18 ms·

Personally, I think Musk is having a bit of a laugh. This will never happen. * Twitter operating income for 12 m/e 31 Dec 2021 was negative. For the q/e 31 Dec

• hunterb123 4y ago
  He's said time and time again it's not about the economics. It's hard to put a price on the propaganda machine and it's network effect. It's not really about making money with Twitter. - edit - @McLaren_Ferrari: I disagree it's a misguided purchase, it makes sense to me from his stated goals. But maybe you can sell the world's richest man your financial consultant nightclub analogy and save everyone.
  • golemotron 4y ago
    I think it's very interesting that the subtext is that no one believes he will run Twitter at a loss; it's not his nature. If making Twitter better while making money is possible, Elon's the one who could do it.
    • jollybean 4y ago
      He can make Twitter worth more, while using it as his personal soapbox. It's actually rational.
  • McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago
    Then it's once again a misguided purchase. Trump didn't own any media back in 2015-2016. He won because he sucked the air out of the room by making hyperbolic statements and riffing off the huge news cycle generated by his hyperbolic statements. A good and effective PR team and a charismatic deliver is all you need and it comes for much less than 40B. This is what kids learn in nightclubs fairly early: if you want to command the club you want to be a DJ. Owning the club will leave you with both a huge hole in your pocket and in the shadow of the DJ every given Friday. The answer to Musk "problems" is to become a good public speaker and work on his in person social game, not monopolizing an online platform on which he has by far the biggest account already. Pushing on a string that's what it is. That's about the only thing he can do to expand his virality, owning the platform is kinda redundant. Real life still happens offline (thankfully)
    • zippy5 4y ago
      But what if the DJ convinces his audience to invest in a much larger and more expensive night club at an extraordinary premium. Then it might make sense to buy the original night club just to protect the DJ’s scheme. My math is that Musk’s twitter activity very reasonably increased Tesla’s market cap by more than 5% which is what he is offering to pay.
      • McLaren_Ferrari 4y ago
        I don't think Twitter is special. Going back to Trump I think that he going quiet after losing was not an effect of him being banned from Twitter as much as it was about the post defeat depression, mixed with fear of retribution for Jan. 6th now that he was out of office and also a part of him wanting to be Presidential and not critique his successor. There are no rules in Twitter that prevent Musk from engaging in Pumps&Dumps so he'd have to do something Trump-esque to be banned. Spending 40B to secure the capability of inciting violence and unlike Trump avoid getting banned seems way out of whack. Besides inciting violence doesn't pump a stock.
• padobson 4y ago
  "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper." - Citizen Kane
  • jll29 4y ago
    "I think it would be fun to own a newspaper." - Jeff Bezos (Goes and buys The Washington Post)
• 01100011 4y ago
  • spiderice 4y ago
    > this assumes Musk is acting rationally No.. it assumes Musk is only trying to maximize his net worth with this move, which is a ridiculous assumption.
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    At the point where he's at, what exactly is rational? It's all up to what he wants to achieve. Money is not the end goal for anyone. It's what you want to do with the money. What does he want to do? Only he knows but my guess is influencing the world towards what he believes is better. Twitter seems like a interesting tool for that.
  • programmarchy 4y ago
    • hackerfromthefu 4y ago
      If I was drinking coffee I'd need a new keyboard.
• toomuchtodo 4y ago
  “What is the point of fuck you money if you don’t get to say fuck you?” is the turn of phrase I believe. (Or in the case of Musk, meme lord when you’re not on the factory/star base floor) Wealth has diminishing returns; he’s just trying to get more value for his exceptional personal wealth (and remember, he plans on dying on Mars, he’s playing a different game than typical billionaires). Status is his drug of choice, Twitter his platform. If you crave validation (Biden admin not mentioning him until recently, people buying ads in time square “say their [Tesla] name”), buy it if it isn’t given freely. (observations as someone with years of therapy and a scholar of the human psyche)
  • username_my1 4y ago
    It's not really about that alone. Musk have a case against him by the SEC (tweeting about taking tesla private), it seems like they can win it, and he might be forced to stop using twitter. Now I can imagine it hard for the SEC to enforce such a role if it's his private company. So in a sense he's using that money to secure his best tool to marketing / growth which is definitely worth 50Bn$ for tesla alone (then add all his other ventures now and in the future)
    • onelovetwo 4y ago
      He addresses the SEC thing here: https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM?t=1635 https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM?t=1635
    • VectorLock 4y ago
      >he might be forced to stop using twitter Just like last time.
    • dwighttk 4y ago
      Is the SEC upset about Elon’s tweeting or making public statements that happen to occur on Twitter?
      • elliekelly 4y ago
        It was definitely his false and misleading statements that were the problem.
• memish 4y ago
  I would spend 15% of my net worth on free speech. Wouldn't you? A lot of people downvoting, so I'll expand; It's fair to give the benefit of the doubt given that Tesla is helping combat climate change and SpaceX is about becoming multi-planetary. These are civilization level problems and solutions. The idea is to make twitter a TRUSTED public square. He suggests open sourcing the algorithm and making all moderation actions visible to the public. Makes sense as transparency is needed to rebuild trust in the platform.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    Everyone agrees that "free speech" should have limits (e.g, not be free) but nobody agrees on where those limits are.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • nradov 4y ago
      The majority of US citizens agree with the very narrow limits on free speech defined by the Supreme Court. Only a fringe minority want much stricter limits, or no limits at all. Twitter could potentially align their content policy to match US law and stop censoring legal content, although that would make it less valuable to some advertisers.
      • jeremyjh 4y ago
        We already have that, it’s called 4chan.
        • robonerd 4y ago
          Not really, most of 4chan is moderated (albeit inconsistently and often capriciously.) I think the defining characteristics of 4chan are anonymity (from other users anyway, with some caveats) and the culture/reputation of the website.
      • 4y ago
• s_dev 4y ago
  I'm just afraid he's gonna let Trump back on and start the gear up for 2024 and continue that craziness in the US of what I though was settled in 2020. Some things are actually more important than money -- Twitter can offer enormous power in setting a national narrative even if little economic benefit for Musk.
  • ralusek 4y ago
    In what possible universe would you think that any craziness in the US settled in 2020?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • hunterb123 4y ago
    • Angostura 4y ago
      Because Jan 6 was completely normal.
      • dontcare007 4y ago
        Well, when you take a look at the other riots happening around that time, Jan 6th was 'mostly peaceful'
        • weakfish 4y ago
          Whataboutism is a logical fallacy and doesn’t address the argument at hand
          • evandale 4y ago
            Isn't this whole thread whataboutism? The claim is the world will go back being as crazy as it was in 2020 (but OP gave a 2021 example) if Trump was let back on Twitter. The counterargument was that the example given was actually in 2021, and the given example of crazy (Jan 6 2021) was less crazy than 2020 (BLM protests).
• boringg 4y ago
  The twitter buy isn't about money its about power. Money is only a proxy for power. Controlling the largest distribution source of worldwide news is a pure power play.
  • user_named 4y ago
    Weibo is bigger. Wechat too.
    • tsimionescu 4y ago
      Good luck buying wechat as someone without Chinese citizenship.
      • FerociousTimes 4y ago
        Good luck buying WeChat without the proper connections to the ruling class in China in the first place.
    • reaperducer 4y ago
      How much global news comes out of either of those? That's the point of the parent comment. Weido and Wechat may have more users, but they aren't newsmakers. Just like there's more people at a Def Leppard concert than in the White House, but the White House makes news.
      • user_named 4y ago
        They're not news makers? Yes they are.
    • danso 4y ago
      Facebook is also far far bigger than Twitter. Yet Elon is content with ignoring it, and so was Trump (who is suspended into 2023 [0]) [0] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1003284948/trump-suspended-from-facebook-for-2-years https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1003284948/trump-suspended-fr...
• markus_zhang 4y ago
  Twitter is a weapon. its economic condition is only secondary in consideration IMHO.
  • bobobob420 4y ago
    Twitter is not a weapon. Most of the world does not give a hoot about anything that is going on twitter. You might get some new come up in celebrity gossip but that's really about it
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • mcguire 4y ago
      The period between the Arab Spring and Jan, 2021, seems to argue otherwise, no?
    • DevKoala 4y ago
      It does matter. A lot of people live in a bubble in which Twitter’s loudest voices are a reflection of the “common sense”. That is why so many governments monitor it.
    • robonerd 4y ago
      Most people in the world don't have subscriptions to the NYTimes, but the influence of that newspaper seems undeniable. Percentage of the global population paying attention seems like a poor measure of influence, not least because actual influence is not fairly distributed through the global populations. Influence over 100 US senators counts for much more than influence over 100 US plumbers.
    • 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 4y ago
      > Most of the world does not give a hoot Correct, but journalists, politicians and companies do, which is all it needs. Twitter has been way more influential than it deserves to be for a while now.
  • aNoob7000 4y ago
• bko 4y ago
  There's no reason Twitter can't hypothetically make a lot of money. > While Twitter does not report its average revenue per user, one independent analyst pegged Twitter’s ARPU at about $17 in 2020, around one third of Facebook’s. Twitter is being mismanaged or at least not living up to the theoretical potential when compared to its peers. It might never get to facebook ARPU levels, but it can approach it https://digiday.com/media/the-rundown-twitter-bets-on-long-form-content-in-its-first-subscription-play-with-twitter-blue/ https://digiday.com/media/the-rundown-twitter-bets-on-long-f...
  • bombcar 4y ago
    It's also possible that Twitter could easily make money and the company is intentionally avoiding that, for tax purposes or whatever. If you are holding yourself out as a growth company but also paying dividends, it creates a mixed message, because if you are growing shouldn't the money be better spent on growth than just giving it back to the shareholders?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • zwily 4y ago
      Twitter is not a growth company by any metric: Users, revenue, or stock price. If they could easily generate lots of revenue right now with their current management, they absolutely would already be doing it.
      • cj 4y ago
        If Twitter is losing $180 million per year, and they have 7500 employees, and each employee costs on average $100k [0] fully loaded ($750mm/yr), you could become profitable by reducing your payroll by 50% (laying off half their employees). My guess is layoffs aren’t considered as an option since it would signal that they’re throwing in the towel and don’t believe in their own growth trajectory. [0] Average salary here is a conservative guess
• ekianjo 4y ago
  > Twitter operating income for 12 m/e 31 Dec 2021 was negative. Twitter is a lever to all the journalistic organizations on Earth. Its impact is not measured by its operating income.
• reaperducer 4y ago
  Twitter operating income for 12 m/e 31 Dec 2021 was negative. The operating income of a superyacht is also negative. But billionaires keep buying them. Some people get to a point in their lives where the numbers no longer matter. To its shareholders, Twitter is a business. To someone who can buy Twitter, it's a hobby.
• imchillyb 4y ago
  Purchases like Twitter aren't about a return on investment. Purchase like Twitter are to seize the platform; period. Dissenting opinions, and bans, then become whatever the owner of the platform desires. How do people not see the actual value of Twitter, which goes well beyond money.
• BbzzbB 4y ago
  Thinking what would Buffett do in this situation is relevant misunderstands (tho perhaps just tongue-in-cheek) both Buffett's managerial and investing approach as well as Musk's.
• mrtnmcc 4y ago
  I suspect Elon wants Twitter data to train an AI/GPT-3. Also if you look at how he uses Twitter, he believes in the tweet resonance idea of being able to signal certain group or individuals with memes. He thinks that may be a key element in the future of human collective consciousness.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Warren Buffett was never going to make Tesla and SpaceX what they are so I don’t see the relevance of the comparison.
• fundad 4y ago
  If I got to skate on securities fraud over and over I'd be rolling around on the floor pissing myself with laughter too.
• gfodor 4y ago
  It’s funny that Musk explains specifically why he is doing this - just like he always does - but people are so deeply cynical they don’t even realize they are ignoring it and coming up with more Machiavellian explanations.
  • shafyy 4y ago
    Exactly. There are a lot of things to critize about Musk - but it's also undeniable that he has done very impressive and useful things. Lately, dunking on his every move has become somewhat of a folk's sport (or easy clicks for "journalists").
  • Hasu 4y ago
    Probably because "just like he always does", he is probably lying. He lies quite a lot about his business intentions and reasoning. It's not surprising that people don't trust him and wonder what the real reason is, since no one believes the reason he's giving (other than uncritical Musk fanboys).
    • awestroke 4y ago
      Do you have any examples?
      • Hasu 4y ago
        "I think we will be ‘feature-complete’ on full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I am certain of that. That is not a question mark." - Elon Musk in 2019 Lie. Full self-driving is not feature complete in 2022, and won't be for years. "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." - Elon Musk in 2018 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776 Lie. Funding was not secured. Musk is still doubling down on this one. There was an incident where the EPA gave the Model S a range of 391 miles, and Musk got upset and claimed the left the key in the ignition overnight, which the EPA denies. Musk provides no evidence, but neither does the EPA, so I guess this one is "Makes weird claim contradicting a government agency that has no reason to lie", but I am inclined to believe the EPA over Musk. (https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244556/elon-musk-lie-epa-tesla-model-s-range-miles-mistake-door https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244556/elon-musk-lie-epa...) These are a small sampling of examples, you can look at Musk's statements over time about Tesla, the Hyperloop, and his future intentions regarding the various bizarre whims he adopts monthly, and there's tons of stuff where exaggerates and overstates, but also plenty where he straight up lies and completely misrepresents the truth. Particularly with anything Tesla related, he's actually more straight up about SpaceX capabilities, for whatever reason.
• aeyes 4y ago
  I don't think Musk is the guy that cares about making more money with a business. 20 years ago anybody would have told you that the odds of being successful starting an electric car company or a rocket company are 0. With Twitter all he seems to care about is the idea, the name, the userbase and some of the technology. I don't think turning $45b into $100b is a top priority, there are easier ways doing that.
  • rsync 4y ago
    The technology ? What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.
    • jll29 4y ago
      It's less about the number of lines of code to replace/replicate it, more about the existing user base size & the fact that Twitter is _the_ place where conversations about any topic happen these days. The world being as unpredictable as it is, the conversation may also move to another medium tomorrow.
    • dkislyuk 4y ago
      Obligatory _Sounds Easy_: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ Doing anything on Twitter scale has significant technical challenges.
    • VirusNewbie 4y ago
      I can't think of better way to diminish one's own technical skills than to make a claim that twitter is '60 lines of perl'. Let's see, let's even take one tiny component of twitter, realtime push notifications across a distributed system, can you do that in 60 lines of perl?
    • JoshCole 4y ago
      > If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl. If you remove ads and surveillance Twitter isn't 60 lines of Perl. Just their frontend, without even getting into problems of scale, is already much heavier than sixty lines. It also happens to have been an influential technology export [1]. You can find more than sixty projects, not just sixty lines of Perl, open sourced by Twitter. While some of them are related to ad tracking and surveillance not all of them are [2]. Although I haven't checked, I would be shocked if any of them are below sixty lines. The idea that modern tech companies can be replaced with sixty lines of code is exceedingly naive. There are certain problems that naturally come up at scale like the regular failure of hardware, hot users, persistent dedicated attacks by intelligent malicious actors, and regulatory requirements around data handling which, even taken alone rather than together, demand more than sixty lines of code to adequately address. Twitter may be simple in theory, but you are quite clearly provoking a straw man conception of the value of Twitter's technology. If you weren't, you wouldn't need to lie or exaggerate to the point of absurdity. [1]: https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ [2]: https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/ > What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology? The person you are responding to is largely repeating first-party accounts of motivation - Elon says he believes that producing greater transparency in algorithmic moderation and active moderation at Twitter, understood as a technology owned by Twitter, is a core ideologically rooted reason for the takeover. You can get this first party account of motivation by listening to the TED interview with Elon Musk which covers the topic of why he feels Twitter should be taken private and why he feels it would benefit from having its moderation practices be incredibly transparent to the point of open sourcing the entirety of Twitter and making their moderation process public.
• etempleton 4y ago
  He made an offer in modest excess of the book value for a company that is probably overvalued to begin with. He knows this. The board knows this. Every investor with half a brain knows this. It makes it impossible for the board to say no without having a good reason. They have a fiduciary duty to examine the offer and determine if it is best for shareholders to cash out at this price. And the answer to that is it probably is because Twitter has never had a good path to long term profitability. So yes, he is having a laugh. I am sure if they agree he will find the money. He just doesn’t care. He sees a poorly run company that is making decisions against his freedom of speech ethos. It is an easy target.
  • jayd16 4y ago
    This freedom of speech angle is such a crock. How is the world richest man setting the rules of discourse on someone else's platform freedom? It's akin to buying your way into the opinion section of every newspaper if not in magnitude, certainly in direction. If he really cared about freedom, he'd just make a new platform with the $54B. But it's not about that. At best it's a laugh, at worst it's about control.
    • status200 4y ago
      He believes in freedom of speech until someone tracks his jet, then he is more than ready to use his wealth to pressure them into silence.
      • kjksf 4y ago
        How do you equate "freedom of speech" with "publishing Musk's physical location in real time" ? In general we have laws against tracking individuals. What he does seems legal but it doesn't make it good or ethical. FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time. It's a legitimate security risk for those planes and people who use them. It's an abuse of the system.
        • undersuit 4y ago
• qualudeheart 4y ago
  He wants Twitter as a media asset. Twitter is the new public square. Controlling it means power.
  • chroma 4y ago
    He wants to control the new public square by... not banning as many people?
    • qualudeheart 4y ago
      Yes. I don’t think this is the gotcha you’re treating it as.
      • chroma 4y ago
        I think it’s a legitimate point. If something is a public square, banning certain viewpoints from it is a huge deal. Either Twitter is a private company and they can ban whoever they want for whatever reasons they want, or they’re a public square and we need to make sure that everyone can read the tweets they want to read. I’m fine with either option, but I’d prefer a little less hypocrisy from everyone who praised Twitter when they banned certain accounts. You can still follow terrorist groups on Twitter but the previous US president is banned. That is insane, and I don’t care how many people disagree with that statement. It’s still true.
        • qualudeheart 4y ago
          I’m not anti free speech.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  musk buying twitter is not like throwing money into an incinerator So if the stock price stays above $50 he has not lost any money
• puffoflogic 4y ago
  I agree it won't happen, but not because Musk isn't serious. This filing is dated April 20. It is a holy day for Musk — that's not a joke, only an exaggeration. I think we can take as a given that anything Elon Musk does on 4/20 which is serious on the face of it, is serious absolutely.
• shreyshnaccount 4y ago
  Whoever controls the largest online space where people talk practically own the next election-
• drc500free 4y ago
  Twitter and WaPo are the things you spend the money you've made on, not the things that make you money.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  If he was simply a finance guy, then yes, it wouldn't make sense. However he is into multiple businesses that are deeply embedded with politics and governments. Electric cars, space program contracts, telecommunications - all need the right kind of governments to succeed. Twitter has shown to have large effect in politics, it makes quite a bit of sense to own and control that thing if you like to own and control the government. If his motives are purer, it also makes sense to try to improve the society with a portion of your wealth. You don't have to donate your money to the cancer society, you can engage in philanthropy through building something good instead.
  • rland 4y ago
    I mean, arguably, most of the valuation of his companies are dependent almost entirely on his presence on social media -- Twitter being an essential piece of that. I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6. Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks. Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM. Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself! This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple: 1. Be Elon Musk 2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter 3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture; 4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible; 5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture. 6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)! If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.
• djtriptych 4y ago
  He has 250 billion. He can afford a 20-40 billion dollar laugh once or twice.
• soheil 4y ago
  > Why he thinks Twitter is worth $45b is beyond me. It may be beyond you, are you also saying it's beyond all Twitter's investors too? Have you asked them?
  • kjksf 4y ago
    We don't have to. By generally accepted rules of engagement the totality of investors think that Twitter is worth 30% less than what Musk is offering. That's the difference between Twitter's market cap and Musk's very tender offer. There's no better way of asking investors how much they value a stock than by allowing them to bid in an open market.
    • soheil 4y ago
      I see I thought that was the market cap.
• chaostheory 4y ago
  > Personally, I think Musk is having a bit of a laugh. He's definitely demonstrating how toothless the SEC is. It's just good at empty threats. I'm not sure what the bigger joke is: the SEC or the financial industry's multiple private watchdog corporations like FINRA which masquerade as public regulatory bodies.
• Teandw 4y ago
  All that shows is that you don't have the slightest idea on how companies are valued?
• kromem 4y ago
  Everyone talking about "free speech" is buying the spin hook line and sinker. Anyone remember the Musk tweet about how his AI is so much better than anyone in the market realizes? Did no one notice that this is all happening within a month or so after Twitter added a dislike button? Would both positive and negative sentiment data for one of the largest under-monetized repositories of social data have any value to an eccentric billionaire with some major AI R&D focus? He's not buying Twitter to defend the first amendment. He wants the data for his AI stuff. That's just not nearly as popular a PR slant.