this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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"Fidelity is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion"

I found this funny.

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[–] [email protected] 267 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Honestly terrifying that they still think it is worth that much.

[–] [email protected] 115 points 2 months ago (2 children)

they still own the twitter trademark, that might be their biggest asset

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Since they don't seem to care about it, start using "tweet" for every social media post to devalue them further.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Tweets are a specific type of a microblog post you do on twitters. Have you tried tweeting, make your own twitter at https://joinmastodon.org/ today!

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 months ago (4 children)

If someone were to buy it, ban the Nazis and get advertisers to come back it's still salvageable, I guess. The longer Musk owns it, the bigger the chance is that it'll become the next MySpace.

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (9 children)

And yet, he's still one of the what, 5 richest people on the planet?

He doesn't give a shit, and neither should you (as nice as the schadenfreude might feel). He got something worth more to him than plain old money - an established propaganda platform, which he is using as he intended - to war monger and otherwise interfere in politics to ensure fascism progresses as fast as he can help it. The "dent" (more like a surface scratch) it put in his finances is completely invisible and irrelevant to him.

And it should be to you, too.

He is NEVER going to end up without means or power, not even fucking close, unless we take them from him, and abolish the system that encouraged and enabled him to amass them in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.

Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.

Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price..

Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yeah a lot of people miss the fact that the play for Twitter was never about money, but control. Owning one of the most popular social medias makes it easy to spread propaganda and amplify your voice.

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Musk did not buy this as an investment. He bought it to flip elections and manipulate public opinion.

Tesla is writing him a check that will cover the entire purchase price, and Saudi Arabia and Russia will pay the operating costs.

Active users are what matters; if they lost 75% of their users then I'm paying attention.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure he gave an outlandish bid for Twitter to manipulate it's stock prices when he pulled put, but he was sued into following through.

I don't think he ever wanted to buy it, or at least he wanted to crash it's value to come back and buy it on the cheap.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

Aren't 75% of the users Russian bots? Lol

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

I think you're giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn't like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think it’s even pettier than that. He’s the loud guy on the forum who literally bought the site so he could be admin.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

We'll never know since Musk is nurturing a state-funded "user"-base that will always keep their numbers inflated

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[–] [email protected] 73 points 2 months ago

Elon Musk's greatest personal achievement has been his tireless work and incredible effort toward disproving the myth of Billionaire Exceptionalism.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Couldn't have happened to a douchier bag.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The funny part was when he said he was a free speech absolutist, but then he started restricting the free speech of people he doesn't like

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 months ago (11 children)

We knew this was going to happen before he made the purchase.

Everyone said, the best way for Elon to keep his money was to change very little, or even take a hands-off approach.

Masnick suggested this would happen

It was that and so much worse. Moral of the story: Running a huge social media service is hard. Maybe don't assume that because you're a billionaire you're the best at doing stuff.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Meanwhile he is on track to become the world's first trillionaire

I think the purchase was more about welding power than any financial gain

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

He tried to back out, I don't think any of this was about anything. He's just a dick with a weird sense of humor.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I mean the people at Twitter were very happy to sell it off. Remember how they actually sued to force him to go through with the deal and succeeded in stopping him from backing out?

Even if he’d managed it as well as the prior stewards, it was always a losing business.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (5 children)
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[–] [email protected] 40 points 2 months ago (6 children)

If they influence the election to their desired outcome, then the value won't matter. The damage will have been done.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 months ago

I just checked and it's worth nothing to anyone important.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (9 children)

its worth comes from being able to influence world politics. Does he seem like someone who cares or needs money?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

True, but that power is also diminished greatly as more and more regular users abandon the site. No eyes on the propaganda makes it worth a lot less.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (21 children)

Elon is a genius at losing money.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

No wonder he is starting to get along so well with Trump

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Musk is and always has been an incompetent yet lucky scammer.

Twitter will be bankrupt within two years.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Didn't he pay too much for it in the first place?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

How to become a billionaire: Start with 54 billion

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

Posts about value are ads. Stop give exposure to this guy or his companies

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

And may it continue to crash and burn. It’s just 4 chan at this point.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

May it sink even lower

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Let’s everyone point and laugh. It humbles people like him, right?

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My first thought is 'I can't wait for it to turn zero' but then I realize that 79% decline from 44 billion still means it is worth 9.24 billion.

And that is still a shitload of money.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Something tells me its value is not monetary for Musk.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (4 children)

A quarter is cute and all but...

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (7 children)

I doubt anybody would buy it for a tenth, tbh.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

Twitter was useful.

X is just useful idiots at this point.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

I remember thinking twitter was bad before he took over

It's now a complete shadow of what it was even just a couple of years ago. Just a quarter of its value seems generous

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I wish, I wish... I wish I was a fish.

I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.

Like: we're going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We're going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.

You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.

But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I'd like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who'd be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.

I may as well wish I were a fish.

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