The biggest irony is that with Emerald Boy 100% preoccupied with Twitter, his other companies are flourishing.

I worked for a guy, many years ago, small scale version of Musk. Guys like that hate to be contradicted. He had gone into partnership with my old company - which was a digital election company (back in the 90s and early 00s). We prided ourselves on our security and anonymity measures. Under this new company, this guy because CEO, and the first thing he did was tell everyone we could make “millions” by selling user data. I pointed out that violated out privacy and anonymity standards, and not even the next day I was reprimanded for speaking out.

You don’t need to be a billionaire to be stupid. Affluent is enough of a threshold. These are all grifters, granted many being successful. The grifters in this company were big fish/little pond. But they ruined a lovely little company that could have been stable and steady, recession-proof income for decades. Instead, they grifted the angel investors, ran the company into the ground and ended up spawning dozens of competitors in the field whereas before there were only 2 or 3.

These guys go from start-up grift to start-up grift, maintaining their affluence on the investor’s dime. I would say they, and the vulture capitalists they dance with deserve each other, but unfortunately, regular folks are always the collateral damage.

Musk was likely always an idiot, but was propped up by money, and earlier on either knew his place (as the “faceman”) or was adroitly distracted from direct involvement with the actual running of the company he bought.

Love Cody’s Showdy.

The most convincing argument that elon does a lot of cocaine is just listening to him speak in a less formal interview.

BUT! I don’t think he used to be actually smart, just lucky. Too many people assume “succesful” people had to have done something exceptional to earn it, but 99% of extremely wealthy people acquired that extreme wealth through a simple combination of luck and startup capital (which of course they have because they are lucky).

He purchased his companies from other people who had already developed the ideas. The only patent with Musks name on it for Tesla is the charging port that is proprietary so other electric vehicles couldn’t use tesla charging stations.

He does indeed have a history of paying his way into looking like a visionary and/or an engineer. He bought into Tesla in early 2004, it was founded in mid 2003.

His comfort zone was convincing people to give him money for one really ambitious thing, and then using that money to achieve some other thing (that no one would have given him money for) that is sort of on the way, but which has commercial value to him.

For example, he has repeatedly said his companies will deliver full self-driving cars by dates that have passed - and convinced investors to get him in a position to compete with companies like Toyota, promised a ‘hyperloop’ and got funding to compete with other horizontal drilling companies, promised to send people to mars and got to compete with other satellite technology companies.

So making big promises paid off for him. For the investors, in terms of long term value, they might have been better off investing in existing companies he ended up competing with.

But I suspect he is now outside his comfort zone, and might not even realise how far out of his depth he is.

Not gonna lie, that still felt a little dirty. But I already posted it to the internet and there’s no going backsies.

I think personal micro-blogging (mastodon) and posting forum-style topics (reddit) can have different words?

The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there’s an argument to be made that “posts” applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I’d call them posts here on Lemmy for that.

Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone’s head or ass. When someone says, “Kanye West ‘tweeted’ <INSERT OPINION HERE>” you’ve already determined about how seriously you’re going to take it.

@Master @audaxdreik that’s a good point. There are all sorts of trade names now in common use, but those products still kept their names.

Also read that Microsoft is holding the trademark on ‘X’ because of DirectX, X-Box, etc…

I wonder how long until Elon pulls the “it’s just a joke bro”

It’s even worse than that. X is used so widely in trademarks that it’s guaranteed to attract lawsuits. Facebook had to settle several claims over the change to Meta, and the use of X is a much bigger problem than that. And Musk is so dumb that he’ll probably try to fight them and end up paying a fortune in legal fees anyway.

Edit: Relevant article: https://www.reuters.com/technology/problem-with-x-meta-microsoft-hundreds-more-own-trademarks-new-twitter-name-2023-07-25/

I have read here on Lemmy someone claim this is all political and just 4D chess to own the libs.

He is the only share owner. He bought the whole company.

He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.

Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.

I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.

I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.

Musk bought it, he’s the sole shareholder now. It’s not a public company anymore.

TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.

I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.

It’s probably between $15-20B right now.

I think it comes with a salvage title though.

If anything, what this has really shown is he’s exceptionally bad at software-first companies and people. His successes have been in high risk manufacturing markets blended with software methodology, ie reusable rockets, electric vehicles, and storage.

I honestly think he’s just a guy clearly on the spectrum with grand visions that works in certain markets and completely fails in others. Regardless of his poor character, ascribing everything to luck seems a little emotional to me.

Musk did not pay $44 billion to buy Twitter. He paid $26 billion, underwritten by stock in Tesla, which subsequently lost significant value. $5 billion was from other investors including the Saudi Prince.

The remaining $13 billion was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf. Even before Musk started tanking the revenue, Twitter could not afford that debt - the interest alone was comparible to its revenue. That debt is probably about what Twitter is worth right now after the name change, making it pretty much unviable as a business.

You don’t have to look at Musk’s antics to conclude that the intention was to kill the company. You only have to look at the financials.

Leveraged buyouts almost always lead to the business closing. It’s how Toys R Us, and many other staple brands, were brought down.

Of course there are degrees of usefulness and different types of organizing, but generally, your wrong here in your first point. Some merit in your second claim, but overall, it’s something they likely feared to a degree as a point of connection and amplification of information.

He needs daddy’s approval and the other billionaires are surrogate daddy. That would be the social agenda influence you’re referencing. Look at how desperate and odd he was on stage with dave chapelle, that was a core view into his base self, he needs to be praised. He’s also a eugenics/natalism cult member and sees the wealthy as his equal, superior “race” of people - so he would 100% sacrifice a lot for even their passing approval.

wait he actually built that?

Any user who loves Elon Musk enough to continue using “X” for the foreseeable future would have certainly joined him on a new social media platform anyway. That’s how cults of personality work.

Meanwhile, most of the normal and sane people who regularly used Twitter before have decreased or totally stopped their use of the platform since Elon Musk took over and started it on its current death spiral.

I’m sure you’re right, that he bought Twitter for its userbase (and, maybe more importantly, the data), but the grave miscalculation that both he and you are making is that the userbase is not hostage to his whims. People have left to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc., more are leaving everyday, and more will continue to leave until the site is no longer worth the cost of maintaining and Elon shuts it down or sells it off.

He could have spent a fraction of that $44B making and marketing a new platform, and it probably would have gone a lot better for him than this shitshow. It’s not 4-D chess… Dude bought an unprofitable, overvalued company at the absolute worst time and then proceeded to alienate the majority of him users and advertisers while absolutely destroying the brand.

VCs fucked up the tech industry when capital was cheap by investing in companies that showed potential for massive growth without caring for the viability of the business. Now capital is expensive and these same companies are now trying desperately to make a profit to become a sustainable business because the VCs aren’t blindly giving them money anymore. This is exposing a lot of company’s leadership teams incompetence.

Could be a bias and/or coincidence. Due to all the shit in the world (partially due to COVID as well), the financial markets are quite troubled and much more unsteady than before. This also increased the pressure on a lot of previously growing companies who then suddenly had to change course and shrink again. Increasing prices and decreasing revenue while investors become more cautious means that a lot of these “startup”-kind-of-companies are suddenly in big trouble and enter survival mode.

People who were able to sell ideas to investors suddenly need to actually manage and become profitable. Stuff that worked without a real strategy (aside from shining for the investors) suddenly needs to stand on its own feet.

These are all very real possibilities.

Here’s another: The big shot billionaire’s agreed over drinks one night that their handlers - the staff that used to make them look smart - were overpaid.

Jack Dorsey did not make that decision. The company had a board that made the decision.

Dorsey was eager to sell in part because he knew the price was ridiculously high.