Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.
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.
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.
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
The simpler explanation is he's a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn't have any lifelines left, and he's failing miserably.
Simple. He didn't shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.
He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.
But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.
If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He's comfortable telling us about Twitter's financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let's him focus on his other vanity projects.
It's not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It's not like he's going to pay his bills. It's not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?
The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.
Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.
When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.
When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.
Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.
From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.
By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.
Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.
But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.
Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.
So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.
The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.
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
Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.
medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I'd like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.
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....
Not even just that...
Alienates all potential leftwing/brand friendly advertiser's through changes and being the spokesperson for the platform.
"We're down 50% how could this have happened?????" - Elon Musk
Dude needs to stfu, make an alt account. He has chosen to be the spokesperson for the platform. Spouting off conspiracies and controversial takes. You can't be surprised nobody wants to associate with him.
He is a liability and a brand risk. Sure he can have his opinions but here is the problem...
He has chosen to be extremely public and force those opinions onto the average consumer feed due to his narcissistic tendencies and it is biting him in the ass.
No sympathy. He wanted free speech, (albeit it isn't because he is okay as long as it doesn't criticise him or his affiliates.) now he has his free speech platform but in the same way advertisers can chose not to engage with it.
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.
To be fair, the social media platform are generally very advanced in terms of technology. Many of the most breaking grounds software technologies at least come from them.
With RIF is just straight blocked posts containing Musk, Rowling etc, plenty of specific subreddits and managed to make my /all experience a great one. I'm hoping I can do that down the line with Lemmy too!
Weird, users can't access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that's literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?
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.
I don't see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.
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?
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.
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.
Elon complaining about this just reminds me that he can afford to lose ~50 billion dollars and still be one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived.
I remember a fellow saying Elon is a very business savvy person, because of his 2 other successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX. I guess ruining communications with potential advertisers on a platform that depends entirely on advertisers wasn't a very intelligent move.
If I recall correctly, Tesla was actually cash-negavite for like half a decade after Musk bought it, surviving off investors and SpaceX's success, I remember it was very big news when it finaly went cash-positive and subs like WSB were all over r/all
I think we should all remember that company's success is also a function of investors' money AND public trust. SpaceX for some people was a symbol of all things modern. Tesla as well to some extent.
With such amount of trust no wonder these finally became profitable.
Ah, also companies engineering vehicles and spacecraft are rather different from a company the whole purpose of which is matching people (readers to posters, advertisers to customers, so on).
The same people would say the same thing about Trump and everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. I think they're legitimately delusional.. all of them.
I think they're just brainwashed by our capitalist system which says that if a person is wealthy it's because they worked for it and we're successful. We are indoctrinated from very young ages to believe that capitalism is a strict meritocracy where only the best, most intelligent, most deserving people become wealthy.
In reality most wealthy people inherited some or most of their wealth, and used that inherited wealth to create more wealth- because it turns out that once you are wealthy it's really easy to get more wealthy. They aren't wealthy because they are skillful or intelligent or good at business. Most of them are good at precisely one thing: giving some of their money to a professional who knows how to grow it so that they will never run out.
Then they throw money at whatever catches their eye, and when you have billions to throw around you can cast a very wide net that will almost certainly catch something.
Of course! It's because of Threads! Don't you guys get it? They stole their secrets!! It has absolutely nothing to do with how things are being run on twitter or because Elon Musk is a genius!!!
…
Fuck Musk and fuck twitter and all that goes with it.
When you think about it, there were a lot of populist movements growing through Twitter. It probably pissed a lot of wealthy, powerful people off.
Then Musk and Zuckerberg were called to private meetings with the president, weren't they? And Twitter was taken over and shut down. Then Threads, owned by Facebook who is known to help out law enforcement quite happily as well as track everything, takes off as an alternative.
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.
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.
This practice destroyed several century old retail chains in my country. Got sold to some American investment fund,, via a loan placed on those company's account. Then immediately sold the real estate in prime locations these chains held, so the companies became tenants in buildings they previously owned (and had paid off 80 years ago). Waif a few years, then they die even with decent revenue.
It's not really that different from buying a house or car. The money Musk put forward is the down payment, the loan is the mortgage, the company assets are the collateral. Where it's sketchy is that a house or vehicle is generally worth repossessing and selling if you default, but by the time Musk is done with Twitter, it'll be worthless.
Think of him like a crackhead who strips the plumbing and wiring from the house he has a mortgage on, before skipping town
The Saudi prince was already invested in Twitter, and opted to roll over his shareholding when Musk bought out everyone else. Wonder if he's happy or sad about that decision now.
probably both. twitter was never profitable afaik, the whole idea was to have either some rich moron or (more likely) a megacorp buy it and everyone who contributed would get a fat final paycheck. but the way musk handled things definitely didn't help either.
Gasp. Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads! Poor Elon!
Also doesn't help that the site was basic private for a while. I know I never bothered to log in while it was log in only.
Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!
Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who's advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.
Maybe, but there's a market out there for CEOs who are willing to take the blame for some unpopular decisions and then walk away. There's also something to be said that "-50%" might actually be an improvement over where it was before she was hired, and the bad decisions weren't hers.
But that's the thing. She isn't taking the L on this. That's my point. She seems to just be chillin', doing fuck all. Everyone knows it's Musk running it.
This isn't a case where he needed to bring in a fall guy CEO for a difficult business choice. This is a case where he brought in a new CEO to literally save the corporation, and she's doing nothing and nobody is blaming her. It's surreal.
BTW, fuck him and MS so bad for ruining a tech company I could really make no complaint about.
Especially if you think that Nokia didn't only make good phones, they also were the major force behind Qt toolkit. And that was in Qt3 times, when Qt was unarguably cool.
Rich people are so disconnected from reality. I mean, when I tell you disconnected people really don't understand. The best way to put it is ths: we have a hard time intuitively understanding the vast distances in the universe. Musk is like that. He is a person with such level of disconnect. He truly lives in his own reality, most likely because a man like him does not understand the concept of poverty or struggling to make ends meet. The narcissism displayed in that interview in which he says that "if speaking his mind means losing money then so be it" should tell you how this man truly lives in an alternative reality. I am so glad most of us realized the kind of scum he is.
but like, why did it take him tanking Twitter for many to realize that he's just a manbaby with a diamond-encrusted platinum pacifier
like it's really weird that it wasn't clear when he called that one guy who saved those kids in that cave a pedophile because the guy told Musk that his invention wouldn't be useful for the rescue effort; like people didn't see how shitty he was after he said that
Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.
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.
My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.
But he's not. He'll be fine. He'll always be fine.
It's hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk's net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
He's not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he's not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.
Yeah he personally isn’t broke and no matter how much debt Twitter racks up, it can’t put him in the red. That’s just how corporations work.
Still, he borrowed that $44bil and will have to face the people who lent it to him. Apparent the service on that debt is already equal to Twitter’s total operating expenses. That’s real money.
WhY he’s lost by this is prestige. He lost the court case and demonstrably got taken to the cleaners. He hasn’t been able to turn the business around and in fact has made it worse. And his creditors are left holding the bag. That’s some real humiliation for someone like him.
Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let's say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let's say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.
I was looking at Twitter earlier, and my feed was full of antivaxxers, election deniers, some anti-abortion activist that claims that Planned Parenthood is involved in sex trafficking, and even 9/11 deniers.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's even worse than he's describing, but at the same time, it's not like we didn't expect it. The platform has seen a colossal influx of bigots, and all kinds of completely unhinged people, because Elon has clearly shown that he's okay with them posting what they want
I just don't get what's so problematic with casual bigots when one can encounter Turkish and Azeri Nazis (and bots) in numbers and nobody is really trying to fight them, on any platform.
But then nobody's trying to fight them IRL.
In terms of these people Twitter was sort of better than Reddit, or so my sister says (she hasn't used Reddit, I haven't used Twitter).
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.
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.
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.
The way he talks is so fucking stupid. He's trying so hard to be a "tech bro". You'd think money would give someone some amount of self confidence, but clearly not.
Advertisers don’t want to advertise on Twitter anymore even after Elon fired all the talent and essentially drove the platform into the ground? Noooooo…
I saw one of his interview where he said he doesnt care about money. May be thats why he spills all that shit on twitter. Does twitter even post their cashflow , I know its publicly traded but never saw cashflow being posted. Idk if Elon cares but We 9-5 plebs do care about money coz we got mortgage and shit , may be that why we hate all billionaires.
True that's the beauty of being rich. What I have learnt is 9-5 plebs are really important for the economy, if all 9-5 stop working , the economy will crash but if billionaire or millionaire stops working, not much affect on economy.
You see all these billionaires and millionaires control the 9-5 plebs and that's how they know they dont have to be held accountable.
Twitter is no longer publicly traded. One of the first changes Musk made upon purchase was pulling it off the market. Ostensibly so he could ruin it faster.
Publicly traded companies must post financial statements that show all that information. There is no getting around it to be publicly traded. But they are no longer traded, so have no disclosure rules.
More nazis should fix the revenue issues. Advertisers love associating themselves with hated people. Advertisers hate making a profit. Forever Elone, Musk will need to share sucking dick to turn a profit. If you look on twitter you'll notice his lips are chapped.
Are you on tiktok? There's a genre of livestream where the streamer picks a controversial topic and then invites the audience to send gifts to vote for one side or the other. Of course the outcome of the vote has no effect on the world, and whether you're voting for one side or the other it's the streamer (and twitch) who get paid, but people are willing to pay good money for that little dopamine hit of seeing their side of an issue they care about win something. I feel like they're trying to turn Twitter into; a place where people pay some small monthly token to be agreed with and to feel like they're in the majority. Of course, an environment like that is almost always going to end up right wing because if Trump taught us anything it's that right wingers will buy literally anything that validates their beliefs.
Seriously. I didn’t join Lenny to get updates on twitter and Reddit. Apollo had a keyword filter I used to block musk trump and kanye. Desantis reddit and twitter are first on the chopping block when I get that ability.
I wonder how the revenue would have look liked if he hadn't gone out of his way to cater to right-wing nutjobs with all his might. Who knows, maybe he would've been able to turn a profit through his numerous schemes like the paid verification and such.
Maybe if the remaining users that are still on twitter need to jump ship just to really set in stone the amount of user drop off they might have. That or upload tones of photos and videos to try and overload there servers.
Awesome. I didn't doubt he was stupid enough to write it, just couldn't find it. According to article you linked ~50% might actually be closer to 89% which is extra hilarious.
I just want to be able to see a page with only the folks I follow. That's it. They are mostly there already, except one or another. When this happens I'm dropping Twitter at the same second.
I think the real question is: how many installs did he get? That's the real metric of how many real-life people are using it, since there's no browser-mode.
lol I hope he loses it all. But I’m sure he’ll just find another rich loop hole to kick the can with another company. He got lucky with spaceX. Found the right people; and the right people that don’t put up with his shit.
I think we should acknowledge his strengths. Inspiring and empowering smart people to prototype something audacious is something he is very good at. He didn't get lucky with SpaceX, he did what he is good at.
What he is bad at is the next step. And because his ego doesn't allow him to step away and let somebody else do the next step:,take a prototype and turn it into a business, his companies are doomed to be just fluff.
I'm worried SpaceX will suffer the same fate under his leadership. There's no escape from a leader with bad leadership skills.
"Inspiring and empowering" aka he's rich and gonna get richer, nothing unique to the man himself. Those smart people could do leauges better out of a coperate environment - he doesn't even let non-teslas park in their parking lot as their Cali research locations. Lotta empowerment there
It's okay, I'm sure Elon will figure out what the problem is eventually, not sure if Big Blue Bird will still be alive by then but he might just get it!
I know it's easy to just rag on twitter, but I think that everyone needs to remember that a lot of the problems Twitter is facing are also problems that the entire industry is facing.
Ad rates are down across the board. You hear YouTubers talking about it, you here people who run websites talking about it, and that's just the way things are.
Everyone got really pissed off at Elon for the mass layoffs, but everyone seems to forget that every other company also did layoffs just a few months later.
In short, blame them for the stuff that he actually did, not systemic trends that affect everyone.
I'm saying blame him for the things he actually did. Just like I said I said.
It's turning into a recurring gag for me to see another news article about some website (like reddit, for example) crashing and burning and my response is "Why would Elon Musk do this?"
His layoffs were way more stupid than others. They were sudden, they were spiteful, they were public, they made little sense even in the framework of the bigger picture
You can blame him for the stupidity of how he engaged in them, but a lot of people seem to think that if nothing else had happened there never would have been layoffs.
Big Tech got fat during the pandemic, it couldn't have kept on growing as people started leaving the house again.
Seeing as how many people, including public figures and government agencies, use it as the only way to post important information we can't just "not use it". I haven't logged into that site in years but I still often have to go there even though I'd really rather that I didn't have to.
I'm just worried this marks then end of the glory days of free speech and the internet and the world will never be the same again.
Musk got a lot to answer for but I also respect him in a lot of ways.
Free speech is an ideal I would die for and I hate seeing it disappearing.
(Also pre preempting any American acktually reply. Let's me make myself clear. I do not give a shit in anyway what your government has to say on free speech in this context. Free speech exists as a concept out there in the world it wasn't invented and isolated to some sheet of paper some "Gods" wrote down 100 years ago, they don't control what I think)
As long as I have been on the internet the ideals of the internet have been declining.
Which as I seen it were people working together to solve a common goal. Accessibility. Exchange of information. Discussion based where ideas are exchanged, dissected and people learn and grow.
Now this isn't about twitter exactly because I have never been one for twitter. I'm much more interested in seeing ideas and views being valued for what they are, not for valuing the person and following their views. But the absolute disgust the common man has over a space where anyone can say what they want scares me. People only want to hear what they want to hear, they want to be controlled and those they disagree with silenced.
That's why this marks the end of the glory days because one else is going to run a big site of free speech ever again. This was what I believe to be the last attempt. Maybe the fediverse will do something being less centralised but who knows?
Free speech the way you describe ended with internet 2.0. There is nothing about Musk's Twitter that is free speech. He banned the word cis as a fucking slur.
Also if you would die for free speech why are you just sitting on your ass then?