Musk warns twitter may have to declare bankruptcy

[Beerzerker]

6 hours ago, Donut417 said:

The issue is if Zuckerberg drives Facebook in to the ground, I dont think the government could justify bailing it out. This is not 2008, considering the shit I have seen happen in America since 2020, Im pretty sure a bailout might not be in the cards. People were not happy when we bailed out Wall Street. The fact is in the last few years we had cities literally burning. We had rioting in the streets and we had the capitol building ransacked. 

I believe they'd prop it up even if they have to legislate it to do so.
Do bear in mind what FB really is - A personal data prfile harvesting engine that works. Don't kid yourself, that's worth more to them than you'd think and they do have alot invested in it. I mean why did they have Zuckerburg show up to testify more than once on the hill over it, even though it was something he started on his own like so many other things we know about?
It's because of the effect it has and the value of that effect can be used for their purposes.

Reagan did say once there is something you never want to hear - "Hello, I'm from the government and I'm here to help" - And he was right about that.
Can't count all the things the gov has ruined by getting their grubby paws all up in it.

6 hours ago, Donut417 said:

 

Twitter failing wont flush the toxins out. Social Media as a whole is the Toxin. 

I agree that Twitter alone won't do that, you'd have to shutdown the media, as in all of it to acheive that kind of "Cleansing" effect.
And just like before, as soon as it's up and running (Again) here comes the infection to make it toxic all over again.

[porina]

3 hours ago, HenrySalayne said:

You might think so, but no! It's way easier to get money if you sign it in the name of the company you're about to buy.

Thanks, that seems like a decent explanation although it is still beyond my non-investor brain how that is allowed! 

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, Beerzerker said:

I agree that Twitter alone won't do that, you'd have to shutdown the media, as in all of it to acheive that kind of "Cleansing" effect.
And just like before, as soon as it's up and running (Again) here comes the infection to make it toxic all over again.

That's because Twitter has never been the problem. Social media in general were never the problem. Human beings are the problem. People have fundamental disagreements over objective reality. They've always had that. It's just much more visible these days where these types of opinions aren't relegated to the Stammtisch, where they were largely isolated by the fact that someone saying something in the presence of others face-to-face only goes so far, but something posted on the internet is practically eternal and can theoretically gain an infinite reach. And of course there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory that only amplifies the problems.

 

Now regarding Twitter's possible bankruptcy, I feel like this was a foregone conclusion, given Twitter's well documented inability to become profitable. Musk may have styled himself as the savior of free speech (or at least the very wrong definition people online seem to have of that term) by buying Twitter and claiming that nothing about this was about money, but if you're surprised that a capitalist in general and Musk in particular, with his ways of operating his businesses, would let this become the albatross that sinks his wealth just to make Twitter an even worsely moderated cesspit, you should probably start taking a closer look at how capitalism works and that capitalists never do something for the greater good unless that greater good aligns with their profit motive. Which is usually when you should question if that "greater good" is actually good to begin with.

[mr moose]

13 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

That's because Twitter has never been the problem. Social media in general were never the problem. Human beings are the problem. People have fundamental disagreements over objective reality. They've always had that. It's just much more visible these days where these types of opinions aren't relegated to the Stammtisch, where they were largely isolated by the fact that someone saying something in the presence of others face-to-face only goes so far, but something posted on the internet is practically eternal and can theoretically gain an infinite reach. And of course there's the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory that only amplifies the problems.

The problem is that we have never before had such a huge change in the way information is exchanged and right now as we speak there is a huge deficit in social political control over that information.   When you have twitter and facebook who together control the vast majority of social media (for all intents and purposes they control all of it) and you have both of them banning and "fact checking" only one side of politics, then you have a massive problem.  When you see specific posts get deleted, only certain replies are visible or sometimes you don't even see posts at all then it's a problem with who controls SM and not with the users. At least with the American MSM you have fucktards on both sides of the divide, you can at least choose to be misinformed with one sided reporting and know which side you are listening to. 

 

[ravenshrike]

15 hours ago, oali24 said:

the article says

Well, whoever wrote this was certainly a moron. While the debt Musk brought with him didn't help, if Twitter was making any significant money(which at it's stock valuation before Musk started his shenaningans it fucking should have been) then the payments would have been... manageable. Instead it was fraud all the way down, with people paying 5 digits for a blue checkmark under the table. In reality, if Trump's presidency hadn't resurrected interest in the platform and COVID kept people inside for a year and a half, it would already have gone bankrupt from how it was being mismanaged.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, mr moose said:

The problem is that we have never before had such a huge change in the way information is exchanged and right now as we speak there is a huge deficit in social political control over that information.   When you have twitter and facebook who together control the vast majority of social media (for all intents and purposes they control all of it) and you have both of them banning and "fact checking" only one side of politics, then you have a massive problem.  When you see specific posts get deleted, only certain replies are visible or sometimes you don't even see posts at all then it's a problem with who controls SM and not with the users. At least with the American MSM you have fucktards on both sides of the divide, you can at least choose to be misinformed with one sided reporting and know which side you are listening to. 

 

There was nothing wrong with fact-checking, the problem is there is a tiny-but-vocal type of person who feels they have unlimited free-speech and can say anything without consequence, but it's a liability of the platform, both legally and financially to keep those asshats around. Once you start blocking those people (on the right and left) they start crying censorship, and then the platform has started a slipperly slope to nobody understanding what is allowed anymore, like on Twitch.

 

At least twitter wasn't censoring things left and right, it was just banning people for saying violently disturbing things. Getting someone banned off twitter can take months. Oh and you know what the kicker is? Let's say I have two accounts, one that I follow and read artists, and another that I follow and read other creators on. If I report the violent images being sent to the people I follow by some disturbed creep, from one account I'll get "we don't see anything wrong (despite the image being covered in body fluids and the eyes cut out)", and the other account will get "we are investigating this." There is no consistency at all with twitter.

 

In an ideal situation, "simply blocking" the disturbing crap would help, but that isn't what happens.

 

Here's another example... Every time I see the gross 3 and 4 panel ads, I block them, and then a new account pops up next month.

 

These accounts are not verified and not paying for twitter blue.

 

 

You know what would go a long way to making twitter pay and self-moderate for itself? Limiting the number images and quality, limiting the length of video and quality, and auto-play features so that people trying to game "twitter" for free ads is reduced to zero.

 

If an account has, oh, say under 1000 followers, or has less than 1000 unique posts over 2 years, limit the image and video posts to a single image and videos to 15 seconds. reTweets don't count as unique posts, and neither do videos or images. That's where you put "twitter blue" as a value. 

 

Instead you get this garbage

Elmo must have thought twitter users were all clout-chasers. Sorry no. "half the ads" Sorry, I'm not paying for "half" the ads. Remove all ads entirely, and give me control over the timeline so that I can also block all images by default from accounts I don't follow, or aren't followed by any people I follow.

 

The only, and I mean the ONLY way Elmo gets his free-speech utopia social network requires two things:

1. NO advertisements, because advertisers will not advertise on brand-unsafe content, something that Elmo clearly doesn't want to understand. No "but muh free-speech" idiot content is brand-safe.

2. NO paywall, if you can't see it, it's ineffective anyway. Hell, if you want to see "chaos performing exactly as expected", you'd be better off having a tips-for-tweets system where twitter users buy Twitch's equivalent of bits, and charge users for leaving likes, or quote-retweeting.

 

[Spotty]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Instead you get this garbage

 

Elmo must have thought twitter users were all clout-chasers. Sorry no. "half the ads" Sorry, I'm not paying for "half" the ads. Remove all ads entirely, and give me control over the timeline so that I can also block all images by default from accounts I don't follow, or aren't followed by any people I follow.

Wait, you pay $8/month and you still get ads on Twitter? Why not just disable ads fully for people who subscribe? That $8/month has got to be worth way more to Twitter than the revenue they would get from serving up ads to the same user. I don't really see what excuse Twitter has for not just fully disabling ads for Blue subscribers when Youtube Premium can remove ads, and let's face it Youtube's operating costs must be way higher than Twitters just from the nature of serving 4k video & streaming.

heh I guess if more advertisers keep bailing from the platform soon everybody will be seeing half as many ads

 

Just call him Elon. Calling him Elmo in all of your posts makes it hard to take your other points seriously while you're taking childish shots like that at him.

[Fasterthannothing]

18 hours ago, oali24 said:

I don't use or have any interest in using twitter, but clearly its important to many people and lots of people  use it for their livelyhood.

Yeah no it's really not I literally can't think of one good reason social media needs to exist for 

[Kisai]

2 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Wait, you pay $8/month and you still get ads on Twitter? Why not just disable ads fully for people who subscribe? That $8/month has got to be worth way more to Twitter than the revenue they would get from serving up ads to the same user. I don't really see what excuse Twitter has for not just fully disabling ads for Blue subscribers when Youtube Premium can remove ads, and let's face it Youtube's operating costs must be way higher than Twitters just from the nature of serving 4k video & streaming.

heh I guess if more advertisers keep bailing from the platform soon everybody will be seeing half as many ads

 

Just call him Elon. Calling him Elmo in all of your posts makes it hard to take your other points seriously while you're taking childish shots like that at him.

Nah, Elmo is the name some comedy sites have taken to calling him. People with thin skin and big egos track who talks about them. I'd rather call him Elmo with the assumption that nothing I say will get his attention than try to be "serious" about the topic when the guy throws baby-tantrums when people prove how much of a hypocrite he is when users who were already "verified" changed their display names or icons to Elon to make fun and prove how useless the checkmark is.

 

Twitter is going down in flames, all because Elon is not the business man he thought he was. There is also a former president who pulls the same schtick and he was already well disliked long going back to the 90's. When you're rich enough, you can afford to ignore the people throwing punches, but the real danger is when they can censor you out of spite. Twitter should have "never been for sale" in the first place, but hey, no doubt something will popup and replace it, but, again I've never seen people abandon ship a platform so quickly since myspace.

 

Buying Twitter and destroying it, is the biggest censorship that will Elon will perpetuate on the internet ... by incompetence. 

[Beerzerker]

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

Twitter is going down in flames, all because Elon is not the business man he thought he was. There is also a former president who pulls the same schtick and he was already well disliked long going back to the 90's. When you're rich enough, you can afford to ignore the people throwing punches, but the real danger is when they can censor you out of spite. Twitter should have "never been for sale" in the first place, but hey, no doubt something will popup and replace it, but, again I've never seen people abandon ship a platform so quickly since myspace.

 

Buying Twitter and destroying it, is the biggest censorship that will Elon will perpetuate on the internet ... by incompetence. 

Elon didn't become the guy with what he's got by being incompetent in business..... He's got it as proof of his competency in business along with Tesla and SpaceX as further, specific proof of it.

BTW, since you bothered to "Go there":
There is another former president, well disliked by many going back to the 90's that's IS competent with the use of cigars and other various implements that has been proven (Admitted to it no less) to lie their ass off when confronted about it. 

These kind of (Political) statements applies to both sides of the isle and with that, let's leave the politics on the shitpile (The hill in DC) where it belongs please.

This is just more proof of the hatred that appeared towards him after he had said a few things, which is fine by me because he's entitled to his thoughts and beliefs like anyone else.

Whether I agree or disagree, at least I've made up my mind if I like him or not inspite of it.
Others in the past were practically worshiping the ground he walked on at one point over Tesla and other eco-related stuff... Until he said "Something" they didn't agree with. 

From that point on, for him it's been nothing but like standing up close and in front of the monkey cages at your local zoo which brings up another point made earlier:

5 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

That's because Twitter has never been the problem. Social media in general were never the problem. Human beings are the problem.

Makes the point even better than how I had put it earlier.
This correct in that the tech itself does nothing on it's own, be it an iphone, EV, hammer, firearm, or really anything because they are all inanimate objects but do what they do when used by us regardless of the "What" this use is or would be for - We decide that. 
The objects don't get to decide or even have a vote about it.

Ultimate responsibility and blame comes and goes full circle to roost where it started with - On us. 
It's essentially a Mobius loop effect you cannot negate no matter how hard you may try to.

[Kisai]

1 minute ago, Beerzerker said:

Elon didn't become the guy with what he's got by being incompetent in business..... He's got it as proof of his competency in business along with Tesla and SpaceX as further, specific proof of it.

Buying your way into a business does not make a competent owner of said business. I'm pretty sure someone who runs a terrible real estate business is just as bad or worse at running the country, and unfortunately for them they can't lie their way out of it. The only difference between EM and this other guy, is that EM has generally stayed within the "tech we want" sphere, rather than "do not want"

 

To make a terrible analogy. EM is a techbro who never had to deal with intangible business or advertisers. It's like going from making hammers on an assembly line to hand making bra's. There is no cross-over in that skill.

 

When smarter "investor" types invest in companies, they tend to buy the companies and then leave them the hell alone. No integration of unlike businesses in anything. What does Dairy Queen, Geico and BNSF have in common? They're owned by the same company. Don't screw with what works, and your business won't suffer.

[Beerzerker]

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Buying your way into a business does not make a competent owner of said business. I'm pretty sure someone who runs a terrible real estate business is just as bad or worse at running the country, and unfortunately for them they can't lie their way out of it. The only difference between EM and this other guy, is that EM has generally stayed within the "tech we want" sphere, rather than "do not want"

Whether he bought, earned or whatever, he's got it and he's making money which is the mark of success, not failure.
He would have folded and lost everything long ago if he were incompetent - Since SpaceX was started back in 2002 he's had 20 years to lose it, yet he's still here with it too no less.

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

To make a terrible analogy. EM is a techbro who never had to deal with intangible business or advertisers. It's like going from making hammers on an assembly line to hand making bra's. There is no cross-over in that skill.

I believe he's smart enough to know that and not to try it - At least going in blind.
Certain "Jokes" come to mind with the above but I'll leave those where they are for the good of us all......
 

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

When smarter "investor" types invest in companies, they tend to buy the companies and then leave them the hell alone. No integration of unlike businesses in anything.

 

Not always!
I've been in on that to know it isn't always the case or shall I rehash my experience with the buyout of my former employer by Berkshire-Hathaway (W. Buffet) and how involved he and his cronies were?
Now - You are right in that he didn't do much himself except to say what he wanted, it was the ones he told what he wanted that were swarming around like flies on a stinking shitpile.

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

What does Dairy Queen, Geico and BNSF have in common? They're owned by the same company. Don't screw with what works, and your business won't suffer.

I believe Buffet with what he has and how he runs his business is proof enough of what does and doesn't work.
He's got his hands into all kinds of different business models that's unrelated, yet it works and it's all neatly under the Berkshire-Hathaway umbrella.

[porina]

31 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

Elon didn't become the guy with what he's got by being incompetent in business..... He's got it as proof of his competency in business along with Tesla and SpaceX as further, specific proof of it.

People have managed to be successful not because they are necessarily good at business. They have to learn as they go to not mess things up. You could put Bill Gates and even Linus in that category. Probably even Zuck.

 

The thing is, Elon has different faces of his life. I think his business side is probably one of the weakest. He does it because he has to, not necessarily because he wants to. I still think the SEC let him off very lightly with what amounted to a slap on the wrist after his previous incident, where smaller people doing similar would have had jail time. He's getting into "too big to fail" territory.

[Beerzerker]

11 minutes ago, porina said:

People have managed to be successful not because they are necessarily good at business. They have to learn as they go to not mess things up. You could put Bill Gates and even Linus in that category. Probably even Zuck.

Fair points here, he's not perfect either and I'm not aware of anyone here that could go in and just "Do it" without a few fumbles along the way.
You learn by doing, if the person is smart they'll learn and do well afterwards which he has done since his early days or he would have been gone already.
He's also had some luck in his favor too, that applies to anyone if they were in his shoes.

11 minutes ago, porina said:

 

The thing is, Elon has different faces of his life. I think his business side is probably one of the weakest. He does it because he has to, not necessarily because he wants to. I still think the SEC let him off very lightly with what amounted to a slap on the wrist after his previous incident, where smaller people doing similar would have had jail time. He's getting into "too big to fail" territory.

More fair points here, the same about getting the slap instead of the prison cell applies to the others named above too.
I also have to agree - When you are in the big game, it's go big or go broke and home, if you still have a home to go back to when it's all over.

[ewitte]

I don't understand how people work for this guy.  Everything I've seen he expects his employees to work themselves to death.  I did find it hilarious begging fired engineers to come back.

[Beerzerker]

42 minutes ago, ewitte said:

he expects his employees to work themselves to death

I believe it's fair for the sake of the discussion to request that you elaborate your point(s) about it.
Just "How" are they expected to work themselves to death?

Please tell us so we can all weigh in on this.

[ewitte]

29 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

I believe it's fair for the sake of the discussion to request that you elaborate your point(s) about it.
Just "How" are they expected to work themselves to death?

Please tell us so we can all weigh in on this.

He basically wants them to work as close to 24/7 as possible.  In his first memo he even stated, "minimum of 80 hours".  Not about twitter but someone else that worked for him said he called at like 3am saying if he (Musk) was at the office that the other person needed to be there as well.  He ruins his own family and relationships and expects nothing less of people working for him...  If you enjoy a life of servitude for unimportant things (money) power to you.

[Sauron]

19 hours ago, Arika S said:

Also sure hope people are happy musk was basically forced to buy Twitter now.

Yes, I am quite happy he got what he asked for and for once is being forced to deal with the consequences. I don't really care if twitter lives or dies and its employees will be immediately headhunted by other companies anyway. If nothing else this has been a perfect demonstration that being a billionaire is completely unrelated to being especially smart or competent.

[porina]

1 hour ago, ewitte said:

I don't understand how people work for this guy.  Everything I've seen he expects his employees to work themselves to death.  I did find it hilarious begging fired engineers to come back.

I think a copy and paste from Wikipedia might be appropriate here: Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

 

I'm not saying he's an idiot. Well, not much anyway. It's very likely he's operating beyond his competence in some areas. Mistakes will be made. Normally there should be checks in place to prevent major errors, but in a big transition anything could happen.

[Moonzy]

21 hours ago, suicidalfranco said:

yeeeah... nope

im not going to fall in a semantics discussion, forums are forums, sn are sn, forums are not sn and vice versa. Im done

haven't wanted to slap someone so hard for at least a couple months

[ewitte]

15 minutes ago, porina said:

I think a copy and paste from Wikipedia might be appropriate here: Hanlon's razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

 

I'm not saying he's an idiot. Well, not much anyway. It's very likely he's operating beyond his competence in some areas. Mistakes will be made. Normally there should be checks in place to prevent major errors, but in a big transition anything could happen.

I get that but he can't do it alone which he has already found out.  His people skills and treatment of them is the problem.

[BobVonBob]

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

Wait, you pay $8/month and you still get ads on Twitter? Why not just disable ads fully for people who subscribe? That $8/month has got to be worth way more to Twitter than the revenue they would get from serving up ads to the same user. I don't really see what excuse Twitter has for not just fully disabling ads for Blue subscribers when Youtube Premium can remove ads, and let's face it Youtube's operating costs must be way higher than Twitters just from the nature of serving 4k video & streaming.

heh I guess if more advertisers keep bailing from the platform soon everybody will be seeing half as many ads

 

Just call him Elon. Calling him Elmo in all of your posts makes it hard to take your other points seriously while you're taking childish shots like that at him.

Still serving ads means they make $8 and 1/20 of a cent per Twitter Blue subscriber. That's way more than just $8! Small efficiencies are what make the big bucks! Who cares that you actually lose money if not totally removing ads pushes away even 1 in 16000 potential subscribers!

 

I swear the entire business world's total lack of understanding that not nickel-and-diming your customers could actually make more money astounds me.

[BobVonBob]

Oh no I've done a double post instead of an edit.

Edited November 14, 2022 by BobVonBob

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Buying your way into a business does not make a competent owner of said business. I'm pretty sure someone who runs a terrible real estate business is just as bad or worse at running the country, and unfortunately for them they can't lie their way out of it. The only difference between EM and this other guy, is that EM has generally stayed within the "tech we want" sphere, rather than "do not want"

Based on the fact you dropped down the the calling him "Elmo", I'm going to say that if Twitter shifts around and becomes profitable that you will just say it's another company he bought to make his billions.

 

Just to take you a bit off of your high horse.  Tesla, he was already going to enter into the EV market...which is why he sought out other's like him.  When he entered Tesla though they had only really created as much as the name, and he was the one who brought in the first people into the company.  So it's fair to say that he did lead it to success.  Especially when you consider one of the other founders was the CEO during the beginning days and they only really showed improvement when guess what Elon ousted the guy and took over (where he promptly fired something like 50% of the workforce).  From the time he took over the position of CEO to now we have seen the increase and shift to profitability that rivals the other big named car companies.

 

SpaceX was a thing, but again he brought in the necessary people and funded it.  The whole Paypal thing, iirc X.com was effectively what paypal became (the bit that paypal had been focusing on wasn't the paypal we know today...x.com was more like that).

 

4 hours ago, Spotty said:

Wait, you pay $8/month and you still get ads on Twitter?

Apparently you do, but I'd actually like to know what ads people are seeing before I judge...as ads could also be promoted tweets, which I have less of an issue with than those other annoying ads.  I don't know, I don't subscribe to services like this so I won't know what exactly the "ads" shown are.  They apparently are going to ad features for blue subscribers like longer videos and higher quality videos...so maybe the pricing it set to help justify putting in those features.

 

Honestly, at this stage only time will tell I think to see whether or not the value of $8/month is valid...as features and abilities will take time

 

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

At least twitter wasn't censoring things left and right, it was just banning people for saying violently disturbing things. Getting someone banned off twitter can take months. Oh and you know what the kicker is? Let's say I have two accounts, one that I follow and read artists, and another that I follow and read other creators on. If I report the violent images being sent to the people I follow by some disturbed creep, from one account I'll get "we don't see anything wrong (despite the image being covered in body fluids and the eyes cut out)", and the other account will get "we are investigating this." There is no consistency at all with twitter.

Twitter actually was censoring things quite a bit...but the issue is that they were inconsistent in what they were censoring and only sometimes cared about censoring the information that the top exec wanted censored.  Ultimately that is what has gotten them into so much trouble with advertisers...the amount of stuff that was allowed to be on the platform and the advertising along with it.  Like what Linus had said during the WAN show, Twitter is not an App that is safe for work.

 

They should never have allowed ads that literally showed body parts though, yet they did.  They have accounts the supported pedophilia and didn't remove them.  They literally censored a story from the NYP during election time.  They also randomly kicked people off the platform that didn't want to submit their phone numbers (it happened to one of my accounts).  So plenty of censoring, just only when they feel like it.

[Beerzerker]

3 hours ago, ewitte said:

He basically wants them to work as close to 24/7 as possible.  In his first memo he even stated, "minimum of 80 hours".  Not about twitter but someone else that worked for him said he called at like 3am saying if he (Musk) was at the office that the other person needed to be there as well.  He ruins his own family and relationships and expects nothing less of people working for him...  If you enjoy a life of servitude for unimportant things (money) power to you.

Some reference links to this please?
I've heard none of this before and would like to see it myself.