The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
> $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.
It's weird that everyone and their mum "could" clone twitter easily. And yet the only products of note that's more than dismissive hackernews comments/slideware with something in production at similar scale was meta with threads and that's still inferior in terms of search and discoverability and scaffolded with the guts of Instagram and bluesky which has the advantage of being founded by Jack Dorsey and has been around for years now. For all the big talk musk et al have I'm not sure they could actually have built a clone. You can pay influencers but if we look at how dominant tiktok is/was making buzz and content is more of an outcome of a bunch of incentivisations and the kind of non technical community management stuff people dismiss as marketing than throwing money at all the big names you can find.
he bought presidency with it so it is not that bad of an investment. it is short-sighted to look at “twitter” value since he bought it, one should look his net worth since he bought it. even if closes it down tomorrow it will be money well spent
not bias but facts :) he took over twitter, made it into right-wing propaganda machine, changed algorithm during the election campaign ... it is short-sighted to not take into account that he basically bought dissemination of public information and single-handedly swayed the election. if you think he bought twitter to make money off it I have some crypto to sell to you :)
That's less an issue of a lack of manpower and more the result of one person up top pushing everyone away. A less annoying owner could lay off 70% of the staff without gutting revenue.
Though Elon Musk's purchase of the company was entirely in his own self-interest, and unfortunately, it's serving him well so far. Buying a company for a fraction of his personal wealth and leveraging that into having the president as his personal servant is one of the greatest investments in American history.
