Twitter Layoffs Continue into 2023
timesnownews.com
timesnownews.com
I think it's interesting that this is the new narrative about the state of the company. I don't recall this being a common consensus before the acquisition, but likely tied to the financial revelations made public during/after the acquisition.
> To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said.
People who believe Musk is being hounded for ideological reasons also believe that NYT is among the culprits.
I’m quite familiar with the Elon fanboy who says “masterful move sir” when he sees Elon slam his dick in a car door. But you’re in a different category. Your response to dick destruction seems to be “nothing to see here, it’s a regular, normal activity. The mainstream media is persecuting Elon!”
On top of that Musk has given guidance that he expects revenue to fall from $6b in 2022 to $3b in 2023. (This seems dramatic TBH)
I don't think there were revelations (this is all public info), the transaction just changed the fundamentals.
Holy shit, that's terrible.
Can you give a source? A quick google search only shows articles about how Musk claims he prevented a 3bn shortfall through layoffs.
That is not exactly accurate, twitter has lost about a billion dollars since the ipo...
https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...
Operating profit and stock share price are two different things.
I don’t have inside information but considering how the acquisition reportedly started deterring ad buys almost as soon as it was announced, it’s very easy to imagine that they were in fact losing money in November but would not have been had the deal never happened.
I think the loss of advertising revenue since (and because of) the deal is much bigger than the interest expense.
The amusing part is that this narrative is ultimately getting checked by reality - with each passing month of the company not immediately failing as per the media hysterics, people will have to face that uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
Agenda you say? You look at any business and see that they took on massive amount of debt, and said debt did not go to improve their bottom line. And calling that “financial issues” is an agenda now?
There have been structural issues related profitability literally since around 2012, which is not something that relates to capital structure.
Mergers where the loading of debt onto the company to finance the merger is a major cause of bankruptcy also aren’t that unusual. (For both public firms and firms taken private.)
It's pretty clear the borrower didn't know what they're doing when they made this deal. The borrower even tried to get the deal canceled (or maybe just renegotiate) by going through the court, and failed.
The lenders moved forward because they know the borrower is good for it. And the borrower can afford to lose even more billions and still function. The borrower can afford to make mistakes of this size.
I think you're confusing "this has been allowed to continue" with "all parties know what they're doing".
If you want to have any chance of being objective, you will include the cost-cutting that was done as well, which did improve the bottom line. At any rate, it will be very interesting to revisit all these threads a year from now. My bet is it will work out fine, but we'll see soon enough, right?
The company had issues prior, but the financial blow Twitter took the day the deal closed may be impossible to recover from. These were not hidden revelations that came to light, they occurred because of the price paid. It's looking increasingly likely Twitter died the day the acquisition closed, and actions since are proverbial deck chairs.
And all of that was because Musk (lamely) threatened to increase free speech on the platform. They don't like that, the media.
The only change after the acquisition is based on Musk’s decision to add new annual debt servicing on the order of 20% of their entire revenue and recognizing that removing moderation and welcoming extremists and sex traffickers back to the site probably isn’t the recipe for getting advertisers to significantly increase their spending.
Same ideological reasons as your main point.
"Twitter now allows stuff i disagree with, so them being in financial trouble is good, because stuff i disagree is bad". Where as your post forces them to think through how is it that twitter is in financial trouble all the sudden, but not before, and whether that is an accurate representation of reality versus a narrative to appeal to the aforementioned bias. People go out of their way to avoid cognitive dissonance, so downvote.
On a personal note, Twitter feels more like Musk's personal platform now. Every single time I visit the Twitter website, the first tweet I see is Elon's. I don't follow him. Two people I follow happen to follow him. No matter how many times I select that the tweet isn't relevant, a new Elon tweet shows up. The only way to get rid of him from my timeline is to block him or unfollow everyone I follow that follows him, which seems pretty absurd.
Sometimes it isn’t a grand mainstream media conspiracy.
Unless they are planning on bullying their users into switching to some mobile app (kind of like Reddit do), I don't see the point of adding a bookmark button that all browsers already implement.
The only thing new is a dedicated button for it.
It definitely can't be coming soon if it's been here for ages already though.
I think they're planning to move it next to the like button to make it more visible.
It's inside the "Share" button menu
> Content moderation teams in Singapore, Dublin see job cuts
Private equity has financially destroyed a lot of companies. Leveraged buyouts are not exactly a great way to make a company healthy and profitable.
Whereas Twitter was the opposite: it was already publicly traded and then went private. So there was no new capital. Instead, we see a ton of cutbacks.
Musk is not infusing capital, he's cut-cut-cutting to the bone. What's the endgame? At what point does Twitter become more valuable than the day he bought it at $44 billion?
... Meanwhile there is practically no "left wing" in the United States mainstream... and hasn't been for a long time. Identity politics and cultural liberalism, sure. Stuff around the margins. Actual redistributive economics, unions, and worker's power? Not since Clinton. How stuff like the NYT or CNN got reframed by people as "left wing" is beyond me.
If there's a concerted press attack on Musk, it's not by the "left wing"; it's by one wing of the established business class in the United States vs another. The fights around Trump are similar. Competing economic interests, areas of control, which are framed in the public mind as being about "left wing" vs "right wing" ideological issues, but in reality these are only tangential.
As for your second point, you're playing a no true Scotsman game where the only real liberal is hyper focused on money. Identity politics has almost wholly consumed the attention of the American left. Even during a press announcement of a bill to legalize marijuana in MN, a good portion of the talk was about racial justice.
CNN has recently sacked a number of people or cancelled shows to get away from the blatantly partisan content they were producing. The NYT has had a number of controversies recently over internal fights among editors and staff that their coverage wasn't biased enough.
Meanwhile, redistributive economics marches on in the background. Trillions given out to everyone and anyone, plus long extensions of unemployment payouts during COVID. Municipalities playing with "UBI" schemes which are targeted at minority groups like BIPOC or gender non-conforming individuals.
Union support is generally unpopular outside of some groups, because unions have some powers here that would be illegal in most other Western countries, and that gets abused. Of all of the "left wing" positions, expanding unions is probably the lowest priority for that reason. I'll bring it up every time the topic comes up, because it truly is that important: the SEIU tried to take money from government benefits paid to mentally or physically disabled people in MN, and if I'm not mistaken, they are doing so in other states. Unions in the US are not what people in other countries expect when they wonder why American union participation is so low.
But I think we actually agree more than disagree: all the cultural stuff has taken the place of actual left wing politics.
Because socialist politics in the west was defeated, politically, in the 80s and 90s.
The "right wing" won. There's no real anti-capitalism left. People who might consider themselves left wing are really just playing with cultural shibboleths, acting out a part, because stating actual left wing opinions (e.g. "we should nationalize the oil industry") is so far out of the political mainstream that you can become absolutely ex-communicated for speaking these opinions in public. They're so dead, that you look like a crazy lunatic.
And the corruption you're speaking about in the union movement, etc. is IMHO a product of that. They become ossified into guilds and mafia-like clubs (this has always been a pressure). Because actually within the union movement historically it was rank and file socialists & communists who were pushing the unions away from that kind of thing historically, and the lack of a principled radical movement in the unions leads directly to corruption. (Look up the Teamsters for a Democratic Union sometime, for an example)
Socialism does not exist as a political force in the United States, unless you ridiculously redefine socialism to mean "anything government does."
Is there a liberal media vs conservative media war in the US? Yes. I just think it's absurd to frame this around "left" vs "right". It again takes us back to these stupid football teams.
[1] "engaging"