Musk's $44B Twitter now valued at just $9.4B as X | Hacker News Reader

Musk's $44B Twitter now valued at just $9.4B as X

theverge.com

14 pointsarromatic28 comments

Enterprise value != equity value. This is finance 101 and a bit ridiculous for the deputy editor of The Verge to be fucking up.

According to Fidelity, X’s equity is worth ~$10bn. X also has $13bn of debt on which $2bn of losses have been reserved [1]. That implies an enterprise value around $20bn.

That Fidelity gives its X stake a positive value implies it doesn’t believe Twitter will have to play by the standard rulebook when it defaults.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-lenders-expect-to...

1. Is creating a proper twitter alternative that difficult ? What is google , msft and maybe companies in entire eu (and us) doing ? 2. Is there a chance twitter will be sold ? or a get a government bail out . Twitter's reach is too valuable to let it go bankrupt/ crash .

The problem is not technical. The main task is convincing the masses to use it. When there was only 1 player (twitter), it was a trivial thing. When the market is fractured, it gets more exciting.

Exciting assuming the future apps or users are too excited to choose alternative ? I don't really think there are any proper alternative on the market even after a year for users to move . Bluesky ? no algo , Threads ? no politics and meta , t2/pebble ? bankrupt .

I'm just going to address the elephant in the room: Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber. You cannot get an "alternative" to it because people refuse to acknowledge that Twitter was never all that great in the first place. You can never go home, as they say, and that applies to old versions of social media just as well. You will never, ever have an alternative where all your friends and role-models post on the same network. It just doesn't happen, ever. Not with Twitter, and not with a Twitter alternative - your expectations aren't realistic, and so you're bound to be disappointed until your outlook changes.

If you're willing to adjust your expectations and use a smaller network, you can still enjoy social media. You just have to stop treating it as an attention-stealing exercise where you're in competition with your peers to get noticed by "the world". Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.

If you are a hobbyist writing blogs for fun and not spending hours doing seo for google old twitter was the only way your post / site could be delivered to your intended audience . You wrote a post about the latest python update ? Twitter will deliver it to python liking cluster . Something no other social media does nor do search engines like google where only limited sites are shown .

You vastly overestimate how many people actually use Twitter. The "python liking cluster" does not uniformly hang out on Twitter - maybe like less than ~3% of them probably still use the site. Also, X will happily downrank your content if it isn't controversial enough to be viral. After all, your python-likers aren't reading on a chronological timeline. They're being fed an algorithm of doomscrolling - finding your posts on the site is little more than a beneficial mistake.

You can continue to cling to Twitter until the corpse is cold and they've replaced the blue branding with black, if you wanted. People are both stockholm-syndromed to the app in an unhealthy way and addicted to attention-seeking in ways that X knowingly exploits for ad revenue and premium subscription tithes.

It will only get worse!

I do overestimate user count But sharing links was a big thing in twitter . And for cluster for someone who has zero traffic , ten or a hundred traffic makes a huge difference . I do intend to leave twitter but as my previous comment indicated there aren't any .

> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.

Pretending a platform as large as twitter was/is "one thing" is silly. It may have been that for you, it was not that for many.

> Platforms like Mastodon are great, as long as you don't rely on likes and reposts for dopamine.

As long as you're willing to post to no one, sure.

It's most likely the their personalized timeline was filled with crypto and politcs .

I agree on mastodon . Twitter is for finding new people . Mastodon is for following people you know .

> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.

Like Youtube is a Heavy Metal Anime obsessed echo chamber?

You've said more about the sliver of your personalised algorithm parameters and less about the breadth of the platform.

> You cannot get an "alternative" to it because people refuse to acknowledge that Twitter was never all that great in the first place.

I do think there may be an aspect of permanent fracture. There's a reason people used to affectionately call it the hellsite. Even if Naughty ol' Mr Car were to give up on it and go to spend more time with his imaginary car tunnels, and if borderline sensible (it was never _great_) management, third party clients, etc, were restored, I'm not sure I'd go back. Frankly, at this point, mastodon suits me better anyway.

> Twitter, before Elon's takeover, was a crypto-obsessed political echo chamber.

IME, old-Twitter _was_ better at keeping the stuff you didn't want to see out of your face. I never saw crypto people but did see people making fun of crypto, for instance. I rarely if ever saw a post from Musk, and then only if someone retweeted it. After the takeover this degraded within months; I had to block Musk because it kept shoving him in my face, I started getting content from a wide variety of conspiracy theorist lunatics, shock content, extremely obvious Russian propaganda, etc.

By the time I stopped using it (November 2022 I think) the algorithmic timeline had become pretty much unusable. Some users were surprised to start seeing porn; old-twitter, of course, was full of porn, but it was very good at not showing it to you if you didn't look for it.

I think Twitter needs a new CEO/owner, not alternatives.

Personally I don't use Twitter/X anymore, it has no value to me, but I understand some people find it valuable.

Twitter cannot survive at current scale with any reasonable subscription price. If advertisers come back and it shows enough ads to turn a profit users will get sick of the ads, it will turn into Facebook.

Twitter was doing okay (maybe not) before pre-musk without being another facebook .

New owner is actually the best option in my opinion too , but I don't think anyone is willing to buy it for 44b .

> Twitter cannot survive at current scale with any reasonable subscription price.

Twitter was not bought to make money. Twitter is expenditure for narrative control.

That is correct. Valuation is irrelevant.

We’ll see how long Twitter can bleed out. Even Musk can’t afford it forever.

My bet is on bail-out or resell to msft . Google is possible which would be nice assuming same treatment as yt but meta is unlikely since they have threads .

Musk bought it to cancel the woke culture but got cancelled instead, lol.

FWIW it's not really fair that everyone interesting left just because they didn't like Musk which turned twitter into boring place, basically self reinforcing cycle.

When you choose to turn your establishment into a Nazi bar, people who don't want to hang out with Nazis will find someplace else to be. That isn't unfair, that's just the consequences of your actions.

Musk didn't want those interesting people on his platform to begin with, and he he did everything he could to drive them away.

What I witnessed was tons of people jumping ship on day 1.

Elon jumped into conspiracy theories a bit later, tho I don't see his tweets anymore for some reason.

And for nazi's - you'll find them everywhere if you squint hard enough.

You don't have to squint very hard to find them, given that the result of Elon's quest to destroy Twitter's "woke mind virus" (which he was ranting about when he bought the platform) is making a safe space for them and boosting their content as much as possible.

Yet somehow I heard more about them here than on twitter.

Also kinda amazing even anti-elon bots haven't been stopped - https://x.com/teslaeurope/status/1831622360656421294

> What I witnessed was tons of people jumping ship on day 1.

There were definitely waves of jumping ship. Some people left on day 1, presumably because, well, life is too short to have to deal with Musk. But IIRC the biggest boosts to Mastodon traffic (for most of the early period Bluesky was invite only so not a useful metric) were around when it started banning a bunch of journalists (this later seems to have been abandoned as a strategy), brought back a bunch of particularly egregious lunatics, and nuked the third party API. Those inciting events were scattered from late 2022 to early 2023.

> Twitter cannot survive at current scale with any reasonable subscription price

Twitter can survive with zero subscriptions and no advertisers. It’s owned by the world’s richest man.

Not forever. Twitter costs a lot to run, and now has a big debt to service. Musk’s wealth comes from Tesla stock, not a growing revenue stream.

Its now worth less than the worse case scenario that the banks believed

That 13b bank loan alone could build another twitter with more revenue .

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