It's because no other social media platform currently meets their requirements. Other platforms either functions significantly different from twitter or it lacks the reach that a politician needs in order for it to be worth their time.
Yep. I mean in the end it has no product. It's just billboard/ad space, in the world of commerce. Sure, it's a lot of ad space, but ad space in the digital world is also effectively endless, so the percentage still isn't actually that relevant as it can shift in a moment's notice.
Say... if a neonazi buys the platform and brings all his friends with him.
But beyond an office he's not even paying for and so on, Xitter got... nothing. They have no actual product that can be liquidated, no supply chains worth any money, nothing to rent/sell out beyond said adspace. Like many digital companies they rely entirely on hype for all their perceived value.
It still has a big enough user base and brand recognition that they could put things back on course if they really went for it. The only permanent damage is the brain drain from firing a lot of people that has experience in running twitter.
Once valuable? Fuck that. Twitter has always been and always will be Jerry Springer for the Internet. It's fun to watch some toothless hooker throw a shoe at a priest until Grandma finds out you are on their as 4chan gaslighting the priest and the hooker.
The value is pure entertainment. Anyone that takes it more seriously has not seen it for what it is.
This is why it bothers me that so many government agencies and officials use it to communicate with the public.
It’s almost as if there should be an official government service / platform specifically for that purpose. A state run Twitter. (Maybe they could use mastodon under the hood.)
That ~25 billion, heavily absorbed by foreign investors, has bought influence on worldwide events/elections and allowed those that previously hated the platform to sabotage it internally, likely to a post-election failure.
Makes you wonder to what degree we have a "useful idiot billionaire" situation, with other interests (countries?) steering the out of control train to their benefit.
Bring back shadowbanning.
Uses user data to train AI models.
Limits replies to verified users only…
Elon has made so many terrible changes to Twitter. I’m happy to be out and migrate to Mastodon and WireMin since last December. Using Mastodon to track up to date news and WireMin to stay connected with a few friends who also left Twitter.
Now I just look at Twitter like it’s the house burning down across the street.
'Freedom of Speech Not Reach', I was like isn't the same thing with Shadowbanning?
It's so disgusting that he keeps claiming Twitter is the place for online Freedom of Speech but look at what he did.
44 billion is chump change to him. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find his sole motive was to silence critics now that he got outed as a massive douche.
I rememy when i could call him a massive douche and a faux-engineer and people would pile on as though he actually built the cars himself. (Fact: he’s not a Tesla founder. He bought Tesla. And made them call him a founder.)
I'm sure the value will come back. Valuing X at $19B puts the value of the whole alphabet at $500B, which seems low for an established technology which has been in continuous use since before the time of the Roman Empire.
The US GDP is $24 trillion, and all the financial reports supporting that valuation use the Roman Alphabet. The Alphabet is essential to justifying the value of the entire US Economy. I think it's reasonable to value the worth of the alphabet at 8% of GDP, which would give X a fair value of $74B.
See, haters? Elon really is a financial genius. Numbers don't lie.
Come on. Obviously not all letters in the alphabet are worth the same. X is not that popular even if you take into account its different uses like ':x', 'xoxo' or 'xxx'. Not that many words use x and if one day it collapses and becomes unavailable you can just substitute it with 'ks' like 'seks' or 'meksican'.
I don't think it was even worth half of what he paid for it when he paid for it. Musk is a complete god damned moron. I'd be surprised if the company was even worth $19 billion when he bought it for $44 bn. And there's no way in fuck that it's worth $19 bn now. Absolute dogshit assessment. Not that I'm surprised, mind. It's Musk's assessment, after all.
I just read the news somewhere that they introduced two payment tiers for monthly subscription. Good luck keeping users. There's not a single social network that charges people use. No matter how cheap.
How many times will they reuse this image where his jaw is doing something super weird? This time it's gotten some fancy graphics but it's the same flipping image. I must have seen it on 10 different articles.
It was never worth what he paid for it, and his "enlightened" changes have only made things worse in terms of value.
One big thing that must be bad for advertisers is that generally, even people without a Twitter account (I've never had one) generally needed to view posts from some businesses or services. So they still had people coming by and serving ads to them without an account.
But now that you cannot even see comments on a tweet and if you're somehow able to get to a list of tweets (it usually just forces you to the login screen) you cannot get ANY useful order from it when not logged in.
Believe it or not, I think the majority of people won't create an account with a gun to their head like this. As such, the advert revenue is already down from people like me.
Furthermore, though, I suspect businesses will eventually work out that Twitter is no longer a suitable bullhorn to use to deliver promotion information or to offer customer service, and will start to move away. That's not going to help Twitter or their advertisers out either.
But, I don't think he ever planned to make it profitable. I think this weird anarchy he's iteratively implementing was what he decided to do, as soon as he was forced to finish the acquisition.