Elon Musk said Monday that X, formerly known as Twitter, has “no choice” but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League amid an ongoing slump in advertising revenue.
“Based on what we’ve heard from advertisers, ADL seems to be responsible for most of our revenue loss,” Musk wrote on Monday. “Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”
How to avoid being antisemitic, step one: Don't blame your incompetence and piss poor judgement on "the Jews."
I'm no accountant, but I have to imagine when he's talking about "value" it's not exact loss of sales, but something more like "projected sales for the next 10 years" or something.
There's no way Twitter, a company that was overvalued at $43 billion, was also making $40billion a year in advertising sales.
He seems to be saying that the market value of Twitter is $40B less than what it was before stuff happened. "Value destruction" tends to be applied to "stock" (like market cap) rather than "flow" (like revenues).
He's basically saying Twitter is worth $4B, given that he paid $44B and seems to be saying $40B of values was destroyed.
Losing $40B in less than a year is, uh, remarkable.
What kind of mental gymnastics do you have to do to wind up there?
Remember, he grew up a rich white boy in full apartheid South Africa, and never matured beyond that. He has no ability for self-reflection or introspection. Which means he's never wrong, so someone else must be to blame. So far, that's included religious, racial, and sexual minorities. He's only going to grow more deranged as time goes on.
The kind of gymnastics that apparently develop when you’re stupid rich and think you know better than everybody because you “made” some really smart-sounding companies.
Twitter stockholders collectively received $44B from Musk on October 27. So, yes, Twitter was worth $44B at that moment. And, yes, it's also true that Musk grossly overpaid for a company probably worth around $10B because he made the most costly "420" joke in history. Both statements are simultaneously true.