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For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later
by martin-adams 3y ago
For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back.
He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.
I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.
- jkaptur 3y agoSure, everyone wants to be "WeChat for the rest of the world", but even WeChat hasn't really made progress in pulling it off.
- datavirtue 3y agoSo do that instead of bike shedding the logo.
- catgary 3y agoAt this point it seems like he’s dismantling Twitter on purpose. I can understand why the Saudis who lent him money would want it gone after the Arab spring.
- dualboot 3y agoThis. Twitter has been the bane of billionaires, aspiring billionaires, and corrupt nation-states for a long time now.
- azornathogron 3y agoReally? Why? What problems does Twitter cause for them?
- pookha 3y agoYet it's been a god-send for nation-state authoritarians in the US.
- simbolit 3y agoPlease give some concrete examples (which aren't a decade old) of twitter being the bane of billionaires and corrupt nation states, that would help a lot. For now my only reaction to your comment is 'huh?'
- HWR_14 3y agoAre there even examples from a decade ago?
- simbolit 3y agobelow someone predictably mentioned the Arab Spring. Not sure if that even counts, but that was the reason for my restriction.
- ipaddr 3y agoSearch for: Leader of Turkey censorship twitter
- malermeister 3y agohttps://thehill.com/policy/technology/4019109-twitters-turkey-election-sparks-criticism/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4019109-twitters-turke... This was after he took over. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri... This was before.
- adamckay 3y agoElon himself didn't like that an account was tweeting the location of his private jet, generating bad publicity, going so far as paying for the owner of the account to stop. Trivial, yes, but does show how it can be an annoyance even through simple things.
- simbolit 3y agoThat is indeed trivial. And it was the best idea I had before asking my question. But I though it was too trivial to even mention.
- smcl 3y agoI could understand this if it was acquired and then heavily censored or monitored. Or if something more obviously destructive was done. But if this is all part of a plan to ruin twitter, it relies on having an egotistical person very publicly take an enormous "L" and everyone involved keeping quiet about it. I'm still going with Elon biting off a bit more than he could chew.
- artsytrashcan 3y ago>I could understand this if it was acquired and then heavily censored This has happened. Impression count has been decimated for anyone without a check. Bonus points if you've ever blocked Elon or posted with a sentiment he disagrees with.
- smcl 3y agoWait the suggestion is that billionaires/powerful people bought Twitter for nefarious purposes. Is it not worth more intact but surveilled and censored than utterly sabotaged with Elon graciously taking one for the team? I’m not convinced, this is a bit complex, conspiratorial and nonsensical for me. When the simpler explanation is that Elon has just mismanaged the company.
- artsytrashcan 3y agoThe answer to that is simple: it was worth more to them destroyed than as an intelligence asset.
- smcl 3y agot h e m
- artsytrashcan 3y ago*Elon and whoever he owes favors to and/or is influenced by. (Owing favors and being influenced by others is a normal human person trait thing.)
- HWR_14 3y agoThe Arab Spring, you mean a decade ago? In any case, they would rather have a tool they can control (just get Twitter to shadowban tweets about democracy) that their population uses seems better than a void.
- thesimp 3y agoNo the arab spring that is coming soon. Remember why it was there: because many countries could not pay for food anymore because of the high grain prices. And what is happening now in ukraine? Exactly: they cannot ship cheap grain anymore to the arab countries that need it the most.
- 1121redblackgo 3y agoOccam's Razor might suggest he is simply bad at managing a social media company
- Analemma_ 3y agoSomething that has become abundantly clear over the past few years is that all the supposed instances of "[my beloved idol] is actually playing 9-dimensional chess; their master plan will become clear soon" are wrong, and that in every case the idol in question is actually just an idiot. That's almost certainly what's happening again here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- philippejara 3y agoThey didn't lend him money, they kept the stake they had before he bought twitter, both the Qatari and the saudi. Also I'm not sure why they would want it gone after the arab spring, given how the Persians only benefited from it and Qatar was pretty much a state instigator of it in other countries.
- heyjamesknight 3y agoI hear what you're saying, but I don't think this is remotely the right way to go about it. It would be like Google changing the Google name to Alphabet, or to "A.com" or something. Imagine throwing away "to Google something" in an effort to popularize a big, story-less, meaningless name.
- smcl 3y agoYeah if it was like "Twitter - an X.com app" then maybe, or maybe building out the brand of X and merging the two if X takes off. This switch seems a bit sudden and misguided. I was certain he was doing some weird Elon joke but he seems to have gone through with it.
- CommieBobDole 3y ago> I was certain he was doing some weird Elon joke but he seems to have gone through with it. I think that describes nearly all of his public behavior over the last few years.
- neuronexmachina 3y agoI feel like in the past others were able to keep Musk in check when he was having a manic phase. Nowadays, he has enough power that I suspect anybody who wants to stay in his good graces doesn't dare to contradict him.
- Rustwerks 3y agoWorse than that. tweet -> excrete
- themagician 3y agoHis vision is to turn it into a bank. He talked about this with Baron's last year. The part of the "everything app" he actually cares about is banking. His goal is to make it into the world's largest bank. He actually said so. Honestly, not a bad idea. If you are the world's richest person you might as well have a company that can actually make money.
- hef19898 3y agoHe wants a bank, and buys a social media company for 44 Bn. Interesting strategy, as someone else so pointly called it: 5d checkers.
- j16sdiz 3y agoHe want a P2P payment platform, double as a social network, function like a bank, without a bank license.
- ke88y 3y agoEven if you think social graphs are the future of banking/payments, Twitter is still an... interesting... strategy. It's exactly the wrong social graph for that sort of thing. (I also don't think that hypothesis makes a lick of sense -- Apple+Google, not any particular app, is the "WeChat of the west".)
- notahacker 3y agoAnd even if you think the Twitter social graph is the right social graph for it, it seems unlikely that the best way of converting it into a ubiquitous payment platform is to make a lot of noise about most of its user base being bots, relaunch the "verification" feature as something which has nothing to do with verification, wade into populist politics, and slash its employee base whilst panning the quality of its tech platform.
- fomine3 3y ago
- upon_drumhead 3y agoI see zero indication he ever intends to sell X/Twitter. He wants to pivot it into the worlds most successful and useful app. He won’t sell that.
- simbolit 3y agoRight, what a genius move. Pivoting your 17-year old startup company from 'social messaging' into the 'most successful and useful' category.
- henry2023 3y agoNo one will buy twitter / X?! again because it's going to be bankrupted in a couple of years.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoI said he doesn't intend to sell it. Being forced to due to bankruptcy is an entirely different thing that I didn't comment on. People in this thread are all saying this is part of his master plan to get Twitter/X to be worth hundreds of billions and then to sell it and walk away. I don't see any reason why he would sell and walk away if he manages to pull it off.
- Capricorn2481 3y ago> He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce This is the exact vacuous nonsense Sam Bankman-Fried was spouting while playing League of Legends in a VC meeting and it made Sequoia Capital wet their pants. It really puts the cart before the horse of "how or why" Twitter should position themselves this way. It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution.
- finikytou 3y agosam bankman-fried is closer to Musk opponents at every angle you look at. and btw those opponents crowned sam bankman fried while they hate musk in every newspaper you can buy in the US
- Capricorn2481 3y agoWhat opponents? You mean in the tech VC world? Cause the rest of us are disillusioned with both of them.
- finikytou 3y agopretty much every newspaper, tv journalist and a big chunk of the politicians. its easy just look at everyone that gave money to Sam Bankman and try to link see what those people think of Musk. I guarantee you the spread will be something like 90% against Musk
- _jal 3y ago> It is frustrating to watch people continuously buy into his complete lack of vision or execution. "Hey, look over there! I'll make the 6 Million Dollar Man!" I'm pretty sure he just watches 80s TV for vaporware announcement ideas to use when there's bad press to suppress.
- atourgates 3y agoI really dislike Musk - but it does seem like sometimes - he has a really strong vision. Tesla and SpaceX and StarLink are really impressive from a "had a vision for something on a broadly positive world-changing scale, successfully executed it" perspective. With Twitter, I'm not sure he actually has a vision. The best realistic pro-Musk argument you can make is that he can be a real ass, but he's an ass whose companies tend to do amazing things. With Twitter, the best I can come up with is that he had a personal grudge against the platform, and the means to take pattiness to unheard of scales.
- tootie 3y agoIf you ever ask the question "Is this a dumb move or 4D chess?" the answer is literally always "dumb move".
- bamfly 3y agoI heard some pal of his (owner of the big MMA league or something? IDK, some other Saudi-loving guy I gather, I don't know much about combat sports) interviewed on NPR a couple weeks ago and he was still saying Musk is a business genius (but he also had some weird "once someone's in the circle, they're in the circle, and Musk's in the circle" thing going on, like from goddamn Meet the Parents—dude was a living caricature, the interview was fawning but the guy was just an absurd human being). Look, everyone makes mistakes, but the whole Twitter thing, from the beginning, has been the equivalent of hiring a fry cook and then he sticks his fucking hand in the fryer, on purpose, on day 1. Then he sticks the other hand in. You wouldn't say that dude's a genius chef—or, if he ever was, he's either gone nuts or is on way too many drugs to trust with anything. Or both.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoEh, Musk will 100% make money on Twitter. All of these moves aren’t meant for you. They’re meant for the stock market, which has lived in an alternate reality for the last few years. Musk is cramming the social media app with all of those useless buzzwords that Wall Street loves. When he IPOs it, you can bet it will have AI, Finance, and depending on its standing then, Crypto in the prospectus. It will be hot trash but the markets will lap it up as they always do. You are literally not the audience for these shenanigans.
- tootie 3y agoHis purchase of Twitter was explicitly to take it private. He would look like a pretty humongous moron to just take it public again. And I seriously doubt Wall St would ever mindless lap up a super app with no users. It makes no sense. It's a ten-year old, mature company that was already public-traded. He can't just take it private, make it a whole new company, rebuild the user base from scratch then expect it to be worth more than he paid. He should have just bootstrapped a new company from zero if that was the intent.
- AirMax98 3y ago> For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back. A reminder that Elon had to be sued into buying this company.
- mgiannopoulos 3y agoHe tried to back away when the stock markets fell making financing more difficult/expensive. He wanted a better price. He still wanted to buy it.
- henry2023 3y agoWhat makes you think this? IMO he really wanted to not buy them but was forced to do it.
- mrguyorama 3y agoIf he wanted a better price he shouldn't have started purchasing talks by posting a ludicrous price on twitter before talking to anyone. In the normal world, this is called being really stupid and bad at business
- praptak 3y agoSo he wanted it to take it off the stock market, fix it, yada yada but then realized this is a bad idea?
- hacoo 3y agoHe made the offer impulsively without due diligence, then got cold feet when the market dropped. Real genius business moves
- quandrum 3y agoEvidence points to him wanting to use the potential of buying Twitter as a cover for selling a few billion in Tesla stock without impacting it's value.
- 3y ago
- dehrmann 3y ago> He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App Seems easier to do that without buying Twitter. He has enough reach that anything he talks about gets fanboy traction, there's no value into Twitter's infrastructure for this, and converting tweeters into everything app users is possible, but a stretch. Plus the ship has sailed for an everything app outside China.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gremlinsinc 3y agoif he wanted all that, he wouldn't have cratered the app economy around Twitter's API, nobody's going to be build apps like taxi/restaurant booking services off the framework if they can't afford to even get started.