It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I’m not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He’s carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can’t be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
Responsible financially, as agents of the corporation, sure. And I understand why they did it. Morally though (and I would argue civilly) it was wildly irresponsible. Thousands of people lost their jobs, hundreds of people are now forced to work at Elons insane business under threat of deportation if their visa is invalidated, and hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people. The world is a worse place for having let this deal happen. What is responsible financially is often irresponsible in pretty much every other way, and I wish this perspective was represented more.
As a shareholder in a number of other large corporations, I would actively like for buy-outs like this one to fail, even if it would make me a quick buck now, even if that quick buck is a lot. I much prefer stability to major erratic changes, even when they benefit me.
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
Imagine your favourite fancy restaurant suddenly adopts an extreme “Batman” theme. Same food, but just hardcore decorated a la the Dark Knight. You’d probably still go there, but you’d have a different time. And you’d reconsider the types of people you’d bring there, etc.
Brand is far more than the logo in the top corner, and I think marketing textbooks are going to use Twitter -> X as an example of how not to do things.
If you said it was the final nail in the coffin, sure. But for that to be the only reason?? Why??
Are you one of those “my brand truck is better than yours because … bowtie” types?
You are jumping into conclusions. See my other answer here https://lemmy.world/comment/2511227
This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
Tusky is a great app. But it doesn’t seem to have a trending tab, which I use to find cool accounts to follow. For now I use trunks.
Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon (and other federated microblogging platforms) in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
EDIT: Try it yourself! Follow technology@lemmy.world from Mastodon to see what I mean. Although I don’t know that I would stay a follower of a community that large unless I wanted significant impacts on my feed. A smaller, potentially more useful, addition to your feed are things like gardening communities.
