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How Much Longer Can Twitter Last, Really?
- m3kw9 4y agoTwitter will last as long as Elon wants it to, the spend is pretty much know. And it’s a software problem. Sure if they make zero money it’s fail eventually but don’t bet on that
- brucethemoose2 4y agoOption 3: Musk says something particularly offensive and starts an avalanche before these hammers even fall.
- theery 4y agoLikely the most likely
- dragontamer 4y agoI don't think so. There's been a lot of especially stupid things said the last 4 years, and I haven't seen any real backlash to any of it. People like it when rich people say stupid things on the internet. Its how he grows his fanbase.
- brucethemoose2 4y agoI dunno. He may not lose his fanbase, but there is a line where many advertisers will leave, which will make the remaining advertisers antsy and more prone to leave. And this is not unprecedented. See: Kanye West.
- jamestimmins 4y agoAn alternative is that it gets purchased for a few billion dollars by a tech PE firm or Microsoft, which honestly would be a pretty good outcome.
- paxys 4y agoA low single digit billion exit is meaningless for Elon. It things reach that point it'll make more sense for him to just ride it out till the end and file for bankruptcy.
- dragontamer 4y agoEven if you bought Twitter for $0, you're taking on $13 Billion in loans. You'd have to buy Twitter for *negative* dollars, like -$8 Billion (ie: Elon gives $8 Billion to you and Twitter) to "only" buy the company for $5 Billion effective costs. Note: The $13 Billion loan is likely devalued 30%+, so maybe its only worth $9.5 Billion these days. Hard to say exactly, I'm just making some crude assumptions here. The loans may have been backed by several banks, but they aren't trading on the public market yet so its hard to value them.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> An alternative is that it gets purchased for a few billion dollars by a tech PE firm or Microsoft, which honestly would be a pretty good outcome. But with all the potential outstanding liability? Why not wait until the hammer comes down and the uncertainty is gone to purchase the firm, or whatever assets are useful, unless you really want to beat someone else to the punch?
- dragontamer 4y agoI know you know this, but I'm going to elaborate for others. Bankruptcy is the best time to buy companies. The loans will be rewritten, so you can buy the company's assets _WITHOUT_ taking on any of its liabilities. The Twitter name, trademark, and other assets (maybe source code, servers, data-centers, etc. etc.) all will be up for sale. You can likely buy the "bits of Twitter" you care most about, and leave the other bits for others. I have severe doubts that anyone will want to buy Twitter when it has so much debt under its name. Might as well wait for it to collapse first.
- ericbarrett 4y agoTwitter is also under fairly severe consent decrees from both the U.S. and EU. I wonder how those would work if you bought e.g. the trademark?
- kosasbest 4y agoWeird. I can't read this page with or without JavaScript. Can someone copy and paste the article here so people can read what it says?
- pitaj 4y agoYeah that's weird, for some reason they have html { opacity: 0; } Works fine with JS on though.
- thedailymail 4y agoI had the same problem. https://archive.md/8DeJ7 https://archive.md/8DeJ7
- adamrezich 4y agoit seems to be working just fine despite all the layoffs. many of these complaints seem more political than practical. I understand that a set of people exists who are dissatisfied with twitter and/or are eagerly anticipating some grand implosion of the company, but many more people than this set use the platform, so questions like "how much longer can twitter last, really?" come across as having come from a very insulated ideological bubble, rather than taking the entire spectrum of experiences had by twitter users into account.
- wootland 4y agoThere have been constant problems since Musk took over. Just yesterday retweets were showing up in people's feeds without the attribution of who retweeted them, so they looked like random people showing up in your feed.
- adamrezich 4y agoit would be hard to argue that the scope of the issues directly correlates with the scale of the layoffs
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wootland 4y agoThe layoffs are certainly one piece of the puzzle, but the incompetent leadership style of Musk, complete lack of viable strategy and failing financials are also to blame.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- giraffe_lady 4y agoPolitical complaints are practical. The entire thing and every decision is in the hands of someone who has proven himself petty, vindictive, and capricious. Flawed as it was there was at least a process before. What his failed "twitter files" scandal did reveal was that it was previously run by people who may have been in some ways wrong or incompetent, but at least were generally operating with a sense of professional responsibility. Musk actively flouts professional responsibility & ethics, which is strictly worse with a large scale international social media platform.
- smeeth 4y agoA meta comment: since Elon’s takeover there has been an astounding volume of Twitter doom wishcasting. Almost none of these predictions have come true, and while I suppose they may eventually, the posts/articles getting increasingly difficult to pay attention to. Every time I see another of these my reaction is “god, another one?” I’ve been struggling to evaluate these articles on the merits, I’m sure I’m not alone. If you want to write an article like this and avoid this problem I recommend that you take extreme care to at least pretend Elon failing wouldn’t give you profound schadenfreude.
- dragontamer 4y ago> Almost none of these predictions have come true There's only one prediction that really matters in my eyes: the prediction that Elon would win the October 2022 court case and somehow get out of his contractual agreement to buy Twitter. Can the future be predicted? Ehh, probably not. But the thing that has held up time-and-time again is legal, contractual obligations. 1. Elon Musk is terrible at understanding contracts. 2. Because of #1, Elon Musk breaks contracts on a regular basis. 3. In some cases, Elon Musk gets sued, it takes months (or even a year+) for the courts to address these contracts, and Elon eventually gets his ass kicked in court. #3 has the most uncertainty. But... Elon has been breaking contracts with such vigor this past year (including his attempts to "not buy Twitter", among others), that I'm willing to bet that he's going to make the same mistake again, and again, and again. ---------- Haraldur Thorliefsson and the FTC case are both similar events to the October 2022 court case in my eyes. They seem to have solid foundation of law. They seem to have been ignored by Elon Musk, and finally, there seems to be court action going on. I don't know how long the court action will take, but I'm willing to bet against Elon Musk on this one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- smotched 4y agoNone of those are/were predictions...
- OscarCunningham 4y agoThere is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
- exabrial 4y agoCan someone succinctly and definitively explain why everyone wants Twitter to fail? It's a beat to death news headline at this point.
- cubefox 4y agoJournalists dislike Musk, so they write articles biased against him, so most everyone dislikes Musk, including Twitter.
- s4n1ty 4y ago[dead]
- adamrezich 4y ago"I don't like Elon Musk and it frustrates me that he managed to purchase Twitter even though everyone in my bubble told me it wouldn't happen and/or that the process of doing so would bankrupt him, and neither of those things ended up happening" optionally, additionally: "also I liked Twitter better when only celebrities and friends of people who worked at Twitter could be Verified, because I was one of those friends, and I was Verified just like the celebrities, but the unwashed masses weren't, and that made me feel important and good about myself, and now that said unwashed masses can pay a nominal fee to become Verified, and Twitter is phasing out the older, unpaid Verified accounts, I'm going to take my ball and leave, because feeling more important than most people was a chief reason for me to use the platform to begin with. now come join me in moving over to $NEW_SOCIAL_FEED_APP and follow me there—where, you'll notice, my profile once again has an exclusive Verified badge of some sort, setting me apart from you, the unwashed masses."
- giraffe_lady 4y agoI don't like elon musk and I do think it is bad that a rich person can buy an entire platform widely used for public discussion because they don't like how it's being used. You're having fun mocking it but I don't think there's anything particularly inconsistent or outrageous about this position. Musk is annoying and hangs out with shitty annoying people, now shitty annoying people are more prevalent on twitter. The changes he's made to timeline, presentation, letting the white nationalists back on make it actively worse for me, in ways it wasn't before. None of these are preposterous preferences my man.
- pipeline_peak 4y agoLonger than these long winded hate blogs…
- pomsense 4y agoAll these doomers don't realize the power of network effects.
- rsynnott 4y agoI mean, define 'last'. Myspace.com still goes, well, somewhere.
- sxvtemp 4y agoTwitter faces two major financial threats: pending employment lawsuits and massive fines from regulatory violations. On top of this, the platform's recent efforts to limit API usage have negatively affected both regular users and SaaS products that rely on Twitter analytics. With these mounting challenges, the company's survival is increasingly uncertain, and some are predicting bankruptcy as a potential outcome. The long-term impact of these developments remains to be seen.