nuff said

  • RouxFou@dormi.zone
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    1 year ago

    With the way he’s running this, I’m a bit confused as to why he didn’t just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn’t have cost him nearly as much.

        • Arakwar@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Twitter could have 200% more users, if no one want to show them ads, then ad spots will be dirt cheap. Printing 5 millions of 1cent ads vs 1 million of 10cents ads is not the same. Both on income and expenses…

          • 1nk@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            This, so much this. I also find it rather coincidental that fb cam out with threads soon after the twitter implosion. Opportunistic feasting on a dead carcass perhaps?

            • Neato@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              Twitter has been on the outs since musk bought it. If Facebook was smart they’d have started right then.

    • Moohamin12@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Let’s be honest Elon doesn’t care about Twitter.

      He bought it with money he doesn’t have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.

      Everyone of them won.

      • JeffCraig@citizensgaming.com
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        1 year ago

        I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It’s the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.

    • donuts@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?

    • rustic_tiddles@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost

    • DingleBoone@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      I’m still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well

      • BarqsHasBite@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.

  • randomTingler@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago
    • Your Google search result redirects to Twitter
    • you click and open the link
    • Twitter asks you to login to see the tweet.
    • You close that tab and move on to next search result.

    Best way to avoid traffic to your site, then complain about revenue loss from advertisements.

  • eoddc5@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public

    We have no reason to believe his public statistics

    • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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      1 year ago

      100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn’t the “ad” tag I couldn’t distinguish that.

      They can’t cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap

  • rusticus1773@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pub
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    1 year ago

    Maybe… I don’t know, just throwing ideas out there… you shouldn’t have Musked all over Twitter nor fired its core developers? Again, just thinking out loud…

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Translation: “I’m terrible at business, and I’m making it everyone else’s problem”

      • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I had to search the euphemism to see if I was just out of the loop on the economics terminology, and if those legit were different concepts.

        On the downside, they’re not. On the upside, Musk is setting a great example for how to stop getting accused of hoarding wealth

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    On the other hand, I think the people at Tesla/SpaceX are probably very happy that Elon has his hands full with Twitter right now.

    • randfur@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m happy to learn about significant updates to the health of the platform but not as literal Musk tweets pls.

    • chickenwing@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree. I don’t really consider social media “technology” anymore. I mean yeah it uses technology but so does everything else. I don’t think technology is the right community for this kind of post. There should be an enshittification community where we can see all the Twitter, reddit, and meta stuff.

      In fact a lot of “technology” companies are just regular companies with an app. Netflix is a media company, Uber is a taxi company that somehow skirted regulators, and Airbnb is a hotel company that also skirted regulators.

  • Uniquitous@lemmy.one
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    1 year ago

    50% is just what he’s admitting to. Not sure how easily that number can be verified, but if someone told me that the actual numbers were much, much worse… I wouldn’t bet against them.

  • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Hmm maybe putting in rate limits, thus greatly reducing the amount of time people spend on the app, isn’t the best strategy for a platform whose main source of revenue comes from advertising?

    • Catma@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I think there is like a 1% chance rate limits were an actual thing. It really feels like someone fucked something up, caused the issue and the “rate limits” were how Elon decided to try and play it. Then “increasing” the limits multiple times to completely illogical values was the system slowly coming back up. Elon increasing that limit makes him look like he is listening to the users and thus the good guy.

      I have not seen anyone complain about rate limits since the day it happened. Other than jokes has anyone seen or heard of the issue?

      I would say a company suddenly introducing a major policy change like view limits with no warning is beyond stupid but then again it is Elon who seems to believe he is God’s gift to tech.

      • ritswd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169

        The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.

        Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.

  • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The heavy debt load was caused by his purchase… He paid $26 bn, a couple other investors (including a Saudi prince) together paid $5 bn, the remaining $13 bn is a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf.

    The purchase was always a financial death sentence. Either Twitter steps into line and becomes the propaganda tool he and his old friend Peter Thiel want, then it can have some extra investment, or Twitter dies.

    • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      I still don’t get how it’s legal for Twitter to take out a loan on itself on Musk’s behalf.

      • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        It’s a common trick the wealthy have. The idea is, if the business was under the control of its new owners, they could direct the business to get the loan. It’s what happened to Toys R Us and many other businesses.

        Somewhat similarly, the UK have a way of turning a business into an “Employee Owned business”. Basically, if the business has enough cash, it can buy itself from its owners. The real shady part, though, is that the owners don’t pay any capital gains tax on the sale whatsoever. They get all their money out of the business, tax free. But yay, employee owned businesses (that are still run the same as before).

        And if you try to read the financial regulations to understand it all, you’ll very quickly lose the will to live. Reading law is one thing, financial regulations are a completely different ball game.

        • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          That’s the part which is the most absurd. Extending a hypothetical to justify a 13 billion dollar loan is bonkers.

          I wonder if there’s a study of how many companies this has happened to, and how many have come away from it not bankrupt after 5 years. I assume the only reason this is still legal is because the original shareholders get their payday when the company is sold, the new CEO gives themselves a great salary, bleeding the company dry and it’s just the employees who suffer when their jobs are cut, which is valued less than the shareholders and CEOs in America.

  • Bdi89@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s impressive how quickly and severely he fucked up what was once a successful tech giant!

    • drathvedro@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I disagree. Twitter was already going under even before he took over. In fact, it was doomed from the beginning as one of the uber era “grow valuation, think about revenue later”, hoping to exit someday by selling it to some rich megalomaniac, and actually, they’re the ones who succeeded.

      • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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        1 year ago

        well, it was actually about ready to start breaking even, and even paying off some debt. there was a path to profitability with twitter, but it was tenuous at best.

        king of the idiots was forced to by it, saddling it with so much dept that that profitability dream was over the moment he became involved.

      • JuliusSeizure@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        I think twitter is artificially ‘failing’ because of meddling by influential special interests. It is being shunned by some advertisers because he won’t bend the knee to the ESG tyrant bankers.

  • tswerts@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m not waiting to see Twitter fail. I’m just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream. And I must say that I’m happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.