this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
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[–] UnknownQuantity@lemmy.world 121 points 1 year ago (3 children)

So let me get this straight. Musk bought Twitter for 44 billion, fired most of the staff, destroyed bunch of features and functionality, scared advertisers away and now changed the brand's name. Wouldn't it be less hassle to just start a platform and pay people $100 each as a sign up bonus?

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 62 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's absurd! Assuming 4 billion in actual startup costs, at the purchase price they could only afford to do that for...

four hundred million people. LOL.

Jesus this was a dumb transaction.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just for perspective, the U.S. population is 300 million. Add on the 67 million population of the UK and you still have plenty of change left over.

Jesus, this was a stupid decision.

[–] wjrii@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago

Yup. Four hundred million is more than the entire daily userbase of twitter.

[–] min_fapper@iusearchlinux.fyi 6 points 1 year ago

Damn, this comment thread was a level of enlightenment I was not expecting this morning 🤯

[–] Ryumast3r@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are currently ~366 million Twitter users.

If Musk paid each person $100 to start using "X" instead, he'd spend $36.6 billion, leaving him with $7.4 billion to actually build the rest of the website and infrastructure.

Yup, he's stupid.

[–] UnknownQuantity@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

He could also pay his rent and other bills.

[–] athos77@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Copying my comment from another thread:

But they're not just re-branding. Twitter is now under some kind of corporate shell company. I haven't seen much coverage of that, but my suspicion is that it's intended to act as some kind of insulator to contain Twitter's debts.

Like when they break a company into pieces and put everyone's debts and no assets into a single part and then that part declares bankruptcy and all the debt magically goes away, leaving everything else with lots of assets and no debts and a future that looks really rosy. I can't help but think that this is something similar to that.