Elon Cleaning House

He floated that to propose 8 dollars a month now it looks like. I guess for some people it would be worth paying the roughly 100 bucks a year.

 

Let's see. The guy looked at a company that has been very openly looking to sell itself off for years, isn't making money, and that nobody wants. At this point, he makes bad decision 1, slowly buy shares that holds up their stock price as their competitors decline, potentially raising the price of acquisition. Bad decision 2 is blasting out the intent to purchase for an amount nobody in the industry even believes. Bad Decision 3 is actually following through and getting the debt financing for this offer, tying it to his holdings in Tesla and tanking that stock and his personal wealth. Bad decision 4 is signing a crazy document that basically gives him no way to back out of the deal. Then trying to back out of it. Then failing to back out of it (because of bad decision 4). Now, he is showing up with some half thought through ideas (he is already negotiating pricing on verification with people in public, he doesn't have a team of engineers he wants to install and shows up with Tesla ones as if they are his personal employees). That is bad decision 5.

The "free speech" stuff is basically empty calories. It sounds good. It means nothing. His board to reassure advertisers will look like all of the other boards in the industry that do exactly that. They will think of content that their advertisers won't want associated with their brands and get rid of it. On social media, you are not the customer. You are the product. You are being sold to advertisers. The other boards didn't develop randomly. There is a reason that every social media company in the US has essentially handling content moderation the exact same way: it is fairly optimized.

This has been on-going for months. Could he have some super secret genius strategy? Sure, that is possible. Have his actions up until now supported the notion? Absolutely not.

 

Actually, in that industry, I do (as a consultant). Of course, if Elon was listening to people in the field, he wouldn't have ended up being forced to buy an asset nobody else wanted for a massive premium.

 

Whatever the amount (and as I understand it the premium money buys you more reach and visibility too), the people most likely to pay will be big corporations or people who want to buy credibility (i.e. hucksters), which seems like a bad recipe to me, since one of the only useful things about Twitter is breaking news.

 

Totally the type of thing you want to be doing in public instead of with basic marketing research.

 

Billionaires can make mistakes. I’m not sure Trump is a Billionaire but he had his share of business failures. Twitter makes no money. By comparison Mitsubishi makes $7B in profit a year and is valued at $42B. Valuations are tricky so I’m not saying that apples to apples but this has a chance to be the biggest business loss in the history of the world.

Mitsubishi Corporation (8058.T) - Earnings

 

He did his own market research when he replied to Stephen King's tweet about not wanting to pay $20 with "what about $8?"

 

My guess is Musk bought Twitter for its infrastructure, but it going to transform it into something that looks and functions nothing like its current iteration. He bought the backbone, not the platform.

 

Well the blue check won't carry the weight it did previously that is for sure.

 

Tesla boy is used to social media influencer types that need constant exposure to succeed.

King produces products you can purchase and therefore doesn't need the checkmark status.

 

Musk is going to regret buying Twitter more than the Brits regret electing conservatives. My estimate is he takes a $35B loss on Twitter and with his eye off the ball and superior EV options to virtually every model (the roadster looks rad) I expect Telsla will lose 50% of its martlet cap from here.

 

What infrastructure? Everything is in the cloud these days...I wouldn't want a bunch of servers. And he doesn't appear to want the workers or the algorithm (which he has said he will make public).

 

There's nothing valuable about the infrastructure though, Twitter has no secret sauce. It just has a fairly large user base compared to competitors that basically do the same thing.

 

Everybody knows your predictions of Twitter’s demise are because Musk has snubbed the left and you’re no longer in control of the platform. Otherwise, you wouldn’t give a damn he bought Twitter. He probably sits at his screen and laughs for hours on end as lefties try to tear down everything he does and has accomplished.

 

I’m pretty sure Elon doesn’t spend a hot minute at a PC or mobile device laughing at libs but if he is I’m pretty sure it helps explain Teslas martlet cap destruction to the tune of 40%this year

 

It is certainly an interesting time for Tesla with the competition coming out. Even before the Twitter fiasco i was thinking their product line started to look stagnant (even with Cybertruck and the semi in the pipeline). Granted, they had built like a 10 year technological advantage, it’s possible they have something else in the pipe to make another jump. They might need to in order to keep that edge.

 

Yeah, he loses money on everything he buys…

 

No, but he has lost money on some things he buys. Neuralink has certainly not made any money. Neither has the Boring Company. Twitter has never consistently made any money and he vastly overpaid for it. Sorry, but those are just true. If he has some genius idea, it is not evident in the completely unstrategic manner that he has behaved in up to now in terms of this acquisition. But I guess we will see. I don't really care whether he makes money or not, but nothing up to now has looked even vaguely smart in regards to his acquisition.

 

I always say the best N is 1! (Researcher joke)