this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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We should be so lucky. But aren't the losses so far not that much compared to the market value?
It's market value is nil if there are no advertisers.
There’s still plenty of value for someone in the activity data, user list, and archive of text. Nothing close to what it was bought for, though.
There may be other revenue streams but not enough to cover costs.
Sure, I just mean that the business still has valuable assets and could be sold for… something.
I guess you're technically correct but I think the assertion is based on a misconception, as though xitter could be gutted and sold for it's constituent parts.
Like imagine someone bought a house for $1m, and then lived there for a year and their dog shat on the living room carpet every day. You wouldn't say "oh well it still has some value because you could sell the copper wiring for something."
Yes you could sell the copper wiring, but it's worth far more where it is - you just need to change the carpet and then the property would return to something approaching it's former glory.
Oh, I agree that he's fucked the business, wrecked the valuation, and it has much more value as an ongoing business. One weird thing about Twitter (and many other internet companies) is how they have been valued for years super highly, way out of proportion to the profits they make - presumably based on future profits. I doubt if anyone is going to assume they'll make profits in the future, though with actual competent and non-insane management, they could. Musk already shredded a big portion of their assets in terms of talent and organizational knowledge. Still, I think they could sell the dataset, user list and so forth, but it might be at fire sale rates compared to $44 billion. Maybe like 2. And agreed, more likely someone would buy it and try to turn it around, but he's also kind of screwed the whole thing by calling it "X". I guess a new owner could go back to calling it twitter.
The purchase price already exceeded the real market value, which is why the former board was persistent in pushing the deal’s completion. A normal price at the time would have been about 20% less. Estimates since then have been even lower, like maybe $20 billion. So most of the loss is in market value, not cash expenditure or lost revenue.
Watch the stockmarket. AFAIK it already went down by a third or so.