287 points

Still seems way overpriced. Doesn’t even have name recognition anymore.

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85 points

I’d guess that $19 billion is the value where if someone bought it and did their best to undo everything and get it back on track, that’s how much it would be worth.

The problem with measuring value is you have to quantify what that $19 billion actually is. Like you could say it’s the share price times the number of shares, except now twitter is privately owned we don’t have a market share price anymore.

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28 points

Theoretically what someone would pay for it. The buyer always has plans to make it better.

Or the textbook definition, the present value of the sum of all future profits.

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17 points

The buyer always has plans to make it better.

That’s an interesting claim to make, especially on this post 😄

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3 points

it’s x’s own current valuation, to calculate stock options to give to employees

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24 points

I wonder if that’s a portion of why it’s devalued so much. I mean I know there’s a dozen or more other reasons but brand recognition could very well be one of them.

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30 points

Take a look at their user data over the past year with the name change date in mind.

It’s is absolutely ASTONISHING how fucking moronic and empty headed Elon Musk is. A literal idiot with all the money.

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11 points

Boy are you going to have a real egg on your face whenever X becomes a successful blogging/dating/banking/investing app \s

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8 points

They surely still own the twitter name right

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Can any trademark lawyer in the audience tell us how long before, if Musk lets the trademark lapse, some rando could come along and make a Twitter clone while literally just calling it “Twitter?”

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14 points

Meta is being told to drop the “Threads” name, it would be hilarious if they changed it to “Twitter”

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8 points

People recognize it, just not as X lol

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6 points

Yeah it’s never going to be called just “X”, it’s always going to be “X, formerly twitter”.

Just like Prince the whole time he changed his name to that symbol.

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11 points

Prince wanted people to call him Prince. He changed his name to that symbol to get out of a shitty contract with Warner Bros.

“Warner Bros took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing took to promote all of the music I wrote,” Prince once said in a press release. “The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36107590

Elon changed Twitter to X because he’s a babyman who never got over the fact that PayPal didn’t like the name.

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1 point

I really wish xitter had have caught on.

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4 points
*
Deleted by creator
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76 points

To put this in perspective, they lost an average of $2B per month in value. According to HUD, there were about 582,000 homeless people in the US last year. $2B per month is enough to house all of them nearly 4 times over if you assume $1k per month in housing expenses.

What a monumental waste of resources that could have made a difference. Musk just sucks

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43 points

It’s not real money, though. It’s all just speculative value based on estimates of future revenue.

The real barrier to ending homelessness is the large number of real estate vacancies that are held open to prop up the price of the housing market. Twitter’s lost value has nothing to do with that.

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17 points
*

But the 44B was payed, so they do/did exist. Now he could have just NOT bought twitter and spent half of this money on the poor et voilà no more homeless for at least 4 years.

But you are right with the rest.

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3 points

But the 44B was payed, so they do/did exist.

It was mostly debt swaps. Elon traded equity in Tesla for equity in Twitter.

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10 points
*

There is no “real” money. It’s all speculative based on what value people assign to it. For example, you may have noticed that the US dollar has become worth significantly less in recent years. Shares and fiat currency just have different volatility.

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1 point

The US dollar has outpaced nearly every other global currency. Five years ago you’d get 100 yen to the dollar. Now you get 150.

But cartelization of the supply chain means we don’t get to see the benefits of low import prices. The difference all goes to business profit, while real increases in material and labor get passed on to the consumer.

Netflix buys anime for pennies on the dollar and sells it back at escalating rates. They spend less and we pay more.

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6 points

You’ve missed the mark on two counts:

  1. Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter and bring it into private ownership. I’m saying had he just left well enough alone, he could have used that money for other purposes
  2. Your point on adding more supply to the real estate market to prop up prices is the opposite of Econ 101 - more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices. Mental health is a much larger barrier to receiving help for the homeless.

I used to volunteer weekly with homeless and housing insecure people in Philadelphia and untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.

Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society. Anyway, my point was simply to illustrate what a magnificent waste of resources it was to buy Twitter.

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-1 points

Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter

He raised $20B by using his own (highly inflated) Tesla stock as collateral. So this wasn’t new money, it was a swap. He covered the balance with Twitter’s own equity as collateral (which is a big reason why he’s been so cavalier with its devaluation). This new money was effectively just to keep a business in the red from running out of operating income.

more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices.

Not under a cartel. And real estate markets are increasingly cartelized, with large vacancies kept off the market clearing rate in order to prop up the book value of the rest of the market.

untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.

Which creates a vicious cycle, sure. But the solution is to reclaim vacant real estate from speculators and use it as real housing.

Building more investment properties and vacant luxury units to increase book value of real estate does nothing to reduce homelessness.

Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society.

All services that are best delivered to housed populations. What’s more, they’re services with a universal application. You don’t just need to be homeless to benefit from professional counseling, education, and public health care.

But, again, sky high real estate costs make these services prohibitively expensive to expand into neighborhoods.

Delivering these services at cost requires local governments to reclaim vacant real estate kept open at above market clearance rates and turning it over to public sector service providers.

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1 point

all the people that imagine their home prices are as high as they are, will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. the empty house market is crazy, just look on a “social home sharing site”. houses are hotels for the few.

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2 points

As someone who sees my property tax bill jump 10% / year, I have no interest in rising real estate prices. I’m not selling any time soon and I use my house to live in rather than to invest.

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53 points

Lol it’s not worth anything near that much

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12 points

It’s all gonna fold once interest rates get high enough. Didn’t he borrow like 13 billion?

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53 points

If only more people would move to Mastodon it could drop another 50% in value!

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15 points

Please don’t put more pressure on us, we’re already telling people to do that.

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2 points

Haha I’ve been trying too.

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3 points

Mastodon got a shout out on the latest Some More News, which was cool.

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3 points

Anything that helps demonitize Twitter is good in my opinion!

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50 points

WORTH 19 BILLION TO WHO??

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14 points

No one willing to buy, so it ain’t worth shit

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9 points

Aquaman might go for it

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