for me.
The mind boggles as to why someone like musk doesn’t do this. It would be like achieving global eternal financial domination on easy mode. A world hack if you will. It would cost a mere fraction of his wealth.
Imagine if every descision you made was well informed and well reasoned instead of just shit.
greavous@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 11:17
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The problem is that they don’t want money any more. They want attention.
Trashcan@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 21:54
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This is the quote:
“I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so around $4 billion.”
In my head, he is comparing the minimum size of ADLs value reduction to be 10% or 4 billion.
10% of 44 billion is 4,4 billion.
In this comment he is not saying anything about the current value except that 10% of 44 is around 4.
How else can you read it?
Cabrio@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 21:55
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I think you replied to the wrong comment.
Sovereign_13@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 22:14
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You can read it as “being responsible for 10% of the [total] value destruction, equal to $4B”.
So if they’re responsible for 10% of the total value loss, and that’s equivalent to $4B, then 100% of the total value lost would be $40B.
Otherwise you would say “they’re responsible for destroying 10% of the value”.
Trashcan@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 06:04
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Right. So it’s a Schroedinger’s quote…😑
But thanks for pointing out what was obvious for others
RekcuffuckeR@feddit.de
on 07 Sep 2023 22:19
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He’s saying that 10% of the value reduction is 4 billion so the total value reduction is 40 billion (of the 44 billion he bought it for).
But you’re right, he probably meant it like you read it and just failed to express himself properly.
PerCarita@discuss.tchncs.de
on 07 Sep 2023 21:11
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Now they’re researching a time machine to try to create a conundrum where Musk simultaneously buys Twitter, runs it to the ground, but then in the past re-buys it from himself after he runs it to the ground.
dbilitated@aussie.zone
on 07 Sep 2023 21:52
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MaxHardwood@lemmy.ca
on 07 Sep 2023 21:59
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I could be remembering wrong but Twitter was only worth $15B at best, and Elon bought it for $44B because he’s that smart.
Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Sep 2023 22:42
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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.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 22:58
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I genuinely think he’s just a pawn in a bigger game in which some powers wanted twitter gone.
ultratiem@lemmy.ca
on 07 Sep 2023 23:53
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Brainless but sounds like a competent leader. Has all the qualities the Illuminati are looking for when appointing a new drone.
He hasn’t stopped a lot of folks, including all the shitty ones that would normally be banned. Hell, he unbanned them in many cases (i.e. Trump.) With Blue he gave them a way to be all the top responses in comments no matter how shitty their take is. Making the feed useless can be just as bad (if not worse) then censoring it.
tomatopathe@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 11:16
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Why gone? I understood that the Saudi government just wanted to de-anonymize it (i.e be informed about the authors of any critical tweets).
Like that guy who has been condemned to death for a critical tweet to his… 8 followers.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 11:58
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I bet that’s happening right now.
ThePenitentOne@discuss.online
on 08 Sep 2023 21:55
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No. He may be influenced by others, but it’s clear his ego is just that enormous and that his emotional immaturity makes him do stupid shit impulsively.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 00:11
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Which makes him perfect for manipulation.
ThePenitentOne@discuss.online
on 09 Sep 2023 11:38
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Even if he was ‘manipulated’ he would be the same person regardless if he wasn’t. He is clearly a self-serving person with ego problems. There are no billionaires that aren’t fucked up people.
elbarto777@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 21:02
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Oh for sure! But a stupid person may do stupid things on their own, and more stupid things when manipulated.
collegefurtrader@discuss.tchncs.de
on 07 Sep 2023 22:06
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He overpaid for a piece of shit and ran it into the ground.
Everyone with a used BMW knows the feeling.
hypnotoad__@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 00:22
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Please stop attacking my character based on terrible purchase decisions
Are you talking about the poor quality control on the Tesla Model 3? OP was talking about the BMW 3-Series, which typically have excellent fit and finish.
Saneless@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 18:57
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Ahh I just saw the 3 and a post about Musk and my brain made a nice leap to nowhere
gonzo0815@sh.itjust.works
on 07 Sep 2023 22:22
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HODL lol
Coreidan@lemmy.world
on 07 Sep 2023 23:25
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Listen all y’all it’s a SABOTAGE
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 2023 01:17
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That might be giving Musk too much credit. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Coreidan@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 01:47
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There’s far too many coincidences and moments of horrendous decisions for it all to be chalked up to incompetence at this point.
And no I don’t give him any credit. Credit goes to his handlers which at this point it’s clear is Russia. It’s obvious at this point what’s going on with Twitter is politically driven to benefit GOP and therefore Russia.
You are talking about the “let that sink in” guy, the car tunnel fail guy, the guy who bought into PayPal and Tesla and called them his creations. There is no need to assume a conspiracy, he is just a diamond level asshat and always was. SpaceX/Starship, Neuralink, Solar City, they are ALL absolutely insane and miscalculated projects and if you read about them you see that he is totally incompetent. The big question is why people believe in him.
I strongly recommend watching this channel which has excellent videos on Musk:
bizzacore@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 03:46
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Don’t forget about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (via MBS) large investment, putting them as the biggest shareholder of the company behind Muskrat himself.
Here’s an interesting Birdsite thread on how the KSA has been intertwined with Twitter since as early as 2011 - and no, not just as an “investor”. There’s been all sorts of the shadiest shit going on over there.
whats_a_refoogee@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 07:30
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No, Musk is just a moron. You just need to look at his interactions with former staff to realize it was his ego and inability to admit being wrong that ran the company into the ground.
He’s been behaving like a bratty child, except he’s the owner of the company so any tantrums he throws have direct influence.
originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
on 07 Sep 2023 17:50
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CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 02:34
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Imagine having so much wealth that he can walk away from his utter failure at Xitter and remain completely unaffected. For him, this is like some side-hustle vanity project a bored trophy wife runs.
Globulart@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 06:06
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Losing 40b is a pretty big deal even for Musk to be fair. It’d be more like a bored housewife remortgaging the house to pay for their vanity project.
AlboTheGuy@feddit.nl
on 08 Sep 2023 08:34
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I mean not really, he knows he’ll always have a roof over his head, food on his table, doctors when he’s ill, it is a rather big deal but that doesn’t really affect his daily life in any significant way.
He’ll still be able to afford anything he may ever want, what he really lost is financial power and social respect.
In short I think it’s more like a bored housewife getting thrown out from the homeowners association.
Never met a nice billionaire hell I’ve met some millionaires and 90% of them are assholes.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 15:41
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90% of all people are assholes if you give them enough time to show it.
ThePenitentOne@discuss.online
on 08 Sep 2023 21:40
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Even if it isn’t exactly true, it definitely feels like it sometimes.
crackajack@reddthat.com
on 08 Sep 2023 11:06
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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.
Quill7513@slrpnk.net
on 08 Sep 2023 11:40
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Sounds like he realized being a billionaire is intrinsically unethical and elected to be a millionaire
crackajack@reddthat.com
on 08 Sep 2023 12:34
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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.
CaptainAlcohol@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 10:37
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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.
Birdlaw@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 05:40
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From Yahoo, definitely we should take the former search engine as a reputable news source. X (Twitter) has lost money because he is enforcing free speech which the main stream doesn’t like so obviously advertisers who are scared pull from it. It’s so obvious when it was Twitter and you had whatever leftist pouring propaganda it’s all ok but the second that a different opinion gets put on there then it’s garbage. This is America words are words and we should be able to have conversations.
Panurge987@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 05:48
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It’s Fortune magazine. Yahoo aggregates news from other sources.
Doomsider@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 06:02
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For real, Elon gave the platform to Incels, Nazi, and White Supremists. The left woke agenda can’t handle the bigotry, hate, and racism. Weak ass advertisers don’t want their brands associated with the alt right. What is wrong with them? /S
bernieecclestoned@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 07:29
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It’s a Fortune piece that Yahoo regurgitated. That’s all I see Yahoo doing these days
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 06:11
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This serves him somehow, not sure how but he’s used social media and PR to make money through market manipulation before.
I doubt his mental math is accurate on the value loss anyways.
whats_a_refoogee@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 07:24
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Or he’s just a narcissist that can’t run a company if he’s not held on a leash by people who actually know what they’re doing.
Diplomjodler@feddit.de
on 08 Sep 2023 09:41
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He got high on his own supply. The man created quite the aura by leveraging his less-than-glorious Paypal past, his taking over of Tesla and actually doing some interesting things with SpaceX. His companies achieved some genuinely impressive feats which he gladly attributed to himself and probably confined himself to his perceived genius and infallibility.
Hopefully, Twitter will be a teaching moment for him but so far he seems to just double down on his mistakes.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 15:39
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I doubt that’s true, or he wouldnt have managed to take Tesla from a prototype and a few million dollars to billions, and then again with a rocketship contractor from scratch.
It’s possible for people to be evil/immoral and also good at what they do, I don’t get what the obsession with painting him as a dip shit who managed to accidentally make multiple successful global enterprises.
If it was really that easy to fail upward when managing these businesses you’d see a lot more of them.
Diplomjodler@feddit.de
on 08 Sep 2023 09:41
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It serves him and his far right cabal politically. The money is not really a consideration in this case. They’re gearing up to reinstall Trump in the next election.
fosforus@sopuli.xyz
on 08 Sep 2023 06:22
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$4B seems also a tad too high.
zuhayr@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 09:27
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There are network cables, servers, laptops from all those employees who were fucked laid off.
Nioxic@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Sep 2023 10:10
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A macbook pro is less than 10000 dollars.
But lets assume it was 10000 dollars.
Thats 400.000 laptops…
FireWire400@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 12:19
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All of them probably iCloud-locked and worth nothing
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 17:24
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They’re great fancy doorstops.
Diplomjodler@feddit.de
on 08 Sep 2023 09:39
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Best I can do is tree fiddy.
TheRealLinga@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 12:32
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I knew it was you, lochness monsta!
moitoi@feddit.de
on 08 Sep 2023 08:50
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According to real math, Elon always overestimates the value.
whitecapstromgard@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 10:49
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That is 4 billion $ too much
Tilgare@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 11:43
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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.
Kage520@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 12:14
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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.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 23:12
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Only because larger media outlets use it as “news”
Twitter has always been one of the smaller “social media” giants
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 16:53
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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 😂😂😂
blady_blah@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 02:30
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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.
Commiunism@lemmy.wtf
on 08 Sep 2023 11:54
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Wasn’t twitter worth way, way less than musk paid for the company’s acquisition (like 2x or more)? If so, the 4 billion evaluation is still probably much higher than what most people were anticipating the company would be worth under musk in 1-2 years after acquisition. Great job elon, exceeding expectations yet again.
gareth886@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 12:15
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It’s a rather sad state of affairs. I have 2 accounts, one for professional network and SFW interests, plus another for porn. The professional network and SFW interests has become an absolute bonfire. I find myself using it less and less. I used to check every day, now I barely check once a week.
TL:DR Twitter is only useful for porn these days, and even that isn’t fantastic.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 17:04
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I thought most of the porn was gone from Twitter.
dangblingus@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 12:22
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He’s just that good at business. Truly an unstoppable force in the world of commerce. Capitalism really is the best system. No problems.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 2023 14:48
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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
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 16:17
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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.
randomperson@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 15:09
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The alternative to that is?
quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 08 Sep 2023 16:01
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You can know something is a problem without knowing the solution.
randomperson@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 08:58
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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.
quackers@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 10 Sep 2023 00:51
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Can’t find a solution without first pointing out and understanding the problem.
seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org
on 08 Sep 2023 17:06
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cheery_coffee@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 2023 17:35
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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.
AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 16:40
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I really hope the original owners re-buy Twitter for a fraction of what they sold it for lol
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 17:48
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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”.
scarabic@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 20:33
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Maybe they could use it to swindle some other mega rich bastard, just the way they robbed Musk.
FleetingTit@feddit.de
on 08 Sep 2023 22:08
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The Twitter brand is still worth good money, just not in the hands of Musk.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 16:53
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Three fiddy
MrCrankyBastard@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 19:50
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Good. Fuck ElMu. ElMu sucks.
scarabic@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 20:32
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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.
mog77a@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 21:06
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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.
scarabic@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 21:25
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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!
odelik@lemmy.today
on 08 Sep 2023 22:51
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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.
justastranger@sh.itjust.works
on 09 Sep 2023 02:07
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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.
scarabic@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 04:41
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Okay yeah one tear for them and the special hell they are in.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip
on 09 Sep 2023 09:05
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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.
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.
greavous@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 11:09
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They robbed Elon in the deal? They accepted his deal. He robbed himself!
Gerula@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 22:03
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What company?
nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca
on 08 Sep 2023 22:34
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Xitter. Pronunciation is left to the imagination.
greavous@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 11:10
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Could be? Those are rookie numbers!!! Dear Leader has almost bankrupted Truth Social already!!! You gotta get them even lower!!!
kalistia@sh.itjust.works
on 08 Sep 2023 22:39
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What a clown
Smacks@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 22:56
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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?
Kerred@lemmy.world
on 08 Sep 2023 23:03
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I have a dumb conspiracy that Elon wants to be US president like any Lex Luthor like person, but since he can’t he is ruining things extreme republicans hate. Then he can gain favor and make his way up as high as he can to reach religious cult status Like some megalomaniac. 😆
What’s weird is if you look at users on places like Newsmax and Oann or other extremist forums they seem to happy seeing Tesla and Twitter going down but don’t mock Elon for it
nxdefiant@startrek.website
on 09 Sep 2023 02:30
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He 10X’d Twitter!
Buffalox@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 09:29
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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.
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.
Buffalox@lemmy.world
on 09 Sep 2023 17:00
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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!
threaded - newest
South African Magician Makes $40B Disappear!
Nah, he just donated 40B to the former ownership. Keeping the big bucks in the hands of the ultra wealthy.
I don’t think that Elron can really do math, so who knows.
Cheer up Elon - it wasn’t worth $44B when you bought it, so it’s lost significantly less value than you think!
Exactly.
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.
Well, 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
The point of acquiring Twitter wasn’t to make money; it was to take away something that woke lefty journalists like and give it to fascists.
Have you considered that Elon Musk is a dumbass rather than a super genius?
The guy didn’t plan on buying twitter. He was made to after he tried gaming the system and fucked it up.
Both things can be true
Incredibly inflated ego and self-image combined with poor emotional maturity and self-control after a life of entitlement. He said it to piss people off and then came back to eat shit, but unfortunately is also so rich he can throw his money away and have it barely matter.
Yea it’s this. If he was smart he wouldn’t make himself look like a total idiot every week.
And? I seem to recall that he fantasized about doing it loudly enough and in enough detail, that he was legally obligated to follow through to avoid being charged with securities fraud. The reason he wanted to do it was to take a communications medium away from the liberals and give it to the Nazis.
This is marvel-brained fantasy. The guy played games and ended up with a business he doesn’t understand and never should have been in charge of. He’s not a super-villain, he’s an ordinary villain, dumbass nepotism case.
To see him explain it on Xitter or with a cartoon meme or whatever, he was in the “center”, and the radical left was so extreme that they brought the Overton window to the left and ruined his day, and were super mean to him, too, I guess. In other words, look at what you made him do, all normal Americans!
Or something. I guess the super-mean liberals also stole his hair, too.
Is that pronounced “shitter”? Very appropriate.
That’s the best pronunciation, IMHO.
Honestly, i think he wanted to oump and dump the stock and was flabbergasted when Twitter forced him to purchase it for the full price he states.
Can this man baby just go away? No one cares dude. Enjoy your overpriced echo chamber.
Him buying twitter was just some sort of narcissistic flex on his daughter.
😬
.
I don’t think he ever intended to buy it. He was forced to buy it due to his own stupid actions.
Put another rich guy in charge of spacex first please! I don’t want to be stuck on this rock forever 🥲
luckily, he has minimal influence over SpaceX, and only really provide high level direction. Same with Tesla.
Twitter, though… the turnaround time on his whims is staggering
Considering the fuckupery at Tesla (especially as of late), this may not entirely be true. It seems that he has slightly more influence at Tesla than he does at SpaceX, which has been doing a pretty great job.
Glenn Shotwell runs SpaceX and is a competent adult. Nothing to worry about on that front, thankfully.
Ah ok i thought it was musk boy. Tbh I don’t look too much into who the ceo of a company is. Mostly just what they do which i why i love spacex. I take it all my downvotes are the musk haters lol. I’m neutral on that whole thing with him. Can’t say anything about the whole twitter situation as i have never used it.
I have some sad news…
This guy must be from the future. Oh wise one tell us all your secrets.
Ever heard of having some hope my guy? Hate to break it to you but I hope humanity leaves this rock and isn’t stuck here forever. If humanity stays on this planet forever we will 100% go extinct either by war, virus, or the most obvious asteroid impacts or the guaranteed one the sun expanding over a few billion years. If we want to live till the end of time and space itself we HAVE to leave.
The tech we will rely on for interplanetary travel is pretty much settled science, it just takes time and money to implement.
Hoping for unexpected breakthroughs isn’t going to help much.
This is the 4-D chess at play actually - now that it’s been delisted, there can’t be any securities class action against him. taps forehead
The Saudi loaners will be satisfied. The banks might not.
This is dee-dee-dee chess, I think.
On one hand, I can’t wait for his empire to crumble and on another hand, I don’t want to see this many Elon/X/Tesla links about something so seemingly useless.
When you have a net worth measured in the billions of dollars, it's genuinely impressive to be able to lose money. With that kind of sum behind your name, you could just do nothing and out-earn most people on the planet with just interest alone. To actually be able to lose money? Now that takes work!
Since Elon is just flushing money down the toilet do you think he might do me a solid and slice me off like 50k? Brah, that’s like if I dropped a penny on you from my last paycheck, right? I ain’t even getting greedy.
Like he could do that for 800,000 people and it would just be buying twitter, right?
With $40 billion you could give a random person $1 million today. Then give another person $1 million the next day. And so on, for 100 years.
And you’d still have a private jet, a bunch of mansions, a fleet of luxury cars, and a bunch of yachts.
It’s completely bizarre that a billionaire that’s so desperate to be popular doesn’t just give money to people. They don’t want to give up the power that wealth gives them and so try to trick people into liking them.
I’m assuming he could still be accruing wealth if he did that.
Assuming he made at least 5% or so per year on investment income, that would be 2 billion, and if you assume a 20% tax rate on that, it would be 1.6 billion, still more than 365 million it would take to give away one million every day.
And so if he could live on less than ~1.2 billion per year, he’d still be gaining wealth…
I mean, it was never worth what he paid for it. But, he's definitely devalued it by a lot.
It was also on a severe downward trend for about a year prior to him buying it.
I swear this is playing out like Brewster's Millions more and more each day
Except Brewster was a decent guy.
And he’s blaming the anti defamation league…
.
He's defaming the anti-defamation league. Ooh, what delicious irony!
Calling the ADL Nazis is probably the funniest thing he’s ever said
Imagine being so conceited that you think you’ll walk away from defaming the ADL.
Nothing says definitely not a racist Nazi like blaming the Jews for your failings. Nazis would never blame the Jews for everything.
And now that it’s more like a shitty and smaller version of reddit (i don’t see real people posting there anymore), i don’t see how it can recover.
At this point I’m starting to think he wanted to topple Twitter. Nobody is this careless.
My guess is he launched Tesla in China and wanted a WeChat clone, and as he has bought pretty much every company rather than founded them, he just thought it was rinse repeat.
Twitter as WeChat is exactly what I’m guessing Musk is attempting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started linking Teslas and the Supercharger Network to Twitter.
He has mentioned that the three would have some interconnectivity via his xAI platform. Along with StarLink providing the networking to the platform.
What all it means and how it all works has yet to be seen. Pretty hard to work on new ideas when your company is hemorrhaging money faster than an executive at a top dollar strip club.
Yeah, good points. Maybe all his companies are like this, it’s just the first one that’s been so public and shown his true colours.
Him calling that diver a pedo was when I realised what a moron he is.
I'm not going to look for it now, but there was a Twitter thread from last year that kind of talks about this.
Basically, SpaceX and Tesla are companies that grew up with Elon as an early investor, and have learned early on how to contain him. They institutionally have firewalls in place to keep him from wrecking the real work they're doing, like dedicated Musk-handlers that slow walk his bad ideas until he changes his mind a few days later.
Twitter basically had none of those institutional firewalls, and could not container him with company culture.
My hypothesis is that wealth causes brain damage.
🎻
And he's... proud of this?
I don't think Musk is capable of not being proud of himself.
Big W for the ADL, ratio’ing Musk harder then anyone else ever could
.
Honestly, I feel like he’s incomprehensibly wealthy even relative to single-billionaires. Google says there’s about 2600 of them on the planet, so I’m putting Musk incomprehensibly wealthy compared to 99.99997% of us
Well, maybe I just read another article wildly blowing up a story based on a tweet Elon Musk spent 4 seconds thinking about.
His rush to spout shite may have led him to reveal more than he meant to I think is their point
That’s still way more than that shithole is actually worth though.
Its main asset is its name, and he changed it. What a moron!
I’m just impressed that he’s still got so many people tricked into believing he’s smart.
When no-one was looking, Elon Musk lost forty billion. He lost 40 billion. That’s as many as four tens billions. And that’s terrible.
I never would have guessed that Musk is a billion times worse than Lex Luthor, but the math is right there. Terrible.
Lex Luthor bought a company for 44 dollars then lost 40?
Thanks for making my day!!
It’s an older meme, but it checks out.
Source (spoiler'd because image)
<img alt="" src="https://i.imgur.com/BfJQD3e.jpg">
Terrible for him. Great for everyone else that that 40 billion is now in the hands of other people. 
It’s also ironic, that he is single-handedly the greatest redistributor of his own wealth. 
Depends what they do with it, I guess.
That's not really how that works. He just reduced the value of the site. He nuked value out of existence.
I mean he did spend 44 billion prior to said nuking. Site isn’t worth as much now sure, but the volume of currency still traveled into the hands of others.
Good point actually.
Is the previous owner also a fuckhead though?
But he hasn’t realized his losses yet - HODL!
Twitter having overwhelming dominance may have had value to shareholders, but IMO that is at the expense of everyone else. Not having to use Twitter is valuable.
40 billion going into the bank accounts of investors that previously owned Twitter stock certainly is a redistribution of wealth, but I doubt it’s the kind you’re referring to.
Not really, and that’s the obscene part. Literally absolutely nothing changed about his standard of living by losing $40B.
He could have solved world hunger for years with that money, and wouldn’t even have had to give anything up for it.
He could have ended world hunger multiple times. But instead he bought a social media site so he could be popular with the Nazi crowd.
On the bright side, whenever anyone fucks things up now, they can think “well at least at least I didn’t fuck things up as badly as Elon Musk.”
I mean, we were all looking. We’ve been enjoying mountains of popcorn to twitters slow collapse.
40,000 millions. Most people could live without working ever again with one million dollars (provided they managed them wisely.)
While one million is a pretty good amount of cash, you’re delusional if you thinks it’s a “never working again” amount of money. I had this talk pretty recently with a friend of mine, if he used it to finish paying his house (150k) at 24k a year it would not even last 40 years.
You’re assuming that everyone living today will live for more than 40 years. Ageist much? (I’m kidding.)
No, I’m not delusional. I’m not saying “never work again and live in luxury.” I’ll gladly live in a studio apartment for a few years while I put some of that money work for me (instead of me working.) It’s doable.
Edit: you can also move to a relatively safe country where 20K a year gives you the same standard of living as a middle-class westerner - minus the 9 to 5 grind.
At a 4% return, a million nets you around 4000k/month without affecting the principle. After taxes, youre likely walking away with 40k/yr.
Plently of places in the US you can live for around 40k/yr. Not luxury, but if youre fine with rural to semi rural, you can do well on interest alone.
Last time I looked into it, it was closer to 4 million to “never work again” if you were in your mid-30s. Nowadays, even that figure is probably not enough. Your point still stands, however.
Let’s run an experiment. Someone give me 1 million dollars, post-taxes, and I’ll try my best to never work again. Any takers?
Didn’t Elon have the opportunity to end world hunger for 8 billion dollars a couple years ago?
Almost. He said that if anyone could present a plan on how to end world hunger for $6B, he’d sell Tesla stock to pay for it.
The U.N. publicly presented a plan on how they’d use that $6B, but it fell way short of that goal. Which isn’t surprising, since they never claimed they could solve world hunger permanently for $6B. Musk’s challenge was rhetorical because the bar was impossibly high. He was really just trying to make the point that he does not have the money to truly end world hunger.
The U.N.'s plan for that $6B would “feed 42 million people for one year, and avert the risk of famine”. That’s nothing to sneeze at, obviously, but it’s not a permanent solution.
Friendly reminder, for context, that the U.S. military budget is $842B. For one year.
As much as I dislike Musk, I think your argument is a bit of a straw man. He responded to something or someone saying it was possible for $6bn. They stopped responding after Musk said “open books for accounting” or something. The UN shouldn’t have responded at all since it wasn’t feasible
I still think it’s interesting information, and feeding 42 million people for a year is a better deal than funneling that money to people like musk or the DoD.
Elon has screwed up the site.
It astounds and amazes me that there was a time Elon could have feasibly been considered a smart, level-headed entrepreneur. The whole submarine thing with the trapped kids really was the beginning of his unraveling. I for one thank Elon Musk for proving once and for all to even the most shameless corpo-apologists that having a ton of money doesn’t magically make you smart or cool. The dude’s an idiot, and I love watching him self-destruct.
At one point they even had him cameo in iron man, and had him name dropped on star trek as a pioneer of human discovery. People used to jerk off to this dude’s PR image like he was a real life Tony Stark.
He's mentioned in star trek discovery as if he took us to mars. Those lines aged so poorly
I prefer to pretend that they’re talking about another person named Musk, one of his many kids perhaps…
Or the story is happening in the other better timeline.
Putting aside that that whole show is pretty rough and I’ve mentally decanonized it, the guy who said it is technically a mega space nazi from the space nazi dimension so I choose to believe he just thought that Musk being an aspiring space nazi was as cool in our universe as it was in his.
Truth.
If he stayed off Twitter he’d have a pretty impressive CV. Mainstream electric cars, actually usable Satellite Internet, Major Solar Panels etc. Even weird shit like Hyperloop would just be random neat things.
Same with JK Rowling, Kanye West, Notch, etc. It’s literally so fucking easy for people like this to remain loved by everyone. Just keep your fucking mouth shut. Give nice polite interviews about your job, stay out of politics, let a boring publicity agent manage your social media for you, and enjoy your billions of dollars in peace.
Why is it so hard?
Ego.
Every shitty thing can be traced back to ego.
I’m paraphrasing here (see www.newyorker.com/…/elon-musks-shadow-rule) but Musk 'desperately wants to save the Earth, but thinks only he can do it".
Why should they care about being loved by people they don’t care about? It’s normal to have the desire to express your political opinion.
Or, you know, you could keep it to yourself and wait until someone asks for it.
I would have a think tank. I would pay a hundred or so smart people obscene amounts of money to tell me my ideas are daft and come up with really great ideas for me.
The mind boggles as to why someone like musk doesn’t do this. It would be like achieving global eternal financial domination on easy mode. A world hack if you will. It would cost a mere fraction of his wealth.
Imagine if every descision you made was well informed and well reasoned instead of just shit.
The problem is that they don’t want money any more. They want attention.
He admitted hyperloop was complete bullshit he pushed just to try to sideline California’s high speed rail.
Wonderful. The bar keeps going lower doesn’t it?
They put him on Rick and Morty in the most cringe inducing fashions and it was like watching a cartoon suck off a guy.
Which is weird because it’s usually the guys sucking off Rick and Morty
When he called the submarine expert a pedo was when I started to go, “Is this guy being for real?”
Same. I actually looked up to him before that.
I guarantee he’d rather be in his position than yours.
Yeah, can lose all this wealth and still be fucking wealthy in a way that literally dozens of people only know.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/96372ec1-3208-4211-8fc7-67d3d419af24.jpeg">
This is the quote:
In my head, he is comparing the minimum size of ADLs value reduction to be 10% or 4 billion. 10% of 44 billion is 4,4 billion. In this comment he is not saying anything about the current value except that 10% of 44 is around 4.
How else can you read it?
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
You can read it as “being responsible for 10% of the [total] value destruction, equal to $4B”.
So if they’re responsible for 10% of the total value loss, and that’s equivalent to $4B, then 100% of the total value lost would be $40B.
Otherwise you would say “they’re responsible for destroying 10% of the value”.
Right. So it’s a Schroedinger’s quote…😑
But thanks for pointing out what was obvious for others
He’s saying that 10% of the value reduction is 4 billion so the total value reduction is 40 billion (of the 44 billion he bought it for).
But you’re right, he probably meant it like you read it and just failed to express himself properly.
Are you saying that real life “Tony Stark genius, billionaire” is a bit thick and incapable of expressing his thoughts coherently?
I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked…
Don’t forget philantropist
Now they’re researching a time machine to try to create a conundrum where Musk simultaneously buys Twitter, runs it to the ground, but then in the past re-buys it from himself after he runs it to the ground.
let that sink in.
<img alt="" src="https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/62620552-5ec6-484c-9f46-aa8b68aab915.png">
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.
I genuinely think he’s just a pawn in a bigger game in which some powers wanted twitter gone.
Brainless but sounds like a competent leader. Has all the qualities the Illuminati are looking for when appointing a new drone.
.
He hasn’t stopped a lot of folks, including all the shitty ones that would normally be banned. Hell, he unbanned them in many cases (i.e. Trump.) With Blue he gave them a way to be all the top responses in comments no matter how shitty their take is. Making the feed useless can be just as bad (if not worse) then censoring it.
Why gone? I understood that the Saudi government just wanted to de-anonymize it (i.e be informed about the authors of any critical tweets).
Like that guy who has been condemned to death for a critical tweet to his… 8 followers.
I bet that’s happening right now.
No. He may be influenced by others, but it’s clear his ego is just that enormous and that his emotional immaturity makes him do stupid shit impulsively.
Which makes him perfect for manipulation.
Even if he was ‘manipulated’ he would be the same person regardless if he wasn’t. He is clearly a self-serving person with ego problems. There are no billionaires that aren’t fucked up people.
Oh for sure! But a stupid person may do stupid things on their own, and more stupid things when manipulated.
He overpaid for a piece of shit and ran it into the ground.
Everyone with a used BMW knows the feeling.
Please stop attacking my character based on terrible purchase decisions
What a beautiful car
Until I owned it
I’ll never forget my Sweet 3 series… Because I’m still paying for it’s repairs years later.
It’s a fascinating car and I’m always on awe any time one pulls up next to me
With trim and doors and shit so poorly aligned, I can’t believe it left the factory
Are you talking about the poor quality control on the Tesla Model 3? OP was talking about the BMW 3-Series, which typically have excellent fit and finish.
Ahh I just saw the 3 and a post about Musk and my brain made a nice leap to nowhere
You leave my E89 Z4 alone!
HODL lol
Listen all y’all it’s a SABOTAGE
That might be giving Musk too much credit. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
There’s far too many coincidences and moments of horrendous decisions for it all to be chalked up to incompetence at this point.
And no I don’t give him any credit. Credit goes to his handlers which at this point it’s clear is Russia. It’s obvious at this point what’s going on with Twitter is politically driven to benefit GOP and therefore Russia.
You are talking about the “let that sink in” guy, the car tunnel fail guy, the guy who bought into PayPal and Tesla and called them his creations. There is no need to assume a conspiracy, he is just a diamond level asshat and always was. SpaceX/Starship, Neuralink, Solar City, they are ALL absolutely insane and miscalculated projects and if you read about them you see that he is totally incompetent. The big question is why people believe in him.
I strongly recommend watching this channel which has excellent videos on Musk:
youtube.com/@commonsenseskeptic
They did the math.
Don’t forget about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s (via MBS) large investment, putting them as the biggest shareholder of the company behind Muskrat himself.
Here’s an interesting Birdsite thread on how the KSA has been intertwined with Twitter since as early as 2011 - and no, not just as an “investor”. There’s been all sorts of the shadiest shit going on over there.
twitter.com/…/1698827051556618679
When it comes to a malignant narcissist it’s actually the reverse. Never attribute to incompetence that which Is adequately explained by malice.
Edit: This kind of thing is typical malignant narcissist evil:
businessinsider.com/elon-musk-fired-twitter-execs…
No, Musk is just a moron. You just need to look at his interactions with former staff to realize it was his ego and inability to admit being wrong that ran the company into the ground.
He’s been behaving like a bratty child, except he’s the owner of the company so any tantrums he throws have direct influence.
hes very close to his goal of $0.00..
infrastructure... check
userbase... check
branding... check
whats left? fanboidom?
Can this fuck buy russia and fox “news”?
Would you like some making fuck, berzer ker!
My love for you is like a truck, berserker
Imagine having so much wealth that he can walk away from his utter failure at Xitter and remain completely unaffected. For him, this is like some side-hustle vanity project a bored trophy wife runs.
Losing 40b is a pretty big deal even for Musk to be fair. It’d be more like a bored housewife remortgaging the house to pay for their vanity project.
I mean not really, he knows he’ll always have a roof over his head, food on his table, doctors when he’s ill, it is a rather big deal but that doesn’t really affect his daily life in any significant way.
He’ll still be able to afford anything he may ever want, what he really lost is financial power and social respect.
In short I think it’s more like a bored housewife getting thrown out from the homeowners association.
That’s like the worst for a person like Musk.
Exactly, a bunch of made up problems in his own head is the worst that can happen to him
I’m sure Putin and the Saudis comped him accordingly
For now, but not for long. He’s too much of a business genius to lose out long term
LOL
I wouldn’t normally trust his math but he might have gotten this one right
X’ed the bird… Use biometrics and share it… What can go wrong
Government is there to support them fully lol
X’it the bed
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.
From Yahoo, definitely we should take the former search engine as a reputable news source. X (Twitter) has lost money because he is enforcing free speech which the main stream doesn’t like so obviously advertisers who are scared pull from it. It’s so obvious when it was Twitter and you had whatever leftist pouring propaganda it’s all ok but the second that a different opinion gets put on there then it’s garbage. This is America words are words and we should be able to have conversations.
It’s Fortune magazine. Yahoo aggregates news from other sources.
For real, Elon gave the platform to Incels, Nazi, and White Supremists. The left woke agenda can’t handle the bigotry, hate, and racism. Weak ass advertisers don’t want their brands associated with the alt right. What is wrong with them? /S
It’s a Fortune piece that Yahoo regurgitated. That’s all I see Yahoo doing these days
This serves him somehow, not sure how but he’s used social media and PR to make money through market manipulation before.
I doubt his mental math is accurate on the value loss anyways.
Or he’s just a narcissist that can’t run a company if he’s not held on a leash by people who actually know what they’re doing.
He’s held on a leash alright.
He got high on his own supply. The man created quite the aura by leveraging his less-than-glorious Paypal past, his taking over of Tesla and actually doing some interesting things with SpaceX. His companies achieved some genuinely impressive feats which he gladly attributed to himself and probably confined himself to his perceived genius and infallibility.
Hopefully, Twitter will be a teaching moment for him but so far he seems to just double down on his mistakes.
I doubt that’s true, or he wouldnt have managed to take Tesla from a prototype and a few million dollars to billions, and then again with a rocketship contractor from scratch.
It’s possible for people to be evil/immoral and also good at what they do, I don’t get what the obsession with painting him as a dip shit who managed to accidentally make multiple successful global enterprises.
If it was really that easy to fail upward when managing these businesses you’d see a lot more of them.
It serves him and his far right cabal politically. The money is not really a consideration in this case. They’re gearing up to reinstall Trump in the next election.
$4B seems also a tad too high.
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…
All of them probably iCloud-locked and worth nothing
They’re great fancy doorstops.
Best I can do is tree fiddy.
I knew it was you, lochness monsta!
According to real math, Elon always overestimates the value.
That is 4 billion $ too much
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.
Wasn’t twitter worth way, way less than musk paid for the company’s acquisition (like 2x or more)? If so, the 4 billion evaluation is still probably much higher than what most people were anticipating the company would be worth under musk in 1-2 years after acquisition. Great job elon, exceeding expectations yet again.
It’s a rather sad state of affairs. I have 2 accounts, one for professional network and SFW interests, plus another for porn. The professional network and SFW interests has become an absolute bonfire. I find myself using it less and less. I used to check every day, now I barely check once a week.
TL:DR Twitter is only useful for porn these days, and even that isn’t fantastic.
I thought most of the porn was gone from Twitter.
He’s just that good at business. Truly an unstoppable force in the world of commerce. Capitalism really is the best system. No problems.
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
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.
The alternative to that is?
You can know something is a problem without knowing the solution.
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.
.
This cancer made my country struggle for decades before it eventually went on the right tracks so fuck off with that.
So saying it wasn’t worth the investment ?
.
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.
I really hope the original owners re-buy Twitter for a fraction of what they sold it for lol
.
To make a shitload of money
.
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
.
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.
Three fiddy
Good. Fuck ElMu. ElMu sucks.
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.
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!
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.
Except for the green card holders whose residency in the US was literally held hostage by Elon.
Okay yeah one tear for them and the special hell they are in.
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.
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.
They robbed Elon in the deal? They accepted his deal. He robbed himself!
What company?
Xitter. Pronunciation is left to the imagination.
I’ll pronounce it a shitter I think!
Could be? Those are rookie numbers!!! Dear Leader has almost bankrupted Truth Social already!!! You gotta get them even lower!!!
What a clown
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?
I have a dumb conspiracy that Elon wants to be US president like any Lex Luthor like person, but since he can’t he is ruining things extreme republicans hate. Then he can gain favor and make his way up as high as he can to reach religious cult status Like some megalomaniac. 😆
What’s weird is if you look at users on places like Newsmax and Oann or other extremist forums they seem to happy seeing Tesla and Twitter going down but don’t mock Elon for it
He 10X’d 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!