Elon Musk now officially owns Twitter, Part2

Picking up what posters were discussing in the last comments: is there any way for social media to make money like a regular company that produces stuff? Meta seems to be struggling to turn a profit, as Facebook always has.

Going off the gold standard was an act of suicide.

Some of Elon's text messages are out there. He had an exchange with Gayle King. The thing I'm most surprised by is that, unless these texts were edited, she doesn't know how to punctuate and she didn't capitalize Twitter. Most people get a pass but she's a fucking journalist, supposedly.

R3, if correct and perfect grammar, usage and punctuation were the criteria for Twitter usage, 99.75 of its users would be banned instantaneously

I see some politicians, celebrities and members of the media are upset they are now forced to read Twitter comments from the unwashed masses, and not just all the "important people" with blue checkmarks who usually only show up in their Twitter feeds. My heart breaks for these poor individuals.

Poor Melissa

Elon Musk officially owns a smoldering money pit that was once Twitter.

[quote]If you actually knew anything about Asperger's it'd be that they're great at details and seeing the trees but horrible at seeing the forest or the 'longtermism'. One of you mentioned Putin - a dictator who is good at tactics but horrible at strategy.

Well, both of them are considered the richest men in the world. That doesn't just happen by focusing on details. Putin's wealth is more hidden but most experts seem to think he's probably close to 1 Trillion in dirty money.

At least now women won't get banned for stating that biology is real and that men cannot become women.

Well, now we can see first hand just what a complete media whore Gayle King is.

This is Twitter now:

R8 Why not though? Also while both are fabulously rich right now, both are trashing their reputations and probably their wealth eventually because they can't see the bigger picture of what they're doing.

I'm glad some major new outlet finally published an article asserting that being a super-rich asshole does not make a person a genius.

A lot of them are just scammers or in the case of Putin, a kleptocrat, a criminal.

[quote] Picking up what posters were discussing in the last comments: is there any way for social media to make money like a regular company that produces stuff?

Sure, by charging commercial users for using their platform to promote their brand by defining what is a commercial brand. From an actual product or brand like Coca-Cola to services to OnlyFans.

Musk has 115 million followers.

If 20 percent of them—23 million—pay $8 per month, then that is $184k per month and $2.2 million per year in additional revenue for not having done anything at all except creating a new checkmark icon.

R16 Put like that, that's terrible for Musk's model because he himself says that Twitter is losing $4m per DAY. And he has to pay almost $1*billion* interest on the loan he took out to buy Twitter.

R16 I think your math is way off.

R16 and you think he has enough people in love with him to do exactly as he says? The liberals are turned off by his use of his Twitter weapon to meddle in American politics, and the MAGA trash who thought he would help with their red wave Renaissance and would give Trump his voice back are sort of lukewarm now. Also his blue check debacle that helped to bankrupt that pharmaceutical company, and the plethora of staff let go and executives leaving are obviously adding to the distrust of HIS platform

He's now pushing some QAnon conspiracy how FTX was a money laundering operation for Democrats. Never mind the fact their other CEO gave $24M to GOP. Time for 5150.

Elon also being sympathetic to Kyle fucking Rittenhouse.

Too funny

Financial Times:

"Legal fight over Elon Musk’s $56bn Tesla pay deal heads to court.

World’s wealthiest man expected to testify this week in case brought by unhappy investors.

Lawyers for the Tesla investors who brought the lawsuit argued Musk’s growing portfolio meant he is stretched too thinly to be considered a full-time chief executive of the car company, let alone one worthy of an award that they claim “dwarfs the pay package of every other public company CEO”."

R22 Only funny if you're a right-wing cretin.

Or if you're a humorless cunt like R24.

R25 Ask Eli Lilly and traders about how funny it was that a Twitter 'verified' user was able to tank their stock price. Elon is a stupid CEO - people are going to start taking legal action against Twitter for that.

Musk was fact checked by his own company.

^^^ just shows how his own employees don't even like him.. Of course they know that he'll probably fire them either way.

Now r27, THAT’S FUNNY!

R24 is right.

R25 is a right-wing cretin.

R27 is actually funny.

Take it easy on poor old Elon! He has too much work on his plate for some reason!

Awww call the Waambulance!

[quote]Why not though? Also while both are fabulously rich right now, both are trashing their reputations and probably their wealth eventually because they can't see the bigger picture of what they're doing.

They dont care about their reputation that much, that's not what motivates them. Do you really thing either of those guys is going to end up broke to a point of a DL troll? Snap out of it! They may dig their own popularity graves some day but they will never be poor enough to not have a roof over their head in a million dollar mansion and millions more hidden off shore somewhere.

Elon truing into the great and powerful OZ now?

[/bold] I AM ELON

"Provided you have enough courage or money, you can do without a reputation".

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation, and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Twitter in danger of shutting down as thousand of employees respond to Elon's demands by walking out and quitting on the spot. Twitter headquarters are on lock down as paranoid Musk tries to figure out what his next stupid move will be.

Twitter is absolutely going to collapse by the end of the year. That's why so many people are migrating over to Mastodon as we speak. I just wonder when the Russian trolls are going to make their way over there and ruin it like they ruin every other site they infest.

You could make a good argument for electric cars and space exploration to continue, cant think of a single reason we need Twitter.

Really? Take a look at how journalism operates in developing nations and you'll see why Twitter is a lifeline for news both to and from those places.

Link

If Twitter is your lifeline, regardless of country, you have issues.

Try better news sources of internet and maybe a VPN for god's sake. That's what people are doing in Russia and Ukraine.

Twitter is just a big megaphone for loud obnoxious people seeking attention. There was a world before Twitter, and there will be a world after Twitter. Twits take their tweets way too seriously.

I'm going to guess that Africa is not really something that interests you, but journalists there use Twitter to post stories and information that sometimes land them in jail.

Also people in a lot of countries, where journalists can't freely operate, are able to share their stories and expose government malpractice in a way they couldn't without Twitter. Why do you think the Saudis coughed up so much money to buy the platform? Because killing it is worth far more to them than the billions they sunk into purchasing it. This prevents another Arab Spring from rising up. See it as revolution insurance.

If posting on Twitter lands you in jail, maybe Twitter is not the best place for that in the first place. Just proves how useless Twitter really is.

[quote]Also people in a lot of countries, where journalists can't freely operate, are able to share their stories and expose government malpractice in a way they couldn't without Twitter.

Twitter is not the only platform on the internet to post information Dear.

R46 Twitter's value isn't in the tech so much as the userbase though. There is nowhere else like Twitter with the audience they have.

R45 They do it because they are brave people exposing and calling out these things. We need those people.

There was no where else like MySpace, then suddenly there was. Facebook ring a bell? Things change, Twitters out. Something else will replace it. No big deal.

All female personnel will report to Conference Room A where they will be impregnated with Musk sperm ([patent pending) via turkey baster. You have three hours to opt out if you're not hard core.

Latest

He doesn't seem to realise that activity is at a high because a lot of people are watching the car crash. Seriously don't think he understands very much at all.

Can we stop the charade that Elon Musk is a genius? Also, if he is doing all of this "on purpose" he's still not doing a very good job. His reputation is hovering between zero and shit and his Tesla stock is tanking. "Let me get rid of a social media app by destroying my other businesses and making sure the entire planet hates me" is not the act of a genius.

His fanboys are all over this though. They talk like god has just descended down to earth to make himself known. Mostly Repugs because well, he's owning the libs and that's all that matters to them.

R40 has an excellent point. I truly think we in the U.S. don’t need Twitter—and that something will come along to take its place. But there could be many nations where Twitter is a great way of disseminating news (aside from the fake stuff that’s there), and people might not have the cab ability or money for a VPN. I think r44 is right. If it’s truly the Saudis helped Musk buy Twitter, it’s to bring it down.

R46 No other website has the accessibility and reach to share important information to a global audience, Dear. Facebook is locked into your immediate social network and Instagram doesn't have the same ability to share things widely as Twitter (can't access posts without an account). TikTok is a Chinese operation that censors information they don't approve of and sells off valuable user information to hostile governments. Without Twitter, social justice movements around the world, and likely even here in the Good Ol' US of A, are going to see an immense setback until (and that's a big if) another platform rises to take its place. This isn't the wild west of the information age anymore. Regulations, government crackdowns and sabotage operations ala Musk and Peter Thiel's efforts to kill Gawker, will constrain progress for the foreseeable future. We may not see another Twitter for a while if a new competitor doesn't emerge in the near future.

So what do you propose r55?

No one cares that TikTok is owned by the Chinese, it's bigger than FB and Twitter now. Many VPNs are free which is why even really poor people in Russia use them and teach their Babuskas even how to use them. Russians are criminals by nature, they love that shit. Many 3rd world countries are like that. Twitter is not even a reliable source of info. The "Twitterverse" is literally a bubble of certain types of people. It is NOT a true sampling what a country thinks or what's going on. It's not different than saying the world will collapse without FB because it's a real sample of what America is. For example, Judges, Police, and many other public servants have a policy to stay off social media. So right there have a an entire segment of influential people not being represented in the Twitterverse bubble.

It's fascinating how public this all is. I'm sure this has happened many times before, with some asshole coming in, wrecking the place out of pure stupidity and ignorance and arrogance. But the nature of Twitter is so public and so immediate and so, well, talkative that we get to see that collapse in realtime as it's happening. All these users wondering aloud if this is there last posting.

oops, sorry Grammar Bitches, "their last posting."

Twitter only went on line in 2006. And not with many followers. Oh what what a cruel world it was without Twitter. How did the world ever survive without it? How did people communicate? It's almost like trying to imagine a world without TikTok. You cruel heartless olds and poors just don't understand no one can survive without it.

The memes

are epic

Twitter was an alternative to right wing, fascist owned media outlets worldwide. Legit, freelance journalists were able to get their stories out there without their stories being killed by their boss acting on behalf of the media outlet's owner.

Sure, you can point to all the bad and negative stuff that went on at Twitter, but I prefer to look at the good it did.

R26 Either Mastodon takes off or we're in for some deep shit in the near future.

Omg

That was yesterday, r63.

Latest poll

It must have been an anti-Trump result. Musk has apparently deleted the poll.

He's deleted a lot of his shitty, stupid posts.

R68: I just clicked on the link at r67, the poll is still there at Twitter, currently ‘Yes’ leading at 58.7%

R68. Is it deleted? It's showing up for me.

I'm not registered with Twitter though so I can't vote or see the result.

R63. To play the devil's advocate, hasn't discussion and reporting gone on in authoritarian states long before Twitter?

People used to communicate over the internet using TOR and stuff right, particularly if they were dissidents?

Here’s a screencap of the Poll, a few minutes ago

Twitter didn't die overnight. Boo.

R67 3 million votes in an hour, pretty impressive.

He’s lost a lot of weight. Pictured here with Ligma and Johnson, the fake employees MSNBC and almost everyone else fell for (‘Ligma’ is a meme.)

^^ The guy on the left has lady legs.

I really hate him. He spent all that money to act like an adolescent Internet troll, ruin thousands of Twitter employees' livelihoods within a couple of weeks, explicitly tell Twitter users to vote for Republicans, and his endgame seems to be restoring power to Donald Trump, a man who tried to overthrow the government and has led a life of crime and fraud and has been accused by 26 women of rape or other sexual assault.

People should have the same kind of hatred for Elon Musk that they showed to Brett Kavanaugh but more extremely. And people seem to tolerate him and continue to think of him as a genuis even though he falsified his education. He is a borderline terrorist, and it's only barely borderline.

If Musk lets Trump back on (as he seems to be doing under the guise of "vox populi"—huh, wouldn't have thought he knew Latin), at the present rate Trump will be be tweeting to an audience of zero.

R79. The more "sophisticated" amongst the alt-right seem to love Latin. I suppose they fetishize the Romans and feel knowing Latin phrases makes them intelligent.

You're right, R80, and there's a sub-group of them who actually practice speaking Latin and attain some expertise, imagining themselves as defenders of the old Republic or of the pre-Vatican II Church (whichever their inclination). As a one-time Latin teacher myself I think it's safe to say that Elon isn't part of this group.

So Twitter is now Parlor. Got it.

Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos and other Nazis who try to influence politics within the US call the Nazi salute the Roman salute. Yes, it is part of their Eurocentric Aryan Nation philosophy. They conflate ancient Rome and Greece political history with Northern European ancestry as if the Scandinavians and Germans were part and parcel with the Mediterranean old world.

R83. That's a tale as old as Charlemagne. The Nazi party was just one of the more recent groups who appropriated that old belief with their so-called "Third Reich".

That the alt-right have begun to parrot such beliefs yet again just shows how the patterns of history seem doomed to repeat themselves.

They really are sheep.

Very true, R83 and R84. The hoops that post-WWI German reactionaries jumped through, and the pretzels they twisted themselves into, to identify modern Germany with ancient Rome (via the Holy Roman Empire) are wondrous to behold, in small doses anyway.

R71, it didn't show up when I clicked on it last night, and folks on Twitter were complaining about it being deleted. Maybe one of the 15% of Twitter employees left managed to fix it.

R86 I've been having that issue lately. Sometimes tweets don't show up and I have to refresh. There has definitely been a deterioration since Elon fired a bunch of people who keep the site running.

15 MILLION votes. In 24 hours.

[/bold]Well it's OFFICIAL. Trump can come back on Twitter.

I am so done with Elon, what a Trolly fucker. He did this for clicks. AKA money. No rearguard for democracy or a society where people behave respectable to each other. He said he didnt want that site to turn into a free for all hellscape yet he just doused it in gas and lit the match.

I deleted the app from my phone. There will be no Twitter, no new accounts. I'll explore Mastodon or Tribel or whatever, or just stick to Instagram. Twitter has been a hellscape anyway since the advent of Trump and the rebranding of Nazis as alt-right in 2015.

I canceled my cable last spring and didn't know how that would go. No cable news—so much less anxiety. It will be the same without Twitter. If newspapers send emakls and push notifications about Trump tweets, I will cancel those subscriptions, too. I've reached my limit. If the country lets him take us down, so be it. I'm not being made to panic 24/7 anymore. It's over.

I would never join Parler or Truth Social, so tonight I officially deleted my Twitter account.

He’s baaaaaaack.

He is tanking Twitter on purpose. I don’t get why, maybe he has his reasons, or maybe he is an idiot, but most advertisers (always the first budget to get cut IIRC), will not want to be associated with Trump.

They just won’t. Regardless of politics it is just a bad business decision.

Dumping $44 Billion to own the libs. I guess it's a fair deal.

The people have spoken

Close

The people have spoken? Well, they certainly WILL speak by cancelling Twatter and hurling it into the ash heap of history.

And the advertisers are speaking as well Elon. Stop being such a snowflake and whinnying when you get some of your own medicine.

Which is key. Twitter is just as popular as ever but is it making money? Nope. Elon said it's losing $4m per day. At some point there will be a reckoning about that. April next year when he has to make his first payment on his $13bn loan is my guess, if not before then (and that interest payment will be $500m). He can sell Tesla stock but he doesn't want to especially if it's just going into a money pit. Bankruptcy is very likely.

I can't believe Trump hasn't tweeted yet. Maybe he won't.

Truth Social was started to own (figuratively) Twitter. Sure, Trump is now welcome back, but returning will ensure he adds another failed business venture to his portfolio.

Twitter is no longer secure, it's a free for all buffet for hackers. Musk has not the workforce to respond to hacker attacks, or prevent them, and will keep quiet about them unless they are public ones with hackers posting porn or off brand messages not aligned with the original account holder.

Anyone still having an active Twitter account is a fool.

Trump is claiming he'll stay with Truth Social. He says he sees "A lot of problems" with Twitter. Oddly enough, he's not wrong.

[quote[He is tanking Twitter on purpose. I don’t get why, maybe he has his reasons, or maybe he is an idiot, but most advertisers (always the first budget to get cut IIRC), will not want to be associated with Trump.

I keep wondering if he wants everyone's user data, not for himself, but for other parties. What if Twitter goes under and he ends up selling the Twitter servers with user data on it to Trump or GOP operatives? Or what if he's not going to wait until Twitter goes under to do that?

Before/After

R105 You already posted that in TWO other threads. Troll.

He has made good on his promise to start airing Twitter's dirty laundry. He has handed over thousands of emails related to the suppression of the New York Post's October 2020 exposé of Hunter Biden to former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi:

Yawn. No one cares about Hunter Biden unless more nude pics are involved.

R107, "Look how much our company fucking sucks!" seems like a weird way to install consumer confidence.

I love how pissy he got about the NYT ignoring his yuuge “scoop” about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

It is very huuuuuuge, enviably and excitingly so.

[quote] "Look how much our company fucking sucks!" seems like a weird way to install consumer confidence.

That's not the narrative. The narrative is "Look how much our company fucking sucked before I took over and fixed it. You're Welcome."

[quote] before I took over and fixed it

And to think there are some who say Elon has no sense of humor!

Call us when you fixed it Elon. Until then, we just love watching the dumpster fire it is.

I bet you Elon runs for president in the 2028 election. That is, if, there is still a USA or planet left, for that matter.

I don't know what Musk is up to, but for some reason trump is staying off Twitter. It's like he wants to be able to say, "I had nothing to do with it" (when something bad happens).

Plus trump's attorneys probably told him to stay off every form of social media. His social media records can be used against him if he ever gets brought to court.

Maybe musk is doing him a favour and bought Twitter so he can destroy all of Trump's direct message records. We all know trump can't keep his mouth closed. All his DMs must be full of incriminating statements.

R117, I read that Trump has some sort of exclusivity agreement with Truth Social, he would probably be in breach of contract if he goes to Twitter. And it would collapse Truth Social, because no one would go there if they didn’t have to go to hear Trump’s latest turd droppings. They would probably sue him.

Sorry, that was for R116^

R115 that would be an impossibility . Naturalized citizens can only run for Congress. They are expressly forbidden from the Office of President.

Trump owns Truth Social, what's with this bullshit line about a deal that he cannot go on Twitter? Nonsense. We all know Trump does whatever the fuck he wants, even to his own demise. The only reason he does not go onto Twitter is because he still thinks his own network will lose part of it's fallowing.

I don't like Elon, but he realizing that TQ+ are misogynistic terrorist group and distinct of the LGBs make me hate him less.

Go die in a grease fire, hon @R121.

R122 You have only Ad hominem because this is the truth, either you like or not.

It's very good to see big names realizing that distinction, The LGBs dissociating with the trannies is very good.

Twitter is full of &Adam ex Russian trolls. They don’t even try to hide it anymore.

After years of tweeting against Trump & his supplicants I got permanently banned on Musk’s watch for mildly insulting a loony right-winger. Someone told me you can get unbanned by blaming the “woke mob”.

Twitter is now worth 1/2 of what Elon bought it for. 🤣😂🤣

He gets it.