Unlike others, I saw at least $20B of potential in Twitter. Advertisement and media alignment was basically Twitter’s P0, and why they had a bloated staff that managed corporate sales and media accounts. TV execs around the world wanted a slice of Twitter’s analytics to measure what people interacted with, and we’re willing to pay for it. It wasn’t $44B worth, but they had a “solved” solution for scalable social networks, and whoever could scale enough to be irresistible to advertisers would have come close to justifying that valuation over time.
Knowing a few people that worked there, it justified it’s reputation a bit before Musk came in. The tech side was fairly limited compared to the sales/accounts side, and there were a lot of people doing very little outside of making sure that an advertiser was happy. A smart CEO would have scaled that side of the business without scaling sales staff, but Musk did the exact opposite - and utterly gutted the thing that made any money, and made it about himself…
He’s obviously a fucking idiot, but I consider Twitter to be a vanity project above anything else. He leveraged his debt against the company, ran it to be barebones, and now it’ll just “exist” until he can sell it when he’s bored.
As a software engineer, the one company I really wanted to work for was Twitter. It’s sad to see it killed, but they also kinda deserved it too. At least they got a payout!
Twitter was worth around $22 billion, when Elon bought it at $44 billion, but to help pay for it, half of that is borrowed by Twitter to pay for itself! Yes you can do that.😋
So now the company is worth about $22 bil less, because it has new debt.
In my book 22-22 = 0 = zero = nul = naught = zip
On top of that, the original value has declined dramatically, with about 60% decline in revenue that we know of. So the internal value is actually way below 0, but a limited company cannot be worth less than 0, so it remains 0.
The company is insolvent, which means it’s basically bankrupt, except it’s not declared yet. The only possible slight value it may have left, is for tax deductions on the losses.
The value is determined based on a shareholder valuation, insolvent means having a negative cashflow and depleted reserves.
You can technically run a stock absolutely into the ground if everyone would place sell orders at market (i.e. without limit) and the only buyers would offer 1 cent.
That changes nothing about the profitability of the company though.
And while this is a very hypothetical scenario for a listed company, for an unlisted one you can freely adjust your list price. If he were to sell 1% for $1 to his neighbor, the company valuation would be down to 100 bucks.
Since it’s not a stock company, the valuation is speculative.
But the company being insolvent, and running on a deficit without prospective og turning a profit. Would by normal measures render the company worthless, except if there is a tax benefit to take over.
Musk can value it at whatever he wants, I strongly doubt he will find a buyer at any price.
I have a dumb conspiracy that Elon wants to be US president like any Lex Luthor like person, but since he can’t he is ruining things extreme republicans hate. Then he can gain favor and make his way up as high as he can to reach religious cult status Like some megalomaniac. 😆
What’s weird is if you look at users on places like Newsmax and Oann or other extremist forums they seem to happy seeing Tesla and Twitter going down but don’t mock Elon for it
Social platforms are only worth what they are on paper. Elon is pushing ads and premiums more and more, but it’s 100% not enough to run a service like that. How much longer can this go on?
No tears shed here. The people who built Twitter got a nice payout when they absolutely robbed Elon Musk in that deal. Anyone who chose to stay on the Elon train after his first weeks at the helm gets no sympathy from me.
A lot of people say this, but there seems to be almost zero effort being put into resolving many of the systemic issues with the US visa system.
As a British person in tech, I’d love to work in the US for a year or two, but I have zero intention of dealing with the shitshow that is visa slavery in big tech, and how the visa system is lop-sided to deal with 2-3 countries and a handful of companies over others. In the UK, it’s much simpler to offer visas to Americans, and even mid-sized companies can sponsor visas.
Simply reversing Elon’s decisions would bring back advertisers and engineers, and the media would paint them as the Messiah for saving “the Internet’s public square”.
to be fair, he didn’t just say it was worth that, he put up that much money to buy it (with backing). So it was worth that amount at the moment he swore he’d do it. Whether that was a stupid valuation is a different question.
That is a very nice way of putting it. He’s a narcissistic worthless idiot asshole and a scammer who got really really lucky a number of times. He has charisma, I’ll give you that, but so did Hitler (and sorry for the comparison, its just to make the point that charisma alone isn’t worth that much)
I’ve seen him for what he is for years now and still there are huge swaths of people out there thinking he is some kind of saviour or something,blind of like people who think Tru o is the next coming of Christ.
I kinda wish what I said about him back in 2010-2011 when he started getting attention had come true. “Just wait, he’s gonna turn out to be a comic book villain, he already has the name.”
A comic book villain would have been so much better, sure he’d be out to rule the world, and probably be well on his way to do it, but he’d be intelligent at least.
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