It's amusing to consider that Musk could have bought one of the many dying alt-right Twitter clones and achieved the same results for billions of dollars less. But no, he had to turn Twitter itself into a dying Twitter clone.
In doing so, he destroyed Twitter.
Which is exactly what was meant to happen, to either turn it into a tool of the right and foreign parties, or destroy it.
Remember, the first thing crackpot dictators did in the past decade, whenever there was an uprising, was to block Twitter from being accessed.
There's nothing unique about twitter that makes it irreplaceable, and in fact the alternative of a post twitter world is worse for dictatorships. Imagine trying to block every mastodon and Lemmy server, most or all of which aren't in your borders, none of them have a commercial presence you can use as a hostage, and who would all tell you to go fuck yourself
Something like Twitter isn't just the tech behind it.
Why do people keep stating this wishful thinking bit as how reality works??
People flock to one social media platform of a specific type over time, period.
And as we're dealing with a large mass of people, this will never be fediverse systems, it will always end up being a corporate system.
And those governments either want to control or if that is not possible, destroy.
People are strongest together.
Divide and conquer et al.
Why muat it always be corperate systems? Thete's no reason to believe this
It doesn't have to be, it simply is.
That's the annoying thing with reality, it doesn't always do what you'd like it to do.
Is right now, and that day looks to be ending
Its the users, stupid. We saw the same BS when a Russian firm bought LiveJournal
I'm honestly kind of loving watching the destruction of Reddit and Twitter. It is a big loss, sure, but like you said they are not irreplaceable. The communities, the people are what matters, not the platform. The people make the platforms. If you lose the people, you lose the platform.
If everyone migrates to Lemmy and Mastodon like I did, then these large platforms don't have to matter anymore.
Every day I’m getting more and more convinced that demolishing Twitter was 100% intentional and part of the plan.
I don't think so, personally.
I can't imagine Elon spending over 40bn to buy up a company that he then desperately needs to enact measures in order to recoup the lost money in ways that just dig him a bigger hole.
I think he's really that dumb. He tried to devalue the company prior to purchasing by saying bots are rampant etc. The case against him said he needed to buy the company at the original price.
Until this point, his reputation had him as some kind of infallible tech messiah, so in order to not lose face, he bought it at the original price, knowing his plan backfired and he had to borrow billions in order to complete the sale.
Every decision he made after just attracted ridicule and caused the platform to fall further into a heaping mess. Once his reputation was revealed to be a petulant child, he just doubled down and destroyed it.
Elon, it turns out, just isn't as clever as he (or many of his backers/fans) thought...
People always forget he was literally sued into buying twitter. He never wanted to buy it, he was just playing stupid games like he always does.
Yeah, IMO he was trying to do a pump and dump in the same style of his crypto pump and dumps, but he managed to make some legally binding statements while doing the pump.
Until this point, his reputation had him as some kind of infallible tech messiah
I mean.. only on terms of his PR team.
When you actually look at what Twitter has cost him, it's a lot more than the 44bn ticket price.
He had to sell off a LOT of Tesla stock in a very short period of time to fimance the deal. Tesla was already in a weird place where a lot k of investors were starting to worry that it was overpriced. The combination of the sudden sell-off and the reputational damage that came from him being outmanuevered by the Twitter board led to a huge slide in the stock price. Since the majority of Musk's fortune is Tesla stock, this absolutely annihilated huge amounts of his net worth.
On top of that those financial deals he made with the Saudis did not come with friendly terms. He's paying about $0.7billion a year in interest, plus Twitter's operating costs, which come direct from his pocket now. That requires more stock sell offs, which further depresses the Tesla share price.
In all, Musk is about 200bn poorer now as a result of this deal. It's probably one of the single most expensive things any one person has ever bought.
Tesla stock is massively overpriced. I mean Tesla stock is going for $246, meanwhile Ford and General Motors stocks are going for $12 and $33 respectively.
Which is exactly why Musk selling off large amounts of stock cratered the price so hard and so quickly.
I doubt it, if only because publicly failing like this must hurt his ego pretty badly.
He, like Trump, is the useful idiot.
Remember, he didn't exactly buy Twitter cash in hand.
The money he used came from all over, only about half of it from selling stock he owned, the rest is banks and foreign interests (a very large one being the Saudi).
His goal was probably genuinely to turn it into a success with his own political views ruling the platform, but to do that, they should've stuck with his usual shtick of him being the PR face of the company while actually competent people do the work and make the decisions. Whatever political shite he spouts on the platform then doesn't matter.
But the other interests wanted Twitter either in the hands of someone they can influence, preferably someone with questionable morals and a similar totalitarian political view, or have it destroyed. For them, either way is perfectly fine.
They got what they wanted and the useful idiot is left to look like a fool.
My guess is, Saudis are trying to prevent another Arab spring from happening. By fragmenting the social media landscape, it will be a bit harder for the masses to organize demonstrations.
That requires there having been a plan to begin with. He desperately tried to get out of buying Twitter. Now he’s flailing but trying to act like he knows what he’s doing.
My guess is that it wasn’t Elon’s plan. The Saudis might want to take Twitter out of the picture to prevent another Arab spring from happening, and they found a way to do it through Elon.
I've been saying that about Twitter and Reddit from the beginning. Both have been platforms responsible for significant progressive organization. The Arab Spring would likely not have happened without Twitter. Conservatives know they cannot compete in the "marketplace of ideas", so their only means to compete is to silence the competition by dismantling the platforms progressives use to organize and communicate their ideas.
Of course it was.
Here I am wondering if he just asks GPTChat what to do for every business decision and follows it blindly.
He also bought it to get Trump reinstated, but failed to convince him to return, and so winds up competing with him to convince the most ignorant demographic to come back instead.
Getting kinda sick of those whole "Elon bought Twitter to destroy it!" Perspective. Read the history.
He was trying to manipulate stocks (successfully) like he has for years.
Finally, it caught up with him and didn't work and he was forced to buy it or get sued.
He tried really hard for months to "reinvent it".
He's really really fucking stupid and with his drug habits and wealth, doesn't live in a state of reality
Twitter gets worse and worse because his knee jerk solutions aren't working. Because unlike his other companies that run with competent people who block Musk from intervening, Twitter was pure Musk at the helm.
Stop with the conspiracy bs. There's so much documented resources to follow this history.
You're right and you should keep on saying it.
The thing that annoys me the most about this ridiculous theory is that it's just playing right back into the deluded notion that he's some kind of genius.
He's not. He went to court to try to get out of buying Twitter. They had to force him into it.
He never actually wanted to buy the bloody thing, and now he's just doing the best he can with a bad deal. And it turns out his best really, really sucks.
And for the people out there touting the "Actually the Saudis are forcing him to tank it" version of this nonsense, please try to answer these two questions;
What kind of insane leverage do they have on him that he'd be willing to burn $200bn of his net worth over this (which is roughly what it's cost him when you factor the damage to the Tesla share price, and that's not counting the almost a billion in interest he's paying the Saudis every year for those loans)?
If he knew the plan was to set this thing on fire, why would he attach the X name to it? X is Musk's precious little baby (literally as well as figuratively); it's been his obsession his entire adult life. Musk has never stopped trying to make X.com happen. His obsession with it is what got him booted out of PayPal. If the plan was to give Twitter a Viking funeral, why in God's name would he take something so important to him and throw it on the pyre?
Actually the Saudis are forcing him to tank it
If that's directed at me, please actually read what I said.
They aren't forcing him to do anything. He's a useful idiot.
Anyone could and did see he'd either steer it politically to be more in their favor, or the idiot he is, would destroy it through sheer incompetence.
They aren't making him do anything, they just saw the cards on the table and thanked Allah.
If that's directed at me
It wasn't.
This should become a copypasta, or stickied to every thread relating to the sometimes slow, sometimes fast, trainwreck that is X'itter.
I agree on most of it, but I have genuine conspiracy theories I can't let go of about the end of the "state media" flag. Applying the state media flag to BBC and CBC and NPR was an excellent way to kill it for his Saudi and Russian friends.
I'm honestly surprised that feature lasted this long given how often it was used to embarrass Musk personally when he was spreading blatant misinformation and utter idiocy.
It's easily the best idea Twitter ever had. I'd like to imagine that other social media platforms will pick up on it, but that's probably too much to hope for.
!murderedbywords@feddit.uk is going to take a hit.
Every week it’s something new with that fuckin place.
We should take mastodon and rename it to twitter2. Just to fuck with his ego in showing that it’s better.
You could register the twitter2.com domain, fire up a mastodon instance and go with it.
Just name it twitter as that name's not being used by anyone anymore
Should do X.Net or some other extension... make him think the only thing wrong with the idea was he picked the wrong extension the whole time... that would really gaslight him.
Frankly, X.net as a name is somehow so much better than just "X", so yeah, I fully support this.
Twotter
Oooh so is that why it's called tooting? :D Twooting!
I can understand Twitters move. The way things are pointing at Twitters user community, if they have to remove objectionable content, they'll soon have nothing but empty pages.
::taps forehead::
Can't be responsible for hosting objectionable content if nobody can point to it.
Shocker
They could allow user to highlight not misleading informations, it would be a much faster work, seeing how many b******t are on that site.
About the link, it's sad the Indigenous will be hit, but I bet they are unfortunately just the first... We can only hope the common people will start to understand what a s**tshow is that site and move to mastodon
Sadly, the Voice referendum is going to have majority 'no' vote regardless of Musk.
Haven't heard of it before, why wouldn't it pass? Can't believe it's that controversial...
@Kecessa There's been a massive disinformation campaign against the Voice, largely lead by the conservative side of politics and often tying into racist conspiracy theories.
The most outlandish one I've heard is that the Voice is part of a secret Australian Federal Government plan to hand all the land back to Indigenous Australians... as if any government would ever voluntarily give up its land and power. 🙄
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