Ask HN: Is Twitter worth more or less $$ since Musk bought it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Twitter worth more or less $$$ since Musk bought it?

5 pointssmooke12 comments

He bought at a pretty high price, there's been a lot of controversy since, advertisers are reportedly dropping out... but staff is 1/3rd ppl/cost and reportedly traffic is up. Curious how that puzzle fits together

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Musk's high-interest loans added the equivalent of roughly ⅓ to ¼ of their total reported annual costs (excluding the one-time lawsuit settlement) so a large fraction of the people he sacked are cancelled out for years to come by debt service.

Traffic going up doesn't directly correlate with revenue — it depends on ad sales to be anything other than a cost and by all accounts advertisers have been hesitant to stick with the company. There's a reason why Gab, Parler, Truth Social, etc. struggled and unless Musk can convince mainstream advertisers that people are not going to see their ads next to extremist content those revenues are going to decline.

I would also be very skeptical about numbers without much detail because we know that bot activity has gone up since the teams which dealt with it were decimated and there have already been news reports about e.g. China taking advantage of this to drown out unfavorable stories.

Twitter is priceless.

It's a megaphone heard by a quarter billion people.

It has double-digit market reach in many countries.

It can probably swing any election by five points or more. Ask yourself what that is worth.

$44 billion is nothing. Twitter could unhinge a nation and destroy any individual or elected official. Twitter is real power. Real power cannot be measured in dollars.

Well, it wasn't priceless, apparently it was worth $44B to Musk and the question if it is now worth more or less, in my estimation it is worth considerably less and the double digit reach that it had is eroding. Keep in mind that even as a megaphone Twitter has bills to be paid and Musk can't afford to spend the rest of his life managing Twitter's various brushfires, at some point he will have to weigh the importance of SpaceX and Tesla versus Twitter. Maybe his ego will get in the way of making the right call there and he'll run the whole thing into the ground but from where I'm sitting so far it has gone exactly as I expected, only a bit faster.

Any residual value of Twitter is at risk as long as Musk is at the helm.

Twitter's now on the hook for a $13 billion dollar loan, they've lost advertisers hand over fist and they've now got potential legal issues on the horizon due to the way some employees were let go. They're worth considerably less now no matter how you look at it.

A recent article suggests the banks writing those loans currently think they're worth at least USD 9 billion, but still less than the original 13:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/musks-banks-book-twitter-...

Elon was dragged kicking into buying it after he shot his mouth off.

So you need another Elon to overspend substantially.

Sure you can price it, but finding a buyer is a seperate issue.

the next liquidity event if Automatic doesnt buy it will be an IPO, I would guess

That is the rub when it comes to private companies. There is no way of knowing. It's not like Twitter stayed public and changed manangment...nope. Fully private. So a big fat black box. That is one of the benefits of going private: no transparency. No reporting. The only way of perhaps getting some glimpse is with traffic analytics.

OP could call Musk and ask him how much he wants for it ... but for not sounding like a looky-loo, OP might have to pretend to be M. Arnault :)

If even the debt is getting written down on the banks' books, then the equity is effectively null, and theoretically any of us could reasonably call. Although I think anyone on HN would be wise enough to due diligence about inheriting potential liabilities.

Difficult to say. Some people left but others have replaced them, maybe 10fold. I think it really pushed some who had old accounts or no accounts at all to start using it.

The Musk hype factor is real.

This isn’t even close. It’s substantially worse off at this point.

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