How Musk’s Twitter Faces Mountain of Debt, Falling Revenue and Surging Costs | Hacker News Reader

How Musk’s Twitter Faces Mountain of Debt, Falling Revenue and Surging Costs

wsj.com

22 pointsmfiguiere21 comments

Traditionally, the real value that comes with owning a media outlet is not revenue generation, it's being able to manipulate public opinion and promote certain narratives over others.

The fact that Musk seems to view it instead as mostly a lark, a meta-trolling game that's looking more like The Onion writ large, with no real expectation that satire and parody can reliably be distinguished from 'serious journalism' (which has, again traditionally, included a lot of state-corporate propaganda) - this seems to be raising institutional hackles.

It might be an attempt to mimic Tik-Tok's success by switching Twitter over to essentially an entertainment channel?

> It might be an attempt to mimic Tik-Tok's success by switching Twitter over to essentially an entertainment channel?

The real confusing part is Musk’s insistence on a public square but yeah this seems much more realistic. But still not an easy path, he’s got a long way to go to change the tooling and culture of Twitter. Maybe he could sign someone like Mr. Beast? Or another of the bro-y YouTubers? But I would think that’s a better deal for Musk than a successful YouTuber, even with improved revenue sharing their view count would probably drop significantly for a long time. Are any of those YouTubers sticky enough to pull essentially all of their viewers? Or what percent of their views are from casual viewers and the YouTube / Tik-Tok algorithm.

> It might be an attempt to mimic Tik-Tok's success by switching Twitter over to essentially an entertainment channel?

Considering how badly the $8/mo feature launch was botched, how threadbare their staff is, and how bad video on Twitter always was.....I think this is unlikely.

I think there is no evidence that what we wittness here is an attempt at anything in particular. This looks more like Elon tries to throw mud at the wall to see what sticks, intermixed with impulsive, unchecked ideas and panicked reactions.

> It might be an attempt to mimic Tik-Tok's success by switching Twitter over to essentially an entertainment channel?

Twitter has always been and continues to be an entertainment channel by an overwhelming margin. It's the digital equivalent of the magazine rack in the supermarket checkout aisle.

> [Twitter] hasn’t booked an annual profit since 2019, and posted a loss in eight years of the past decade. The company’s net loss narrowed in 2021, to $221.4 million from $1.14 billion the previous year.

Hard to imagine what shareholder morale looks like for a company that has lost money for the better half of a decade.

Is it common to refer to the owners of a private company as "shareholders"? (TWTR was delisted.)

Or bagholders?

Private shares are, at the end of the day, still shares.

The current private holders knew what they were getting into though, at least as far as past financial results.

Granted, they may not have known that Musk was going to unleash this much chaos so quickly on the company.

Didn't Elon buy every outstanding Twitter share with the $44 billion since it was a cash offer? That would mean there are no remaining Twitter shareholders besides Musk.

edit: I don't get why I'm getting downvoted. Is it not correct that all Twitter shareholders were just given cash at the time of purchase? https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/what-happens-...

Dorsey retained a chunk, maybe others

I was never interested in Twitter before, but under Musk, it's become hilariously entertaining. If Musk can add functionality, like payments, crypto, markets, etc, I can see myself paying the $8 to subscribe.

The Babylon Bee should be getting paid for content creation. Best comedy on the web these days.

> If Musk can add functionality, like payments, crypto, markets

He better start hiring quickly then. The current skeleton crew is, at best, enough to stop Twitter from imploding.

I'm hearing of whole teams wiped out, and other teams having just one person left (now permanently on call), which sounds unsustainable on multiple levels.

[Goes to Babylon Bee]

"If Women Had The Same Rights As Guns - Feminists say they want their uteruses to have the same rights as guns. Now, it's become a reality: women have all the same rights as your AR-15!"

Misogynistic jokes among rampant mass shooting violence is hilllarious.

Elon seems to have no interest in building Twitter's ad business. I wonder if the lenders will have the courage to try to salvage their investment. At this point, what's left might still recover most of the debt, but even that likely gone in a year.

Did musk take on the existing 5ish billion in debt that twitter had?

they had 128m loss first quarter, with avg dev salary of 100k per year, then he needs to fire 5k devs to break even :)

First fire all the devs, then rewrite the software to reduce server costs.

CBS came back to *posting after 40 hours [1]

[1] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/cbs-news-resumes-twitt...

That doesn't say anything about advertising, just tweeting.

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