nuff said

387 points

With the way he’s running this, I’m a bit confused as to why he didn’t just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn’t have cost him nearly as much.

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189 points

He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.

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198 points

-50% ad revenue says otherwise

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107 points

Twitter could have 200% more users, if no one want to show them ads, then ad spots will be dirt cheap. Printing 5 millions of 1cent ads vs 1 million of 10cents ads is not the same. Both on income and expenses…

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1 point

To be fair I don’t think that can be entirely prescribed to drop in user base; the internet ad market in general is absolutely tanking at the moment.

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24 points

“users” - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL

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1 point

Threads has like 100 million sign ups. It could replace Twitter.

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18 points

That saw an overnight 50% drop in activity. People were kinda pissed to find out that Meta created them a Threads handle from their Facebook/Instagram and immediately deactivated their Threads accounts. I don’t know what it means, but I like it

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20 points

Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.

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43 points

Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?

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46 points

I think the evidence speaks for itself.

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36 points
*

Let’s be honest Elon doesn’t care about Twitter.

He bought it with money he doesn’t have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.

Everyone of them won.

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6 points

I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It’s the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.

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4 points

The d*ck contest. It’s all about who has the biggest.

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15 points

I’m still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well

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12 points

As much Saudi money as he burned though, I’m expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.

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6 points
*

I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.

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9 points

The simpler explanation is he’s a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn’t have any lifelines left, and he’s failing miserably.

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11 points

Simple. He didn’t shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.

He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.

But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.

If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He’s comfortable telling us about Twitter’s financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let’s him focus on his other vanity projects.

It’s not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It’s not like he’s going to pay his bills. It’s not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?

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2 points

He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost

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10 points
*

The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.

Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they’d be immediately run out of the venue, despite “angry, dissaffected, young people” being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.

When the internet did come along, initially things weren’t much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they’d “raid” other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn’t figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.

When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.

Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to “alt-right”, the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.

From there, the “mask on, hide your powerlevel” stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.

By the time Charlottesville’s swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.

Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they’d slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of “as far-right as we can get away with”. They’d move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.

But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you’d hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of “freedom of speech” any more.

Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren’t being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn’t breed more of them.

So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.

The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.

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2 points

Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.

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155 points

Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!

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36 points
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Deleted by creator
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136 points

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102 points

Weird, users can’t access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that’s literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?

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23 points

Maybe it’s the advertisers. They’re racist and hate Musk because he’s African. That must be it. Couldn’t possibly be anything else.

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24 points

Colour me surprised that Mr Musk and lowering moderating standards would lower advertising revenue.

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27 points

I am mostly surprised that he actually admits worse numbers

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