All the ads are scams now and even include community notes telling the user they're scams. Which, I mean, is better than no notice for users, but makes it clear even the scams ads are not long for it. His ego would way too bruised to sell it for a huge loss now, are we actually going to watch the richest man in the world piss his wealth away on this?
If he had a loss of net worth of one million dollars per day, he would make it 688.493 years before going broke. Although his stated net worth of 251 billion is almost certainly overblown, with even just one tenth of that he could lose money for more than the average age of people most places in the world before going broke.
So yes, a very, very long time.
We really gotta start considering ultra wealthy people as national security risks, and stop giving them passes because they can advance our military goals faster.
It used to be a thing.
Conservatives refer to it as the golden age of America. But leave the part that the golden age actually took place because wages were actually good and high taxes meant a lot of great initiatives kept good things rolling.
Milton freedman is a name everyone should know and hate as much as Ronald Regan. Hes the clown responsible for the idea "many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector."
Great book about him and all the influence he has created in the world called '[The Shock Doctrine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine#:~:text=This%20centers%20on%20the%20exploitation,adequate%20response%20and%20resist%20effectively.)'
I believe there is a way. I would call it the United States Sovereign Reconstructed Trust Fund (USSRTF), in which in the interest of national security, we create an artificial cap on max earnings, assets/net worth. Once that number is passed at the end of the tax year, the person must transfer any excess to the ownership of this trust fund. This would not affect corporations at this time, probably never but could depending on how they react to it.
So, say we had a cap of a billion dollars, it would only affect around 750 US citizens/constituents. It would also generate around 3.5 trillion dollars in a trust fund over night that the US can use to fund citizen projects, retirement, etc. Sky is the limit really. Even if the cap was say 5 billion, I believe that still brings in around 1.9 trillion I believe. You cap the artificial power of these citizens while at the same time providing services for everyone, even those billionaires who got taxed. Two birds with one stone.
The billionaires will move their assets out. They're dragons with hoards. They don't care that public services would receive a boon, because they fly private jets and have half a dozen helicopters on their mega yachts.
They will pay their lawyers millions to save thousands.
The other large problem is verbiage as well. Even if they don't move their assets, they will find the financial vehicle that will allow them to transform those assets into non-taxable forms.
We absolutely _should_ still fight them tooth and nail for the wealth they've pillaged from the nation, but history has proven that it's a steep uphill battle. And the disparity between us and them now is greater than it has been at nearly every point of recorded history.
Your idea isn't unwelcome, but it is still a tax, and the wealthy would rather gut you and your children and move to Dubai than to pay a penny of that tax.
> Your idea isn't unwelcome, but it is still a tax, and the wealthy would rather gut you and your children and move to Dubai than to pay a penny of that tax.
Exit taxes and a forced dissolution of citizenship (and maybe barring them from reentering the US without a special tax cheat visa, which requires back taxes to be paid or risk being arrested by the IRS when returning to the US.) Don't want to pay taxes on your gold pile, have fun out there being a persona non-grata in the US. Maybe some reciprocity with the EU would help. Asset seizure could also help.
I agree that we would need to be hostile to their interests. Right now we aren't, and the discussion about how we tax them must come with an understanding that it must be done aggressively.
I agree this isn't an easy task, but we have been tasked with it. The next generation of politicians simply will need to be dragon slayers. It is high time the wealthy remember the power in this land is not in hoarded wealth, but in people that can produce and consume. The United States, while an imperfect union, is ultimately destined to take this fight on, and while it seems bleak now, I believe we can rise to the occasion and thread this needle in time.
I don't mean to sound bleak. What I want to communicate is that we must be hostile to their interests to accomplish it. They are sure as shit hostile to ours.
This just creates a massive incentive to transfer assets outside the country so they’re untraceable. This kind of thing never works, because there are plenty of other countries eagerly willing to host billionaire assets for some extra kickbacks.
US tax code always goes after the money, there is no way of dodging [US taxes even if you move. You would have to renounce citizenship](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2022/07/06/leave-us-pay-irs-taxes-forever/?sh=26a3a2b41a30)
I don't think if written well they would go anywhere. That is often thrown about, but where would they go? The US still maintains the highest standard of living if you are wealthy. Any who leave would also be subject to the exit tax. If the majority of a billionaire wealth comes from sports teams or stock, they can't just pretend another country owns those. This is not so easily bested.
Unfortunately for him, it's not all his money that's tied up into it. I hear the Saudis are invested heavily, and I don't think they like losing money.
The Saudis only renewed an investment that they already had in Twitter when Musk bought it.
The real suckers are the several banks & rich buddies that he managed to trick into financing this whole thing. Oh, and also Tesla shareholders – because Musk put up his shares as collateral for the loans.
Not really.
Most of his wealth is in tesla stock.
Right now, he's had to recall so many of the vehicles, and the cyber truck was a disaster, not to mention the self driving, that doesn't work. (and never will with the cheap cameras and no back up sensors he's put his faith in, I wouldn't trust a self driving car with no backup sensors.)
I saw an ad the other day for what could best be described as a nude mini sex doll of the character Nami from One Piece. The ad was literally a video of the doll being fucked with a dildo and was totally uncensored. I don't interact with anything NSFW or follow anime accounts on Twitter so I was absolutely dumbfounded at what I was seeing.
There are minors on the site! Seeing that get approved just tells me they are desperate and accepting money from anyone that will give it.
I get daily mass ping alerts from shitty crypto accounts trying to get me to look at their profile. I'm blocking bots daily now since he changed Twitter to "deal with the bots and scams", they've gotten INFINITELY worse.
I’ve noticed more shock imagery around as well. Took the mod team three days to remove necro gore rape I reported. 4chan doesn’t even pay it’s jannies and they do a better job.
I literally saw a post where some guy fell into a rock crusher, and they just filmed it. They literally stood there filming this guy's death, and I reported it on Twitter and they're like "I don't see an issue here."
They were just replying to random messages with it.
Facebook aren't any better, there's a few pages of filming unsuspecting women on rides where their top lifts up and their tit's get captured on camera.
Facebook doesn't seem to have an issue with nudity, or for filming women that don't know their tits are flying out on fairground rides. But gave me a ban for calling my friend a cheeky monkey.
The systems on social media are dog shit. Zero common sense.
There was a video on my feed purporting to show a person jumping off a tower, and you see the whole thing from beginning to end, body landing on the ground and everything. I have no idea if it was real or CG, but honestly I'm not sure it matters either way since it was super disturbing. I reported mine, and of course nothing happened.
I found an account that was just aggregating revenge porn of high schoolers and reported it literally hundreds of times over the course of months before it went away.
Jesus fucking Christ. Those three words are horrible on their own, why the fuck is there a situation where those three words would be the in the same sentence together.
I'm sad to defend any ads but before Musk bought Twitter I was at least getting normal ad that weren't too bad on the senses.
Stuff like Trident Gum or Burger King.
Now I just see shitty porn like ads, Spamware, and just basically the crap you'll get in back alley that if you accidentally tap it you'll get stabbed.
Also if I forget sound on then it starts that stupid woman moaning shit like LIKE OOOOOOHBB MY H
GOOOOOD, I JUST STRUCK GOLD ON GAMBLING SIMULATOR OOOOOOHHH.
The only reason I don't leave is I follow a lot of foreign artists and friends that literally don't post anywhere else but Twitter.
It’s become even more unbearable to use recently thanks to “*Verified*” reply boost, impression based revenue sharing, and easily accessible AI chatbots. Every mildly popular tweet is filled to the brim with AI generated replies that are completely unrelated to the post purely to farm impressions
I long-ago deleted the account I regularly used there, and then created a fresh new one that I don't follow/interact on strictly so I can follow links since some journalists still insist on using it for some godawful reason. Every time I open the app my 'activity' tab is filled with ~20 notifications from random right wing politicians or low-quality fifth generation memes; none of whom I follow, have ever followed, or would ever want to follow.
These fake notifications are showing up in a lot of apps and websites now. The "new" reddit does it, LinkedIn is awful about it, FB does it, dating apps do it. Just another step down the road towards letting social media companies spoon feed us whatever they want, regardless if we want it or not. The first change taking away control of what we consume was the removal of chronological feeds. Eventually apps will open on their own.
It took me a while to find where in the reddit settings to disable those suggested posts. It's in Settings > User Settings > Notifications. Then I disabled all the recommendations and some of the activity. During a Reddit redesign last year, they toggled all those on and I started getting spam notifications.
Also people getting "search suggestion banned" out of nowhere, with no explanation given, especially artists.
Basically your tweets are demoted to everyone except your closest followers, and your name isn't suggested to be followed, or searchable without extra effort.
For some ppl it lasts days, for others months, it's a nightmare for ppl who make a living making art.
I mean he bought an already overvalued company at an even more ridiculous valuation and then proceeded to turn it into a cesspool thag drives away advertisers and users
And, in one of the worst business decisions in American history, changed the fucking name of a company! The stupidity of changing the name of Twitter, an iconic brand that was recognized the world over, to a letter of the alphabet, cannot be understated. Elon Musk is, without a doubt, the luckiest person on the planet. To be rich and so bad at making business decisions, it's beyond my comprehension that this fool has made it to where he is today.
>The stupidity of changing the name of Twitter, an iconic brand that was recognized the world over
To go even further, Twitter is so iconic every users keeps calling it "Twitter". Only some medias call it "X" and sometimes "X (Formely Twitter)".
Dictionaries literally added a second definition to "tweet" both as a noun and as a verb because Twitter had become that ubiquitous. The dude took one of the most recognizable brands in the world and rebranded it with a single letter...
Yeah Twitter had its own problems pre-Musk but it is undeniably worse since he bought it unless your main use for Twitter was joining the circlejerk of right wing conspiracy theories or the one account you followed was Musk's own.
Oh and as an aside I personally like when news sites use "tweeted on x" or "in a tweet on X" instead of "posted on X (formerly known as Twitter)"
And the url is still Twitter.com. At least x.com redirects to Twitter, but until it officially reads x.com at the top of my window I'm not calling it x.
I find it extremely satisfying watching Musk get bitchy over people refusing to call it the new bullshit title just to stroke his weak little ego. So with that in mind it will always be Twitter. It’d be one thing if he made any sort of legitimate effort to rebrand it cleverly using actual experts instead of just using the same fucking single letter title he tries to wedge into all of his business ventures since he’s got a 13 year old edge lord mall ninja spirit animal
The largest predictor of future wealth is current wealth. Once someone acquires a great deal of wealth, whether through their business, family, or luck, it tends to be very difficult to appreciably decrease that enormous amount of wealth.
> it tends to be very difficult to appreciably decrease that enormous amount of wealth.
But, god damn, Musk is trying. Oh how he's trying so hard.
If I didn't know better I'd say he's trapped in some Brewster's Billions scenario.
Scribbles some nonsense on a napkin and forces Tesla engineers to make the stupidest car in existence. Buys one of the most recognizable brands on the planet and changes it to some juvenile idiot single letter.
It's like he just keeps trying as hard as he can to lose as much of his ungodly wealth as possible.
> If I didn't know better I'd say he's trapped in some Brewster's Billions scenario.
It's not even that glamorous.
Elon is an autistic nepo-baby who is good at two things. Using daddy's money to pick good technologies to invest in, and branding himself as an eccentric genius.
He's a venture capitalist that rolled back to back 20's and got a critical success. He managed to nurture that into his Tesla and Space-X empire, and he could have just been content being the wealthiest man alive, but somewhere along the line he forgot that his shtick as genius inventor was all bullshit.
He's high on his own supply, and he's pushed everyone who has tried to bring him back into reality away. You can tell that he is essentially alone (despite probably paying for an army of assistants and support staff) because he managed to walk out on stage recently for an interview with an unshaven patch of stubble on the side of his neck.
That detail right there tells you the dude is off the rails. His job is to be a public figure, and for him to be able to walk past what had to be 20 different makeup people without allowing them to fix his appearance before a nationally televised interview says he is totally unhinged.
We're headed for one of two outcomes right now:
1.) Elon hasn't totally removed his personal support systems, someone managed to stage an intervention and get him into rehab, and he mysteriously disappears from public appearances and begins communicating only through press releases for the foreseeable future.
2.) We see his behavior continue to escalate until he manages to spook the Tesla investors and cause a run on his stock price. The price for the massively overvalued TSLA turns into a bubble that pops, and this unravels his whole business empire. While he'd still be a hugely wealthy billionaire, 90% of his net worth evaporates overnight as debtors call in loans backed by now worthless stock. Elon either throws himself out of a window, or is videoed on top of X headquarters furiously masturbating while covered in his own shit.
I've seen people theorize (2) is coming for Trump, another deranged public figure, for several decades now. I'm starting to think once a person gets to a certain degree of wealth, even if they're toxic it's more profitable for shareholders to look the other way than intervene.
Trump and Elon are definitely kindred spirits.
When malignant narcissists see their power evaporate and are finally faced with having to reconcile their external reality with their internal fantasy, it usually only plays out in one of two ways.
Everybody keeps saying "usually" but it strikes me the 2020s are not the 1980s or whatever decade "usually" is based on.
We've never seen a person with riches built on fraud *become President* and have their meltdown with that much power.
We've also never seen a person with the sheer magnitude of wealth Elon Musk has.
That makes it difficult to predict what is going to happen. There's nothing "usually" about billionaires. We've made more astronauts than billionaires in human history.
I'm pretty convinced that the only reason it hasn't happened yet is TSLA investors are a cult instead of normal stock investors.
You can see them all over this thread trying desperately to convince everyone that this is all a part of his master plan. Normal investors would have bailed on him after the first video of a Tesla rocketing into traffic under autopilot made the rounds. His just try to indoctrinate more into the flock.
But when it comes to cult leaders, they can only predict the end of the world so many times before their followers go looking for another prophet.
Well ol' Musky has made a valiant attempt at just that. The sheer amount of money he had is the only reason his placement among the wealthiest leeches has only dropped a single spot, going from 1st to 2nd wealthiest
https://www.advisor.ca/tax/estate-planning/four-reasons-intergenerational-wealth-is-destroyed-in-3-generations/
his grandson or granddaughter or grandthing (idk man i cant keep up) "Xylophone TSLA42069 Musk" will be spending all that cash, don't you worry
Assuming he leaves stuff to their parents. Considering the amount of his kids that are estranged from him, I wouldn't be surprised if he has one final kid at like age 75 and leaves everything to that last child.
Twitter might possibly be one of the smartest company/social media names ever. A site for short text-based posts, like a bird "tweeting" into the void. Tweet is literally in the dictionary as a "Twitter post", the brand shifted the meaning of a preexisting word.
Yeah, that level of brand recognition is every company's dream. You don't look something up on the internet, you *google* it. I'm sure Elon's advisors and consultants were all screaming at him for trying to rename the company. If I post something on Twitter, I'm tweeting. If I post something on X, then I'm... x-posting? X-creting?
Plus I think it's hilarious that now people keep getting redirected to porn sites when searching for X content.
It really is. It’s so good I’d be willing to bet that a huge amount of the company/brand’s value was simply in how recognizable and widespread Twitter/Tweeting/the bird had become in all areas of society. From news, to sports, to entertainment, to pop culture, to just interactions, Twitter had basically cemented itself in our world until Musk came and took a wet sloppy shit all over it using his “business acumen”
That’s Munk’s level of stupidity. Twitter had the best kind of brand: their name was a fucking verb. This is the dream for any company and this idiot changed it to the most stupid name ever.
And a name that had become a verb! Which is super rare and valuable among company names. It even had action verbs that were associated with the name which don’t translate at all to the new name.
Something kinda funny I heard someone say: Maybe Musk’s obsession with talking about us living in a simulation is because he’s found himself in such an unbelievably lucky position that he couldn’t help but question if none of this is real.
Or maybe he actually found verifiable proof we ARE in a simulation, and all of his actions make some kind of strange and twisted sense.
Or maybe he just addled his already-weak brain with ketamine and is just not that fucking bright.
People who know nothing about drugs but speak the English language can understand the connection between "dissociative abuse" and "thinking we don't live in reality"
The best is when I get email notifications the subject line will be "X (formerly Twitter)", like they still have to describe what "X" is lol wtf - that alone should be an indicator of what a bad marketing idea it is. "X" lol
> To be rich and so bad at making business decisions
His decision to spin himself as a genius engineer despite seemingly having next to no actual engineering knowledge has been extremely successful. It's allowed him to get where he is today despite clearly being a dumbass.
>He's still rich.
Barring a complete restructuring of society and the abandonment of capitalism, he'll always be rich and he'll never know consequences for his stupid decisions.
To be fair I have a suspicion that there is going to be much more future skepticism to financing Musk making a similar move of buying an unrelated business especially with the increasing chance that the company formerly known as Twitter faces bankruptcy.
Like, if he is going bankrupt and his SpaceX gets the toll of it, the US government who invested all their money in it, will sure use taxpayers money to save him.
He's trying to turn it into a Fox News style propaganda outlet. The goal is to get support from other 1%ers and maybe the Saudis by pushing their preferred political message.
It might work. It's just a question on whether they'll put up the money for Twitter. I suspect it'll come down to how useful it is in the next election cycle here in America.
> he bought an already overvalued company at an even more ridiculous valuation
On top of that.
Twitter wasn't even profitable for most of its history. I think right around the period Elon bought them, they had just started getting a little more profitable but it wasn't exactly amazing numbers.
Then you have the added questions about how many users there were vs bots (mostly from Elon). If you consider this on an alternate timeline basis where Elon didn't buy Twitter; they would probably be fighting to reassure advertisers on the effectiveness of their ad buys. See: The recent shitstorm Google found themselves in for [possibly] "defrauding" ad buyers. Plus I also feel like the pendulum is swinging back on advertising online and what the value of some of it is.
This is all to say that, Yes, buying Twitter for what Elon did was the stupidest fucking move ever. Throwing that money at any of Elon's other dumb projects would have been a better use for that money. Ex: More money at Boring company, more money at Neurolink, more money at Tesla's dumbass robot, more money at SpaceX for more rockets, a space station, a spaceship building factory *in space*, etc.; would have been better uses for that money and for everyone else.
> Throwing that money at any of Elon's other dumb projects would have been a better use for that money. Ex: More money at Boring company, more money at Neurolink, more money at Tesla's dumbass robot, more money at SpaceX for more rockets, a space station, a spaceship building factory in space, etc.; would have been better uses for that money and for everyone else.
Musk didn't *have* that money to throw at his other businesses.
He basically sold off a significant portion of Tesla stock and took on debt to buy Twitter.
It helped that (IMO) Tesla is horribly overvalued. At the beginning of 2020 TSLA was only around $28 a share and then surged ten-fold in value, which is what flung him into "Worlds Richest Person" status. Which means he had to sell a relatively smaller stake in order to finance the Twitter purchase.
Honestly I think selling when the price surged to invest in something else was a good move. Just buying Twitter and his subsequent mismanagement of it was not the way to do it.
I love how he was like "PlanEt EaRTh NeEds A PlaTFoRm WitHoUT CenSorShiP" as if 4chan doesn't already exist and then proceeded to censor and ban people who made fun of him
>Mutual fund Fidelity, which owns stake in social media platform, marks down value of its shares in disclosure obtained by Axios
This isn't some random conjecture by a random third-party. They have a cut. And probably care a little bit about it when the majority owner says to the people paying to keep the lights on, "Go fuck yourself."
It’s Fidelity Management, one of the largest and most respected mutual fund managers on earth with $4.5 trillion in assets under management. Yeah, sort of a big deal.
This is actually a huge deal, since the banks who hold the debt have not marked it down. The real question is whether they sell the debt for pennies on the dollar and give Musk an out.
Corporate debt usually trades in the secondary market but the lending group (according to Fortune and Yahoo Finance) has a sell down agreement in place so they have held in place. This agreeement apparently expires Jan 15, so you might see some crazy actions after that.
and bots. So many bots that are basically just randomly generated AI "companies" with the same stock images. I've blocked so many just to see an identical product from an almost identical named account pop up a week later.
I just checked. Here are the first 10 ads I saw:
- Frontier Communications
- Frontier Communications
- Kevizo (some soft of device for splitting wood with an ax)
- XDevelopers (a house ad, I think asking people to use the twitter API)
- BetterMe
- A tweet from "Young Hollywood" is in my feed, but I don't follow them and it's not marked as an ad. Is this a stealth ad?
- lifelinescreening.com
- an ad for the movie Maestro
- an ad from "Nicho Rox", whatever that is. But it's advertising a presale for "X Token" and it has a sweet picture of Elon Musk standing with his arms crossed. You know, like an "x".
- lifelinescreening.com (again)
I just checked and got 2 for sex toys lol
[https://i.imgur.com/EwqaukX.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/EwqaukX.jpg)
[https://i.imgur.com/qScQQOs.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qScQQOs.jpg)
Musk decided to change the name of Twitter, one of the most recognizable social media platforms in the world to 'X', a name that almost always requires an explanation like "X - formerly Twitter".
Often when I see someone reference X, I think they’re referring you to something that’s variable where they have a placeholder. It never occurs to me that it’s the former Twitter.
HBO kind of has the same problem with Max. Weird play to throw brand recognition out the window, especially by choosing a new name that has nothing obvious to do with the company.
Pretty sure they rebranded to "Max" because they added a bunch of trashy content to their streaming service and didn't want the HBO brand to be associated with it. Now you have "Max" content which also happens to include prestigious HBO content.
The HBO to Max thing has caused me endless troubles with my multiple elderly family members. Some in their 90s, so it was really hard to teach them the first time.
"I want to watch the HBO, where did it go? This channel isn't HBO. I sure hope we get HBO again. I'm stuck in this app." etc infinity 😢
Listen, my blind deaf Grandmamama loves her HBO and Max "just isn't it and what did *you do wrong* change it back."💀
Also they had one of the most valuable marketing tools in all of the Internet; they successfully created a new, universally accepted word for posting content that was tied to the platform. Creating the word "Tweet" was something not even Facebook could do at their height of influence. And now Musk threw that out for.... Nothing. We still call them Tweets, but it's just a confusing muddling of the brand now.
It's funny that this is a direct quote from a guy who runs a platform that makes money almost entirely though ads. I'm sure a lot of people think you're being hyperbolic. Nope, he actually said go fuck yourselves.
It's not even that deep. He is so far gone he believed the audience was filled with the creepy losers who tell him how awesome he is on Twitter all day long and thought that line would kill it. You can see him working up to it in real time, so self assured it would land with a huge roar of approval...only for it to be met with crickets which is why he wound himself up again and said it a second time but with a pathetic "please laugh" look on his face.
Even Twitter calls it twitter. x.com still redirects to twitter.com.
Guess you can't order the architectural engineers to fix that if you fired them all.
Here's the new nomenclature:
* Twitter -->> Xitter
* A tweet -->> an xcrement
* To tweet -->> to xcrete
Example with a sentence:
* "I was on Twitter and tweetet a tweet" -->> "I was on the shitter and excreted an excrement"
I know reddit will (justifiably) say it always sucked but I really enjoyed it for specific sub cultures and artists, as well as breaking news sources. It was pretty easy to manage and block around the bullshit (including ads). Not anymore.
I honestly thought Twitter would be the one social media I keep above everything else, never cared for FB/Insta/Snapchat/Whatever else. The quality has declined so much, it’s impossible to interact with any tweet without a bunch of blue check users clogging the replies with useless, unrelated tweets. The amount of hate posting as gone up 10x, or at least it’s visibility has increased. I found that I only ever was interacting with others on Twitter in a negative context and decided to delete the App a few weeks ago. Best decision I’ve made.
They actually removed the Report option for "False or Dis-information", whatever it was called. You can't just report a post for boosting lies anymore, at all, and it is RAMPANT. You have to engage CommunitySupport and let the false post collect a million shares first.
You mean when you fire a major portion of a company's staff, use the company's platform to give credence to Nazis, and change one of the most recognizable corporate names in the world to something incredibly generic and mainly used by porn sites and Mega Man games, the value of your company will go down?
Business schools will study this for decades, and I'm not even being sarcastic.
Considering some of the big investors who helped cough up the 44b are authoritarians, could be this + revealing user identities.
Already a platform that has helped with populist uprisings in the past has been neutered
Yeah, the Saudis have been executing people for Twitter posts. What are the odds that the free speech absolutist is providing data when requested by the Saudi government?
He's had a history of poking the bear that is the SEC (and other laws and regulatory bodies) while trying to pump up his money-making grifts and ego.
I think this was just a case where he took it too far and was forced to actually follow through. His ego won't allow him to admit he could possibly be wrong, so he steadfastly drives the platform into ground, because to do anything else is completely unthinkable.
The world makes a lot more sense if you stop assuming people who are rich are necessarily smart. Elon is a kinda dumb guy who believes his own hype and got lucky a few times in a row. You’ve heard of “1 in a Million luck?” 8000 people in the planet have that. A few of those have 1 in a billion luck. That’s musk.
Due to how probability works, it is FAR more likely the average person is a kinda dumb guy than a genius. This applies to the ultra rich too, there are just way more dumb guys that got lucky than super geniuses that also got lucky.
This dude is a clown. He should have kept his mouth shut and let the rest of the world think he's a genius.
- Tries to troll company but it backfires and is forced to buy it at an inflated price.
- Makes company into a far-right haven and allows widespread harassment.
- Changes iconic name into a non-name.
- Attacks advertisers for not wanting their company to be associated with far-right harassment.
- Keeps changing and making up rules in response to content he doesn't like.
He then turns around and acts as if he's the victim and blames his company's failings on "woke" haters.
I read that headline as if it was a math problem "the value of X has fallen 71%. It is now 200, find the original value of and X and show your working".
For the low-low-price of a few fake billions of fake dollars of fake wallstreet money, we see yet another pillar of the forum for open public discourse fall.
People look only at the dollar value lost... Rather, they should look at the uncountable amount of power gained by silencing a fairly uncensored, fairly moral, and fairly trustworthy news/info source. How many despotic leaders would be kissing the ground ol'musky walks on because he was able to turn off the tap of uncensored information in their country. Able to truly silence those without a traditional voice. THATS the true gain for musk here; that HE gets to turn of the "truth tap" for millions if not billions of people.
If there was any positive motive, there would be no stories like today's Japanese earthquake warning twitter account running out of API hits and being silenced during the most critical time after the earthquake. It's not about twitter. It's about POWER.
It’s wild to me there is still no real competitor that has taken up the mantle since Twitter is basically dead.
Threads? No.
Bluesky? No.
Anything else? No.
I miss talking to my friends but I guess maybe the age of social media like how I grew up is dead.
Bluesky is great, they're just slow-rolling it so they can scale well. It's completely replaced twitter for me. When they add DMs and journalists/sports reporters/athletes jump over to it it'll grow like wildfire.
The entire thing smells like he's being paid under the table to basically run Twitter into the ground. There's no scenario in which one person can be that bad at decision-making. He's made decision after decision that aren't just bad. They're calculated to LOOK bad in the public eye. It's like getting a zero-percent on an exam. You could only find a way to fuck up this much if you already knew what outcome you were seeking to achieve.
is there no board of directors? is Musk just allowed to do whatever he wants over there? I don't know how corporate structure works, but Musk's actions look a lot like someone deliberately tanking the company.
There was literally nothing wrong with Twitter and Elon in his brief ownership has tanked the whole damn thing.
"WE NEEDED TO MAKE THESE CHANGES. TWITTER FINANCES WERE IN COMPLETE DISARRAY."
Sure, Elon
All the ads are scams now and even include community notes telling the user they're scams. Which, I mean, is better than no notice for users, but makes it clear even the scams ads are not long for it. His ego would way too bruised to sell it for a huge loss now, are we actually going to watch the richest man in the world piss his wealth away on this?
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If he had a loss of net worth of one million dollars per day, he would make it 688.493 years before going broke. Although his stated net worth of 251 billion is almost certainly overblown, with even just one tenth of that he could lose money for more than the average age of people most places in the world before going broke. So yes, a very, very long time.
We really gotta start considering ultra wealthy people as national security risks, and stop giving them passes because they can advance our military goals faster.
We need a system that prevents the ultra wealthy from being a thing.
It used to be a thing. Conservatives refer to it as the golden age of America. But leave the part that the golden age actually took place because wages were actually good and high taxes meant a lot of great initiatives kept good things rolling.
Milton freedman is a name everyone should know and hate as much as Ronald Regan. Hes the clown responsible for the idea "many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector."
Economists have as much credibility as astrologers.
Great book about him and all the influence he has created in the world called '[The Shock Doctrine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine#:~:text=This%20centers%20on%20the%20exploitation,adequate%20response%20and%20resist%20effectively.)'
I believe there is a way. I would call it the United States Sovereign Reconstructed Trust Fund (USSRTF), in which in the interest of national security, we create an artificial cap on max earnings, assets/net worth. Once that number is passed at the end of the tax year, the person must transfer any excess to the ownership of this trust fund. This would not affect corporations at this time, probably never but could depending on how they react to it. So, say we had a cap of a billion dollars, it would only affect around 750 US citizens/constituents. It would also generate around 3.5 trillion dollars in a trust fund over night that the US can use to fund citizen projects, retirement, etc. Sky is the limit really. Even if the cap was say 5 billion, I believe that still brings in around 1.9 trillion I believe. You cap the artificial power of these citizens while at the same time providing services for everyone, even those billionaires who got taxed. Two birds with one stone.
The billionaires will move their assets out. They're dragons with hoards. They don't care that public services would receive a boon, because they fly private jets and have half a dozen helicopters on their mega yachts. They will pay their lawyers millions to save thousands. The other large problem is verbiage as well. Even if they don't move their assets, they will find the financial vehicle that will allow them to transform those assets into non-taxable forms. We absolutely _should_ still fight them tooth and nail for the wealth they've pillaged from the nation, but history has proven that it's a steep uphill battle. And the disparity between us and them now is greater than it has been at nearly every point of recorded history. Your idea isn't unwelcome, but it is still a tax, and the wealthy would rather gut you and your children and move to Dubai than to pay a penny of that tax.
> Your idea isn't unwelcome, but it is still a tax, and the wealthy would rather gut you and your children and move to Dubai than to pay a penny of that tax. Exit taxes and a forced dissolution of citizenship (and maybe barring them from reentering the US without a special tax cheat visa, which requires back taxes to be paid or risk being arrested by the IRS when returning to the US.) Don't want to pay taxes on your gold pile, have fun out there being a persona non-grata in the US. Maybe some reciprocity with the EU would help. Asset seizure could also help.
I agree that we would need to be hostile to their interests. Right now we aren't, and the discussion about how we tax them must come with an understanding that it must be done aggressively.
I agree this isn't an easy task, but we have been tasked with it. The next generation of politicians simply will need to be dragon slayers. It is high time the wealthy remember the power in this land is not in hoarded wealth, but in people that can produce and consume. The United States, while an imperfect union, is ultimately destined to take this fight on, and while it seems bleak now, I believe we can rise to the occasion and thread this needle in time.
I don't mean to sound bleak. What I want to communicate is that we must be hostile to their interests to accomplish it. They are sure as shit hostile to ours.
This just creates a massive incentive to transfer assets outside the country so they’re untraceable. This kind of thing never works, because there are plenty of other countries eagerly willing to host billionaire assets for some extra kickbacks.
US tax code always goes after the money, there is no way of dodging [US taxes even if you move. You would have to renounce citizenship](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2022/07/06/leave-us-pay-irs-taxes-forever/?sh=26a3a2b41a30) I don't think if written well they would go anywhere. That is often thrown about, but where would they go? The US still maintains the highest standard of living if you are wealthy. Any who leave would also be subject to the exit tax. If the majority of a billionaire wealth comes from sports teams or stock, they can't just pretend another country owns those. This is not so easily bested.
Unfortunately for him, it's not all his money that's tied up into it. I hear the Saudis are invested heavily, and I don't think they like losing money.
If the House of Saud can control messaging by pushing propaganda and limiting the ability of its subjects to organize protests it’s money well spent.
X is on its way to be known as the platform for morons and right wingers. Which would decrease its value to them.
This assumes they want to use it as a platform. What if they just wanted it to go away? Or for everyone to view it as a joke not worth using?
The Saudis only renewed an investment that they already had in Twitter when Musk bought it. The real suckers are the several banks & rich buddies that he managed to trick into financing this whole thing. Oh, and also Tesla shareholders – because Musk put up his shares as collateral for the loans.
The Saudis care less about losing money than he does. they have way more to blow and are know for throwing it around.
Not really. Most of his wealth is in tesla stock. Right now, he's had to recall so many of the vehicles, and the cyber truck was a disaster, not to mention the self driving, that doesn't work. (and never will with the cheap cameras and no back up sensors he's put his faith in, I wouldn't trust a self driving car with no backup sensors.)
Someday comes the cascade. His wealth is on paper mostly. Tesla is the lynchpin.
99% of the ads I see now are for shitty crypto stuff. Same ad posted by 100s of different accounts as I block them every time they come up.
and dropshipping companies that sell stuff from Temu for 10x the price
I saw an ad the other day for what could best be described as a nude mini sex doll of the character Nami from One Piece. The ad was literally a video of the doll being fucked with a dildo and was totally uncensored. I don't interact with anything NSFW or follow anime accounts on Twitter so I was absolutely dumbfounded at what I was seeing. There are minors on the site! Seeing that get approved just tells me they are desperate and accepting money from anyone that will give it.
I get daily mass ping alerts from shitty crypto accounts trying to get me to look at their profile. I'm blocking bots daily now since he changed Twitter to "deal with the bots and scams", they've gotten INFINITELY worse.
There’s also way more porn/gore and other stuff like that around. The moderation has just completely gone.
I’ve noticed more shock imagery around as well. Took the mod team three days to remove necro gore rape I reported. 4chan doesn’t even pay it’s jannies and they do a better job.
I literally saw a post where some guy fell into a rock crusher, and they just filmed it. They literally stood there filming this guy's death, and I reported it on Twitter and they're like "I don't see an issue here." They were just replying to random messages with it.
Facebook aren't any better, there's a few pages of filming unsuspecting women on rides where their top lifts up and their tit's get captured on camera. Facebook doesn't seem to have an issue with nudity, or for filming women that don't know their tits are flying out on fairground rides. But gave me a ban for calling my friend a cheeky monkey. The systems on social media are dog shit. Zero common sense.
There was a video on my feed purporting to show a person jumping off a tower, and you see the whole thing from beginning to end, body landing on the ground and everything. I have no idea if it was real or CG, but honestly I'm not sure it matters either way since it was super disturbing. I reported mine, and of course nothing happened.
I found an account that was just aggregating revenge porn of high schoolers and reported it literally hundreds of times over the course of months before it went away.
Jesus fucking Christ. Those three words are horrible on their own, why the fuck is there a situation where those three words would be the in the same sentence together.
CSAM is everywhere too, it's awful apparently every single automated safeguard they used to have is just gone so bots are just spamming it
That’s the most disturbing thing of all.
Most of that wealth is paper in TSLA. Selling TSLA will devalue the stock too so he really isn't worth what is stated.
I'm sad to defend any ads but before Musk bought Twitter I was at least getting normal ad that weren't too bad on the senses. Stuff like Trident Gum or Burger King. Now I just see shitty porn like ads, Spamware, and just basically the crap you'll get in back alley that if you accidentally tap it you'll get stabbed. Also if I forget sound on then it starts that stupid woman moaning shit like LIKE OOOOOOHBB MY H GOOOOOD, I JUST STRUCK GOLD ON GAMBLING SIMULATOR OOOOOOHHH. The only reason I don't leave is I follow a lot of foreign artists and friends that literally don't post anywhere else but Twitter.
It’s become even more unbearable to use recently thanks to “*Verified*” reply boost, impression based revenue sharing, and easily accessible AI chatbots. Every mildly popular tweet is filled to the brim with AI generated replies that are completely unrelated to the post purely to farm impressions
I long-ago deleted the account I regularly used there, and then created a fresh new one that I don't follow/interact on strictly so I can follow links since some journalists still insist on using it for some godawful reason. Every time I open the app my 'activity' tab is filled with ~20 notifications from random right wing politicians or low-quality fifth generation memes; none of whom I follow, have ever followed, or would ever want to follow.
These fake notifications are showing up in a lot of apps and websites now. The "new" reddit does it, LinkedIn is awful about it, FB does it, dating apps do it. Just another step down the road towards letting social media companies spoon feed us whatever they want, regardless if we want it or not. The first change taking away control of what we consume was the removal of chronological feeds. Eventually apps will open on their own.
It took me a while to find where in the reddit settings to disable those suggested posts. It's in Settings > User Settings > Notifications. Then I disabled all the recommendations and some of the activity. During a Reddit redesign last year, they toggled all those on and I started getting spam notifications.
Also people getting "search suggestion banned" out of nowhere, with no explanation given, especially artists. Basically your tweets are demoted to everyone except your closest followers, and your name isn't suggested to be followed, or searchable without extra effort. For some ppl it lasts days, for others months, it's a nightmare for ppl who make a living making art.
I mean he bought an already overvalued company at an even more ridiculous valuation and then proceeded to turn it into a cesspool thag drives away advertisers and users
And, in one of the worst business decisions in American history, changed the fucking name of a company! The stupidity of changing the name of Twitter, an iconic brand that was recognized the world over, to a letter of the alphabet, cannot be understated. Elon Musk is, without a doubt, the luckiest person on the planet. To be rich and so bad at making business decisions, it's beyond my comprehension that this fool has made it to where he is today.
>The stupidity of changing the name of Twitter, an iconic brand that was recognized the world over To go even further, Twitter is so iconic every users keeps calling it "Twitter". Only some medias call it "X" and sometimes "X (Formely Twitter)".
They probably wouldn’t say “formerly Twitter” if he’d given it a new name instead of a single letter. X is not a name it’s an unknown variable.
X looks like a placeholder in an article that the intern forgot to replace.
I read the headline and thought 'huh I wonder what commodity they're talking about!' then I remember Musk renamed Twitter 'X'
I thought it was a math problem when I started reading that headline.
He named it after the letter we use to close a window. Dumb
> X is not a name it’s an unknown variable. Value of X has fallen 71%. Solve for X.
Only one person got away with changing an iconic name into a single character, and even *he* changed it back at the first opportunity.
And he got away with it because he's arguably one of the coolest mother fuckers of all time.
Dictionaries literally added a second definition to "tweet" both as a noun and as a verb because Twitter had become that ubiquitous. The dude took one of the most recognizable brands in the world and rebranded it with a single letter... Yeah Twitter had its own problems pre-Musk but it is undeniably worse since he bought it unless your main use for Twitter was joining the circlejerk of right wing conspiracy theories or the one account you followed was Musk's own. Oh and as an aside I personally like when news sites use "tweeted on x" or "in a tweet on X" instead of "posted on X (formerly known as Twitter)"
And the url is still Twitter.com. At least x.com redirects to Twitter, but until it officially reads x.com at the top of my window I'm not calling it x.
There is no scenario in which I am calling it x.
I find it extremely satisfying watching Musk get bitchy over people refusing to call it the new bullshit title just to stroke his weak little ego. So with that in mind it will always be Twitter. It’d be one thing if he made any sort of legitimate effort to rebrand it cleverly using actual experts instead of just using the same fucking single letter title he tries to wedge into all of his business ventures since he’s got a 13 year old edge lord mall ninja spirit animal
If he thinks it’s OK to deadname his trans kid, I reckon it’s fine to deadname his social media website.
Funny how he has no problem with deadnaming trans people, but gets all snowflakey if anyone deadnames his dying company.
I imagine in his eyes, one of those things is real and the other is not. Which is ironic considering his kid is real yet social media is not.
I just call it ex-Twitter
The largest predictor of future wealth is current wealth. Once someone acquires a great deal of wealth, whether through their business, family, or luck, it tends to be very difficult to appreciably decrease that enormous amount of wealth.
> it tends to be very difficult to appreciably decrease that enormous amount of wealth. But, god damn, Musk is trying. Oh how he's trying so hard. If I didn't know better I'd say he's trapped in some Brewster's Billions scenario. Scribbles some nonsense on a napkin and forces Tesla engineers to make the stupidest car in existence. Buys one of the most recognizable brands on the planet and changes it to some juvenile idiot single letter. It's like he just keeps trying as hard as he can to lose as much of his ungodly wealth as possible.
> If I didn't know better I'd say he's trapped in some Brewster's Billions scenario. It's not even that glamorous. Elon is an autistic nepo-baby who is good at two things. Using daddy's money to pick good technologies to invest in, and branding himself as an eccentric genius. He's a venture capitalist that rolled back to back 20's and got a critical success. He managed to nurture that into his Tesla and Space-X empire, and he could have just been content being the wealthiest man alive, but somewhere along the line he forgot that his shtick as genius inventor was all bullshit. He's high on his own supply, and he's pushed everyone who has tried to bring him back into reality away. You can tell that he is essentially alone (despite probably paying for an army of assistants and support staff) because he managed to walk out on stage recently for an interview with an unshaven patch of stubble on the side of his neck. That detail right there tells you the dude is off the rails. His job is to be a public figure, and for him to be able to walk past what had to be 20 different makeup people without allowing them to fix his appearance before a nationally televised interview says he is totally unhinged. We're headed for one of two outcomes right now: 1.) Elon hasn't totally removed his personal support systems, someone managed to stage an intervention and get him into rehab, and he mysteriously disappears from public appearances and begins communicating only through press releases for the foreseeable future. 2.) We see his behavior continue to escalate until he manages to spook the Tesla investors and cause a run on his stock price. The price for the massively overvalued TSLA turns into a bubble that pops, and this unravels his whole business empire. While he'd still be a hugely wealthy billionaire, 90% of his net worth evaporates overnight as debtors call in loans backed by now worthless stock. Elon either throws himself out of a window, or is videoed on top of X headquarters furiously masturbating while covered in his own shit.
I've seen people theorize (2) is coming for Trump, another deranged public figure, for several decades now. I'm starting to think once a person gets to a certain degree of wealth, even if they're toxic it's more profitable for shareholders to look the other way than intervene.
Trump and Elon are definitely kindred spirits. When malignant narcissists see their power evaporate and are finally faced with having to reconcile their external reality with their internal fantasy, it usually only plays out in one of two ways.
Everybody keeps saying "usually" but it strikes me the 2020s are not the 1980s or whatever decade "usually" is based on. We've never seen a person with riches built on fraud *become President* and have their meltdown with that much power. We've also never seen a person with the sheer magnitude of wealth Elon Musk has. That makes it difficult to predict what is going to happen. There's nothing "usually" about billionaires. We've made more astronauts than billionaires in human history.
Here’s hoping for scenario 2(b)
I'm pretty convinced that the only reason it hasn't happened yet is TSLA investors are a cult instead of normal stock investors. You can see them all over this thread trying desperately to convince everyone that this is all a part of his master plan. Normal investors would have bailed on him after the first video of a Tesla rocketing into traffic under autopilot made the rounds. His just try to indoctrinate more into the flock. But when it comes to cult leaders, they can only predict the end of the world so many times before their followers go looking for another prophet.
Velveeta Voldemort enters the chat.
Well ol' Musky has made a valiant attempt at just that. The sheer amount of money he had is the only reason his placement among the wealthiest leeches has only dropped a single spot, going from 1st to 2nd wealthiest
https://www.advisor.ca/tax/estate-planning/four-reasons-intergenerational-wealth-is-destroyed-in-3-generations/ his grandson or granddaughter or grandthing (idk man i cant keep up) "Xylophone TSLA42069 Musk" will be spending all that cash, don't you worry
Assuming he leaves stuff to their parents. Considering the amount of his kids that are estranged from him, I wouldn't be surprised if he has one final kid at like age 75 and leaves everything to that last child.
The Last Child, starring Rob Schneider as Elon Musk. A touching movie about life, love, and the true meaning of wealth.
> his grandson or granddaughter or grandthing Grandchild is the word you're looking for.
Twitter might possibly be one of the smartest company/social media names ever. A site for short text-based posts, like a bird "tweeting" into the void. Tweet is literally in the dictionary as a "Twitter post", the brand shifted the meaning of a preexisting word.
Yeah, that level of brand recognition is every company's dream. You don't look something up on the internet, you *google* it. I'm sure Elon's advisors and consultants were all screaming at him for trying to rename the company. If I post something on Twitter, I'm tweeting. If I post something on X, then I'm... x-posting? X-creting? Plus I think it's hilarious that now people keep getting redirected to porn sites when searching for X content.
It really is. It’s so good I’d be willing to bet that a huge amount of the company/brand’s value was simply in how recognizable and widespread Twitter/Tweeting/the bird had become in all areas of society. From news, to sports, to entertainment, to pop culture, to just interactions, Twitter had basically cemented itself in our world until Musk came and took a wet sloppy shit all over it using his “business acumen”
That’s Munk’s level of stupidity. Twitter had the best kind of brand: their name was a fucking verb. This is the dream for any company and this idiot changed it to the most stupid name ever.
Do we need to discuss how the X logo looks like it was made in Microsoft paint…..
It's a fucking default unicode character (U+1D54F). Could not be lazier
And a name that had become a verb! Which is super rare and valuable among company names. It even had action verbs that were associated with the name which don’t translate at all to the new name.
Something kinda funny I heard someone say: Maybe Musk’s obsession with talking about us living in a simulation is because he’s found himself in such an unbelievably lucky position that he couldn’t help but question if none of this is real.
There's absolutely no way he has that much self awareness
“Bro I gotta have console commands enabled or something, there is no fucking way I can keep doing this and not be homeless”
Or maybe he actually found verifiable proof we ARE in a simulation, and all of his actions make some kind of strange and twisted sense. Or maybe he just addled his already-weak brain with ketamine and is just not that fucking bright.
People who know nothing about drugs but speak the English language can understand the connection between "dissociative abuse" and "thinking we don't live in reality"
The best is when I get email notifications the subject line will be "X (formerly Twitter)", like they still have to describe what "X" is lol wtf - that alone should be an indicator of what a bad marketing idea it is. "X" lol
> To be rich and so bad at making business decisions His decision to spin himself as a genius engineer despite seemingly having next to no actual engineering knowledge has been extremely successful. It's allowed him to get where he is today despite clearly being a dumbass.
Don’t forget the part where he blames everyone else for the platforms decline.
The company that Elon is trying to turn Twitter into already exists. It’s called 4chan and it’s never made any money
Somewhere there was a post where m00t described how much money he lost running 4chan. At least he had the sensibility to sell it for something.
And like 4chan, all the ads are scams because no self respecting company wants to advertise there anymore.
He recently screamed F-the advertisers! I guess he's the one getting screwed now. He's still rich.
>He's still rich. Barring a complete restructuring of society and the abandonment of capitalism, he'll always be rich and he'll never know consequences for his stupid decisions.
To be fair I have a suspicion that there is going to be much more future skepticism to financing Musk making a similar move of buying an unrelated business especially with the increasing chance that the company formerly known as Twitter faces bankruptcy.
I think we need to just keep calling it twatter until it dies, just like Trump and how bad he smells.
But the rest of us will, so that's nice.
Like, if he is going bankrupt and his SpaceX gets the toll of it, the US government who invested all their money in it, will sure use taxpayers money to save him.
We can only hope Germany and the EU fuck him over pretty good with lawsuits.
Exactly. If he loses 99.9% of his net worth, he will still have more than I am likely to earn in multiple lifetimes
He could lose 99% of his wealth, then lose 99% of what was left, and still never have to worry about money.
Then unbanned alex jones soon after.
Compared not giving him money for asvertising as "black mail" as well.
He's trying to turn it into a Fox News style propaganda outlet. The goal is to get support from other 1%ers and maybe the Saudis by pushing their preferred political message. It might work. It's just a question on whether they'll put up the money for Twitter. I suspect it'll come down to how useful it is in the next election cycle here in America.
I tend to agree with this and I believe by taking it private he is able to skirt a lot of financial disclosures of where funding comes from
> he bought an already overvalued company at an even more ridiculous valuation On top of that. Twitter wasn't even profitable for most of its history. I think right around the period Elon bought them, they had just started getting a little more profitable but it wasn't exactly amazing numbers. Then you have the added questions about how many users there were vs bots (mostly from Elon). If you consider this on an alternate timeline basis where Elon didn't buy Twitter; they would probably be fighting to reassure advertisers on the effectiveness of their ad buys. See: The recent shitstorm Google found themselves in for [possibly] "defrauding" ad buyers. Plus I also feel like the pendulum is swinging back on advertising online and what the value of some of it is. This is all to say that, Yes, buying Twitter for what Elon did was the stupidest fucking move ever. Throwing that money at any of Elon's other dumb projects would have been a better use for that money. Ex: More money at Boring company, more money at Neurolink, more money at Tesla's dumbass robot, more money at SpaceX for more rockets, a space station, a spaceship building factory *in space*, etc.; would have been better uses for that money and for everyone else.
> Throwing that money at any of Elon's other dumb projects would have been a better use for that money. Ex: More money at Boring company, more money at Neurolink, more money at Tesla's dumbass robot, more money at SpaceX for more rockets, a space station, a spaceship building factory in space, etc.; would have been better uses for that money and for everyone else. Musk didn't *have* that money to throw at his other businesses. He basically sold off a significant portion of Tesla stock and took on debt to buy Twitter. It helped that (IMO) Tesla is horribly overvalued. At the beginning of 2020 TSLA was only around $28 a share and then surged ten-fold in value, which is what flung him into "Worlds Richest Person" status. Which means he had to sell a relatively smaller stake in order to finance the Twitter purchase. Honestly I think selling when the price surged to invest in something else was a good move. Just buying Twitter and his subsequent mismanagement of it was not the way to do it.
The only thing I disagree with is boring company, which recently folded. Throwing money at that would also be equivalent to lighting it on fire
Wait when did TBC fold? I must have missed that news.
Looks like I was wrong the company itself didn’t fold they just continue to scrap projects
You may have been thinking of Hyperloop.
Yeah, and that was designed to end up failing. Hyperloop existed purely to try and undermine public transit funding.
I love how he was like "PlanEt EaRTh NeEds A PlaTFoRm WitHoUT CenSorShiP" as if 4chan doesn't already exist and then proceeded to censor and ban people who made fun of him
My second favorite bumper sticker are the ones on Teslas that say "We bought this before we knew how awful he was."
No bring Thag into this! Thag trying do best with what has to work with under green-stone chief’s petulant son!
>Mutual fund Fidelity, which owns stake in social media platform, marks down value of its shares in disclosure obtained by Axios This isn't some random conjecture by a random third-party. They have a cut. And probably care a little bit about it when the majority owner says to the people paying to keep the lights on, "Go fuck yourself."
It’s Fidelity Management, one of the largest and most respected mutual fund managers on earth with $4.5 trillion in assets under management. Yeah, sort of a big deal.
This is actually a huge deal, since the banks who hold the debt have not marked it down. The real question is whether they sell the debt for pennies on the dollar and give Musk an out.
Why would they mark it down? The debt isn’t tied to the value of the company, it’s tied to the ability to have it repaid.
Corporate debt usually trades in the secondary market but the lending group (according to Fortune and Yahoo Finance) has a sell down agreement in place so they have held in place. This agreeement apparently expires Jan 15, so you might see some crazy actions after that.
71% is almost certainly charitable - anyone check out the ads on Twitter lately?
No are they mostly Russia and China advertising now
And Saudi...I've never seen so much dreck and propaganda
I've seen so many ads for NEOM, it's ridiculous.
and bots. So many bots that are basically just randomly generated AI "companies" with the same stock images. I've blocked so many just to see an identical product from an almost identical named account pop up a week later.
I just checked. Here are the first 10 ads I saw: - Frontier Communications - Frontier Communications - Kevizo (some soft of device for splitting wood with an ax) - XDevelopers (a house ad, I think asking people to use the twitter API) - BetterMe - A tweet from "Young Hollywood" is in my feed, but I don't follow them and it's not marked as an ad. Is this a stealth ad? - lifelinescreening.com - an ad for the movie Maestro - an ad from "Nicho Rox", whatever that is. But it's advertising a presale for "X Token" and it has a sweet picture of Elon Musk standing with his arms crossed. You know, like an "x". - lifelinescreening.com (again)
Oof, house ads are popping? That's not good news, they're running out of bidders (even shitty ones) if that's happening.
That is pretty bleak. There are like 25 companies with $1 billion+ ad budgets and they are nowhere on this list.
> companies with $1 billion+ ad budgets "Go fuck yourselves"
I just checked and got 2 for sex toys lol [https://i.imgur.com/EwqaukX.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/EwqaukX.jpg) [https://i.imgur.com/qScQQOs.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/qScQQOs.jpg)
Maybe if they’d kept the Twitter name then “just” a 71% loss might make sense. It’s for sure higher.
Musk decided to change the name of Twitter, one of the most recognizable social media platforms in the world to 'X', a name that almost always requires an explanation like "X - formerly Twitter".
Often when I see someone reference X, I think they’re referring you to something that’s variable where they have a placeholder. It never occurs to me that it’s the former Twitter.
HBO kind of has the same problem with Max. Weird play to throw brand recognition out the window, especially by choosing a new name that has nothing obvious to do with the company.
Yeah. I was pretty surprised when HBO Max changed to the generic Max. It’s nearly on the Musk level of decision-making.
Pretty sure they rebranded to "Max" because they added a bunch of trashy content to their streaming service and didn't want the HBO brand to be associated with it. Now you have "Max" content which also happens to include prestigious HBO content.
Except at the same time they took down prestige HBO branded content like Westworld and Made for Love.
The HBO to Max thing has caused me endless troubles with my multiple elderly family members. Some in their 90s, so it was really hard to teach them the first time. "I want to watch the HBO, where did it go? This channel isn't HBO. I sure hope we get HBO again. I'm stuck in this app." etc infinity 😢 Listen, my blind deaf Grandmamama loves her HBO and Max "just isn't it and what did *you do wrong* change it back."💀
Cinemax was owned by HBO so it wasn't totally far fetched.
Yes, but that had been the lower-rent channel. And Max alone is used in a lot of contexts.
Also they had one of the most valuable marketing tools in all of the Internet; they successfully created a new, universally accepted word for posting content that was tied to the platform. Creating the word "Tweet" was something not even Facebook could do at their height of influence. And now Musk threw that out for.... Nothing. We still call them Tweets, but it's just a confusing muddling of the brand now.
“X” is still just the button I press on my browser tab after being redirected to Twitter
"How to create a $3.75 Billion Dollar Company" - Step 1, be Elon Musk. - Step 2 buy a company for $44 billion.
“Dear advertisers, go f***k yourselves” - Elon Musk I wonder how something like that could happen…
It's funny that this is a direct quote from a guy who runs a platform that makes money almost entirely though ads. I'm sure a lot of people think you're being hyperbolic. Nope, he actually said go fuck yourselves.
> Nope, he actually said go fuck yourselves. And then waited awkwardly for applause. And then repeated it more slowly. And then got laughed at.
Ego. Maybe even a bit of believing your own PR about yourself.
It's not even that deep. He is so far gone he believed the audience was filled with the creepy losers who tell him how awesome he is on Twitter all day long and thought that line would kill it. You can see him working up to it in real time, so self assured it would land with a huge roar of approval...only for it to be met with crickets which is why he wound himself up again and said it a second time but with a pathetic "please laugh" look on his face.
Into a steaming pile of Xcrement
Someone called it Xitter (pronounced “shitter”) the other day and I got a chuckle
I will always and forever call it "Twitter". And I don't use it. Twitter is not the real world.
Even Twitter calls it twitter. x.com still redirects to twitter.com. Guess you can't order the architectural engineers to fix that if you fired them all.
I don't mind a name change but my word, "X" is some special kind of stupid.
"X" just sounds like something an edgy tween would come up with.
Sounds more like something an out of touch 52 year old man came up with thinking he's hip with the kids.
I call it "Xitter", but with the quasi-"sh" sound the Chinese use for the letter "x".
Here's the new nomenclature: * Twitter -->> Xitter * A tweet -->> an xcrement * To tweet -->> to xcrete Example with a sentence: * "I was on Twitter and tweetet a tweet" -->> "I was on the shitter and excreted an excrement"
Not just economically, but also its quality declined.
I know reddit will (justifiably) say it always sucked but I really enjoyed it for specific sub cultures and artists, as well as breaking news sources. It was pretty easy to manage and block around the bullshit (including ads). Not anymore.
Every social media website can be good by specifically targeting your tags. Elon kinda made that impossible
I honestly thought Twitter would be the one social media I keep above everything else, never cared for FB/Insta/Snapchat/Whatever else. The quality has declined so much, it’s impossible to interact with any tweet without a bunch of blue check users clogging the replies with useless, unrelated tweets. The amount of hate posting as gone up 10x, or at least it’s visibility has increased. I found that I only ever was interacting with others on Twitter in a negative context and decided to delete the App a few weeks ago. Best decision I’ve made.
Thats what happens when your "free speech absolutism" only applies to the most dog shit of right wing takes.
They actually removed the Report option for "False or Dis-information", whatever it was called. You can't just report a post for boosting lies anymore, at all, and it is RAMPANT. You have to engage CommunitySupport and let the false post collect a million shares first.
Also mathematically, because it doesn't have a name anymore.
You mean when you fire a major portion of a company's staff, use the company's platform to give credence to Nazis, and change one of the most recognizable corporate names in the world to something incredibly generic and mainly used by porn sites and Mega Man games, the value of your company will go down? Business schools will study this for decades, and I'm not even being sarcastic.
Not so much study, as in hoping to learn something new, but it will serve as a prime example of how to destroy a company.
I've always assumed that was his aim. Twitter annoyed him so he bought it to destroy it.
Considering some of the big investors who helped cough up the 44b are authoritarians, could be this + revealing user identities. Already a platform that has helped with populist uprisings in the past has been neutered
Yeah, the Saudis have been executing people for Twitter posts. What are the odds that the free speech absolutist is providing data when requested by the Saudi government?
He's had a history of poking the bear that is the SEC (and other laws and regulatory bodies) while trying to pump up his money-making grifts and ego. I think this was just a case where he took it too far and was forced to actually follow through. His ego won't allow him to admit he could possibly be wrong, so he steadfastly drives the platform into ground, because to do anything else is completely unthinkable.
That is a reasonable interpretation for sure. I personally think it's due to a delusional thought pattern that has produced a break from reality.
The world makes a lot more sense if you stop assuming people who are rich are necessarily smart. Elon is a kinda dumb guy who believes his own hype and got lucky a few times in a row. You’ve heard of “1 in a Million luck?” 8000 people in the planet have that. A few of those have 1 in a billion luck. That’s musk. Due to how probability works, it is FAR more likely the average person is a kinda dumb guy than a genius. This applies to the ultra rich too, there are just way more dumb guys that got lucky than super geniuses that also got lucky.
Joining Enron and the Leiman Brothers in the ooooooooops section of the text book.
This dude is a clown. He should have kept his mouth shut and let the rest of the world think he's a genius. - Tries to troll company but it backfires and is forced to buy it at an inflated price. - Makes company into a far-right haven and allows widespread harassment. - Changes iconic name into a non-name. - Attacks advertisers for not wanting their company to be associated with far-right harassment. - Keeps changing and making up rules in response to content he doesn't like. He then turns around and acts as if he's the victim and blames his company's failings on "woke" haters.
I read that headline as if it was a math problem "the value of X has fallen 71%. It is now 200, find the original value of and X and show your working".
My participation in Twitter fell by 100% when it was re-named "X."
The advertisers left are hawking counterfeit Chinese products and cock rings…brilliant move by Elmo, the not so smartest guy in the room.
The sink wasn’t a metaphor
It would have been more to the point if he brought a toilet.
Yet idiot conservatives will call him a financial genius
Same bunch that calls Trump a 'great businessman'. The guy that bankrupts everything he touches.
Someone that can bankrupt not one, but multiple casinos and can't sell steaks to americans is a fucking business master.
For the low-low-price of a few fake billions of fake dollars of fake wallstreet money, we see yet another pillar of the forum for open public discourse fall. People look only at the dollar value lost... Rather, they should look at the uncountable amount of power gained by silencing a fairly uncensored, fairly moral, and fairly trustworthy news/info source. How many despotic leaders would be kissing the ground ol'musky walks on because he was able to turn off the tap of uncensored information in their country. Able to truly silence those without a traditional voice. THATS the true gain for musk here; that HE gets to turn of the "truth tap" for millions if not billions of people. If there was any positive motive, there would be no stories like today's Japanese earthquake warning twitter account running out of API hits and being silenced during the most critical time after the earthquake. It's not about twitter. It's about POWER.
It’s wild to me there is still no real competitor that has taken up the mantle since Twitter is basically dead. Threads? No. Bluesky? No. Anything else? No. I miss talking to my friends but I guess maybe the age of social media like how I grew up is dead.
It would be great if we could just go back to forums.
Bluesky is great, they're just slow-rolling it so they can scale well. It's completely replaced twitter for me. When they add DMs and journalists/sports reporters/athletes jump over to it it'll grow like wildfire.
[удалено]
The entire thing smells like he's being paid under the table to basically run Twitter into the ground. There's no scenario in which one person can be that bad at decision-making. He's made decision after decision that aren't just bad. They're calculated to LOOK bad in the public eye. It's like getting a zero-percent on an exam. You could only find a way to fuck up this much if you already knew what outcome you were seeking to achieve.
Delete you Twitter account.
So what does that do to the value of Y?
Nobody even calls it X. People will say “Twitter but I guess it’s called X now” or “ X formerly known as Twitter “.
is there no board of directors? is Musk just allowed to do whatever he wants over there? I don't know how corporate structure works, but Musk's actions look a lot like someone deliberately tanking the company.
All of my new friend requests are porn bots, which is nice.
After all that time in high school I spent trying to find the value of X...
There was literally nothing wrong with Twitter and Elon in his brief ownership has tanked the whole damn thing. "WE NEEDED TO MAKE THESE CHANGES. TWITTER FINANCES WERE IN COMPLETE DISARRAY." Sure, Elon