Musk buys a big chunk of Twitter

I am honestly curious as to whether this will be his Waterloo. Just don’t see how he makes money off of it.
But I think we’ve all learned not to bet against him.

 

I do. My FB is almost exclusively people I know personally. On the other hand, almost everyone I follow on Twitter is someone I don't know personally. One benefit of Twitter is that it's not as cluttered or unwieldy as FB IMO. I've gotten responses from people I did not expect. One cool feature is that you can create "lists" to narrow your feed to what you're interested in at any given time. For example, I have a follow list of quite a few meteorologists and storm chasers, and those accounts are active during hurricanes and other severe weather events. So when there's a tornado outbreak, I can see videos and takes about that in near real time without having to sift through all of the political content on my main feed.

 

Even if he loses 15B it wouldn’t change his daily life one bit. Nobody wants to lose 15b but certainly wouldn’t end him

 

Tesla isn’t going to cover his losses per se but Tesla shareholders would have some negative downstream exposure if Twitter tanks and there’s a large margin calls on his shares.

 

Me. I use it as a real time newsfeed. I have lists for Gators, Politics and other topics that I categorize providers into. Then I just scroll through that list for the latest info.

 

he’s got 54 billion in it, he could lose a lot more than 15. He could lose it all. He was one more bad test launch away from being broke with SpaceX, no guarantee Twitter couldn’t go belly up too, he’s going to take risks with it.
But more than the dollar losses, it would harm his reputation as the golden boy who always makes the right bet, which could hurt Tesla stock, and his future bets. A bad bet here could be a real cascade effect.

 

I do.

 

I believe Musk has stated that he wants more people to voice their opinion even if it's not popular. That's really what most people want from Twitter. I believe that being the arbiter of "facts" is not the mission nor the goal of such a platform.

 

It is the preferred social media site of The Left and their thought leaders. I cannot remember the exact stats off hand but I think that around 80% of the content is produced by 40k users and most of them are considered to be on the Leftward side of the Democratic Party.

 

IMO his whole plan isn't to make money directly from Twitter, but to use it to a a personal brand builder and push hype towards his products/investments. As the sole owner, he has minimal reporting obligations and no real oversight. He could (and very likely will) manipulate Twitter's algos to drive positive traffic on Tesla, SpaceX, etc. and negative traffic on his competitors. He can also deploy an army of bots to give his empire the appearance of popularity, without any fear of being de-platformed.

Twitter has minimal value selling ads to third parties, because you can't publicly promote the tools that would actually work (bots, algo manipulation, suppression of competitors, etc.). In private hands, though, my guess is it will be very effective and pay for itself many times over.

 

Reich showing his true colors.

 

Both of those points can be true.

 

No idea. But betting against musk has not been profitable the past 5 years or so.

 

Reich's second argument is largely untrue. There are plenty of platforms by which to do that (e.g., Facebook, which has a much larger user base).

Musk is going to run into the interesting conundrum if he really stops banning people, as pointed out by the Reddit CEO. There are two competing effects in social media network reach: become too restrictive and you limit the size of the market, become too lax in restrictions and you end up with a Chan-style free-for-all that drives the "normies" away.

 

Definitely be interesting to see if he has something. He better, because he just made a very big bet that he does.

 

Twitter isn’t going to change. The advertisers are geared toward the non-MAGA types, and they’re not going to risk losing advertisers. Plus, as been stated he has other interests that will occupy his attention while the more liberal employees run, and moderate the business.

 

Brilliant billionaire and nut are not a null set.
What could go wrong

 

Not that big when you look at it. Twitter is not going to zero. IF he can monetize twitter then he will most likely increase his wealth 1.5-2 times. Will be interesting to watch.

 

Musk says he’s going to authenticate all humans and get rid of the spam-bots and fake accounts. That would be a pretty big change from their current landscape, which has arbitrarily banned a few nutjobs who broke certain rules, but can never seem to get a handle on the spam or bot accounts.

That inauthentic behavior he’s talking about is 50% of the problem, perhaps even a greater problem to actually address than the violent/terrorist nutjob content which would permeate if allowed. The thing is it’s much easier to say “authenticate human users” than to actually implement it across the entire platform. Although Twitter claims to have been working at fixing these problems with spam-bots, they might have half assed their efforts under the theory that even “fake user engagements” is still user engagement. If Musk successfully eliminates inauthentic behavior that might crush their engagement metrics… metrics which are part of the valuation of the business. This of course makes the financials even more sketchy. So it would seem to be a bit of a catch-22.