Personally i think most people might be inclined to jump to Instagram but i really don’t want to use something that’s related to Zuckerberg either 
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i have no idea why i feel slightly better about instagram than facebook.
maybe because it doesn’t care if you create profiles for your cats or whomever? it feels less invasive that way. and also less of a “look at this totally true 
article about fluoride killing babies” kind of vibe…
i really wish the government had interceded to stop that purchase. still wish they’d break meta up 
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I generally don’t like the user experience with Instagram, it just doesn’t gel with how i like to browse for content. It’s a pass for me so i hope that something else will get used more
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ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: “uncanny valley”
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It’s OK, she escaped 
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Aye, there’s the rub.
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Yeah, someone did some back-of-envelope calculations and showed that even if a substantial percent of current blue checkmark holders decided they were cool with paying $20 a month, it still wouldn’t equal much more than a day’s worth of advertising revenue. (It wouldn’t even begin to touch the interest on the loans he took out to buy Twitter.) Of course instituting his plans would also drive away far more users and advertiser money than it would actually make in revenue.
Elon really needs to talk to an adult at Twitter about his plans - hopefully he hasn’t fired them all.
It’s just so obvious he hasn’t thought about any of this at all. He’s so clueless about how Twitter actually works, it’s painful. (His exchange with Stephen King about checkmark fees was telling - Musk clearly didn’t understand what the objection actually was even at the end of it.) He doesn’t seem to fundamentally understand that Twitter is not remotely a tech company, but a community of users who basically stay for the moderation service. He clearly hasn’t thought through how this is going to impact his other businesses either. He can promise all the “free speech” he wants, but he’s obviously going to instantly cave when countries start holding Tesla hostage to their Twitter demands. (He’s not even aware of currently pending legislation in various countries that would hugely impact Twitter speech there - he fired the people whose jobs it was to deal with such things.)
He’s doing a really excellent job of demolishing the myth of the meritocracy though, I’ll give him that. Not just for himself, but also the financial institutions that gave him some of the money for this boondoggle. They’re already expecting to take a bath on their investment, something that should have been obvious from the start - and maybe it was, and they gave him billions anyways. Decisions seem to get made at these institutions that are enormous - and obvious - money-losers for the benefit of hugely wealthy men, and I assume those dynamics played a part. It appears if one is an idiot with a terrible plan, you’ll still get the money you need if you start off sufficiently wealthy.
Reportedly 15 billion in this year alone, which is three times the entire R&D budget for Sony, including their game consoles. It’s absolutely incomprehensible what they’re actually spending the money on. Some sort of desperate scramble to justify their previous investment in it, I assume.
I suspect he read one of the many pieces recently published explaining that presenting himself as the arbiter of what was allowed on Twitter was going to seriously bite him on the ass (I don’t think he’s smart enough to have figured it out on his own), and that alienating advertisers by allowing hate speech is going to absolutely tank Twitter’s revenue by alienating advertisers.*
*Though it’s already started happening, looks like (whomp whomp):
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Maybe instead of a blue tick, those wanting to share baseless conspiracy posts can pay $8 per month to be authenticated with a brown poop 
emoji?
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They would need to fix LinkedIn’s UI issues. Sadly Microsoft’s general tenor seems to be to tell people that their changes are user-friendly even if the end user finds things more cumbersome.
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So he’s gotta find $370 mil a year just to service the debt?
Excellent news, he’ll be broke in, what, 500 years?
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Just remember that you are not a passenger, you’re part of the iceberg. Your leaving Twitter is what is going to contribute to its demise.
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“what about $8?”
“we have to pay the bills somehow”
Nice way to admit he hasn’t done any due diligence and has no business plan
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This seems to sum Musk up, doesn’t it? He’s a teenager with enough money to make good on the statement: “you can’t tell me what to do.”
This is part of it: rich, well-connected white guys helping other rich, well-connected white guys fail upwards.
As a former banker, I see so much of what is wrong with US banking in this situation. We have lazy underwriting, where insufficient due diligence is performed because the underwriters bought into the myth that wealth = intelligence. We have collateral lending, where lenders don’t care about whether the borrower can repay or not as long as there is sufficient collateral to cover the principal. (I read in one of the comments that Musk was covering a $15B loan with $65B in Tesla and SpaceX stock; don’t know if that is true, but that’s pure collateral lending.). And then there is rent seeking, which is where banks get the bulk of their revenues. Do the banks care if Musk repays his loans? Sort of. What they really care about is whether he pays the interest. $400M+ a year will cover operating expenses and provide some nice fat bonuses. That money will be lent out anyway, so they want it with someone who will service the debt. Musk is a decent moral risk. Unlike clownstick von bankruptcy, Musk actually cares about looking incompetent by going bankrupt, and will likely figure a way to pay that debt.
My growing concern is what Prince Bonesaw gets out of his investment. All I can think of is: rocket tech. Oil is on its way out (not quickly enough, but the writing is on the wall), which means US security arrangements will also be changing. The Saudis aren’t friendly with either Iran or Israel, and thanks to their Yemeni adventure, other countries in the region have reason to dislike them. Home brewing rocket tech takes a lot of time and money. So much better to invest in some chump’s Twitter purchase debacle and buy 10 - 20 year’s R&D off the shelf. PBS has enough cash to build manufacturing capacity locally to start building himself some rockets to threaten the neighborhood to maintain his dominance. Maybe sell some tech to some rogue nations.
I’m hoping SpaceX was included in the Biden admin’s “national security” concerns over the Twitter deal.
Like the Millenium Tower in San Fransisco, I don’t really care about the financial losses these idiots incur through their mistakes, but do worry about the collateral damage when said mistakes come crashing down.
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When in doubt, there’s always money in porn. No problem with it per se, but it’s interesting how quickly he headed there.
It also seems that Musk has finally been convinced by his lawyers that trying to claw back bonuses and options from employees would be more costly than it’s worth.
This following analysis won’t come as a surprise either.
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But the accelerated timeline gives the company’s internal review teams just three days to provide feedback on the potential risks
What could possibly go wrong?
Musk immediately fired the executive team, installed himself as “Chief Twit,”
Finally! An accurate job title!
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Its wild to see a billionaire haggling with a millionaire over $12. Is he going to debate this with every famous user who complains?
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Exactly. It wasn’t the amount of money - it was the fact that a lot of people are on Twitter to follow people like King. King is the draw. He is the content. Twitter is just the conduit.
As a lot of people are saying, Musk seems almost unbelievably clueless about Twitter and the acquisition process. I’m hoping that is true and that he goes down in spectacular, glorious flames. I’m also hoping that he hasn’t figured out some cruel, private equity like move to suck money out of the company and then let it die.
These people are awful.
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