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As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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It's not just lemmy that's benefiting from Elon Musk.

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[–] 166 points 3 years ago (7 children)

He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can't help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.

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  • [–] 80 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.

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  • [–] 57 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    You've obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.

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  • [–] 73 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    They're not doing that to lose. They're doing that because they already lost.

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  • [–] 59 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (5 children)

    To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.

    I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.

    Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.

    Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.

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  • [–] 32 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it's just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.

    You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children's children.

    So yeah, "bad" financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.

    Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Lol, "real cash", look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn't even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it's not all his money.

    There was never a 44b "real cash" transaction.

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I mean, sure, assuming he doesn't mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    It's not his money though, so your theory hasn't really fallen apart. Some of it his money but he's been hanging with the saudis and murdoch.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    It is most definitely his money. He is using his real source of wealth, Tesla stock, as collateral to secure the loans. $44 billion worth of Tesla stock. And when you sell off a huge amount, as would happen in the case of the collateral being seized, it would tank the rest of his wealth which is mostly in non-collateralized (as far as we know, in relation to Twitter) Tesla stock. Investors knowing that $44 billion of Tesla stock will be liquidated--even if slowly--by creditors would make prices tank.

    Elon's rich. Like all rich people, he is inherently immoral and opportunistic, holding no allegiance to his species nor country of residence ("world citizens" are a blight yet most countries still let them buy citizenship--that's true class solidarity while they get us fighting over stupid shit like transgender Chess Grandmasters). I have a feel that you are correct in that he's been earning money from the Saudis and Murdochs and many others. But the main source of his wealth is still in the market. A source which he pumped up with market manipulation because the SEC is a captured entity run exclusively for the benefit of the parasites at the top.

    But it feels like arguing around the edges a bit. Elon is just not good at this. He has failed upward his entire life which is why he had to buy his way into basically every successful enterprise he is credited for. Rich people, especially nepo babies like Elon, don't succeed because they are better. They succeed because the upper class ensures that their class succeeds, because the alternative is the working class becoming their peers. And they can't have that.

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  • [–] -2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I wouldn't buy Twitter, fire everyone, chase off a lot of the good people and then change the name. If I felt like Twitter was the only plan, I would have negotiated a fair price, worked with the people on what was already working and wasn't, kept everyone on until you knew how it ran, kept the worldwide, known name and probably paid my rent, lol. I'm not a "genius" in business, but I do know that this is probably the best I could have done.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    Okay okay, now add the egotistical jerk trait and reevaluate the scenario?

    You forget that it was an impulse offer, and he thought that most people that work at the company did not deserve to work there. He grossl overestimated how many new slave devs would be willing to replace the devs he fired. Experienced devs still get good pay and offers they don't need to grind for cheap for Elon.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I just want to add he's used tweets to manipulate stock prices before and it put the SEC on his ass. He's familiar with how making public announcements like that can come across to the law at that point. Even though he wasn't punished he knew where he the line was drawn well before he "impulsively" crossed it. Twitter was a haven for actual journalism and journalists who live by ethics knowing damn well the consequences for libel and slander. The stories they pushed had a massive influence on undoing his image and it keeps going. Same with his Saudi co investor and Larry Ellison. These guys all know what it was really worth.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he's going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the "make some statements" phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.

    So there's no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It's just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago

    Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him "you legally can't actually walk away from this deal".

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.

    The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I'm pretty sure it's why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can't unite if there's not a platform for us to do so on..

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago

    Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that's all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn't need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    I wonder if his goal isn't for Twitter to be successful. I'm wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.

    Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I'm not sure they could have done as good as Musk.

    He's carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.

    You can't be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.

    No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Actually the number of Twitter users increased

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Really?!? That's surprising.

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