So at $44b and 7,500 employees the company would have to be worth $5.86m per employee. After layoffs he’d be paying about $23.5m per employee. He sure has a lot of confidence that such a small workforce can generate a hell of a lot of productivity, I guess.
14 Likes
Everyone seems to bash Twitter, but I really don’t have all that many problems with it. I believe that’s because I put a little thought into it. I only follow about a hundred carefully chosen accounts, I read in time-order (not “the algorithm”), and I have blocked several trigger words that help keep most political and racist shit from my feed. And I’m very quick to block the accounts of people and advertisers who tweet stupidity.
Overall I find it quite readable.
But if Musk arrives, I’m expecting a rapid decline in quality, followed by an exodus of twitterers I respect. That’s when I expect I’ll ditch it; either because of the low quality and/or the mistreatment of the Twitter employees. Plus I cannot stomach the thought that I participate in anything that gives that pond scum another dollar.
13 Likes
Spiteful child. If he buys controlling interest and tanks the company, can the other shareholders sue his ass personally?
4 Likes
He’s buying the company outright at a fixed price per share and taking it private. There will be no other shareholders once (or if) the acquisition is completed. Frankly, the existing shareholders are making out pretty well, I think, as most of us believe that Musk is dramatically over-paying.
He’s financing the purchase with the help of other private investment groups (including funds from Qatar and Saudi Arabia) so there’s always the possibility of lawsuits from them if and when things go south but it’s not quite the same thing as stockholders suing each other.
10 Likes
My big beef with Twitter isn’t anything to do with usability so much as the problem that the platform has been a potent catalyst for the rise of fascism.
21 Likes
I would have bet on Facebook falling down its metahole first, but now the crash from Twitter to Mutter looks like it’ll be nasty, brutish and short.
5 Likes
Maybe he wants to compete with Truth Social? 
ETA: I see @snigs beat me to it!
4 Likes
That, mainly, and also while they ostensibly have regulations against hate speech and harrassment, a hell of a lot of harrassment and hate speech happens with no repercussions.
11 Likes
A problem that’s about to get much, much worse.
10 Likes
This was my thought. Although Twitter may be outsourcing moderation to private contractors already.
1 Like
Pretty good way to have a business just stop functioning.
2 Likes
It’s good for stopping a government from functioning as well. Hell, that’s a big part of the GQP platform.
6 Likes
Have we, as a collective group of right-thinking folks (proper, reasoned, rational… not Right) figured out what to do when Musk flips the bird? I don’t monetize from the platform, it doesn’t butter my bread, very much take it or leave it - said adios to Facebook years ago.
Do we migrate to the next up & coming platform, only for that to be overtaken by Nazis too? Will one of these companies ever figure out how to keep the scum from rising?
I won’t miss Twitter and Twitter won’t miss me.
The reality is twitter is a money loser and has been for a long time. Twitter themselves were talking about upcoming layoffs of 20-50% or more before Elon even came in because the funding was drying up and the costs were outrunning the profits massively and the vast majority of those costs were labor. This was always going to happen because twitter is a bezzle.
Elon isn’t being unreasonable or outlandish here (though he is at other points.) This likely is as large as he can make the company while still having some chance of breaking even or making a small profit. If it’s privately owned, you don’t have the ability to just issue more classes of stock to bring in funding, so all Elon can do is pull the lever on costs. Just like twitter was going to have to do shortly.
3 Likes
IF he takes over Twitter.
From what I understand, Twitter is still pushing their court case against him. They know that Musk lies like a fucking rug. Any time he makes a big pronouncement, smart people assume he has no plans to follow through.
2 Likes
5000 people who work for Twitter who are about to be jobless as a pawn in a stupid billionaire power-play would probably rather not be in that win column, though.
The problem I always have with “Just shut down Twitter/Facebook/etc. or let them fall into irrelevance” is that there’s always some subset of the population for which they are a lifeline. I personally know someone in my family for which twitter served as one of the few places they felt comfortable sharing their thoughts of self-harm and received support, for example.
IMHO, “burn it down” or “great, maybe everyone will get knocked down a peg” never seems to end well - heck, how many times did I hear “I voted for Trump because I wanted him to shake up Washington” bandied around, or statements like “The church serves no purpose” despite it being the only source for community involvement and togetherness or support for many underserved or underprivileged communities?
Musk is in the wrong here. He deserves to pay a hefty price for playing with the livelihoods of folks just “for fun”, and Twitter could do so much better as a public commons. But I’ll take no pleasure in the result if it does all burn down. There will be a lot of collateral damage along the way.
26 Likes
Twitter, now with less security and more nazis. Didn’t Musk complain about twitter’s bot problems?
5 Likes
As of this morning Twitter stock is selling at $50/share, and Elon’s agreed purchase price was $54.20 per share, so if the sale does go through as planned by the end of this month you could buy some stock and make an 8% profit on your investment in a very short timeframe. But obviously the market believes there’s still a lot of risk here.
5 Likes
A vast majority of those 5000, if not all of them, would have been laid off in the next few years even without the Elon buyout. The funding is drying up for companies like twitter. They can’t just keep burning through money without any consequence. The reckoning was on the horizon before Elon ever came into the picture, they regularly mentioned that there would need to be sweeping “cost measures” if things did not improve for at least four years there.
It sucks for those working there, but it was coming, regardless of Elon.
2 Likes
So Elon’s statement carries no weight in your opinion because it doesn’t change anything?
3 Likes
