this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2023
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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
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.
Its the users, stupid. We saw the same BS when a Russian firm bought LiveJournal
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.
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 mean.. only on terms of his PR team.
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 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.
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.
edit: and then tried to leverage DeSantis with a comic failure of an event, and now is in a weird limbo between them because DeSantis sucks on his platform and Trump sucks off his platform.