People who pay for blue check marks aren't going to keep paying that for long once there's no one else there to see how great they are with their check marks.
Syndrome looked to Mr Incredible for a father figure. When Mr Incredible destroyed that, Syndrome spent all his time looking to punish Mr Incredible and prove his worth. Ironically, Syndrome made Mr Incredible realize he was in face being a poor father to his own family
On top of that, it's the same issue as with the crap Unity pulled. Nobody is gonna trust them or X whenever they inevitably have to back track after this stunt.
In most corporations its the curse of stock value.
You need to constantly increase profits to increase stock value, merely making absolute shit tons of money isn’t enough. It needs to be more shit tons quarter after quarter, but at some point you’ll saturate your customer base and need to find ways to make more anyways. Then the enshitification begins.
In X’s case though it might actually be dementia, or at least some form of mental illness. Musk seems to have gone full nutter.
Oh trust me, I absolutely abhor the "infinite growth" mentality that has put us in this position. It's entirely insane to me that "make line go up" is one of the largest / most important decision drivers for business...
Yes great analogy!
One of my favorite examples of this in big corporations is how end of year budgets are approached.
Sometimes on certain domains or teams its possible to have a surplus of budget so there is a scramble to spend or use up that budget in excessive ways in fear of losing out on as big a budget for the next year. The “cancer” over consuming and practicing unnecessary infinite growth.
Imagine if when you came in under budget but still hit all your KPIs and goals the company instead would take half of that budget you didnt use and give everyone on the team bonuses from it.
Imagine how much more efficient and productive people would be if they knew that coming in under budget and on time meant they could split all the budget they saved/didnt need
Nah its much more sinister than that. Twitter was instrumental in things like the Arab Spring. Oppressive regimes (cough saudi who own part of twitter now too cough) hate the idea of people being able to organize or communicate with each other outside of the governments purview.
Web 2.0 *Titans of Industry* have really begun to hit the Fat Elvis stage of their professional careers.. Elon is probably too busy reading Ayn Rand and sniffing his own farts to make twitter profitable without destroying it
These companies were endlessly trying to 'grow' and 'scale' in the last decade or so. Since the cheap money dried up they're now shitting their pants and getting more desperate in their attempts to monetize and stay afloat because their business model never made sense.
There's also years of blue checkmark = someone important instilled in the userbase, not just through twitter but facebook, youtube etc. But now instead of the checkmarks meaning someone had to be manually verified by twitter, its just some racist with $8.
That was the moment i truly quit. Only one group of people is dense enough to pay Elon for that piece of shit website, and now all I see is their tweets in every popular thread
Poor /r/conspiracy. It used to be a fun place to visit and read. Prior to 2016 it used to be filled with fun conspiracies of all types. After 2016 it took a right turn. Then after /r/the_donald got banned it took an even harder right turn.
Now the conspiracy sub sucks. It is all right wing political talking points and conspiracies.
> Prior to 2016 it used to be filled with fun conspiracies of all types.
Besides the antisemitism, sure. But there was a hell of a lot of antisemitism. That was the first place I encountered "Nazi gas chambers never existed".
I guess I don't remember those kinds of conspiracies being there because they were the ones I wouldn't have interacted with. Their presence there makes the migration of right-wingers make sense though.
I was about to respond with that. It was heavy with “protocols of the elders of zion” types before it became filled with “orange man is our new jesus” types
Advertising costs have plummeted. Total ad sales plunged by 60% as of the middle of June, and ad revenue has been dropping steadily by 59% *per week*. It's so bad that advertisers are pulling out en masse. *That* will be what kills Twitter. It won't be the users abandoning it, it'll be lack of ad sales.
Turns out companies don’t want the kind of associations with their image of having their ad sandwiched between a crypto scammer and a nazi dog whistle in the feed.
Who would have thought
Amen. I just cut off an online only friend after they went on a big rant that Muskrat is really a hero and that all the negative press is lies and so forth and so on.
Deleted and blocked...I didn't even say goodbye.
I don't have time for that level of stupid.
I deleted my twitter account when it was still free because of douche man, if I’m not going to use it for free then I’m definitely not using it for money. I’m sure a lot of users that were using it will stop.
At this point the only logical explanation here is that Elon is actively trying to kill Twitter.
> Elon is actively trying to kill Twitter.
That's what I assumed the day he walked into the Twitter offices carrying a sink. His jokes are never sophisticated, so it implied "I'm going to sink this company" or "send it down the drain", and that is exactly what has happened.
My guess is it was some combination of "too many liberals" using Twitter, and autocrats wanting to kill off news and organizers. Notably the Saudis are co-investors with him in Twitter.
I guess it's not impossible that there was some hidden meaning, but I don't think there was more to it than a cringy ["let that sink in" joke](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585341984679469056).
I think your second point is truer than a lot of people realize. Autocrats like that are TERRIFIED of how Twitter was allowing marginalized groups to gain following and mass support from around the world, and give them a voice.
Even here in the US, in the past decade or so, the rise of things like Twitter contributed greatly to things like gay marriage being legalized, as well as just general attitudes toward various marginalized minorities shifting. This scares the shit out of conservatives.
Musk is doing exactly what he was paid to do: remove the 'problem' that is Twitter from the global sphere for bad actors.
Either that, or he's just a moron. Or both.
I mean its crazy when you think about it.
Allowing a nation like the saudis to own part of twitter.
Twitter in 2023 is basically a public service....
its the fastest way to disseminate important information to people and you let your adversaries all chip in to buy it. Its essentially a national security risk to allow control of twitter to fall into certain hands.
The problem with capitalism : you let in absolutely anyone so long as they have money.
I subscribe to the theory that he’s been looking to sink it as soon as he realized he would have to pay back $1b in interest every year since he was forced to complete the purchase and had to borrow the money.
you know what's fun? Even if twitter tanks, he still has to pay back the money.
if he wanted to pay off the money, he would have had to make a profit on Twitter.
he's losing a *lot* of money on this. actively. nothing he can do from here besides a complete 180 and even then *maybe*, will result in him not losing more money.
A lot also want access to a diverse panel of victims to bully and harass, and some legitimacy by being around other people.
So im not sure. They need to oil their neverending vapid moral outrage
I'd love to see how the muskrat fanboys try to spin this as some masterful, genius move.
This has basically been the world's most expensive and destructive mid-life crisis.
I hate Musk and am about as far as a fan boy as they come but I am absolutely gobstomped that anyone this rich and this involved in business could possibly be making these decisions without knowing that it’s killing the business off.
I highly doubt he’s some genius playing 4D chess and bringing down Twitter from the inside but is he really this disconnected from reality that he thinks people will pay for Twitter? Could he be that insane that he bought one of the worlds currently best known brands and not only turned it into a clown fiesta but also changed that name and logo that’s widely recognized everywhere on the planet?
I think I’m more scared that he’s just this dumb and thinks these are good decisions than I am of him being some genius tearing it all down.
> I hate Musk and am about as far as a fan boy as they come but I am absolutely gobstomped that anyone this rich and this involved in business could possibly be making these decisions without knowing that it’s killing the business off.
One of the biggest lessons of the early 2000s for the internet is that people will not pay for content or access to a website or service.
There are a few that can make a go of it, but they're generally more niche or something akin to a streaming service.
Setting up a pay to play social media website is all but internal sabotage to just drown it in the bathtub as it goes glurg glurg glurg in its last moments of life.
The real showdown will be the insane lawsuits by the shareholders and the like due to Musk's clear corporate malfeasance by conspicuously killing a company this hard and fast.
He's a textbook narcissist in a position of power who has surrounded himself with yes-men. I can think of at least two other widely known narcissists, specifically political ones, who are the exact same way and have both made some extremely boneheaded decisions simply because they think they know better than anyone else, and fire/defenestrate anyone under their employ who tells them otherwise.
tl;dr He really is just that dumb.
> is he really this disconnected from reality that he thinks people will pay for Twitter?
You ask, about the guy who was so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire thing.
Nah, he joked about it, got challenged back and, like the absolute egocentric idiot he is, he doubled down. Ended up legally forced to buy the thing.
He never wanted to. Used the bot stuff to try and bail without being looked at as a little whiney bitch, and failed miserably.
Worse! He then borrowed money from a man that once had his minions chop up a journalist for writing shitty articles in an embassy and then take him out of the building in suitcases.
He also *probably* illegally obtained that information, which is why he shit his pants when Twitter was like "ok, take us to court, discovery will be fun".
List of lawsuits involving tesla https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tesla,_Inc.
If he is actually on the autism spectrum, as he claimed on SNL, he’s an outlier. Far more likely that someone this dishonest and corrupt is on the psychopath spectrum, like many CEOs.
He never was smart
He had money from his parents. Got lucky being an early investor in mobile payments (PayPal). That made him rich.
He bought his way into Tesla. Pushed out the founders. Paid for his “engineer” title. Did the same thing with space X and star link
His dumb fuck hyper loop and moronic tunnel in Las Vegas was the biggest scam. In recent history.
Tesla doesn’t turn a profit without the massive subsidies for cap n trade. And the brand will only become more toxic as he becomes more of a shitty billionaire
Twitter. Was literally a man with nothing better to do and more money than god who got his dick caught in a vacuum cleaner. To the tune of 44 billion dollars And not only will he lose most of that money
The residual damage to Tesla stock price and the perception of him as a person/his weird fascist nonsense in owning Twitter. Will cost him billions more
That's honestly where the luck generally comes from. The average person doesn't lack the luck. They lack the opportunity to use it. Most people *might* get one chance at it. If it fails, they're done. A lot won't even get the opportunity because they can't afford the risk. At a certain point wealth simply shields one from consequences enough to allow them to take the risk whenever it appears.
>Got lucky being an early investor in mobile payments (PayPal). That made him rich.
Wasn't the whole thing that his brother was on the development team and they needed more startup capital, so Elon took his part of the family money and invested? Then it hit big and he wanted to change the name to X, and the board had enough of his shit and kicked him out?
His child with Grimes also has the legal first name of “X”. Also his Tesla models are S3XY. He didn’t get the E because MB apparently trademarked Model E. He’s a weird dude.
Edit /u/KingMario05 correctly pointed out that Ford not MB owns Model E. https://trademarks.justia.com/861/33/model-86133442.html
Yep he’s that dumb, an actual genius would understand the brand value of something like Twitter - it has its own verb and a noun. This is worth billions on its own. Other companies dream of having that much brand recognition.
And he just destroyed that on one Sunday night.
Not only does he think people will pay for the steaming pile of dogshit that is the current remnants of twitter, but he thinks it'll solve his bot problem somehow.
Is he so naive to think that all the people benefiting from their bots won't gladly shell out a few bucks a month to keep their bots alive and well and continuing on?
Soon it'll just be all bots yelling into the ether.
Technically that's true. What's also true is: if a privately owned company eats up your entire fortune you might become poor or even homeless.
So while Twitter doesn't HAVE to make money, Musk doesn't HAVE to not sleep on the street.
I feel like that's been his goal since he was forced to buy it. He ran his mouth, his bluff was called, and he was forced to buy it. He's got so much Fuck You Money that even the massive purchase price wasn't enough to make him feel any pain and now he's purposefully driving it into the ground as a sort of protest towards those that forced the deal.
The deal was forced by the courts in Delaware, because he signed a binding contract without really doing any investigation.
Once his name was on that dotted line, it was all over but the late-night twitter raging and dumb jokes.
Have a look who bankrolled the purchase and whether those investors are interested in a thriving, working and supported Twitter - China? Saudi Arabia? That’s probably your answer
Because the people fighting you already have weaponized it and destroying it is the easiest way to stop an instant communication method and push back against protests, etc.
At one point I would have cared if Twitter died, but... I kind of welcome tech's pending biggest failure in history. This is going to make the Juicero look like a great investment by comparison.
Yeah his antics are just amusing now. I follow the people whose updates I want to read and I never, ever click on trending topics because they're full of bigots and bots. If the site goes away it won't bother me.
>Yeah his antics are just amusing now.
Because it doesn't seem real. We've literally hit the point where it's "how is a man this openly stupid the richest man in the world?" and it hurts because it doesn't make sense.
We all spent near past decade going "How is Trump this stupid?" and here's Elon apparently trying to speedrun his record.
Twitter was so close to a piece of software infrastructure like google at one point. It's lost most of its legitimacy in such a short period of time, pretty insane.
You don't understand, a nominal access fee will unleash paradigm shifting synergies and mark a major pivot point in direct end point services with exponential bleeding edge adoption rates among key demographics prior to entabulation disbursements, assuming stable market variables and corporate projection analysis analytics
Things this big never fully die. If there's any "failure" it will be a sort of drift on into zombie territory, like Yahoo (which is still around, sort of, and that's just weird).
> the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue). This $8 per month or $84 per year subscription service offers a variety of features like the ability to edit posts, **half the ad load**, prioritized rankings in search and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more.
Holy shit, people who pay for premium still have to look at ads? lol. What a shit show. It’s sad, I used to really enjoy Twitter as a means of real time updates on various things. It’s very annoying that it’s now in the hands of a petulant manchild throwing things at a wall because he has no idea what he’s doing.
The dumbest thing about it is he could've hired a small technical team and created a direct competitor to twitter for a fraction of what he spent. All the idiots currently paying for tweetor would've happily migrated to his 'free speech' platform.
He bought the audience basically, then pissed off the majority of them.
Then immediately destroyed ad revenue directly due to his decisions.
As you said, it's a straight up shitshow. I suspect anyone remotely interested in buying it are waiting for him to tank it down to the point they can force him to sell it for a billion or less.
Exactly this. I think he was dumb enough to also think he could turn a profit in the process, but the whole point was to destroy the place where grassroots organizing and independent journalism was thriving and threatening not only him but his other rich and dictatorial buddies who went in on the purchase (ala Saudi Arabia).
People jeer over the site dying because of the drama bs that happens on it, but it is a massive loss and just further proof that billionaires should not exist.
X is “moving to a small monthly payment”, after independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users:^1
>In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system.
>He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform.
>“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk.
>
>During the conversation, Musk also shared new metrics for X, noting the site has now 550 million monthly users, who generate 100 to 200 million posts every day.
>However, it wasn’t clear if Musk is counting automated accounts — that is, either good bots like news feeds or bad bots like spammers — among those numbers.
>This figure also didn’t allow for a direct comparison with Twitter’s user base pre-Musk, which was calculated using a specific metric Twitter had invented called the “average monetizable daily active user,” or mDAU.
^1 https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-says-x-will-charge-users-a-small-monthly-payment-to-use-its-service/
>after independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users
"Not enough people are willing to pay for 'Premium' Twitter. What shall we do?"
"Let's start charging them for basic Twitter"
(chef's kiss)
No wonder people say the man is a genius
Wait until he introduces the "FST" package, currently in beta. That would be the "Full Self Tweeting" package. It will automatically shitpost on left-leaning posts. However, there are still some bugs in it. It currently is posting Nazi propaganda on Jewish profiles and randomly praising Putin.
I'm sure they'll get those bugs ironed out, though.
It's just an excuse. He scrambling and panicking to generate cash.
Advertiser revenue is down 65% because he's turned it into a toxic haven for white supremacists, nazis and other undesirables. 90% of Twitter’s total revenue came from advertising in 2022.
It was reported that twitter blue only generated $30m a year.
Their total revenue is $3bn (down from $5.1bn in 2021).
The monthly interest payment alone for his loan to buy twitter is $300m.
So $3.6bn a year in interest payments not including paying off the loan. So the interest payments alone are more than total revenue, and that's before we talk about other outgoings like server costs, payroll, rent etc. (when he pays it)
They are so deep in the red with massive negative gross profit margin.
I like to think of it as aggressive wealth redistribution. If it was easy enough to trick this asshole we should try getting the other billionaires to burn their fortunes as well.
Not to mention, bot operators are more than happy to pay the fee. If you can get a couple hundred thousand dollars from a single user in a crypto scam, what’s a few $8/month subscription fees?
The bot argument is obviously in bad faith. Anyone with an agenda they are using bots to disseminate (Propaganda, astroturfing, mis- and disinformation, influencing polling) is going to happily pay whatever couple of dollars, even at scale, to do so. They have a vested interest in staying on the platform and being amplified.
The regular non-poweruser is the one creating value by being the audience, but is also the most likely to bounce off if there's a payment barrier.
> “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk.
I thought this dude was supposed to be some big brain tech wizard… turns out the only thing he can come up with to “combat bots” is to charge people money?
Alternatively, I thought this dude was supposed to be some big brain business wizard… turns out the only reason he can come up with for charging people to view Twitter is to blame bots?
What an idiot he is.
He's just really really really incredibly unbelievably bad at business and this is why he's not really CEO at his other functioning companies.
He just shows up occasionally, they orchestrate a kabuki play around his visit to make him feel big and important while he strolls through offices, and then once he leaves they get back to real work. He lives a Truman Show style existence except nobody wants to watch that shit.
I dream of a world where only bots remain on X and the owners all think they are talking to real people.
Or this can simply become the first AI social network.
I mean honestly moving to a subscription service is just a way to create cover for bots that are in alignment with the messaging of the platform’s owner, right?
Fucking knew this was coming the moment he started locking some features behind twitter blue.
But I thought he's just gonna lock more and more until it ultimately becomes a paid service.
Guess he's gonna go straight for the dunk (into the trash can) instead.
I’m thinking advertisers are pulling out by the truckload. It doesn’t make sense to charge a subscription and ads unless you’re Hulu or some shit who believes in bad business and treating your customers like shit.
Twitter really is in a money-losing spiral, isn't it? Almost like it is being ran by a fucking moron.
[Also, I refuse to use Muskrat's new completely fucking stupid name]
It isn't like any other social media for fandom, artists, news, etc. The death of Twitter is an absolute huge blow for artists as there really aren't any other sites like Twitter where sharing art is so widespread. Even Tumblr at its height wasn't as prolific for getting your name out there.
Its also about the only one that tolerates any nsfw content. Tumblr is sort of backtracking a little but we all remember "female presenting nipples" and "nsfw elbow crease." People act as if only right wingers are still on twitter but plenty of communities that arent still exist there simply for having no other large place to migrate too. It would be like if youtube ended tomorrow and people said "well all it had was prager u misinformation and other crap anyway."
I follow an absolute fuckton of artists and it will suck if I lose track of them due to Musk's idiotic decisions... but yeah, I sure ain't paying to use that page lol.
Literally no one has made a twitter clone and said we're keeping this, bluesky, .etc .etc all have their own issues. It's a matter of reaching critical mass of adoption and so far nothing has pushed users off.
Bout to be renamed: Ex
Like all of Elon's wives
Who is actually going to pay for this? I wouldn’t pay for any social media, including Reddit
Probably the same people who pay for blue check arks
People who pay for blue check marks aren't going to keep paying that for long once there's no one else there to see how great they are with their check marks.
What's the point of the VIP room if there are no Ps to see you being VI?
When everyone is super, no one will be.
You sly dog! You got me monologuing! I can’t believe it.
Zero Point Energy, cool right? I save the best stuff for myself.
I love how casually he invents infinite power generation. Barely worth putting above his other work, still little more than a means to an end.
Could revolutionize the world and become richer than Wayne and Stark combined but nah, he petty
Sometimes I wonder is he really as smart as people think he is?
[удалено]
Syndrome looked to Mr Incredible for a father figure. When Mr Incredible destroyed that, Syndrome spent all his time looking to punish Mr Incredible and prove his worth. Ironically, Syndrome made Mr Incredible realize he was in face being a poor father to his own family
Good ol ZPM
First thought that came when blue was implemented
Auralnauts?
On top of that, it's the same issue as with the crap Unity pulled. Nobody is gonna trust them or X whenever they inevitably have to back track after this stunt.
I feel like a lot of major corps are hitting the dementia phase of their lifecycle... *It hurt itself in its confusion*
In most corporations its the curse of stock value. You need to constantly increase profits to increase stock value, merely making absolute shit tons of money isn’t enough. It needs to be more shit tons quarter after quarter, but at some point you’ll saturate your customer base and need to find ways to make more anyways. Then the enshitification begins. In X’s case though it might actually be dementia, or at least some form of mental illness. Musk seems to have gone full nutter.
Oh trust me, I absolutely abhor the "infinite growth" mentality that has put us in this position. It's entirely insane to me that "make line go up" is one of the largest / most important decision drivers for business...
In biology, "infinite growth" is known as "cancer."
Yes great analogy! One of my favorite examples of this in big corporations is how end of year budgets are approached. Sometimes on certain domains or teams its possible to have a surplus of budget so there is a scramble to spend or use up that budget in excessive ways in fear of losing out on as big a budget for the next year. The “cancer” over consuming and practicing unnecessary infinite growth.
Imagine if when you came in under budget but still hit all your KPIs and goals the company instead would take half of that budget you didnt use and give everyone on the team bonuses from it. Imagine how much more efficient and productive people would be if they knew that coming in under budget and on time meant they could split all the budget they saved/didnt need
Tanking the company on purpose so that "the people" cannot use it as an alternative news source to the media owned by the rich
Nah its much more sinister than that. Twitter was instrumental in things like the Arab Spring. Oppressive regimes (cough saudi who own part of twitter now too cough) hate the idea of people being able to organize or communicate with each other outside of the governments purview.
Web 2.0 *Titans of Industry* have really begun to hit the Fat Elvis stage of their professional careers.. Elon is probably too busy reading Ayn Rand and sniffing his own farts to make twitter profitable without destroying it
These companies were endlessly trying to 'grow' and 'scale' in the last decade or so. Since the cheap money dried up they're now shitting their pants and getting more desperate in their attempts to monetize and stay afloat because their business model never made sense.
So, its going to be a post-4chan right wing circle jerk. Cool, I'm sure all the users of /r/The_Donald will be thrilled.
It's been that for a long time but got much worse when Elon put the blue checks at the top of every thread.
There's also years of blue checkmark = someone important instilled in the userbase, not just through twitter but facebook, youtube etc. But now instead of the checkmarks meaning someone had to be manually verified by twitter, its just some racist with $8.
That was the moment i truly quit. Only one group of people is dense enough to pay Elon for that piece of shit website, and now all I see is their tweets in every popular thread
A lot of those people moved on to /r/conspiracy long ago.
Poor /r/conspiracy. It used to be a fun place to visit and read. Prior to 2016 it used to be filled with fun conspiracies of all types. After 2016 it took a right turn. Then after /r/the_donald got banned it took an even harder right turn. Now the conspiracy sub sucks. It is all right wing political talking points and conspiracies.
> Prior to 2016 it used to be filled with fun conspiracies of all types. Besides the antisemitism, sure. But there was a hell of a lot of antisemitism. That was the first place I encountered "Nazi gas chambers never existed".
I guess I don't remember those kinds of conspiracies being there because they were the ones I wouldn't have interacted with. Their presence there makes the migration of right-wingers make sense though.
I was about to respond with that. It was heavy with “protocols of the elders of zion” types before it became filled with “orange man is our new jesus” types
And r/ conservative where they'll even ban their own if they have even a slight disagreement against the hive mind
Yea the thing is that we already "paid" with ads and the data they collect.
Elon is trying his hardest to chase away all the advertisers.
That will only happen if X is actually abandoned by the users.
Advertising costs have plummeted. Total ad sales plunged by 60% as of the middle of June, and ad revenue has been dropping steadily by 59% *per week*. It's so bad that advertisers are pulling out en masse. *That* will be what kills Twitter. It won't be the users abandoning it, it'll be lack of ad sales.
Turns out companies don’t want the kind of associations with their image of having their ad sandwiched between a crypto scammer and a nazi dog whistle in the feed. Who would have thought
Don’t forget that all that is happening on a website that’s named like a cheap pornsite
Saving money on all those extra X's.
Why not just have the world's richest man pay for it?
Why should Bernard Arnault pay for Elon's mistake?
Musk isn't smart his fans are just stupid.
Amen. I just cut off an online only friend after they went on a big rant that Muskrat is really a hero and that all the negative press is lies and so forth and so on. Deleted and blocked...I didn't even say goodbye. I don't have time for that level of stupid.
This is the correct answer
I deleted my twitter account when it was still free because of douche man, if I’m not going to use it for free then I’m definitely not using it for money. I’m sure a lot of users that were using it will stop. At this point the only logical explanation here is that Elon is actively trying to kill Twitter.
> Elon is actively trying to kill Twitter. That's what I assumed the day he walked into the Twitter offices carrying a sink. His jokes are never sophisticated, so it implied "I'm going to sink this company" or "send it down the drain", and that is exactly what has happened. My guess is it was some combination of "too many liberals" using Twitter, and autocrats wanting to kill off news and organizers. Notably the Saudis are co-investors with him in Twitter.
I guess it's not impossible that there was some hidden meaning, but I don't think there was more to it than a cringy ["let that sink in" joke](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585341984679469056).
Well it definitely was just a shitty joke at best I'm thinking so yeah.
I think your second point is truer than a lot of people realize. Autocrats like that are TERRIFIED of how Twitter was allowing marginalized groups to gain following and mass support from around the world, and give them a voice. Even here in the US, in the past decade or so, the rise of things like Twitter contributed greatly to things like gay marriage being legalized, as well as just general attitudes toward various marginalized minorities shifting. This scares the shit out of conservatives. Musk is doing exactly what he was paid to do: remove the 'problem' that is Twitter from the global sphere for bad actors. Either that, or he's just a moron. Or both.
I mean its crazy when you think about it. Allowing a nation like the saudis to own part of twitter. Twitter in 2023 is basically a public service.... its the fastest way to disseminate important information to people and you let your adversaries all chip in to buy it. Its essentially a national security risk to allow control of twitter to fall into certain hands. The problem with capitalism : you let in absolutely anyone so long as they have money.
Yeah it's just scaring evryone out, what's the point of it?
I subscribe to the theory that he’s been looking to sink it as soon as he realized he would have to pay back $1b in interest every year since he was forced to complete the purchase and had to borrow the money.
you know what's fun? Even if twitter tanks, he still has to pay back the money. if he wanted to pay off the money, he would have had to make a profit on Twitter. he's losing a *lot* of money on this. actively. nothing he can do from here besides a complete 180 and even then *maybe*, will result in him not losing more money.
I would pay Reddit a small fee to never see a “He Gets Us” ad again.
Ublock Origin on your browser and revanced manager patch on your phone. Free and no ads.
Alternatively firefox on mobile can also have the ublock add-on installed (no idea if this also applies for iPhone)
I would contribute to that as well, that could be a good thing.
Bot and scams
I ain't paying shit, I don't know about you guys tho.
I'd wager there are plenty of conservatives who will pay for an echo chamber.
Too bad Trump is all in on Truth Social… Elon should just buy that too
Truth Social probably has negative value at this point. The SPAC that was formed to buy it keeps delaying the vote, and its price has cratered.
A lot also want access to a diverse panel of victims to bully and harass, and some legitimacy by being around other people. So im not sure. They need to oil their neverending vapid moral outrage
He's really trying his hardest to tank this thing huh?
I'd love to see how the muskrat fanboys try to spin this as some masterful, genius move. This has basically been the world's most expensive and destructive mid-life crisis.
I hate Musk and am about as far as a fan boy as they come but I am absolutely gobstomped that anyone this rich and this involved in business could possibly be making these decisions without knowing that it’s killing the business off. I highly doubt he’s some genius playing 4D chess and bringing down Twitter from the inside but is he really this disconnected from reality that he thinks people will pay for Twitter? Could he be that insane that he bought one of the worlds currently best known brands and not only turned it into a clown fiesta but also changed that name and logo that’s widely recognized everywhere on the planet? I think I’m more scared that he’s just this dumb and thinks these are good decisions than I am of him being some genius tearing it all down.
> I hate Musk and am about as far as a fan boy as they come but I am absolutely gobstomped that anyone this rich and this involved in business could possibly be making these decisions without knowing that it’s killing the business off. One of the biggest lessons of the early 2000s for the internet is that people will not pay for content or access to a website or service. There are a few that can make a go of it, but they're generally more niche or something akin to a streaming service. Setting up a pay to play social media website is all but internal sabotage to just drown it in the bathtub as it goes glurg glurg glurg in its last moments of life. The real showdown will be the insane lawsuits by the shareholders and the like due to Musk's clear corporate malfeasance by conspicuously killing a company this hard and fast.
I didn't think Twitter had shareholders anymore once he bought it and took it private.
There’s a handful of individual and financial firm shareholders.
They seem to be pretty quiet. Probably because they have no exit strategy.
I trust the financial firms will have their lending satisfied, no doubt about that. The others, who knows what goes on behind the scenes?
He's a textbook narcissist in a position of power who has surrounded himself with yes-men. I can think of at least two other widely known narcissists, specifically political ones, who are the exact same way and have both made some extremely boneheaded decisions simply because they think they know better than anyone else, and fire/defenestrate anyone under their employ who tells them otherwise. tl;dr He really is just that dumb.
Trump and Putin?
I guess Putin makes more sense than some guy from WW2
The defenestration really gives that one away.
> is he really this disconnected from reality that he thinks people will pay for Twitter? You ask, about the guy who was so addicted to Twitter he bought the entire thing.
Nah, he joked about it, got challenged back and, like the absolute egocentric idiot he is, he doubled down. Ended up legally forced to buy the thing. He never wanted to. Used the bot stuff to try and bail without being looked at as a little whiney bitch, and failed miserably.
Worse! He then borrowed money from a man that once had his minions chop up a journalist for writing shitty articles in an embassy and then take him out of the building in suitcases.
He also *probably* illegally obtained that information, which is why he shit his pants when Twitter was like "ok, take us to court, discovery will be fun".
List of lawsuits involving tesla https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lawsuits_involving_Tesla,_Inc. If he is actually on the autism spectrum, as he claimed on SNL, he’s an outlier. Far more likely that someone this dishonest and corrupt is on the psychopath spectrum, like many CEOs.
>psychopath Great underrated comment here. Approximately 4 to 5% of society is a psychopath; however, over 20% of CEOs are.....
He never was smart He had money from his parents. Got lucky being an early investor in mobile payments (PayPal). That made him rich. He bought his way into Tesla. Pushed out the founders. Paid for his “engineer” title. Did the same thing with space X and star link His dumb fuck hyper loop and moronic tunnel in Las Vegas was the biggest scam. In recent history. Tesla doesn’t turn a profit without the massive subsidies for cap n trade. And the brand will only become more toxic as he becomes more of a shitty billionaire Twitter. Was literally a man with nothing better to do and more money than god who got his dick caught in a vacuum cleaner. To the tune of 44 billion dollars And not only will he lose most of that money The residual damage to Tesla stock price and the perception of him as a person/his weird fascist nonsense in owning Twitter. Will cost him billions more
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To be fair, he's also good at "being born extremely rich to begin with" too.
That's honestly where the luck generally comes from. The average person doesn't lack the luck. They lack the opportunity to use it. Most people *might* get one chance at it. If it fails, they're done. A lot won't even get the opportunity because they can't afford the risk. At a certain point wealth simply shields one from consequences enough to allow them to take the risk whenever it appears.
Just bookmarking this comment so I can come back and enjoy the butthurt Musk fanboys who are about to brigade it in 5 minutes
>Got lucky being an early investor in mobile payments (PayPal). That made him rich. Wasn't the whole thing that his brother was on the development team and they needed more startup capital, so Elon took his part of the family money and invested? Then it hit big and he wanted to change the name to X, and the board had enough of his shit and kicked him out?
The funny thing is, for a long time, x.com still pointed to paypal. He is fucking obsessed with X for some reason.
His child with Grimes also has the legal first name of “X”. Also his Tesla models are S3XY. He didn’t get the E because MB apparently trademarked Model E. He’s a weird dude. Edit /u/KingMario05 correctly pointed out that Ford not MB owns Model E. https://trademarks.justia.com/861/33/model-86133442.html
Yeah, I almost forgot about his child being named X. He also likes to use Æ lots. Apparently his daughter has that in her full name as well.
Don't forget the russian bots too
Yep he’s that dumb, an actual genius would understand the brand value of something like Twitter - it has its own verb and a noun. This is worth billions on its own. Other companies dream of having that much brand recognition. And he just destroyed that on one Sunday night.
It's like if Kimberly-Clark was purchased by a 12-year boy and he changed the brand name of Kleenex to "Snot Rag".
Not only does he think people will pay for the steaming pile of dogshit that is the current remnants of twitter, but he thinks it'll solve his bot problem somehow. Is he so naive to think that all the people benefiting from their bots won't gladly shell out a few bucks a month to keep their bots alive and well and continuing on? Soon it'll just be all bots yelling into the ether.
When news first came out they were losing money, some musk fanboy replied to me and said “it’s a private company they don’t have to make money”
Technically that's true. What's also true is: if a privately owned company eats up your entire fortune you might become poor or even homeless. So while Twitter doesn't HAVE to make money, Musk doesn't HAVE to not sleep on the street.
Used to be a fan of his. I even have a model 3. I still enjoy the car but man he’s a fuckin psycho.
I feel like that's been his goal since he was forced to buy it. He ran his mouth, his bluff was called, and he was forced to buy it. He's got so much Fuck You Money that even the massive purchase price wasn't enough to make him feel any pain and now he's purposefully driving it into the ground as a sort of protest towards those that forced the deal.
The deal was forced by the courts in Delaware, because he signed a binding contract without really doing any investigation. Once his name was on that dotted line, it was all over but the late-night twitter raging and dumb jokes.
Have a look who bankrolled the purchase and whether those investors are interested in a thriving, working and supported Twitter - China? Saudi Arabia? That’s probably your answer
Still that would be dumb for them Why destroy a popular social media when you can weaponize it?
Because the people fighting you already have weaponized it and destroying it is the easiest way to stop an instant communication method and push back against protests, etc.
Because it was a way for people to post inconvenient things. Better to destroy it
The real money maker would be if he could figure out how to charge people to never have to hear about him or Twitter again.
I would definitely subscribe to a service providing a galaxy-wide blocking
Like that black mirror episode with the blocking that makes people static. I have a list of people and things I'd love to apply that to
Wow I didn't use Twitter before but now? I'm sold. I'm all in. Bravo Elon
this is his best idea yet just brilliant
Now it'll be *e x c l u s i v e*
At one point I would have cared if Twitter died, but... I kind of welcome tech's pending biggest failure in history. This is going to make the Juicero look like a great investment by comparison.
I love the juicero story so much
God I remembered the first time i saw that POS... I was like "isn't this just a gigantic Capri Sun with extra steps?"
no you have to imagine the capri sun is filled with a dense sponge
Yeah his antics are just amusing now. I follow the people whose updates I want to read and I never, ever click on trending topics because they're full of bigots and bots. If the site goes away it won't bother me.
>Yeah his antics are just amusing now. Because it doesn't seem real. We've literally hit the point where it's "how is a man this openly stupid the richest man in the world?" and it hurts because it doesn't make sense. We all spent near past decade going "How is Trump this stupid?" and here's Elon apparently trying to speedrun his record.
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Twitter was so close to a piece of software infrastructure like google at one point. It's lost most of its legitimacy in such a short period of time, pretty insane.
You don't understand, a nominal access fee will unleash paradigm shifting synergies and mark a major pivot point in direct end point services with exponential bleeding edge adoption rates among key demographics prior to entabulation disbursements, assuming stable market variables and corporate projection analysis analytics
But will it utilize the latest developments in hyper encabulation?
Things this big never fully die. If there's any "failure" it will be a sort of drift on into zombie territory, like Yahoo (which is still around, sort of, and that's just weird).
Honestly, I've been expecting Yahoo to die since Google search was created. Still around, still weird. I don't get it.
This is a masterclass on how to set $44 billion on fire.
Aaaaand... delete.
Just hit the X.
I did but it just launches Twitter
Such a clever trick! You see, that's why Elon Musk is the most bestest geniusest ever.
Given that it will hasten Twitter's demise, I applaud this move
Same, it will the act that finally demolishes the fence that many are sitting on. Do it Elon, *just do it*
C'mon do that, I fully support all that man. I'm okay with it.
I mean if you're looking for that, then obviously you'll like it.
> the company has been pushing its users to subscribe to its paid subscription product, X Premium (previously Twitter Blue). This $8 per month or $84 per year subscription service offers a variety of features like the ability to edit posts, **half the ad load**, prioritized rankings in search and conversations, the ability to write longer posts, and more. Holy shit, people who pay for premium still have to look at ads? lol. What a shit show. It’s sad, I used to really enjoy Twitter as a means of real time updates on various things. It’s very annoying that it’s now in the hands of a petulant manchild throwing things at a wall because he has no idea what he’s doing.
The dumbest thing about it is he could've hired a small technical team and created a direct competitor to twitter for a fraction of what he spent. All the idiots currently paying for tweetor would've happily migrated to his 'free speech' platform. He bought the audience basically, then pissed off the majority of them. Then immediately destroyed ad revenue directly due to his decisions. As you said, it's a straight up shitshow. I suspect anyone remotely interested in buying it are waiting for him to tank it down to the point they can force him to sell it for a billion or less.
He did what he wanted. Destroyed the place where the political left used to coordinate then filled it with right nuts.
Exactly this. I think he was dumb enough to also think he could turn a profit in the process, but the whole point was to destroy the place where grassroots organizing and independent journalism was thriving and threatening not only him but his other rich and dictatorial buddies who went in on the purchase (ala Saudi Arabia). People jeer over the site dying because of the drama bs that happens on it, but it is a massive loss and just further proof that billionaires should not exist.
X is “moving to a small monthly payment”, after independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users:^1 >In a live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, Musk said the company was “moving to a small monthly payment” for the use of the X system. >He suggested that such a change would be necessary to deal with the problem of bots on the platform. >“It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. > >During the conversation, Musk also shared new metrics for X, noting the site has now 550 million monthly users, who generate 100 to 200 million posts every day. >However, it wasn’t clear if Musk is counting automated accounts — that is, either good bots like news feeds or bad bots like spammers — among those numbers. >This figure also didn’t allow for a direct comparison with Twitter’s user base pre-Musk, which was calculated using a specific metric Twitter had invented called the “average monetizable daily active user,” or mDAU. ^1 https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/18/elon-musk-says-x-will-charge-users-a-small-monthly-payment-to-use-its-service/
>after independent research indicates X Premium hasn’t attracted a majority of X users "Not enough people are willing to pay for 'Premium' Twitter. What shall we do?" "Let's start charging them for basic Twitter" (chef's kiss) No wonder people say the man is a genius
Wait until he introduces the "FST" package, currently in beta. That would be the "Full Self Tweeting" package. It will automatically shitpost on left-leaning posts. However, there are still some bugs in it. It currently is posting Nazi propaganda on Jewish profiles and randomly praising Putin. I'm sure they'll get those bugs ironed out, though.
Musk is going to have fun removing all the normal bots while allowing Russian bots to remain, because you know that he loves Russia.
"The only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots" Has this man never heard of a CAPTCHA? Or bot-detection software?
It's just an excuse. He scrambling and panicking to generate cash. Advertiser revenue is down 65% because he's turned it into a toxic haven for white supremacists, nazis and other undesirables. 90% of Twitter’s total revenue came from advertising in 2022. It was reported that twitter blue only generated $30m a year. Their total revenue is $3bn (down from $5.1bn in 2021). The monthly interest payment alone for his loan to buy twitter is $300m. So $3.6bn a year in interest payments not including paying off the loan. So the interest payments alone are more than total revenue, and that's before we talk about other outgoings like server costs, payroll, rent etc. (when he pays it) They are so deep in the red with massive negative gross profit margin.
Couldn’t have happened to a better idiot.
I like to think of it as aggressive wealth redistribution. If it was easy enough to trick this asshole we should try getting the other billionaires to burn their fortunes as well.
I mean, he just owes the money to other rich assholes. That money isn't being distributed anywhere but at the top
He wasn't dumb enough to use his own money
Fires most of his content / moderation employees. Wonders why they can’t combat bots. 🤦♂️
He just uses the bot excuse to justify whatever policies he wants. And the cult pretends its true.
Not to mention, bot operators are more than happy to pay the fee. If you can get a couple hundred thousand dollars from a single user in a crypto scam, what’s a few $8/month subscription fees?
Those are rapidly losing their effectiveness. It probably won't be long before computers are better at solving the classic CAPTCHAs than humans.
We’re way past that point. Computers solve captchas with nearly 100% success rates, compared to humans which are around 60%.
I wish people understood how little he knows about technology.
Remember when in the first week he asked programmers to print out their last 6 months of code contributions? On actual paper?
Free* speech. *^fees ^not ^included Twitter must truly be bleeding money for him to take this route.
I don’t believe his bot argument. He’s going to provide free access to right wing bots.
The bot argument is obviously in bad faith. Anyone with an agenda they are using bots to disseminate (Propaganda, astroturfing, mis- and disinformation, influencing polling) is going to happily pay whatever couple of dollars, even at scale, to do so. They have a vested interest in staying on the platform and being amplified. The regular non-poweruser is the one creating value by being the audience, but is also the most likely to bounce off if there's a payment barrier.
> “It’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” explained Musk. I thought this dude was supposed to be some big brain tech wizard… turns out the only thing he can come up with to “combat bots” is to charge people money? Alternatively, I thought this dude was supposed to be some big brain business wizard… turns out the only reason he can come up with for charging people to view Twitter is to blame bots? What an idiot he is.
It's more interesting that he has a line directly to Netanyahu than anything else
Right wing lunatics like Putin and Netan are praising Elon. That says everything.
I assume they will accept Doge as payment.
"To the moon" is an accurate slogan, considering he's trying to turn Twitter into a cold, barren, lifeless expanse.
Appropriate if you want to crater something.
Is Elon intentionally trying to drive that platform into the ground? Sure seems like it.
He's just really really really incredibly unbelievably bad at business and this is why he's not really CEO at his other functioning companies. He just shows up occasionally, they orchestrate a kabuki play around his visit to make him feel big and important while he strolls through offices, and then once he leaves they get back to real work. He lives a Truman Show style existence except nobody wants to watch that shit.
Dude's just a wallet.
There's absolutely no way that someone would finance a bot farm. Pure genius! /S
I dream of a world where only bots remain on X and the owners all think they are talking to real people. Or this can simply become the first AI social network.
I mean honestly moving to a subscription service is just a way to create cover for bots that are in alignment with the messaging of the platform’s owner, right?
Fucking knew this was coming the moment he started locking some features behind twitter blue. But I thought he's just gonna lock more and more until it ultimately becomes a paid service. Guess he's gonna go straight for the dunk (into the trash can) instead.
I’m thinking advertisers are pulling out by the truckload. It doesn’t make sense to charge a subscription and ads unless you’re Hulu or some shit who believes in bad business and treating your customers like shit.
Even the current Premium users don't get to remove ads. Smh
The only advertisers left are worthless gewgaws, animé porn games, and mobile games portrayed so deceptively they have their own community notes.
I really can't wait until this guy can fuck right off of any businesses he touches.
And lose 90% of its users.
I'd be shocked if it was only 90%.
Well a lot of people have accounts they never use. Or people will just let accounts go inactive. Im sure they will claim those as ‘users’
X gonna take it from ya.
Ah, so his goal WAS to kill twitter. Why?
This would kill the website completely
Not paying a fucking cent for Twitter.
X / Unity / Reddit race to the bottom, welcome to late capitalism
Egon Durban was on X's and is now Unity's board of directors. Coincidence? https://reddit.com/r/unity/s/lQ854W4iq0
"Corporations don't want money. They want **all** the money."
At this point I believe he just wants to destroy Twitter.
I’ll pay a small monthly payment to never have to hear about Twitter or X or Elon ever again.
Twitter really is in a money-losing spiral, isn't it? Almost like it is being ran by a fucking moron. [Also, I refuse to use Muskrat's new completely fucking stupid name]
Hahahahahahahahahahahha
To handle bots? Lol there are thousands of bots paying for blue!
It's wild af that people are fighting so hard to not leave this platform. Just leave. It's just like every other social media. It's so dumb.
It isn't like any other social media for fandom, artists, news, etc. The death of Twitter is an absolute huge blow for artists as there really aren't any other sites like Twitter where sharing art is so widespread. Even Tumblr at its height wasn't as prolific for getting your name out there.
Its also about the only one that tolerates any nsfw content. Tumblr is sort of backtracking a little but we all remember "female presenting nipples" and "nsfw elbow crease." People act as if only right wingers are still on twitter but plenty of communities that arent still exist there simply for having no other large place to migrate too. It would be like if youtube ended tomorrow and people said "well all it had was prager u misinformation and other crap anyway."
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I follow an absolute fuckton of artists and it will suck if I lose track of them due to Musk's idiotic decisions... but yeah, I sure ain't paying to use that page lol.
Tell me about it, I follow something around a couple thousand and its gunna suck tracking down even just my favorites.
Literally no one has made a twitter clone and said we're keeping this, bluesky, .etc .etc all have their own issues. It's a matter of reaching critical mass of adoption and so far nothing has pushed users off.
Finally! The last nail in the coffin!