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Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted

Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount. It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.

dragontamer 3y ago
> It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021. The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company. You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before. I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down. So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story. But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.
- blisterpeanuts 3y ago
  Twitter has never been a hugely profitable business. They lost quite a lot of money in 2021-22, though 2022 had a fairly profitable couple of quarters prior to the acquisition. Musk made a leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt, true. But that's not really related to operating profit. It's a liability, true. Unfortunately he bought at the peak of the market; had he waited 3-4 months, could have paid a lot less, & thus leveraged less. As I understand it, he signed a contract and then was under obligation to complete the buyout, and Twitter forced him to comply under threat of a lawsuit in Delaware court. It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. Be that as it may, he's treating this like his other companies, where he and his team were able to innovate and iterate until they became profitable. It happened with SpaceX and Tesla, at least. I have a lot of confidence in a man with this kind of track record. Listen to his interview with Tucker Carlson, on youtube. He lays out the problems and promises of Twitter. Exciting times ahead.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    > It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. The Twitter shareholders forced Elon Musk to create a $13 Billion loan to buy Twitter? That's a pretty nuts take, ya know? The deal was designed by Elon Musk. If market conditions change between March and October, that's not Twitter shareholder's fault, that's Elon Musk's fault for failing to see how the economy would shift. Once Musk signed the paper in April, it was over. The company was his, no matter how much he tried to squirm or get out of it. To think otherwise is to treat him as some kind of idiot who is incapable of accepting deals or making decisions for himself.

dragontamer 3y ago

> It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021. The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company. You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before. I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down. So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story. But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.

blisterpeanuts 3y ago
Twitter has never been a hugely profitable business. They lost quite a lot of money in 2021-22, though 2022 had a fairly profitable couple of quarters prior to the acquisition. Musk made a leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt, true. But that's not really related to operating profit. It's a liability, true. Unfortunately he bought at the peak of the market; had he waited 3-4 months, could have paid a lot less, & thus leveraged less. As I understand it, he signed a contract and then was under obligation to complete the buyout, and Twitter forced him to comply under threat of a lawsuit in Delaware court. It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. Be that as it may, he's treating this like his other companies, where he and his team were able to innovate and iterate until they became profitable. It happened with SpaceX and Tesla, at least. I have a lot of confidence in a man with this kind of track record. Listen to his interview with Tucker Carlson, on youtube. He lays out the problems and promises of Twitter. Exciting times ahead.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  > It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. The Twitter shareholders forced Elon Musk to create a $13 Billion loan to buy Twitter? That's a pretty nuts take, ya know? The deal was designed by Elon Musk. If market conditions change between March and October, that's not Twitter shareholder's fault, that's Elon Musk's fault for failing to see how the economy would shift. Once Musk signed the paper in April, it was over. The company was his, no matter how much he tried to squirm or get out of it. To think otherwise is to treat him as some kind of idiot who is incapable of accepting deals or making decisions for himself.