An estimated $4 to $20 billion in value, what is he thinking?
Everything is tweets now, on all platforms; hear me out.
It might sound lazy, and I certainly have no loyalty to the Twitter brand, but if Musk isn’t going to defend it we have the opportunity to dilute and generalize the term (like zipper or band-aid). We can kill it dead AND reclaim it.
It’s a good word! Short, sweet, has familiarity, and is honestly pretty descriptive for the simple bird-like chatter of the discourse. Everything else proposed sounds dumb as hell, not to mention you’re doing the marketing for them. Don’t sell their brands - suffocate them!
As someone who prefers threaded interaction, it’s gonna be hard to stop calling them posts. Maybe that’s what my grandkids will think is old fashioned about me.
“They’s been posts since BBS and they’ll stay posts!”
The original post was at least half joking in tone, but in seriousness, I think there’s an argument to be made that “posts” applies to topical threads. Threads that originate with a piece of content like a link or self post and that all following discussion is at least tangentially related. I’d call them posts here on Lemmy for that.
Tweets, however, often originate out of thin air, be it someone’s head or ass. When someone says, “Kanye West ‘tweeted’ <INSERT OPINION HERE>” you’ve already determined about how seriously you’re going to take it.
I remember when twitter first came out and people were talking about “tweets” and it sounded just as stupid as xing sounds today. But the word has made it into mainstream lexicon and been normalized. Just like “googling” something just means to search. Tweet will mean to message something. I think part of the reason he is abandoning twitter is because it is becoming increasingly hard to legally fight other people using the terms for his platform for other platforms. For instance Mastadon is using “toot” which started from “twoot” which started from tweet.
I also still think he is an idiot for abandoning a brand name that is literally in every house and on every storefront. Even if they cant defend the vocabulary to abandon it all is the dumbest business decision I’ve ever heard of.
p.s. for xing I like “kissing” since XOXO is hugs and kisses with the X being the kiss. Considering how homophobic Elon is having his platform being a bunch of people kissing would just be to perfect!
@Master @audaxdreik that’s a good point. There are all sorts of trade names now in common use, but those products still kept their names.
I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.
With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.
He’s just setting money on fire at this point.
What I don’t understand is how he can still be in charge, at all? Do shareholders not have any legal mechanism to get him removed?
The second largest investors in Elon’s Twitter are the Saudis. They might not take kindly to such antics.
He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.
Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.
I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.
I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.
So you’re saying it’s worth at least 20 billion? Still seems too high to me.
I have read here on Lemmy someone claim this is all political and just 4D chess to own the libs.
TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.
I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.
Pretty sure its been losing brand value since musk bought it
That’s why Jack Dorsey jumped on it. Why spend all your time and energy maintaining a completed project when you can take $44 billion and explore other, new projects…
Jack Dorsey did not make that decision. The company had a board that made the decision.
This fucking dude could have spent <$1M hiring a small team to spin up a heavily customized X-branded Mastodon server, but instead he spent $44 BILLION dollars buying and ruining Twitter.
How fucking crazy is that? That’s fucking crazy… right?
this is the guy who decided to build a tunnel under LA to skip traffic and then instead built one in las vegas that gets traffic jams
yes but he built it in las vegas. It has a few stops and relies on teslas, each with a driver, and it functions as a very basic “public transit” system. Almost none of what he initially promised are present in the final design. Originally it was going to be his “hyperloop” thing. Then it was “autonomous vehicles.” Now it’s “teslas driven by people”
Any user who loves Elon Musk enough to continue using “X” for the foreseeable future would have certainly joined him on a new social media platform anyway. That’s how cults of personality work.
Meanwhile, most of the normal and sane people who regularly used Twitter before have decreased or totally stopped their use of the platform since Elon Musk took over and started it on its current death spiral.
I’m sure you’re right, that he bought Twitter for its userbase (and, maybe more importantly, the data), but the grave miscalculation that both he and you are making is that the userbase is not hostage to his whims. People have left to Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc., more are leaving everyday, and more will continue to leave until the site is no longer worth the cost of maintaining and Elon shuts it down or sells it off.
He could have spent a fraction of that $44B making and marketing a new platform, and it probably would have gone a lot better for him than this shitshow. It’s not 4-D chess… Dude bought an unprofitable, overvalued company at the absolute worst time and then proceeded to alienate the majority of him users and advertisers while absolutely destroying the brand.
That’s not how the network effect works. A large, established, functioning network has immense value that is very difficult to erode.
