Elon Musk’s $44B education on free speech
economist.com
economist.com
as for Musk, let's hope he will not ruin his other projects, i still want to see some people on Mars
Basically the entire market of everyone who realistically might consider an electric vehicle in the next five years overwhelmingly wants nothing to do with him moving forward.
Sounds like it’s already starting to bite as well https://www.cnet.com/tech/tesla-buyers-are-bailing-because-o...
Musk craves constant attention. If he can get that by flirting with the right and pissing off some segment of "the libs" he'll take it. A person tweeting nonsense at 4am just wants attention, in whatever form it takes.
I don't know. It's certainly a massive gambit in that 4D chess game, and unclear it's going to pay off.
Nobody is going to be splashing out the kind of money needed to buy a Tesla as a car they up until this point they hated at a conceptual level to “own the libs”.
These are some of the most insecure men alive that we are talking about here. They don’t want to explain to their friends why they are suddenly driving an electric vehicle. They will look for a million other performative ways to own the libs before they ever consider that.
No one else is putting out EVs at the volume and quality (functional quality, not finishes / luxury) that Teslas have and it isn’t even close.
The Tesla battery is stupidly reliable. The car in general is the most reliable vehicle I’ve owned and it isn’t even close. I have ~200k miles on my 2019 Model 3, and I taken it to ungodly places off roads, through deserts, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, beach coasts, every terrain imaginable — some even jeeps would have issues with. I had to replace the bottom a least twice because I ripped up the covers, but not once did the vehicle ever stop running or being reliable.
When I set in other vehicles, it is like I’m in the past, or some invisible super powers have left me.
I don’t have high opinions of Musk and wish he didn’t get involved with Twitter at all. It would have been better for him to be focused on acquiring more funds for the mission towards sustainable energy and multi-planet species. Stop taking credit for the work of others and do everything possible to enable them instead of managing them; his companies do well because the people believe in the mission, not because of him. After this situation boils down, Tesla will still be producing the best EVs on the market, because the mission is a good one.
Long story short, I don’t want to do with Musk but in the foreseeable future I don’t see me getting any EV besides a Tesla. There are just too many variables to consider when managing a battery and battery life, and even if another company comes out with something that looks better, I’m willing to bet reliability won’t even be close & the battery pack will be significantly degraded after a year — not to mention the lack of a nation-scale charging network.
Taking the car on terrain is more a question of ride height than durability, anyway
Being able to roll over things is the minimum
The real car manufacturers are slow and lazy, but they only need to learn how to slap electric motors and batteries in there
As far as I'm concerned, musk did his part. He got EVs to be a part of the conversation
Want to start a new EV company? Could build a barebones, rugged EV that is cheap as hell, easy to hack, and has no unneeded electronics / no connectivity. I would switch over to that in a heartbeat.
I’d call that stupid reliable.
Doesn’t matter to me in any case; as long as Tesla can survive, all this hate just means there will be a shorter line when I grab my next one.
I’m not willing to do that to anyone, and since an alternative exists, I use it.
There appear to be many contenders, but then Europe's a bigger EV market than North America:
https://eu-evs.com/marketShare/ALL/Groups/Line/All-time-by-Y...
The best EV platform for price to capability (800v, V2L) at the moment is probably Hyundai's E-GMP platform used in the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Kia EV6, and the Genesis GV60.
The best value EV is the Chevy Bolt: https://electrek.co/2022/12/20/the-chevy-bolt-is-about-to-be...
The outright best platform is the Lucid Air for both range and performance:
Lucid Air has an outrageous price for 4 doors slapped on electric motors so I wouldn’t even consider one.
My new 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EUV, on the other hand, it's amazing. And so inexpensive!
This is borderline comedy. I think you’re tremendously underestimating what a Jeep can do just with its ride height compared to a Model 3, that’s before considering the hardware that makes them significantly more capable. A stock Model 3 cannot cross a log or a high median.
There are many places higher clearance vehicles can go that I can’t, but there are many places I can go that they can’t — without puncturing an oil can, or rolling over, or any number of other reasons.
People here can say what they want, but I’ve been places on the US and seen things, with pictures to prove it, that most Americans won’t see in their lifetime.
I was driving through Montana to Spokane, WA and going through the mountain passes between Missoula and Spokane. There are two, Lookout Pass and Fourth of July Pass, both can get pretty bad during the winter.
I am driving towards Lookout pass and it is looking okay; middle of winter but the weather isn’t bad. Right when I get to the major ascension, a storm hits. Visibility completely plummets. I can’t see the road & it becomes difficult to even tell where the side is. I can’t pull over because there are cliffs & visibility was so bad it was not possible to make out the boundary, so I went forward.
Eventually, there was a clearing where you put on chains — for people who thought they could make it and fight to get up, but realize they can’t probably. Anyway, this area was visible because it was lit like sunlight with lighting. i start to veer towards it. Unbeknownst to me, I veer off the road and into the middle. I hit the center of the roadway with a ton of snow packed from shoveling and my car flips on its side….then, stops.
Understand I an on my left two wheels and my car is sideways at > then 45 degrees. I was just happy I wasn’t off a cliff rolling down to my death, and that I stabilized. If I was in just about any other car, I would either have completely flipped or be impossibly stuck and need a tow. In a Jeep, no question this is a flip btw, Jeeps can flip easily especially at that speed and angle.
So I am sitting there sideways, not flipping, and everything still works, so I just do standard “stuck in snow” procedures, starting with going forward and back to slowly build momentum. I do this for about a minute while holding a hard left and, to my surprises, I start moving sidewise. Like out of a cartoon, my car just plops back on all 4 and I keep driving like nothing happened.
It took a crisis that could have resulted in a flipped & buried vehicle, with no cell reception and a practical blizzard outside near a mountain peak, and made it into a funny happenstance.
I drove much slower and more cautious after that and finished the rest of the journey safely.
Not an offroad story but paints the picture of what low center of gravity + electric AWD can accomplish.
> Most would be hard for someone to relate to because of the extremes of where I go.
There is nowhere a Model 3 can go and come back as it left that any off-roader would consider extreme.
The possibilities are endless. Don’t narrow yourself. Being able to drive a car uniquely that has a vastly superior drivetrain is not something difficult to imagine.
I don’t think you have an accurate idea how significantly more capable a Jeep Rubicon is. Agree to disagree.
Happy holidays!
There are many different cars and trucks and vans on the roads in Europe that don't seem to be available for sale here at all.
There are many choices available in the US that are better than Teslas, but there are even more in Europe.
I’ve looked at all of them and I am telling you, there isn’t another choice of an all EV that can go over 300 miles in a charge. The ones that claim have too many reports of rapid battery degradation after a year, and lack a meaningful fast charging network to go anywhere. Most have under 300 miles of range.
It is one thing to say “look at how many are manufacturing EVs”, and a whole other to say look at how many are manufacturing EVs ordinary people can get and use to drive across the US in an old fashioned road trip.
There are so many small details that have turned me into saying what I’m saying. Like being able to run climate all night in a Tesla and not freeze while in the middle of no where in winter, and sleep, while still having enough charge in the morning to make it to a charger. Or going into Death Valley and up a canyon, running nearly out of charge, hiking and enjoying the place, then almost completely recharging on the way down with regen braking. There are things I’ve done with this vehicle I wouldn’t dream of doing with others, years of trust built up in small capabilities most people wouldn’t think about or imagine are possible.
About the only vehicle I’d trade my Tesla for and take a chance on is a Rivian, but I want to see the longevity and support of Rivian play out before I’d get one.
For example, are you aware that the cheapest Tesla available to me with a range over 300 miles is $56,160 plus tax, title, and license[0]? That's $20k more than I paid for my car! The seven less-expensive Teslas available can't do 300 miles on a single charge either.
I've got an amazing 2023 Chevy Bolt EUV that I love, that I bought for much less than any Tesla available within 200 miles of me, even the ones with a 267 or 272-mile range. And that's before the $7500 tax credit I'll get, which I wouldn't with a Tesla, so more than $18k less overall.
But hey, my EUV is only rated with a 243-mile range. Which is more than my Fiat 500e, and plenty long enough for road trips, given the ABRF app, but fails your filter.
I'm glad you're happy with your car.
0. https://www.tesla.com/inventory/new/m3?arrangeby=plh&zip=750...
300 miles is my floor because of how heavy my usage is. In a year, that 300 miles degrades to ~260 miles in an EV with current battery tech. I put about 70-100k miles/year.
Often times I have to max charge to make it in and out of places. Some places even a max charge doesn’t do it, so I come up with tricky solutions to make it work. I went one way into Big Bend, for example, and talk someone that works there into letting me use a 120 service outlet for 3 days. I hiked for 3 days there; went up to Emory Peak and all the surroundings. Beautiful spot. Returned to a fully charged vehicle.
I’d like vehicles I purchase to last at least 5 years. I think this Tesla will go at least another 100k miles before the battery degrades to the point of not being usable for long distance travel.
If I had started with even a 260 mile battery pack, I would probably already be at the limit by now — and I don’t have any data on battery longevity for any other EV used at the rate and intensity mine has been used. I would be surprised to find this kind of durability to be the norm in vehicles, it just doesn’t make economic sense.
The US is neither the cheapest nor the highest quality for most things, although it provides a reasonable trade-off of the two for many things.
Life expectancy [2]: declining everywhere at about the same rate
Infant mortality [3]: Europe ranges from 2.5 (Spain/Portugal) to 3.4 (Netherlands) to 3.6 (Switzerland, Greece) to 3.8 (UK); US is 5.2. By comparison, Canada is 4.8
Guns [4]: Europe is hardly some gunless utopia. Switzerland has 27 legally owned guns per 100 people, Portual 21, Germany 20. Granted, the US does have 120 guns / 100 people.
Brownshirt gangs: no idea what this is
Lax regulations: hard to quantify this, also "lax" compared to what? Europe is frequently accused of having overly restrictive regulations, especially by entrepreneurial types.
The US has problems, but it's hardly a third-world place by these measurements. Instead, it comes off as the sort of condescension that your parent was complaining about. And it's not like Europe doesn't have it's share of problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_ho...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
[3] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/infant-mortalit...
[4] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-owner...
That tracks.
When they talk about "freedom" and "the people", it's ultimately about them.
First of all.
Second of all, the Internet - at least in the US - never had this newly-discovered freedom of speech problem. Even in the early days, when we hung out on compartmentalized HTML discussion boards, the admins would bring down the hammer on idiots and trolls with no mercy, and no one complained. The place was much more civilized.
But when billions were at stake, Elon's concept of free speech transformed: no shitting on Coke or Nestle because that makes Twitter risky to brands, no swastika by Kanye even though it's technically legal, no offhand mention of Mastodon because that's where some users are exiting to. And when reporters shit on Elon during a live voice chat, Elon swiftly removed the feature from the entire site.
This coming from a guy who thinks it's fair play to repeatedly accuse a rescue worker of pedophilia during a deadly rescue mission, even going as far to clarify that he specifically means sex with underaged Thai boys.
I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars or rockets. The latter are both a series of (admittedly very hard) engineering and technical challenges to solve with few, if any, gnarly social or political issues to navigate other than those which inevitably arise in any growing or large company. The hard problems are all engineering and technical (probably regulatory too, in fairness). There will be a lot of failures along the way but, most of the time (barring things that are physically impossible, or orders of magnitude beyond current cutting edge manufacturing techniques), you can brute force your way through - or find an alternative approach - with enough R&D effort/money and enough smart people.
But Twitter is nothing like this: it's all about the people, the politics, the social aspects, and simply having an end goal in sight and pushing hard towards it isn't going to get you to where you want to go - in fact, where you want to go may not even be possible due to different cultural and legal constraints around the globe. No disrespect to any engineers at Twitter but the code and infrastructure aren't the hard parts of that business at all.
I don't know that I'd describe him as unprincipled, but he is perhaps quite naive along certain axes. I think this is actually relatively common amongst very successful people who haven't experienced that much in the way of substantial failure: they can be really bad at dealing with choppy waters when they arise (I've seen this from quite close quarters, as it happens) because it sort of deconstructs who they think they are. And you really only learn who you are when the going is tough.
Every time he tweaks the rules and "crashes" twitter, a bunch of people leave, build a new network elsewhere, and never come back. Or are permanently banned and can't appeal through the back channel like pg.
(edit: the @garius "trust thermocline" concept is a good elaboration https://twitter.com/garius/status/1588115310124539904 )
> I think he just approached Twitter like he approached building electric cars
aren't tesla systematically overconfidently marketed self-driving car capabilities which caused fatalities proving P's point?
Not sure why it should be different for a company like Twitter dependant on global access.
A much (much) larger proportion of the hard work with Tesla was on vehicle development. Just look at the story of the development of the original roadster, which started out in concept as a modified Lotus Elise, but ended up being basically a completely reengineered car, and the reengineering was made that much more difficult by starting from an existing platform rather than from scratch with a clean slate.
With Twitter you have a clumsily handled set of layoffs, with lots of talk about Musk wanting to see code samples from engineers (and frankly way too much talk about Twitter's engineering in general), carried out in front of an already more-politicised-than-the-general-population userbase, features retired, introduced, withdrawn, etc., and in general lots of thrashing around. And all of this in view of an entire audience with a greater-than-the-general-population bias towards kicking off and taking matters viral.
Tesla started small: Twitter was already (relatively) a giant company with thousands of employees. It's just a fundamentally less "make it soable" situation than a small, primarily engineering focussed, car startup.
This is the only difference I spot, meaning no one was oversighting his internal management of the company. His inputs went live into operations as if they were tweets.
This hits home one of the things I consider to be a problem with the single platform approach.
Swastika's are actually not legal in some parts of the world, in others they're taken as a symbol of peace.
When there is content moderation it feels weirdly totalitarian because the political stances of (say: Europe) are wildly different than the polarised extremes of the USA.
A platform should not moderate content, twitter (and facebook) want the perks of being a platform (being not legally culpable for content moderation) and the perks of being a closed community (strict moderation on issues they perceive as problematic, usually to investors).
This is having your cake and eating it too.
Twitter should not be a platform, it is beholden to a global standard and rules and culture are too diverse.
The same is true with Facebook.
Also, rumor has it that what Kanye posted is actually the official logo for some weird UFO religion called Raelism. (Be warned that the Wikipedia article on them prominently displays that logo. You'll probably want to not look at it and/or engage at your own pace, so as to avoid any offense.)
Indeed, some things are perfectly legal in one country but illegal in another so an unique, global moderation policy would have to follow the smallest common denominator among all countries served, which would obviously minimise the extent of allowed content.
How do you feel about deleting post that criticise Iranian politics and ban accounts showing support to protests in Iran? Only for the Iranian audience of course. Then how do you feel providing the list of accounts who shared certain images and messages to Iranian courts, knowing that some of them would be executed?
Note: Twitter already does that in countries where operates. I guess they don't do it in Iran only because they can't operate in Iran as a business(sanctions) but they do it in Turkey since the Gezi protests in 2013. Turkey doesn't have capital punishment, instead they throw people in jail for years awaiting trail.
Musk never spent 30 seconds thinking about any of this.
In the same way you have privacy setting, I think social networks need to enforce geographic settings too. If you want to publish tweets publicly to a global audience then you as a user need to ensure you're posting content that complies with all global speech laws, otherwise you can't complain if the platform is forced to censor or remove your content / account.
I think US citizens should be able post anything that's legal to other US citizens, but the idea that you should then expect Twitter to be forced to publish that content in all geographies because of the US free speech rights seems absurd. While I might personally I think "Ye" should be allowed to post Swastikas to Twitter, in reality that's against the law in many countries.
Then you have the advertisement issue. I'm not even sure how you build a platform that respects internal speech laws which would also be advertiser friendly. Again, it seems like the business model is structurally broken if we value free speech above advertiser friendly speech.
Social media has been eating up advertising by skirting in between the lines, acting as if they don't censor and are mere platforms (and thus aren't liable for falsehoods spread via them) while censoring and curating content heavily to ensure advertising cash keeps rolling in.
I think it is time for (and with recent legislation proposals in the EU, am hopeful for) changes that either severely limit the type of advertising and control these wanna he platforms can accept and exert or simply makes them legally for spreading falsehoods and endangering the public via users they choose to jot exert their editorial control over.
There's also a whole heap of different laws applying to being a "publication" which Twitter currently skirts by claiming to be a platform not a publication - if they declared themselves a publication (as Musk accidentally did the other day because he's not very bright) they would lose the Section 230 protections.
That's not how section 230 works. See [1] for a decent explanation.
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
It is wild exaggeration to compare it with being President
Those NASA contracts sure looks nice ... it'd be a shame if someone quietly underminded their frequency.
Arguably Musk has donkey's mess all over him right now precisely because of POTUS' stance in ignoring Tesla. Again, arguably, there is a direct line from that all the way to Musk's current petulant child act jumping into bed with the right wing ass kissers. He was (ignoring some warning signs) the golden child (to the majority) before that.
The reputational damage that has been done from that, and Musks counter-actions, is measured in the billions ... arguably trillions over the long term.
And not an edict was even issued.
I think that this bottom-up influence is far more powerful in the long run than a direct top-down control style if you want to achieve certain beliefs, mindsets, obedience.
Sure, a billionaire could well undermine a Presidents' chances of re-election, but they have nowhere near the power of a sitting POTUS.
This is Twitter we're talking about, headed up by a Chief Twit man-child ... not Spectre or something ...
1.) Twitter becomes an echo chamber for the alt-right.
2.) Twitter dies.
The only brands that want to advertise on those sites are scams.
No alt right echo chamber is ever in a million years going to be able to provide a good return on investment for $44B.
If they go down that path they WILL die which was my original point.
It might be more accurate to interpret Twitter as a luxury good (from Elon's perspective). Similar to how other billionaires build lavish yachts.
With that being said, there is no argument for his purchase or subsequent actions being construed as a viable investment strategy. The whole debacle looks like child's tantrum.
1. There is not a single instance in the entire history of the internet of a profitable alt right social media website that anyone actually uses.
2. The price he paid was indeed so overvalued and has only dramatically dropped in value since then that they can already no longer pay their bills after just 7 weeks.
1. Facebook took 5 years to become profitable.
2. Twitter took 12 years.
3. Instagram had no revenue before Facebook bought it.
Rumble and Gab should be profitable now if you brought up FB becoming profitable at 5. This is all before FB found it’s mobile ads focus and became the behemoth it is now.
Fox owned MySpace and failed spectacularly with it. They technically tried niching down when they sold the site to Justin Timberlake. Fox itself is doing well enough, but only has a market cap of $16B including their non-right wing assets too.
Truth and Gab have to use non right wing code for their platforms. Code that the coders don’t want either platform to use. Truth wasn’t even giving them credit before.
I didn’t pick the term, I was replying to a comment that used it. I was just trying to keep it consistent.
Atheists know what they are doing. Even, nay especially, the young. They actively reject superstition. The totally reject the white supremacist style of American evangelical churches as utterly disconnected from Christ-like behaviors.
So why claim they are unaware of what atheism means? That is meant to comfort the bulk of evangelicals who rely on preachers for their worldview.
Would you consider those people religious, casually religious, or not at all religious?
But that's all outward religious practice; my comment was more getting at my suspicion that many human behaviors are effectively religion in disguise. Where do axioms come from?
From those who sought to control through the theft of individual power and by consolidating that power to a ruling class.
* some people complain platforms over-moderate but then cry when moderation does NOT prevent things they don't like.
* some people want platforms held responsible for material users post, but then bulk at the idea of paying for an account and refuse to accept no one will host content for pennies in advertising then pay millions in damages when that content is found damaging.
* people object to misleading content but then object to fact checking (especially if they don't like the facts)
* people want platforms to be child-safe (which no one agrees on the definition of) but again won't pay
I actually think Twitters "minimalist" approach to moderation was both economically and socially the least-bad compromise.
I think there is a constant trade off both between and within 3 core variables:
* freedom of expression
* cost/revenue
* "bad" things (from porn to scams to copyright infringement to seeing other peoples' opinions)
I fear Musk fell for the "everyone is like me and will like things I like" fallacy and has tried to make Twitter more what he wanted. Now people whose preferred point on that 3D surface he has moved away from are upset he moved away and people he got closer to are upset he did not move enough. And plenty of other people are not prepared to admit there is a trade off: they want a platform where they can say whatever they like, but an army of moderators with 100% accuracy remove anything they don't like and it costs 0USD per year.
Advertisers will come back and Twitter will be hugely profitable.
True statement. Everyone else knows that MyPillow and scam supplements do not a business model make. That's who advertises on the kind of thing Twitter has turned into.
But there's more: Driving away advertisers was not the first and worst error. Overpaying and using $14B in leverage means equity stakes are so far under water you have to dig under the whale poop to find them. I've seen some sucky rounds, but it's hard to beat the fix Elon got himself into. This is all on top of the fact that social media turnarounds are exceedingly rare and fragile. Everything fragile got broken on a whim and for no purpose already.
Nobody wants fashy techbros anymore. Elon brought a lot of exposure of this species to the normies and the normies are icked-out. Twitter's brand image is damaged in a way that puts it alongside Truth Social, Parler, Gettr, Gab, etc. Nobody wants them. The only thing fun about being those people is getting a rise out of someone by "just asking questions."
I’m going to assume marketing and advertising are not your background but they are mine.
I need you to understand that even before Elon, brands were already extremely on the fence about allocating budget towards Twitter.
They are in no way shape or form clamouring to get back there since leaving.
The reality is they have fatally wounded their only meaningful hope at profitability and the mechanics of the business no longer make sense.
The only thing left to debate is how long until it’s over.
I forgot the details, but it's been mentioned here before.
I work in digital advertising and this claim seems weird. Twitter is expensive compared to other channels, but it's an integral part of many media plans going for reach in b2b / tech / high-income.
It’s unprofitable for everyone else which is why most companies are totally ok walking away already.
It’s also typically used at a very hard time quantify stage of any sales cycle since nobody actually buys anything directly after seeing an ad on Twitter.
Brands were paying for eyeballs from a very specific kind of audience who are also rapidly moving elsewhere at the same time.
The real question is what should Twitter 2.1 (3.0?) look like? From both a social-media user and business perspective.
So far all social media follow advertising business model and inevitably skew the platofm towards what advertisers will consider a safe space for their brand.
There are studies indicating a somewhat left-wing bias of large companies and social-media but is it really a problem? I read somewhere that views morerately centre-left more accuratly fit with reality. On top of that being optimistic about the future also correlates with all (or most) left wing policies evntually coming true.
But somehow we fell into a culture war or are made to believe there is a culture war ongoing because this maximises clicks. Majority of people are centrist / neutral and are not really catered to by the media - perhaps getting more neutral content in fron of the reader is the way forward - but neutral content does badly on click metrics. Is advertising model of the web the root of all evil ??
What a total doorknob that man is.
Latest publicly available usage report from twitter (as you all remember widely and frantically predicted to crash and disappear from the internet):
Conversation impressions surpassed all previous quadrennial events.
There were a whopping 147B impressions of the #WC2022 conversation globally, easily surpassing #WC2018 and more than doubling the number of impressions of the #Tokyo2020 Olympics.
Whether the crowd was reacting to a big goal, watching highlights, predicting the outcome of the next match, or celebrating the star players, fans came to Twitter to discuss all aspects of the game.
"24,400 tweets per second for France’s goal, highest ever for World Cup!"
Edit: Brave down voters, use your words ;)
> Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate.
The challenge is turning those new engagement statistics into dollars.
The question of interest here is what will be the global water cooler come the next World Cup?
There is no real replacement. It's not gonna be some alternative that calls retweets "retruths", nor will it be a decentralised alternative, no matter how much we want it to be, the UX is simply not there (yet?). Even if an alternative pops up, it will take more than 4 years for it to dethrone Twitter.
Put your faith in inertia. It is a powerful (lack of) force.
I'm not even actively boycotting (i don't believe in boycott, it's just a nice story to make you believe you have power)
I highly recommend reading the following article:
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139964806/how-elon-bought-tw...
Elon Musk bought Twitter with "loans". The interest of those loans are now a responsibility for Twitter. Meaning did NOT have a huge run rate. The leveraged buyout caused this.
There have been an insane amount of focus that the huge predicted losses are a result of lazy overpaid developers. This while ignoring that Elon Mush did a leveraged buyout. The number of employees wasn't the issue, making Twitter responsible for billions in loans while the interest rate of those loans went up is the problem.
Elon Musk keeps complaining about the federal reserve and the interest rate. He's complaining for a reason. He gambled and couldn't back out.
Assuming Twitter is breaks even otherwise (give or take a few hundred million) for it to hit 4 billion wouldn't that be like 30% interest? Not impossible, but that seems really high to me.
This has his unsecured loans at something like 11%[0] that seems more reasonable and would have the loans costing around one and half billion.
[0]https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-bankers-mull-new-tesl...
4 billions seems a bit excessive, but 2.5-3 wouldn't surprise me.
I could see perhaps a 2.5-3 billion loss with severence payments, lawsuits and the media uproar next year but that will pass eventually. The real question is what things look like once that dies down. I don't think he will make his money back but historically when captains of industry for lack of a better term buy media outlets that rarely happens anyway (Did Bezos make money on the Washington Post, they are taking about layoffs right now). 4 billion just has the little accountant in my head going "wait a minute".
Now, it's only down that much since november, but it was still down 50% in october (due to the buyout and uncertainties, not Elon's policies), and it was already under last year results this summer. You see the issue? TFA (and me in believing without understanding) fucked up the calculations.
So. Let's not be charitable, and take the worst case scenario:
- Debt service: 1B,
- Cost reduction: Mostly inexistant due to severance package,
- Revenue reduction: 350*2(november-december) + 200 (october) + 200 (rest of the year): 1.1B
Total hole: 2.1B (worst case)
A charitable napkin calculation would be .5B.
I personally think twitter is loosing more than just the debt servicing, because some payments are very late, and it seems that severance package are hard to get for ex-employees. I don't think he would have done the policy change, or have tweeted what he has tweeted either if it was just money (i'm being very charitable here, as an excuse to Elon fans for being a bit of an ass in prior comments)
Usage going up, and taking a 50% haircut on revenue would make quite the dent in cash flows.
Doesn't have a great track record.
For a while, the fact that Major Event in YEAR + 4 has more views than Major Event in YEAR is not impressive on its own.
For all we know Twitter could be sitting still and be carried away by the current.
The trick question is: how are their financials, and especially what's their growth rate compared to their competitors? (Google, Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram etc).
But Twitter can't claim its policies on content have been a success because the World Cup was popular, the two are unrelated.
Aforementioned doomsayers, here, and in the press like the posted opinion piece, are really the only ones making substantial claims. And when those prognostications don't manifest they seem to seethe and double down. Curios behavior.
You whined about down votes. Your comment is worthless and deserves no respect. That I’m telling you this is more than it deserves.
There, used my words
Maybe you should try to use your adult voice and try and engage people in a way that they would want to have a worthwhile conversation.
Instead, your attitude is pretty insulting at best.
You want people to engage in civil conversation? Check yourself first.
It is of course your right to feel insulted but I will simply point out that my post had no content other than directly relevant quotes from the posted article and the twitter blog.
Least I risk sounding as if I am speaking to toddlers, quoting does not even necessarily imply agreement. Relevant information, however many conniptions it might trigger, is still relevant information.
Hence, downvotes are fine, brigading is not. Be well. :)
My mum says I am super smart.
For Musk, he's a white, rich tech bro who explicitly announces his "alpha" status https://nypost.com/2022/05/23/elon-musk-told-first-wife-at-t... (which I'll let you read between the lines yourself on) - a lot of white wanna be rich tech bros will identify with him.
And that's not even going into the whole "If I lick his boots enough senpai might notice me" dynamic
Now, of course there are fanboys agreeing with everything and haters disagreeing with everything, but in these Elon threats I saw a lot of accusations of fanboyism/blind hate when the actual commenter simply disagreed about the situation.
I guess I never looked up to someone in that way maybe... Especially someone who I don't know personally and see on the internet (and thus might be a horrible person irl).
Yes.
https://slate.com/business/2018/07/elon-musks-attacks-on-rep...
July 2018. I know it won't change your mind, but read the article. If the Thai submarine didn't already miffed you, it won't do anything, and you will still be able to see Elon as a demigod, don't worry.
I don't think they're intentionally being ironic here, but "scold" means to speak out about something, and is often implied as feminine. So they're trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but after starting the sentence with free speech absolutism, his noble aim is apparently silencing criticism from women.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/scold
edit to add: also notable that censorious doesn't mean censoring, it means judging:
> his noble aim is apparently silencing criticism from women.
Lol as someone living in the UK, the term "scold" as a verb or noun has never in my life managed to imply "woman". Ever.
You're just looking for things that aren't there
> A person who habitually scolds, in particular a troublesome and angry woman.
-- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scold#English
edit: Please leave me out of your mud-slinging fight. I simply wanted to provide a better link about the assertion, I make no other claims about what hole of Elon you use for what else.
That's not what happened though.
Someone read an article, where someone described a group of people with holier-than-thou attitudes (granted, sometimes they make good points, but let's get real: its Twitter, so there's few good points to be had in general).
This person then decided to cling onto a footnote about archaic use of a single word to insinuate Musk is a misogynist (and maybe he really is, I don't know).
If I was being facetious I could say your use of "link" reminds me of chains and slavery, and call you an insensitive micro-aggressive racist. It would, of course, be ludicrous. (Edit: I forgot this did happen with git actually lol)
'Scold', in the UK, is 99.9999% NEVER used in that context.
The 0.001% use case is probably your comment.
Well, the page I linked to describes the Scold's Bridal, and links to a modern day crime novel of the same name:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scold%27s_Bridle
The use in the article referenced by OP you responded to, ie. "censurious left-wing scolds" was definitely using it in this sense.
The term "bitch" is now mostly non-gendered, used against men and women, would you agree?
Still, when used in a text ranting about political enemies, and not as an endearing term, don't you have an image of a group of women (blue-haired hippies, or blond-haired Karens depending on your political bias :) )? Or of a feminine man?
I'm obviously not an english major and had no idea scold was used primarily for women historically, but being charitable to OP, can't you both have a very different lecture of the word, depending on each other exposition? Be it by age, or even culture.
That's a fair take, and you're right that I was a bit insensitive in the discussion. It just pushed a personal button of mine, which is all too common these days, and that it is to misrepresenting language as a form of gaslighting or manipulation. It's also unproductive—as this thread demonstrated. Anyway, that's also not an excuse to be an asshole, so I apologise.
Edit: not in any way trying to imply the OP intentionally did this, but it's unfortunately all too common when heated subjects are being discussed
Regarding language differences: Again you're right, I assumed that meanings didn't diverge (to this degree); they very well might have.
You should be measuring actual things. For Tesla, this means car sales and operational costs. For Twitter, it's still too early to see if Elon can make it profitable.
Now, for sure, some moves were really dumb mistakes, like suspending people for advertising their Mastodon profiles.
But remember, Musk said early that in the coming months Twitter will do a lot of stupid things. He knew ahead of time that he's screw up on some decisions. This should be familiar to anyone who remotely has any interest in the startup/entrepreneurship world. Try many things, correct the mistakes, double down on the good things.
If you see any highly skilled programmer doing live programming, they will do some obvious mistakes on stream. If you conclude from this that they are stupid, it's only because you have no idea how programming is done.
I used to have a great deal of respect for the man and that has not completely vanished. I think that he has created real results that he deserves credit for. But his actions these last few weeks do not look like those of a strategic, forward thinking leader but rather like impulsive reactions to a self-inflicted chaos.
From the article:
> Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate.
"By one estimate".
I could also claim: Twitter is now on track to become massively profitable, by one estimate.
Can you dispute it? Is it not an absolute fact that by some estimate Twitter will be massively profitable?
Depends on who's estimating doesn't it?
This is why legacy media is not trust worthy.
How can such obvious bullshit fly right over your head?
This is why you're getting downvoted. You can come up with a reason why we're downvoting you, but maybe it's because you need to reflect a bit more on what you're saying and be more open with different opinions/facts?
The poster above you gave you a quote of an estimate. This can be challenged if you quote another estimate or you find some deep methodological flaws on the estimate. Your argument, as it stands, is nonsensical
This is very different from the take in this and similar articles.
Twitter might have a lot of problems, and it's probably made several mistakes. Musks's firing of half the employees and reinstating accounts banned for political reasons are not of them.
That is at least a good outcome of all of this. That it becomes more and more visible for normal users, that news have just become entertainment. And with having news in aggregated/dense form for everyone, one can see also the mechanism, how things get distributed and re-used in channels.
For me a big eye opener was something, that happened a long time ago, when i was working for a company, that became news itself, and i was doing the exact work, that accidentally became news. What i was reading then was just made up fluff and had no overlap with my own experienced reality.
And i think many have the same experience, that when they read articles, that one has expertise of, that it is mostly wrong and sloppy, while, when we read articles about other topics, i just tolerate it and hope and pray, that it is correctly reported. :-)
They lost the majority of their only meaningful income source.
They managed to scare off a large number of their most valuable content creators.
They lost their most important staff.
They have picked up a lot of unwanted attention from regulators across multiple markets.
They have already stopped paying their bills on fundamental things like rent.
It’s over. It’s just a matter of timeline that’s up for debate.
Advertisers will come back in a few months as long as Twitter stays alive and activity lever rises.
There are other revenue sources being planned (Twitter Blue is not the only one).
Now, obviously, it might fail, but it's too early to tell. Too many people want it to fail, that's for sure, but many people want it to succeed.
The doomsayers said Twitter will go offline because so many staff were fired. That didn't happen. In fact there are signs that the opposite is happening.
It is obvious and has been for weeks now to those who do.
I assure you these are going to be unrecoverable failures for as long as Elon is at the wheel.
At best he will be able to sell it for a tiny fraction of what he paid. At worst he might take down Tesla with him considering he just alienated his entire target market of people who were actually likely to buy an electric vehicle in the next 5 years.
(Context: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tesla-buyers-are-bailing-because-o...)
I think you highlight the problem in the middle of your blurb though:
> Now, for sure, some moves were really dumb mistakes, like suspending people for advertising their Mastodon profile
The “dumb mistakes” are happening at a vastly increased rate these days. The fact that you say you will do stupid things before doing them does not justify them and a drastic uptick in the rate they are made is concerning.
So while I’ll admit that there is a chance that most people are wrong and this situation will turn itself around, I’ve yet to see a sign that gives confidence in the new direction of the company.
With Twitter there is no undo. When 80% of advertisers leave because of erratic governance they're just gone. You can get new advertisers to replace the old customers, but that takes a long time. There is no going back to Twitter before Elon. There is no vertically integrated first principles engineering approach to fixing Twitter, because on a fundamental level the interest of the advertisers, users, regulators and journalists are at odds. You can't make them all happy, and as Elon has just discovered, it is very easy to upset groups that are vital to the health of the platform.
These companies know how to run online communities like GitHub, and YouTube. They're also more professional and less prone to one person's cult of personality.
I would think that those guys would love to pay couple billion for such platform and to verify there is no disagreeable material in there either in tweets or private messages.
So far they pretty much ignored it, and even if you think it's a nothing-burger - I can guarantee that if the political options were reversed we would be absolutely seeing articles about them.
Yeah, Republicans getting the kid gloves one again.