To be fair, if he’s going to give paid users priority positioning in timelines and comment threads and stuff, a bunch of people are definitely going to pay for that. If you are Yglesias and making your money from your Substack you are obviously going to pay up. It’s like SEO for your tweets. Whether this adds up to either a better user experience for ordinary users or a more profitable company overall I think is questionable.
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Let’s be generous and say there are a million people (lol) that fit that description.
That’s $100 million of revenue while almost certainly making the user experience much worse.
Which is like 7% of the annual debt service he has to pay.
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Yes, people who’s livelihood is impacted by people seeing their stuff on twitter will definitely pay $8/month. And it would probably be fairly transparent to the type of user like me that makes up the vast majority of its “active user” base.
I don’t suspect that it will be material towards the $1 billion/yr interest expense, but I have done like zero substantive analysis.
Its just so fucking stupid. I have a twitter account, I go there a few times a day. I follow “content creators” I like. I tweet once a year if that and get nothing out of it.
Not once in a million years would I pay ~$100/year to get a blue checkmark next to my name. Or $1/year. There’s 100 million+ users exactly like me.
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It will be interesting to see if companies pick up the $x for the blue check. My company sort of gently pushed for its journalists to get verified, I can imagine it being an $8/month expense billed to them.
The debt load came to fund the buyout like it would with a private equity deal. Twitter had debt before, but much less debt and at a much lower cost of capital.
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This is a good question
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1587640336402243584?s=20&t=l7KcbrK75CkolWtpWHjWbw
Governments gotta pay $20. It’s just good business.
I heard y’all like OnlyFans…
https://twitter.com/WillOremus/status/1587652843238002690?t=-QHIwSdH62WmR-PqULBMWw&s=19
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Tomatoes are like $5 a piece at Wegner’s.
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Can you think of a single person that could play a better Lane Kiffin than Tim Heidecker?
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No one is just like you. Each and every one of us is terrible in a unique way.
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This will be very much on the table when Musk uses the Billionaire Cheat Code of “Hey, what if we just don’t pay back the money we borrowed? What are they gonna do?”
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“Each of us is as God made him. And often much worse.” - Sancho Panza
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The buyout itself loaded twtr up with debt. Equity became debt.
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New Twitter leader Elon Musk suggested that people “de-platformed” will not be allowed back for at least weeks, appearing to rule out the return of figures like former President Donald Trump before the midterm elections.
Musk tweeted about the process in response to a post from Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, regarding attempts to manipulate conversations about the 2022 midterms, which will be held next week.
“Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks,” Musk tweeted early Wednesday.
https://twitter.com/Rayyywhoo/status/1587703337096736768
https://twitter.com/Rayyywhoo/status/1587703339625910272
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Well this is a twist to blue check mark and public figures I was not expecting…
He also said Twitter will start using “a secondary tag below the name for someone who is a public figure, which is already the case for politicians.”
