Question for the financial heads out there: when he runs Twitter completely into the ground, can he write off this loss as a $44B tax deduction?
Technically yes, but like...he borrowed $12b to buy it. There's also some protections around the other shareholders. That tax deduction is more in line with "hey, I'm going to lose some money as part of a restructuring" analogous to "I'm going into debt to purchase some equipment that will eventually earn more revenue", not "I'm running this major corporation into the ground for the lulz." He's already facing lawsuits from the folks he laid off. He'll likely see some from the lenders and minority shareholders soon, not to mention any advertisers who didn't sign on for this kind of trip. If I'm running ads next to a 500% increase in the n-word, misinformation (elections are tomorrow!), and the moderation team was gutted...yeah, I want my money back on ads that didn't confer their expected value. The choices Twitter has are "sorry, here's your money back" (and the lost customer) or "tough shit, we'll see you in court." I saw a Reddit comment that made me think about how some of the political discourse probably lent some skewed perspectives here. "If you just look at national politics, you'd think that America is split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans. But it's not. Republicans only win power through anti-majoritarian methods like the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and the Senate. But the market knows who the popular majority is. That's why Republicans complain so much about "woke corporations". Corporations respond to the will of the majority, and the will of the majority is the Democratic vision of America. In other words, in the court of public opinion, Republicans have no version of the Electoral College to distort popular opinion in their favor, which forces them to confront the fact that they're an unpopular minority who is deeply out of touch with the will of the majority, and they don't like that." Now, Musk is caught off guard because the "muh free speech" crowd is a lot smaller, less active and certainly less powerful than he thought, as compared with the advertisers who do not fuck around. His vague threats against activists sort of confirm that: he's not under attack by woke corporations as much as he completely misread what the wokeness meant.
I still find it incredible that millions upon millions of people think this matters in the least. If Twitter does collapse under his ownership than Musk will be this century’s greatest hero. Piss on it.
He was not a member of the group, but he did appear with them in a news conference to support hydroxychloroquine.
This is who is going to win the upcoming elections. Keep telling me how the US isn't completely fucked.
This is what Democrats/Liberals/Leftists should have internalized and taken to heart, and I'm just not sure they have: the bar has been raised, and "the enemy" has every intention of being there and voting their way, every time from now on. You no longer have the luxury of sitting back and counting on others to vote for you. 74 million showed up for Trump in 2020, and the 81 million who were fired up enough to vote Biden need to understand this wasn't a fluke. It is the expectation.
Musk just banned work-from-home for Twitter employees unless he personally approves the exemption. He really is trying hard to make sure that all of the best engineers are gone. Obviously that will save a lot of money, but I have a hard time believing the technology stack will survive this way in the medium term.
It definitely won’t. The loss of the deep, technical knowledge of the code and application held by those senior devs will be almost impossible to overcome in the short-term by new batch of cheap, 23-year-old engineers. It will basically hollow Twitter out completely as the tech debt piles up.
which one is disappearing from Twitter faster: advertisers, or technical knowledge? legitimate question
Guess I didnt pay attention to the blue check thing. I figured it would be a charge to the people who needed blue check status, not just any person who could rustle up 8 bucks. Guy puts rockets into space didnt see this debacle coming? He could probably turn the verified accounts into having to be tied to an identified individual. Got 8 bucks and want a blue check? You have to identify yourself on your profile. No more being anonymous if you want certification status. Cut down on the shenanigans a bit. Not sure about legacy knowledge but when the IT company I worked at laid of 1/3rd of the staff to save money to pay off the loan they took out to buy the place they dumped the work on everyone left. Most of the talented people left ended up leaving for greener pastures because of the workload increase. It was a business move that I understood, the bank is going to say 'fuck you pay me' every month. Took them two years to turn it around.
The end result is that Twitter users will now be skeptical of the validity of something posted on Twitter, even if it has a blue check? That sounds like a win, to me.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, there's a propaganda technique called "firehouse of falsehood" where you just spam out as many lies as you possibly can, with the idea not being getting people to believe them, but rather getting people not to believe the truth you've now buried in shit. You shouldn't believe everything you read on Twitter, blue check or not, but there were useful things like the verified account of Maricopa County debunking conspiracy theories in real time on election day. That is no longer going to be possible.
I just read that Twitter has now stopped paid verification. Remember when I said 'ol Elon isn't as smart as he thinks he is, and all the fanboys called me a hater? Good times, good times...
Off the top of your head do you know where to get official communications from Maricopa County Board of Elections? Or from the Washington State Emergency Management Division? Or any of thousands of other low level functionaries who might randomly become important for one reason or another? An example we just had is that someone fat fingered an Emergency Broadcast in LA and accidentally sent out a "there is a flash flood warning in your area" alert to the entire county (10 million people) instead of just the small canyon area they intended. Their official twitter account was able to post an update/retraction, which helped calm people who had gotten the alert. It's not their only avenue of communication, but it was a helpful one.