Twitter isn’t profitable. Pretty sure that’s why.
Ever since I’ve been bringing this up we’ve had discussions on the topic. Some people say what you just said. Others seem to think that it wouldn’t take that much to make it profitable. I’ve got no idea what to believe. The details involved are beyond my comprehension.
Profitable or not, twitter was a multibillion dollar company (even without Elon’s ridiculous overpay).
One of the curses of modern capitalism is that you can’t have efficient markets in anything that involves network effects on a global scale, which is kind of everything on the internet.
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Can stop here
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Tesla is massively over valued. Uber is mostly unprofitable. They still are “worth billions.” a lot of tech companies are just propped up by investors money in hope they will make money. These people are not genius people. I was told by the media that Kanye is a genius. I was told elon musk is a genius. Kanye makes great music. That is it. Elon musk marketed Tesla great. He threw a rock into a window that was bulletproof and broke and laughed it off. How many dumb people have him 100 bucks after that.
Me feeling is Twitter has a huge amount of users but they just can’t figure out how to turn a profit. Elon thinks subscription and some other ideas will work. He probably fired all the people that were smarter then him and explained to him why that wouldn’t work.
FYP
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Or it could not affect users by much at all and make the opposing politician look weak and pathetic that he has to ask his supporters to not use social media so they don’t read mean things about him. My main observation is that people aren’t leaving Twitter now despite the shit show going on in front of our eyes. I find it really had to believe this sort of thing is going to be a red line.
I disagree that the base is at maximum engagement on Twitter, right wingers are way more engaged on Facebook and TV than Twitter. Fox News and Twitter aren’t really collaborating together as closely as they could to cross amplify whatever narratives they want to drive. Maybe Musk can’t help candidates win over current Twitter users who don’t like the candidate but this strategy could draw more of the base to Twitter from other media.
Maybe it’s far fetched that he takes on new investors, maybe Musk doesn’t want to sell any more of the company and just keeps it an becomes a kingmaker among the right wing grifters. Maybe a viable competitor actually emerges and overtakes Twitter. We don’t really know what will happen.
I could definitely see people (maybe even foreign investors) who want to buy influence wanting to get a minority stake. I’m not really sure it will happen this way, but I do think all the LOLs at how it’s being run into the ground are premature because despite all the bugs there are still plausible scenarios where Twitter maintains its role as a key social platform and Musk comes out a winner. Maybe they lose 2-5% of users over this but there doesn’t seem to be any mass exodus. The fact that the overwhelming majority of users seem to still be sticking with the platform and using it as much as ever despite Twitter devolving into a complete shit show is evidence it will have sticking power.
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I think Apple / Microsoft / Google / etc. are passing on creating a Twitter clone because you then have to moderate Nazis which will inevitably lead to a political backlash. It’s just not worth it.
Apple makes something in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year. Why risk any threat to your core business chasing, at most, like $500 million of annual profit on a twitter clone.
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Kayne West is not a musical genius, he just makes great music. Elon Musk is not a business genius, he’s just really good at selling products to consumers (Tesla) and enterprises/governments (SpaceX), raising capital, and building organizations to deliver the products. That’s all it is.
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I see something like Reddit being a more likely fit.
I just won a million person coin flipping tournament by picking the right side 20 times in a row. Are you gonna try to tell me that was just luck?
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Tesla opening portions of its Supercharger network to the public in order to access government incentives is not surprising at all, but I do wonder if there’s some impact on the brand since there was some exclusivity in that. … not sure if related to twitter or elon really tho
It will have some impact but pretty small I think. The Tesla Supercharger network is a huge selling point that no other brand has. That being said, I’ve used a supercharger one time in over a year of driving a Tesla, so it’s really less of an issue than it will be made out to be for a lot of drivers.
I like your analysis.
Almost no one is “leaving” Twitter in that almost no one is deleting their account.
Usage and engagement is down but the interface is so good that most will wait until the platform transitions to a different steward. They’re not giving up their accounts.
The alternative to Musk leaving is if there is some sort of audience-based content synergy that redefines Twitter despite Musk, but that’s not going to happen when he’s willing to violate whatever gets the content push he wants.
In the meantime, users are opening accounts and increasing activity with several other excellent platforms. Some, like Mastodon, even mimic the Twitter interface so well that if you could flip the users from one environment to the other, most would never notice the difference.
But none of them have passed the synergy threshold yet to mimic what we might perceive as a viable threat to Twitter. In the grand scheme of things, Musk has only been around for a few hot minutes.
The problem, in some respects, might also be that some platforms are TOO good at fostering peaceful communities. Who is going to use Mastodon if no media outlet ever reports them having a huge user drama bomb that went on for six months and led to them being president?
It’s not even that. They won a couple donkaments and so you think they have those skills you listed
It’s also just once these tools get to some sort of critical mass the network effects are so strong they present an almost insurmountable incumbent advantage. There are probably a lot of Democrat politicians or left leaning news reports who can see exactly what is going on with Musk but are they really going to abandon the platform with the most reach and only use Mastadon? Their consultants would tell them it’s a horrible political strategy. And if they are still tweeting, why are their followers going to leave Twitter?
It’s possible Musk continues to screw up the user experience and a credible competitor overtakes Twitter like happened with MySpace or Yahoo. It’s also possible that there is a legit split like with news sites and Musk owns conservative twitter and some other site becomes liberal twitter.
Maybe I’m just being overly contrarian with weak arguments, I mostly posted all that yesterday because I see people LOLing the platform’s demise and I feel it’s premature.
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If you want people to move from Twitter to Mastodon, just have Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and BTS agree to announce their next albums on Mastodon and not Twitter.
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This power user multiplier will be how they make money. Sell it to rich billionaires to use on themselves or for other people they choose like political candidates.
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