yeah, he is definitely trying to drive eyeballs. I would think his strategy is to create tiered content subscriptions to have premium entertainment, sports, music, etc. Might work. Hard to count him out.
Once state legislatures can use these reasons of interference to no longer trust the electorate, they will rewrite their laws to allow again for the EC to have its “original intent”. I have no doubt they are working feverishly to unwind a popular vote / winner takes all in Red States.
Anything is possible but I would really doubt people will pay for facebook twitter instagram directly. My opinion.
People follow where their idols go. If their idols are engaging on Twitter for a fee, it’s a market based solution. Twitter as a “public square” sounds good, but Musk likely figured out “free content” is never freedom.
He’s such a tool… Elon Musk Had a Disastrous Livestream at the Border While Wearing His Cowboy Hat Backwards
The issue is that this is a two-sided market with substantial competition on both sides. In a standard two-sided market, which is a market characterized by indirect network effects in which one group of customers values a second group of customers and the second group of customers values the first set of customers, you subsidize the side with the highest price sensitivity. The problem in this market: both sides have enough competition that neither side is willing to pay for it. Content creators could simply pick up and go to any of a number of different platforms. Content consumers could easily do the same. So Twitter devised a solution: advertising to pay for both sides. The problem: Twitter advertising has never been as valuable as the more targeted advertising on Facebook and it's consumer user base isn't as valuable as the base on other platforms. Musk hasanaged to lower that value further by placing ads next to content that advertisers don't want to be associated with in their advertising. Musk has, thus far, no ideas to deal with that issue. He tried to charge content creators, but the best content creators don't want to pay because they could easily move. The only ones who do are the worst content creators, who are using payment to up their reach in place of talent. The problem for Musk: there aren't enough of these folks to pay for the system unless they pay huge prices (which, they won't) and they weaken the indirect network effects (people don't really want to read the worst content creators). If he framed the fees as a gain for content creators and given them value for the money, he might have had a chance (if he could provide that value). Instead, he screwed up on the psychology and framed it as the loss of a free service for creators. So he poisoned his only idea to make money that seems even to remotely make sense (even if it was a pretty long-shot idea in the first place).
By his own admission, Twitter is worth $4B now, losing 90% of its value at TOP. Fidelity valued it at $15B in late May, losing 2/3 of its value. Those losses are on him. Massive failure from a business analysis.
Maybe he overpaid, and his due diligence was garbage. Which, is a business failure of those that lent him the money.
Half of the purchase was his own funds (via Tesla stock) 13B from banks (apparently they rapidly offloaded the loans so no real exposure) and the rest from fellow psychopath billionaires (Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison and a Saudi Prince) .
Got to love that I clicked on this a couple of times and it doesn't load. Now we play the game of, did he have somebody delete it or is his website unstable? Edit: Looks like unstable wins out as it loaded the 4th time.
how is removing the badge any attack on free speech? The New York Times is still free to speak all it wants on X, or any other forum. Not having the trusted badge is not equivalent to silencing its voice.