Could X go bankrupt under Elon Musk?
Could X go bankrupt under Elon Musk?
Musk's profane attack on advertisers baffled experts - without adverts, how would X survive?
Hopefully, yes.
If there is a god/goddess it certainly will.
I honestly think that he doesn't have to face consequences like normal people because he has enough money to make problems go away. He can be an awful person in interviews, and mean his words too, then even bankrupt his company, and you know what? He will continue being excessively rich.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It's disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It's disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
One of my biggest gripes is that anyone can have this much money to begin with. We should never have to rely on the ultra-wealthy to fix our problems by making it their pet project, and no one should be able to squirrel away that much money to begin with. All the money that could fix those issues en masse instead pads some sociopath's portfolio.
Personally, I'm okay with a small set of folks being rich as long as they pay taxes. I'm this case, a hell of a lot of taxes. You know, the taxes they should be paying, not what they manage to get away with now.
Let the legal system enforce that they give back to society in a meaningful way. Close the stupid loopholes. I want to see a meaningful improvement in society from their contributions. Everyone else is worse off unless they contribute.
He has wealth, he has to dip into selling stock to have "money."
I don't disagree otherwise, but when your wealth is in the companies you own, you pretty much have to sell the whole shebang in one go (what Musk reportedly tried to do with Apple, offering to sell them Tesla as a whole) or selling it piecemeal, by selling off portions of stock (which he does fairly regularly for cash infusions).
His wealth will surely insulate him for quite a long time. However, it is not a permanent insulator, and he has made a series of, let's say, questionable decisions. It's very likely that it will either take decades for it to really hurt him, or that it just may make him far less wealthy, but still wealthy enough to be annoying.
We're also at a precipice, because the kinds of things that he is saying were the kinds of things that used to get you shitcanned from the business community as a whole. Nobody would do business with a virulent anti-semite. It's one of the reasons Musk bought Twitter, really, because they are busy normalizing positions like anti-semitism.
The normalizing of his hate will actually get him farther, longer, than his wealth.
His money could be used to fix so many issues en masse. It’s disgusting that he chooses not to do so every day.
Pretty sure he posted on twitter a couple years ago about how if someone credible provided a plan to solve world hunger for 6 billion dollars, he would sell Tesla stock and just do it, to which the UN responded with a detailed plan. However, Musk pretty much ignored them, no acknowledgment (as far as I know) and no money donated.
Using the money to fix issues in the world and making it a better place is not a part of his politics.
Life without is better. I left over a year ago. No drama, no loss, no issues. Twitter is not family
I never really understood the interest even from day 1 back in 2009 out wherever. I only used it to shame companies when their support teams wouldn’t help and that only lasted a few years.
yeah same. it always seemed really self-absorbed. I never even touched Twitter until 2020, when I was surprised to hear about all this great political discourse going on. I was.... disappointed. No good dialog can happen in 140 characters. rarely bothered to post, read, or log on. it's just this obnoxious self-promoting slam-dunking virtue-signaling dance.
"I don't have any theories that make sense," Paskalis says. "There is a revenue model in his head that eludes me."
You don't need a complex business model for this to make sense. The man has had "fuck you money" his entire life. Things are finally not going his way and he only has one way to respond..... by saying "fuck you" to the people he doesn't like.
Pretty much. I understand the impulse to think he has to have some secret plan, some rational explanation for his behavior. I used to think the same thing, that there was some way he would actually make money from destroying the company, but no. No, he's just an impetuous, impulsive idiot who tricked himself into having to buy the company at meme stock prices, and is going to burn the whole thing to the ground purely because he is, in fact, a dumbass.
That impulse is similar to the impulse I see in conservatives when they claim Trump has to have a plan. "he's eluded prison time his whole life!" "He managed to become president!" Etc. Like. They insist there's a method to the madness. That method is that he shouts down anyone who tells him he's wrong and sells everyone else bravado. That's it.
No shade, and I mean it. But I wonder if you could explain what it was that convinced you that he was smart originally?
Yeah. Most people, especially in the establishment press, don't know or pretend to not know that this is the first time he's actually shaping how a company is run rather than pay someone else and then take credit for their work like he's always done.
Everything went well when he pretended to be Tony Stark inventing and designing every part of his companies while others did it all much better than he ever could.
Now that he's publicly making actually meaningful (as in they have a big impact, not as in them making sense) decisions, he's showing the world that he's just an extremely impulsive malignant narcissist 52 year old manchild who desperately craves to be seen as cool and edgy by young people.
I liked Twitter. I know it's a cesspit, but as a software engineer it was always the top company I wanted to work at. It didn't work out (for several funny reasons), but for that selfish reason I'll never forgive Musk.
IMO, Musk needs help. If he were a normal person, someone would have pushed him to leave work and find help. As the owner of three companies, responsible for tens of thousands of employees, no chance is he getting that help. He's constantly baited and prodded by his fan boys, people like Rogan and Chappelle who can deal with that kind of fame, and the press that get content from his antics.
As for Twitter, I don't see it dying, until it fails to have a use for Musk. My initial belief was that his "everything app" would use Twitter's account system to get all of its users, and then he'd sell Twitter and continue with the users - but that app isn't ever happening. It's just something he's desperate to ditch, but his vanity and poor mental health won't let him do it. For that reason, it'll just be a zombie app.
I dont think an "everything app" will ever work.
You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your "everythings". The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.
This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it's parts was better than the competition.
The better approach for an app would be to do it's own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with outside data, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed "analytics" module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.
I think it can definitely "work", in that there will be a small number of people that use it. It won't dominate any market, but it will exist, and it might even make some money. It's ultimately a power play, by having an app in every market (video, social, maps, etc) he becomes more entrenched in tech.
It's not an uncommon model, especially in smaller businesses that do a lot of things with a tiny bit of profit everywhere. With that being said, it requires competent leadership and an aligned team - and with Musk's visible problems that won't happen.
I think the idea (I don't say plan, because I think it's more of a seat-of-the-pants situation) was to first destroy Twitter as a platform for any kind of left wing activism.
Next, make it profitable as a subscription based right wing social media app.
The shit last week was just a rich, fragile narcissist lashing out at his perceived enemies.
The sooner the better.
I long for the headline "self driving Tesla runs over musk".
Replace self driving with sentient and runs over with repeatedly crushes
Lots of folks are killed by their own baby. The fellow behind the Segway died while "touring his estate" on his. Bump over a root and into the drink and drowned.
The fact it hasn't imploded a long time ago is proof that digital platforms need to be regulated to enforce interoperability.
Since this shitshow started, I have not heard from anyone that wanted to be on Twitter. In anything resembling a free market, these customers (both advertisers and users) could freely go to a competitor.
But due to the way platforms work, no one can compete, once a dominant platform emerges. A platform has a monopoly on all the things people built on top of the platform (content, software etc.). This monopoly kills the free market. Enforced interoperability would reduce this platform effect and help out competitors.
The EU is starting to tackle that, with the Digital Markets Act, but very few companies are targeted so far, even though the whole industry is plagued by quasi-monopolistic platforms that are universally agreed upon to be trash.
That's a seriously interesting idea. For context, I'm a middle-aged, Southern, American white guy. "FREE speech! CAPITALISM!"
"That how dad did it, that's how I do it, and it's worked out pretty well so far." ~Tony Stark.
High time to start looking at ideas like yours. If Europe and California have to impose these things? So fucking be it.
Might make me uncomfortable, might not understand it completely, too bad for me. I will vote for the world I want my children to live in. They're 8 and 10, I'm 52. Done my time, coasting out. Y'all's turn.
And if you want to hold forth on the notion of "enforced interoperability", I'm listening.
That's called regulation, and is supposed to happen.
We have a problem of regulatory capture, plus these platforms acting like both publisher and platform with no courts taking them to task for it (applying the regulation).
Sure, yeah. The way I imagine this would work out best for humanity, is if companies are forced to open up platforms they provide, when they have e.g. more than 40% market saturation with that.
Most small platforms will want to strive for interoperability with the dominant platforms anyways, so this threshold is just to keep the burden of regulation low.
In practice, this might mean that Twitter would be forced to allow federation with Mastodon.
Or that Microsoft is forced to open-source the code for the Windows API.
Or that Reddit is blocked from closing up their third-party API.Ultimately, I don't think, it even needs to be as concrete. I feel like even a law stating that if you're providing a platform, you need to take special care to keep competition alive (along with some detailing what this entails), and then leaving it up to a judge to decide, would work.
The GDPR is implemented like that and while most larger companies are IMHO in violation of the GDPR, I also feel like most larger companies actually did go from atrocious privacy handling to merely bad privacy handling, which is an incredible success.
That's effectively all I'm hoping for, too. That dominant platforms can't just stagnate for multiple decades anymore. That they do have to put in at least a small bit more effort to stay in that dominant position.
We're scheduled to find out.
Morally or financially?
Both, right?
Pretty sure it's an inevitability at this point and Musk knows it, which is precisely why he's fueling the flames of the whole ad situation. Since the whole controversy are both about the Jews (as in antisemitism) and advertisers, they can be blamed for the death of the platform instead of business decisions by Musk.
There's also the possibility that some right-wing billionaires who really love to spread their propaganda using twitter are going to buy the company or bail it out or whatever, but that remains to be seen
What is it about him, that makes him look like an asshole? It can't just be his eyes being too close together, can it?
For me, it just looks like he has a certain coldness in his eyes. It's not a dead or vacant look, it's just the way a smile, or any other facial expression for that matter, just doesn't seem to make it to his eyes. There's obviously life and intelligence there, but it's not a friendly intelligence. I pulled up the most lizard-man pictures of Zuckerberg for comparison, and even at his most robotic, his eyes still look human. Like there's some capacity for empathy in there somewhere. With Musk? His eyes just don't quite read as human to me in an uncanny valley sort of way.
The eyes of a fucking aristocrat, care for nothing more than power. No ideals, no kin, no kith. Just a hunger for power for powers sake.
It doesn't help that he's got this vibe undulating off him, you know the one-- evil, narcissistic, oligarch dork, trying to look cool but failing miserably because it's impossible to be cool when you're anywhere remotely close to as big of a dickbag as he is.
The honest answer is mostly because you are seeing bad photos of him, since Lemmy loves to hate on him and all articles hating on someone love to show bad photos. If you look up positive/neutral articles he looks much better.
You mean older photos? Publicity photos? This is the equivalent of “you have been fooled by the media into not liking Trump/musk/whoever!”. For one, this is the photo from the BBC article, not one selected by someone on Lemmy. Then, anyone who watched the video of his ‘interview’ last week can see for themselves he’s looking much worse than he did a couple years ago, and fairly terrible overall.
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin. It does seem like space nazi knows it's doomed. Anyone know what happens when bankruptcy happens? Does creditors take over the company? Does he get sued for negligence? Does it get sold to a highest bidder for pennies on the dollar? I'm hoping someone can enlighten us.
Go F Yourself meltdown is probably the final nail in the coffin.
I'll believe it once they're actually bankrupt. So many things have been predicted as "killing" the company in the last year yet somehow they're still going and millions and millions of morons/addicts are still using it.
The first kind of bankruptcy, Elon & his Saudi bros keep the company, and the banks lose like 50-90% of their loans.
The second kind of bankruptcy, the banks get all the servers and office chairs and sell them to either a new data-mining company or a recycler. This isn't very likely, because most of the value of Xitter is all the people who keep visiting, regardless of whether Elon knows how to monetize them.
Yes
This was a hit job and news outlets are trying to pretend it's an accident.
Does it even matter? Twitter is a cesspool! It only has 1500 employees. In the grand scheme of things there will be negligible economic backlash from this company going under.
Nobody really cares if Elon loses all that money and the 1500 employees will be able to find employment elsewhere.
It's not the economic side of twitter that matters, but the informational aspects of the network which are now lost, that is the sad thing. It was used by many journalists and other important peer groups as a live news source for which there is currently no equivalent replacement.
I completely agree. Thanks to Elon it would be better to take this horse out to pasture at this point.
It almost certainly will. Dude's a fuckin' dipshit.
I think Murdoch will buy it just as it goes irrelevant for $580m and then it will go bankrupt
Prediction: Murdoch will be dead by then. He's 92.
Edit: I think we'll see news that he's dead by next Saturday. Why? Trying to cash in my hopium 👍
you can't kill satan, or god, it makes more sense its god messing with us.
deleted by creator
I know this reference.
Could?!
its the whole point. the guy is tanking the business while providing legal cover for doing so. he will default on what he can, let the saudis eat bunch of it and call it a FUCKING WIN.
why you people keep expecting muskrburger to be doing anything but destroying twitter is beyond me. his actions are obvious and have literally nothing to do with generating revenue.
🤞
I just don’t care anymore. I hope far worse for Elon and every other rich asshole piñatas that exist.
Yes, that's what he wants and he's looking for people to take the blame for it. Like advertisers
So obviously his fault, his attempts at blaming everyone else is super cringe
It’s not a question of IF it will. It will. Both financially, and morally
I mean it was kinda destined to go bankrupt even under rge old owners. It only really ever produced a profit for like six months and was surviving of investor money
It was losing money but not a huge amount. They could have made reasonable cuts (compared to how Elron slashed 75% of staff) and been profitable, probably.
I hope so, for the lolz
I hope so.
I don't care. But it will be good for people who are addicted to it.
While bankruptcy is plausible, in such event debtors would simply change who's in charge of the platform, per article. It's wouldn't be the end for Twitter for sure.
its vast archive of conversations can be used to train chatbots.
Maybe Nazi chatbots?
Since that literally already happened years ago with Microsoft Tay. The Japanese version Rinna got depression instead.
Exactly, only difference is Elon would be proud.
I mean if you let a chatbot learn from conversations the internet will try to turn it into hitler.
Someone trained a GPT4 model on 4chan and it supposedly scored pretty high on...truthfulness. YT link.
Screw x, I literally don't care what happens to it at this point. At one point in time "twitter" was actually half decent, then it just went to shit....
Twitter was decent in like 2008 before boomers were on it. By 2012 it had become the information warfare platform we all know and hate.
Can agree with this....
Hate to jump on the Boomer hate train, but I get it. Was loving Facebook for a minute, until some of my GenX acquaintances got on there with their virulent shit.
"WTF Tab?! You were basically Joan Jett in the day! Whipped my ass in my first bike race when we were 5."
"And Lurch, fuck you man. You were the gigantic, weird kid that joined us in 6th grade. We took you in and made friends. We were punkers, and now you're all establishment?!"
Many are still fighting the good fight, but fuck me, I dropped out 10-years ago.
His interview certainly lent some additional weight to the theories that he's been trying to run the company into the ground the whole time.
That's his goal. It always has been. He was forced to buy. His solution? The world's biggest tax write off. Yet everyone is determined to keep him in the news like he actually cares about it.
Yep, and it will. I predict within 3 years.
Of course it can. And it probably will. But that's what the plan was since the get.
I was looking for this comment. He is 100% doing this out of spite because he said something he didn’t mean and was forced to buy it. What a toddler.
It was morally bankrupt shortly after Seth McFarlane left too long under a heat lamp took over. In addition to all his other failings, Elon looks like McFarlane jerky.
I was going to say you're doing a disservice to McFarlane by making that comment, but he probably would've found it funny too. Carry on 😁
It's well on it's way
I think Twitter is going down, may or may not go bankrupt but I think it will lose relevance. Wonder if it will be replaced. Lots of people (myself included) kinda assume that bluesky, mastodon or some other twitter-like service will take over. But Twitter is not really necessary, so I don't think it's a given that something will take its place.
As a time sink, more multimedia-oriented platforms like Reddit/Lemmy, Instagram, Tiktok or Youtube, seem more attractive.
The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it's short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.
Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.
Twitter is also great for announcements. Band you like puts out a new single or album? They're touring? Twitter was great for that. I used it for that, books/authors, and a handful of other media that was similar where I was waiting for release dates. Mastodon and the others don't seem to have drawn those entities to them so they aren't as useful for those things. I don't really know what can replace it if it doesn't have the popularity.
Just do what we did in the 00s. Follow those scientists' homepages and read their bibliographies that show where they cited information from.
Its really not that bad yo. I did it as a teenager. Its not like scientists have stopped publishing bibliographies because Twitter suddenly came into existence, and honestly, the bibliographies are more important today than ever.
Meelon Husk
Let's hope it doesn't, I don't want those racist idiots joining any of the other social networks. Let it become the acceptable 4chan.... to siphon off the scum of the internet so that we don't have to deal with them.
If he doesn't do something about the blatant racism on Twitter, I could see this happening. If he does do this, all the shit stains like Tim Pool will start spouting off about how the platform doesn't support "free speech."
He's doing something about the racism, just not what he should be doing.
Why would he do anything about the blatant racism that he spreads personally?
Hopefully. It's a huge pile of trash.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The companies paused adverts after an investigation by a US organisation, Media Matters for America, flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts.
In a fiery interview on Wednesday, Musk also used the "b" word - bankruptcy, in a sign of just how much the ad boycott is damaging the company's bottom line.
Mark Gay, chief client officer at marketing consultancy at Ebiquity, which works with hundreds of companies, says there is no sign anyone is returning.
When Musk puts chief executives "in his crosshairs" like this they will be even more reticent to be involved with X, says Lou Paskalis, of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, adds: "It doesn't take a social media expert to understand and to know that publicly and personally attacking advertisers and companies that pay X's bills is not going to be good for business."
According to the New York Times, which got hold of the pitch deck Musk was giving to investors last year, X was supposed to bring in $15m from a payments business in 2023, growing to about $1.3bn by 2028.
The original article contains 1,032 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It won't fail because of money. Musk has enough money to fund it out of his petty cash forever.
If it fails, it will fail in the same way the newsnet failed - it becomes full of angry old men screaming about Israel and guns.
Does he have the desire to do that, though? It seems more likely to me that he’d sell it first. All of the attention it’s created seems to be something he desires, though.
No. Whoever wrote this doesn't understand bankruptcy.
If things got really bad creditors would take control and sell the business to shareholders who would install a clean CEO who would entice advertisers back.
No one would utter the b-word.
Twitter isn't public, though. Elon took it private when he took over, so there aren't any shareholders beyond Elon and the Saudis who chipped in money to buy it.
That doesn't preclude what I said though.
Now even Betteridge's law is dead.
Such bad journalism. Sucks how much reporting has gone the drain with clickbait bullshit titles like this.
I've noticed a general pattern that if the title ends with a question mark, the article is not worth your time
Yep. Exactly my thoughts.
That's a better guideline than Betteridge's Law. My reflex when I see such a headline is "Why are you asking me?"
Wait, it hasn't yet!?
We should be so lucky. But aren't the losses so far not that much compared to the market value?
The purchase price already exceeded the real market value, which is why the former board was persistent in pushing the deal’s completion. A normal price at the time would have been about 20% less. Estimates since then have been even lower, like maybe $20 billion. So most of the loss is in market value, not cash expenditure or lost revenue.
Watch the stockmarket. AFAIK it already went down by a third or so.
Asking if X will go bankrupt is not the right question. Elon has many untapped reserves of cash that he could use at any time to continue to pay the bills.
The guy just needs to speculate publicly on a cool sounding idea and a billion dollars in cash will fall out of a tree somewhere. That is his level of social status.
Bankruptcy happens when a company is imminently falling apart because there is no cash and a creditor repossessing things may disrupt other higher priority creditors. Therefore a judge needs to add order to the process which puts a legal hold on a lot of things. Unless Elon has some dramatic personal meltdown way beyond what we've already seen, that's really unlikely.
The real question is... How does Elon plan on making a profit from this thing if he's insulting those who are paying his bills today? He did float the idea of creating a super app that might handle payments and many other features. That has the potential to be a massive profit center if executed with precision. Perhaps the Twitter user base can be converted... Which would mean advertisers are no longer needed.
I would not be surprised if such a thing is in the works and would be announced when it's almost ready to launch.
"Just wait everyone, Elon is actually being smart this whole time" I just don't buy it.
He can pay for it, but would you dump money into a burning pit over and over and over again, after you already dropped around 1/8th of your total worth into a failure? Especially when you only bought it because you were forced to by law? Musk has been directly asked if he would subsidize it more with his personal fortune recently, and in response he whined about who would be at blame for it going bankrupt. I dont think hes going to put anymore of his money into it.
Even in Twitter's fully profitable years where it made 1.5bil pre buyout, that still would barely service its new yearly debt. That was before he lost 13% of the userbase and 50% of the total advertising, including nearly all of the large advertisers.
His current replacement for losing all those advertisers and 100s of million of dollars? Paid twitter blue, which apprently is about 300k out of 400mil users, or less than 0.1% of total users. As you can imagine, their 30mil/year is not going to make up to the 100s of millions/yr shortfall his behavior has caused.
His "lets be wechat" idea is also ludicrous. He has said that he thinks X can take over 50% of all banking in the world, which by the numbers is all of US, Europe and China combined. This means not only taking over an area that already has native apps that are entrenched and making billions, but also convincing all Europeans and Americans to abandon banks and put their money into an technically unstable platform run by a loud and proud antisemite/racist. This ignores that Americans and Europeans already have "use an app for banking" like google pay and apple pay, but apprently vastly prefer using cc/debit by a ratio of 90%. The apps are already on all our phones, and most no one uses them.
So yeah, his "hail mary" is to eliminate huge, entrenched and dynamic state supported rivals in China, and to change all of the 100s of billion dollar banking landscape in the US/Europe where no one wants an app to do this, all with zero inhouse expertise and a CEO whose technical background is Ad sales.
I have my doubts.