Since twitter is no longer publicly traded, he doesn’t have to make anything “seem plausible” to the SEC… So the premise of your theory needs some work.
That would be illegal and too obvious.
Not surprised you’re a DRS GME participant and I say that as a GME shareholder… In this case the guy is just an idiot.
I can shutter my private company whenever I want for whatever reason I want. If the private investors have an issue w/ that, they can sue me.
This has nothing to do with the SEC.
Market manipulation? There are no shares on the market to manipulate. This is WHY companies choose to go private… So that they are no longer beholden to the public shareholders and the regulatory bodies that exist to protect them (the SEC)
Eh… They would have lost money as he bought Twitter for more than it was worth and once he bought it the edge funds were forced to close their positions as Twitter wasn’t on the market anymore.
Unless you’re talking about shorting Tesla in which case sure, but that’s Elon’s piggy bank, so that wouldn’t make much sense.
Whether he intends it or not, it’s going to die when it turns into a far right outrage echo chamber. The only people willing to advertise will be outright scammers. There’s a reason why every right wing alternative platform fails. They also tend to fail to attract normies with moderate conservative beliefs. If they do get them, they leave after the userbase reveals itself to be a bunch of racist incels.
I partly agree. He isn’t that stupid and things are not so simple that twitter would just go under.
He is not that smart either. He is a petulant child. Either the money he has, or from before, he is a narcissist and he thinks he knows better than anyone else. He doesn’t get dettered by having failures.
Such bad journalism. Sucks how much reporting has gone the drain with clickbait bullshit titles like this.
I’ve noticed a general pattern that if the title ends with a question mark, the article is not worth your time
Asking if X will go bankrupt is not the right question. Elon has many untapped reserves of cash that he could use at any time to continue to pay the bills.
The guy just needs to speculate publicly on a cool sounding idea and a billion dollars in cash will fall out of a tree somewhere. That is his level of social status.
Bankruptcy happens when a company is imminently falling apart because there is no cash and a creditor repossessing things may disrupt other higher priority creditors. Therefore a judge needs to add order to the process which puts a legal hold on a lot of things. Unless Elon has some dramatic personal meltdown way beyond what we’ve already seen, that’s really unlikely.
The real question is… How does Elon plan on making a profit from this thing if he’s insulting those who are paying his bills today? He did float the idea of creating a super app that might handle payments and many other features. That has the potential to be a massive profit center if executed with precision. Perhaps the Twitter user base can be converted… Which would mean advertisers are no longer needed.
I would not be surprised if such a thing is in the works and would be announced when it’s almost ready to launch.
He can pay for it, but would you dump money into a burning pit over and over and over again, after you already dropped around 1/8th of your total worth into a failure? Especially when you only bought it because you were forced to by law? Musk has been directly asked if he would subsidize it more with his personal fortune recently, and in response he whined about who would be at blame for it going bankrupt. I dont think hes going to put anymore of his money into it.
Even in Twitter’s fully profitable years where it made 1.5bil pre buyout, that still would barely service its new yearly debt. That was before he lost 13% of the userbase and 50% of the total advertising, including nearly all of the large advertisers.
His current replacement for losing all those advertisers and 100s of million of dollars? Paid twitter blue, which apprently is about 300k out of 400mil users, or less than 0.1% of total users. As you can imagine, their 30mil/year is not going to make up to the 100s of millions/yr shortfall his behavior has caused.
His “lets be wechat” idea is also ludicrous. He has said that he thinks X can take over 50% of all banking in the world, which by the numbers is all of US, Europe and China combined. This means not only taking over an area that already has native apps that are entrenched and making billions, but also convincing all Europeans and Americans to abandon banks and put their money into an technically unstable platform run by a loud and proud antisemite/racist. This ignores that Americans and Europeans already have “use an app for banking” like google pay and apple pay, but apprently vastly prefer using cc/debit by a ratio of 90%. The apps are already on all our phones, and most no one uses them.
So yeah, his “hail mary” is to eliminate huge, entrenched and dynamic state supported rivals in China, and to change all of the 100s of billion dollar banking landscape in the US/Europe where no one wants an app to do this, all with zero inhouse expertise and a CEO whose technical background is Ad sales.
I have my doubts.
This was a hit job and news outlets are trying to pretend it’s an accident.
I liked Twitter. I know it’s a cesspit, but as a software engineer it was always the top company I wanted to work at. It didn’t work out (for several funny reasons), but for that selfish reason I’ll never forgive Musk.
IMO, Musk needs help. If he were a normal person, someone would have pushed him to leave work and find help. As the owner of three companies, responsible for tens of thousands of employees, no chance is he getting that help. He’s constantly baited and prodded by his fan boys, people like Rogan and Chappelle who can deal with that kind of fame, and the press that get content from his antics.
As for Twitter, I don’t see it dying, until it fails to have a use for Musk. My initial belief was that his “everything app” would use Twitter’s account system to get all of its users, and then he’d sell Twitter and continue with the users - but that app isn’t ever happening. It’s just something he’s desperate to ditch, but his vanity and poor mental health won’t let him do it. For that reason, it’ll just be a zombie app.
I think the idea (I don’t say plan, because I think it’s more of a seat-of-the-pants situation) was to first destroy Twitter as a platform for any kind of left wing activism.
Next, make it profitable as a subscription based right wing social media app.
The shit last week was just a rich, fragile narcissist lashing out at his perceived enemies.
If he were a normal person, he would have learned the value of real work (out of necessity) and probably would be a much more grounded person.
I’ll assume that by normal, we’re referring to him not being wealthy. In that regard, I’d disagree. I think he’s a real narcissist, and even if he didn’t have all his wealth he’d still have similar issues, just on a much smaller scale. He wouldn’t have the large audience he currently enjoys, nor all the attention he gets without his money.
In other words, without his money we would just view him as another kook espousing whatever idea he happens to find interesting that day.
I dont think an “everything app” will ever work.
You can make one thing that does one thing very well and better than the competition, and you will get users. Or you can do one thing that will try to do 10 things half assed, and it will fail to impress users. This happens because you have to divert your resources (time, money, people) for development, maintenance, new ideas, design etc. across all your “everythings”. The more everythings you have, the less resources each one gets, however the costs for maintenance, bugfixes, updates etc. stay the same.
This happened to Yahoo in the early 2000s, where it tried to be Search, News portal, Email, Web directory, Weather, games and whathaveyou, however it failed because none of it’s parts was better than the competition.
The better approach for an app would be to do it’s own thing it is supposed to do, but support other apps that can enhance your product by allowing it to interact with outside data, and also give his data back out to other apps: use mailto:links/email instead of inventing your own messaging protocoll, support exporting to standard calendar files instead of implementing your own calendar that is oblivious to the schedule on the users phone. Support exporting datasets into common formats the user knows from his everyday tasks (excel, csv) so he can run his own data analysis on it, instead of baking some half-assed “analytics” module that only has 10% of the features the user needs.
Of course it works. See WeChat in China.
But I doubt it’ll be X that will make it work in the rest of the world.
Of course WeChat dominates china when they ban other apps from even operating. WhatsApp can’t operate there. Facebook is entirely banned in fact. Twitter is blocked as well.
Amazon failed to get a foothold due to complex regulations restricting them, which forces them to shut down their marketplace there.
So you can’t really compare that to a much freer market.
WeChat is an anomaly and not proof of anything. It only works in China because the Chinese government controls who can and can’t operate, and thus can pick winners and losers.
If suddenly everyone with a better take on a service that a theoretical X “everything app” offered couldn’t operate without applying for a license and possibly never getting it or having to find a domestic partner to operate in every country they want to do business in, then yeah this X app would take off, because it would be essentially the only option.
Since that will never happen, then an everything app will never exist outside of countries that exercise end-to-end control. This is also why American tech companies outside of entrenched operating system vendors and hardware companies (think Apple & Microsoft) have a hard time making inroads there. Because if you get too popular and it’s something they can copy, then suddenly the Chinese copy gets all the market advantage and boatloads of funding, and you get shut out.
That is a good example, but as the other commenter pointed out I dont think you can compare weChat with Twitter. Twitter is a startup trying to make money from it’s service. WeChat is a tool for the chinese goverment to track each persons chats, money transactions and purchases, and as such will pretty much receive all the funding it needs. Being profitable is not the main objective of WeChat.
I think it can definitely “work”, in that there will be a small number of people that use it. It won’t dominate any market, but it will exist, and it might even make some money. It’s ultimately a power play, by having an app in every market (video, social, maps, etc) he becomes more entrenched in tech.
It’s not an uncommon model, especially in smaller businesses that do a lot of things with a tiny bit of profit everywhere. With that being said, it requires competent leadership and an aligned team - and with Musk’s visible problems that won’t happen.
