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Comment by s1gnp0st | Hacker News Reader

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I’d start by not immediately losing 40% of revenue and loads of users, personally.

Immediately adding 1 billion in interest payments a year and lowering revenues by 40% is certainly not how you do it.

That's an excellent question. Having given the matter some serious thought, I think what I'd suggest would be to start by making Twitter better, rather than worse.

I'm not a business genius though so perhaps I'm missing something crucial here.

By selling it to a chum who paid an overpriced tag of $44B through leverage.

Honestly I think this point is understated. Twitter (executives at least - but that's how capitalism works in America right now) basically won by offloading a dying platform onto a sucker with more money then sense. If they'd spread the joy around so that everyone who worked there got a golden parachute to glide away on before Musk walked in with a kitchen sink I think I'd be singing praises of them as folk heroes - as it is they're at least assholes that managed to pull one over on a larger asshole.

Edit: Blargh - switching word order.

> onto a sucker with more sense than money.

I think you have that phrase backward.

Where did this meme of them being a cash incinerator come from (other than from Musk, hoping people didn't look into the public statements)? Last time I looked, they had a few profitable quarters on the books. Looking at the last annual statement, I see a 200M loss on 5B revenue, with them sitting on 8B in assets, 2B of which is in cash. That's nothing close to a cash incinerator.

As far as I can tell, tightening up that slightly and reasonably could have turned it profitable again. The only cash incinerator I see in this picture is bull-in-a-china-shop Musk who appears to have made the problem 100x worse.

Everything changed after mister "genius" operated a leveraged buyout of the company, which essentially means that it is now riddled with debt and zero assets that have not been pledged to pay the debt.

> who appears to have made the problem 100x worse.

Where is that reflected in the quarterly earnings report?

They don’t have a quarterly earnings report because they’re a private company now, and their revenue has dropped by 40% according to an email sent from a manager. Ironically, we can only really know their cash position pre acquisition, and the only source for their being a “cash incinerator” is Elon’s word, which to any reasonable person is worth exactly zero at this point.

I only need one example but I have dozens. The only one that matters is he banned journalists from the platform after promising to make it a haven of free speech. It’s objectively one of the more hypocritical things a public figure has done in recent years.

Musk took Twitter private, and private companies are not required to report financials.

100x was rhetorical. It's not a public company anymore, so we can't know. But if the headlines reporting a 40% drop in revenue are true, that would bring the net loss from 200M a year to 2.2B a year, which would be 10x worse (though I don't even know if you were being that specific in your critique), but that also doesn't take into account whatever he saved from chopping headcount.

Don't give it to the worlds biggest and most divorced narcissist?

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