X says it is worth $19B, down from $44B last year
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.
That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand. While it had about $6 billion in cash before Mr. Musk’s buyout, a large portion of that probably went into the cost of closing the acquisition.
...
To make ends meet, Mr. Musk probably has to slash costs — by a lot. Over the weekend, he was said to be already moving to do so by ordering job cuts across Twitter. One investor who put less than $1 million in the buyout of the company said he was told by the head of Mr. Musk’s family office to expect that around 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees would be laid off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...
The internet had/has no problem hosting repugnant viewpoints. Plenty of web hosting providers are available for you to share your most vile, hateful thoughts. We're watching a very powerful person discover in real time that free speech isn't something that generates value on its own.
Taking a $13 Billion loan and therefore being charged $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments means its going down the Xitter faster than ever before. The amount of loan-payments Twitter had to make this year alone dwarfs the losses Twitter had over the past decade.
Does X pay its rent yet? Is that part of the Vision?
The ones who need to won't.
The largest problem with businesses these days is the "we must make profit next quarter" mindset and the "I hope he fails" is either that - or a pocket dislike of free speech. Each option is questionable in it's own right.
I hope Elon succeeds. Not because I agree with everything he says or does but because I value free speech.
“I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” -Voltaire
That said, an open-source platform more focused on decentralization would be a better solution, but nothing will be perfect while power and wealth are so centralized. I hope Damus is able to grow, but it's just not easy access enough as it is.
If you value free speech then you don't want Musk to run Twitter. Musk does not believe in free speech:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-20/news-analy...
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-12-musk-free-speech-absolut...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-s...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/07/elon-m...
The only change is that what gets censored is now more aligned with Musk's own interests. That's all.
One of the biggest scandals of our time is "disinformation" that the government doesn't approve of being silenced by Government working with Private Industry to get around bans on government censorship of speech. Used for dissent around COVID "misinformation" or "election integrity".
I didn't claim X is perfect but it's a lot better than twitter that banned, say, the post for putting up The Laptop Story - that's long since been proven 100% true and was suppressed by... drum roll! the FBI literally lying about "russia".
The only thing that's changed is there's a top place for information that isn't controlled by the government - right or wrong.
I understand that's scary but scary freedom is better than the safety of slavery.
1. Instances of deceit, irrationality, or fallacious reasoning:
- The claim "it's not working with the US Gov to censor free speech that's proven to be true after the fact" suggests that because something is proven true later, it was necessarily censored for being true. This is a post hoc fallacy.
- Labeling disapproved "disinformation" as "literally the hallmark of fascism" is a slippery slope fallacy, as it makes an extreme conclusion based on limited data.
- The claim that Twitter banned "the post for putting up The Laptop Story" and connects it with the FBI "literally lying about 'russia'" makes an assumption of causation without clear evidence.
- The comparison "scary freedom is better than the safety of slavery" is a false dichotomy, suggesting only two extreme options exist.
2. Overt emotional appeals or attempts to manipulate the reader's emotions:
- Using terms like "biggest scandals of our time," "hallmark of fascism," and "safety of slavery" are emotionally charged phrases meant to evoke strong reactions from the reader.
- The phrase "drum roll!" is an attempt to heighten anticipation and add emphasis to the subsequent statement.
- "I understand that's scary" acknowledges the emotional weight of the topic, attempting to resonate with readers who might feel the same.
3. Summary of the Overall Approach:
The text primarily employs emotional appeals and fallacious reasoning to make its points. While it presents some claims as factual, it lacks concrete evidence or logical argumentation to support them. Instead, it relies on emotionally charged phrases and extreme comparisons to drive home its perspective. The text does not align strongly with Enlightenment values of reason, evidence, and logical argumentation. Instead, it leans heavily on emotional and manipulative tactics.
Edit (to add my rational for why I'm not convinced it's any better):
Like ChatGPT points out, the arguments against the prior Twitter and for the new I don't find fully logical or evidenced.
And in my view, the transition of Twitter to private ownership under Elon Musk pose challenges to its role as a guardian of free speech, compared to its time as a publicly traded company.
This change potentially alters the checks and balances in place, as the discourse and recourse now largely rest on Elon's discretion. And possibly on Elon's creditors, which some of them are questionable.
Previously, various stakeholders could critique and influence Twitter's policies, fostering a level of transparency. Now, this dynamic is gone.
So I'm left to take Elon's personal guarantee. To believe his claim that he's a good dictator. That he won't leave his personal beliefs and interests bias his platform. And to believe that it will end up being an overall net positive to truth seeking, and not devolve into another tool that helps falsehoods spread while truth erodes.
Even if he does manage to do all that for some time, being privately held isn't a robust mechanism to protect free speech and promote truth long term. If he worked to somehow democratize, create check and bounds, and all that, I'll change my mind.
Ahh... the thing that makes up stuff and is increasingly... censored?
Hard pass.
I'll take my own thoughts and not AI limited by fear.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/chatgpts-user-ba...
"OpenAI also started responding to user backlash and regulatory pressure by censoring harmful ChatGPT responses, which may have led some users to abandon the tool, possibly viewing it as less useful, less trustworthy, or simply less fun."
Let me know when I can talk to a human again. I'm not here to talk to NPCs hiding behind Censored AI.
pre-post edit: noticed your edit.
"To believe his claim that he's a good dictator."
I trust Elon as a "good dictator" when compared to alternatives. (IE: Media working with the FBI to censor stories and influence elections by hiding truth)
Don't talk about the "robust mechanism to protect free speech" without being willing to talk about all the alternative to "Elon"... the US government? Other tech companies? Media? Who have all been proven to be willing to lie to keep a narrative?
Even if he has his flaws? (hint: he has many) The fact that he's not beholden to the US Government or other entities is in itself a step that we needed to break the silence about all the "conspiracy theories" that keep ended up being true.
Elon is faaaaaaar from perfect. He sure as shit isn't the one walking on water.... but he's waaaaaaay more trustworthy than most of the alternatives out there.
Elon, you're just blindly putting your trust and faith in him...
I'll never understand the tribal instinct people seem to have in blindly following a single authoritarian but convincing leader over a system that empowers you, has checks and balances in place, and federates the powers.
I also just want to elucidate this quote a bit in case you didn't know.
Voltaire did not actually write these exact words. The line is a summary of his views on freedom of speech and thought, and it was penned by Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 biography of Voltaire titled "The Friends of Voltaire." Hall wrote this phrase to encapsulate Voltaire's beliefs on the subject.
Given that Voltaire himself did not say these exact words, there is no specific context in which he was addressing someone or some particular statement he disagreed with.
Voltaire was a man of the Enlightenment, which prioritized reason, evidence, and logical argumentation. He would likely have opposed the deliberate spread of falsehoods and deceit. However, he would also probably have advocated for the right of people to express even flawed arguments, as challenging such arguments through reason and debate is foundational to Enlightenment values.
But when it comes to personal attacks, slander, deceit, and hate speech, he would have not been so tolerant, because the subtext is when he speaks of "speech" he means engaging in an enlightened conversation using reason, evidence, and logical argumentation. It's okay to have flawed logic, evidence or reasoning, but he was fighting the powers at be of his time, and those were using deceit, irrational and illogical fallacies, appeals to emotions, forced censorship and the like to push falsehoods. The values of the enlightenment were about working towards accurate truth seeking.
I think free speech is like all our other rights - absolute but your rights end where the rights of others begin. Which is a wonderful paradox in which to live.
You have the right to self defense but don't have the right to own a nuke. You have a right to speak freely but not to defame/slander/incite violence. The question isn't are those rights yours but where your right ends and the line between your rights and mine.
It's still probably my favorite quote - especially as a veteran - even if, like a lot of things, its not exactly 100% accurate lol.
I should put it as "Voltaire, misquoted by Hall"
My other favorite quote is:
“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings
Fidelity has marked down the value of Twitter/X by 65%
All advertisers are gone - it seems like most advertising is some absolute crap. No way it brings any real money. Linda Yaccarino was recently caught lying (or rather, presenting the state of affairs in Elon's way) - suggesting and even naming some big brands that are supposedly back, while they are not (or spend 0.1% of their previous spending).
Creators revenue sharing seems to be a 'fake it till you make it' attempt - with first payouts an order of magnitude higher than the last ones. And of course, it's completely opaque - nobody has any idea what the payouts are really based on. But hey, Twitter open sourced 'the algorithm' ! Even Elon fans appear to complain and realize that they may have been mislead.
We are definitely witnessing history in the making. A guy, that 4 years ago had a legitimate shot at becoming an absolute legend, decided to push his 'optimism' way too far (for which, I believe, he will end up in prison) and then on a whim, to buy Twitter for $44B, only to burn it to the ground.
He paid 44 billion to restore free speech.
I think his cause is more noble than sheer capitalism
Edit: down vote and hate all you want... mark my words .. Elon is going to go down in history as a visionary, a hero and a champion of free speech.
a bunch of angry ex-twitter employees on hacker news is not an accurate representation of reality
On top of that, he's very clearly just picking and choosing which accounts to treat with "FREE SPEECH!" (these tend to be far-right wing figures), and who to ban (these tend to be journalists who cover Musk)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
Eh, care to elaborate?
Musk was always very 'optimistic' about Tesla goals and timeline estimates. That's fine (I guess) when you're a small company trying to achieve a major breakthrough. And they did actually deliver and started to mass produce EV cars - absolutely impressive result.
But in the process, Musk also started to promise more and more impossible things, on a bigger and bigger scale - FSD (almost 10 years ?), Robotaxis (!), Tesla's cars as 'appreciating assets', Boring Company, recently Optimus, AI, Tesla Semi, Cybertruck. Infinite demand that he claimed on investors earning call (he knew the real numbers) ?
The scale of optimism varies of course here. Tesla Semi for example ? Announced 6 years ago, officially started deliveries 1 year ago. In reality, those are prototype trucks, with specs and price being kept secret.
Another interesting one is the deal with Hertz - in October 2021, they announced a deal with Tesla, in which they supposedly bought 100k Teslas. Tesla stock skyrocketed (something like +50% in 3 weeks), to hit its all time high share price beginning of November 2021. It turns out (as announced by Hertz last week) that they only bought 35k Tesla's so far.
It's fine to say with huge optimism you're tackling a big problem when you're a 50 persons startup. It's another thing to say that you are in the process of building and close to delivering them as a huge public company, whose valuation is higher than 10 next competitors combined (when said competitors are doing >x10 sales).
And it's an entirely different thing, when the main character of the story, sells almost $40B of stock (!!!) at the peak of the hype he created. To give some perspective, $40B is the entire valuation of Ford, or GM. And he sold with excellent timing too. Remember this Hertz story - October 2021, then shares hit 400$ (all time high) beginning November 2021. Elon Musk starts selling on 8 November 2021.
It's a hard sell for now, that's for sure. Once the stock inevitably crashes, it will be a different story.
I’m not asking about his optimism, but why he should be imprisoned.
You didn’t mention anything criminal, so I’m going to assume FUD.
Well, all this optimism (and I omitted several other important misrepresentation of Tesla business, made by Musk) is looking like that - just too much optimism. Keep in mind, their current valuation is based solely on those promises (or shall I say misrepresentation of reality) - they're not making that much money, their margin are contracting quickly, and they are a rather small carmaker as compared to others.
However, I'm betting that fast forward 3 years, Tesla share price tanks 90% from now (that would still leave it bigger than Ford !!!) and Tesla won't deliver any meaningful progress on all those 'optimistic' predictions, people's feeling about this period will be much different.
Edit: For what it's worth, Sam Antar (former CFO of the Crazy Eddie - a huge securities fraud. He's now working for the government) is also regularly picking on Musk - he's seeing a lot of red flags.
Also, for what it's worth, it's CFO was recently fired. Without any comments as for why.
At his current net worth, Musk will be able to underwrite Twitter for the next 3 centuries before he starts running out of money.
Yes, don't listen to the outsiders who question the Vision. They're only doing so because they haven't purged themselves of their body thetans, yet.
There's a blurry line between over-enthusiastic corporate-speak, and cult-speak, and this is sitting somewhere on the line.
Musk made the offer just before a big drop in valuation of tech companies. Even if Twitter revenue remained stable it probably wouldn’t be worth $44B Musk paid.
With a drop in usage, drop in ads, controversy around the bots, misinformation, failure of Twitter Blue, I would expect that the actual value is quite below the said $19B.
Maybe the cost saving measures partially offset the drop in revenue? They crippled functionality for guest users quite a lot (I’m not logged in on my work laptop and I can’t see quote tweets nor replies), their workforce is 5x smaller, it seems their costs are way lower than before.
It wasn't worth $44B when he bought it, so I'm not sure why the NY Times would even use that number in any way. If I pay someone $100,000 for a stick they found on the side of the road, it doesn't make that stick worth $100k.
I doubt Twitter was worth $19B even before Musk overpaid for it. It was a 15 year old company that couldn't make money.
This is almost exactly how accounting works. Whenever they want to decide how much something is worth the answer is the most someone else would pay for it.
Doesn't make it less insane, especially in the presence of idiots with huge sums of money.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...
What is this, alternate reality land? It was trading for $16 (albeit this was a low point) a share when Musk started his pump and dump scheme, which rocketed the value to 45 a share, which is the point that Musk decided he doesn’t want it and also began proceedings to dump stock.
There were ATH in the $45 range, but TWTR was on a clear downward trend.
I don't have quick access to share prices older than Jan 1st 2019 - but from that date through the date of Elon's first share purchase on Jan 31st, 2022 - Twitter's average price was was $44/share.
We aren’t talking about when musk first purchased shares. We’re talking about when twitter was trading at $16 when musk attempted to then manipulate the stock market by stating he’d buy twitter, which shot twitter back up.
So why did you pay $100,000?
When you bought that $5 lotto ticket, it was worth $5. After the lotto is drawn, it's either worth approximately nothing or potentially a lot more than $5.
Aren't most tech companies back near their ATHs? MSFT is above what it before that drop. Meta had the most notable crash but they're only ~20% lower than pre-that drop.
Capital losses can offset unlimited capital gains.
(Yes, it's very possible to be both smart and overconfident.)
You can write that off against profits, and save around 20% - but you still lost 80% of the money.
So what would be the purpose of tanking it on purpose? He could just send the US Treasury the money for less trouble.
Elon's cause is more noble than sheer capitalism.
Advertisers don't want to be on a platform that allows honest, open communication. A sterile non-controversial platform is much safer for them.
At some point as our rights and our freedoms in this country slowly erode, we're going to be grateful to have Twitter and to Elon Musk for being one of the last platforms to put our freedoms over sheer capitalism.
Musk isn't interested in your rights or freedoms:
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/rcna81961
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/15/twitter-s...