7 ms·

Fear mongering by left wing media to discredit musk. Who did make a mistake in the price he paid, but will sell a part of spacex to finance Twitter. The company

Fear mongering by left wing media to discredit musk. Who did make a mistake in the price he paid, but will sell a part of spacex to finance Twitter. The company is fine, and needs cuts. This is not that different from what private equity companies do on a monthly basis

lapcat 4y ago
> This is not that different from what private equity companies do on a monthly basis Private equity has financially destroyed a lot of companies. Leveraged buyouts are not exactly a great way to make a company healthy and profitable.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  And built up a ton as well. The trendy thing's been buying up old fashion brands and doing a bunch of product and marketing work - Canada Goose jackets being a thing that everyone and their mom has to wear is a good example of that.
  - lapcat 4y ago
    That situation is a bit different, because it was a private company that was acquired and then IPOed, which brought in a large amount of new capital. Whereas Twitter was the opposite: it was already publicly traded and then went private. So there was no new capital. Instead, we see a ton of cutbacks.
    - pxmpxm 4y ago
      They IPOd in 2017, where as Bain (IIRC) started that marketing+product thing a bunch of years earlier. Out of nowhere everyone on any big budget movie production was wearing a jacket with a canada goose logo.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        The point is that the IPO was the payoff in the end that made the investment worth it. Musk is not infusing capital, he's cut-cut-cutting to the bone. What's the endgame? At what point does Twitter become more valuable than the day he bought it at $44 billion?
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I consciously avoid any product that comes from a private equity owned company because I assume it will be the cheapest crap they will be able to get on the shelf without it actually falling apart before you get it out the door. To be fair, fashion products which are ephemeral by nature might actually be a good fit for that. But as someone who's been on the receiving end of a private equity buyout, I want no part of that ever again.
ulfw 4y ago
Is this what America has become? Every single anything of everything is "left wing" "right wing"?
- fullshark 4y ago
  Not America, but online discussion.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Seems that way when watching from up here in Canada. Like somehow that country's intense obsession with football/team sports has taken over public discourse. And it's infecting discourse up here, too. It's awful reading comments sections. My team vs your team but framed around these ridiculous mis-characterized bundles of other people's opinions. ... Meanwhile there is practically no "left wing" in the United States mainstream... and hasn't been for a long time. Identity politics and cultural liberalism, sure. Stuff around the margins. Actual redistributive economics, unions, and worker's power? Not since Clinton. How stuff like the NYT or CNN got reframed by people as "left wing" is beyond me. If there's a concerted press attack on Musk, it's not by the "left wing"; it's by one wing of the established business class in the United States vs another. The fights around Trump are similar. Competing economic interests, areas of control, which are framed in the public mind as being about "left wing" vs "right wing" ideological issues, but in reality these are only tangential.
  - zdragnar 4y ago
    Pretty much all the "public discourse" you're seeing is a tiny bubble. Day to day life for the vast majority of people here is unchanged. As for your second point, you're playing a no true Scotsman game where the only real liberal is hyper focused on money. Identity politics has almost wholly consumed the attention of the American left. Even during a press announcement of a bill to legalize marijuana in MN, a good portion of the talk was about racial justice. CNN has recently sacked a number of people or cancelled shows to get away from the blatantly partisan content they were producing. The NYT has had a number of controversies recently over internal fights among editors and staff that their coverage wasn't biased enough. Meanwhile, redistributive economics marches on in the background. Trillions given out to everyone and anyone, plus long extensions of unemployment payouts during COVID. Municipalities playing with "UBI" schemes which are targeted at minority groups like BIPOC or gender non-conforming individuals. Union support is generally unpopular outside of some groups, because unions have some powers here that would be illegal in most other Western countries, and that gets abused. Of all of the "left wing" positions, expanding unions is probably the lowest priority for that reason. I'll bring it up every time the topic comes up, because it truly is that important: the SEIU tried to take money from government benefits paid to mentally or physically disabled people in MN, and if I'm not mistaken, they are doing so in other states. Unions in the US are not what people in other countries expect when they wonder why American union participation is so low.

lapcat 4y ago

> This is not that different from what private equity companies do on a monthly basis Private equity has financially destroyed a lot of companies. Leveraged buyouts are not exactly a great way to make a company healthy and profitable.

pxmpxm 4y ago
And built up a ton as well. The trendy thing's been buying up old fashion brands and doing a bunch of product and marketing work - Canada Goose jackets being a thing that everyone and their mom has to wear is a good example of that.
- lapcat 4y ago
  That situation is a bit different, because it was a private company that was acquired and then IPOed, which brought in a large amount of new capital. Whereas Twitter was the opposite: it was already publicly traded and then went private. So there was no new capital. Instead, we see a ton of cutbacks.
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    They IPOd in 2017, where as Bain (IIRC) started that marketing+product thing a bunch of years earlier. Out of nowhere everyone on any big budget movie production was wearing a jacket with a canada goose logo.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      The point is that the IPO was the payoff in the end that made the investment worth it. Musk is not infusing capital, he's cut-cut-cutting to the bone. What's the endgame? At what point does Twitter become more valuable than the day he bought it at $44 billion?
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I consciously avoid any product that comes from a private equity owned company because I assume it will be the cheapest crap they will be able to get on the shelf without it actually falling apart before you get it out the door. To be fair, fashion products which are ephemeral by nature might actually be a good fit for that. But as someone who's been on the receiving end of a private equity buyout, I want no part of that ever again.

ulfw 4y ago

Is this what America has become? Every single anything of everything is "left wing" "right wing"?

fullshark 4y ago
Not America, but online discussion.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
Seems that way when watching from up here in Canada. Like somehow that country's intense obsession with football/team sports has taken over public discourse. And it's infecting discourse up here, too. It's awful reading comments sections. My team vs your team but framed around these ridiculous mis-characterized bundles of other people's opinions. ... Meanwhile there is practically no "left wing" in the United States mainstream... and hasn't been for a long time. Identity politics and cultural liberalism, sure. Stuff around the margins. Actual redistributive economics, unions, and worker's power? Not since Clinton. How stuff like the NYT or CNN got reframed by people as "left wing" is beyond me. If there's a concerted press attack on Musk, it's not by the "left wing"; it's by one wing of the established business class in the United States vs another. The fights around Trump are similar. Competing economic interests, areas of control, which are framed in the public mind as being about "left wing" vs "right wing" ideological issues, but in reality these are only tangential.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  Pretty much all the "public discourse" you're seeing is a tiny bubble. Day to day life for the vast majority of people here is unchanged. As for your second point, you're playing a no true Scotsman game where the only real liberal is hyper focused on money. Identity politics has almost wholly consumed the attention of the American left. Even during a press announcement of a bill to legalize marijuana in MN, a good portion of the talk was about racial justice. CNN has recently sacked a number of people or cancelled shows to get away from the blatantly partisan content they were producing. The NYT has had a number of controversies recently over internal fights among editors and staff that their coverage wasn't biased enough. Meanwhile, redistributive economics marches on in the background. Trillions given out to everyone and anyone, plus long extensions of unemployment payouts during COVID. Municipalities playing with "UBI" schemes which are targeted at minority groups like BIPOC or gender non-conforming individuals. Union support is generally unpopular outside of some groups, because unions have some powers here that would be illegal in most other Western countries, and that gets abused. Of all of the "left wing" positions, expanding unions is probably the lowest priority for that reason. I'll bring it up every time the topic comes up, because it truly is that important: the SEIU tried to take money from government benefits paid to mentally or physically disabled people in MN, and if I'm not mistaken, they are doing so in other states. Unions in the US are not what people in other countries expect when they wonder why American union participation is so low.