Wealth has diminishing returns; he’s just trying to get more value for his exceptional personal wealth (and remember, he plans on dying on Mars, he’s playing a different game than typical billionaires). Status is his drug of choice, Twitter his platform. If you crave validation (Biden admin not mentioning him until recently, people buying ads in time square “say their [Tesla] name”), buy it if it isn’t given freely.
(observations as someone with years of therapy and a scholar of the human psyche)
Couldn't he have more noble causes in mind like trying to do the right thing for humanity (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX)? Social media is a cesspool right now, they seem to have a negative impact on democracy and humanity in general, and public social media companies have no incentive to clean themselves up because that will hurt shareholder value in the short term. Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.
AFAIK, his publicly-stated plan is to not "clean [Twitter] up," but rather turn it into more of an un-moderated cesspool.
I had an account I created in 2009. I had a modestly decent number of followers due to some past blogging on data science and DIY electronics. My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.
Maybe you hold some opinions that will also one day be unpopular with The Good People™. If you do, you'll soon find out that censorship is a very clumsy tool.
Eh, no. It's more about signal to noise ratio. Because if recent history has taught us anything, it's that crowdsourced lies are often at least as compelling as the truth.
> My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.
Realistically, "un-moderated" will be 99% Qanon and Stop-the-Steal and 1% the kind of stuff you say you posted. The most obsessive have the loudest voices in those spaces, and people who believe wacky things seem to be more obsessive than those who don't.
You've got to think, if someone has the exact set of approved opinions today, that's almost certainly not a coincidence, but a sign that they form their opinions based on what is approved. And in that case they're at no risk of ever having a meaningfully unpopular opinion.
Now it's officially a credible theory[1].
This is exactly why moderating "The Truth" is so dangerous. The people claiming to be the arbiter of the truth are politically motivated and self serving.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/16/politics/biden-intel-review-c...
I'm sure he thinks that. Apparently he's a "free speech absolutist."
> Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.
It's not a binary condition. Twitter can be a cesspool with relatively more or relatively less shit. I'm sure his preference will result in relatively more shit.
Personally, I've appreciated a having society that lacks the shit Donald Trump created on Twitter.
If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Surely he has the means to attract tech talent to do it, the means/message to attract users to a new platform, and presumably if he knows what's bad about Twitter and how to subtract it and make it good, he could do this greenfield.
This would result in increased platform diversity, too. And I'll bet you it's cheaper.
Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.
People have tried to do what you said. Let's make a Twitter that's not controlled by the hard left! The result was Twitter's ideological allies at tech firms immediately banned them from every platform they controlled, and other allies ganged up to hack and destroy them.
You cannot start a Twitter competitor today, it's impossible, because:
1. The sort of people who found companies tend to be pro-free speech because their economic survival depends on having risky but correct ideas, and that naturally leads to a sympathy for free speech.
2. The sort of people who hate free speech are obsessed with Twitter/tweeting platforms specifically.
3. They are exceptionally aggressive. They will do anything, including damaging their own companies and even breaking the law in order to stop any other platform from becoming popular. They've managed to take over tech firms to a sufficient extent that they will destroy any attempts to replace Twitter, which they see as a key pivot point in their power over society.
The obvious solution: buy Twitter and fix it. It's too big to ban. This also has the major benefit of really, really upsetting Musk's ideological enemies. They'd hate him anyway and many are in powerful positions in politics and the media. Even the thought of losing Twitter to Musk has very conspicuously driven them into a frenzy in recent days, and such frenzies discredit them in the eyes of the general public, thus weakening their ability to move against Musk.
Twitter is one of the few social networks that actually has a network. A lot of social media failed because the cold start problem is a very hard problem to solve at this point in the game. Elon probably knows it and I would bet that this is why he is looking to buy an established social network rather than creating a new one.
Musk has market-moving clout and a cult of personality, so the remaining question would be if he has a compelling insight into distinguished features.
If he doesn't, he won't make Twitter better. If he does, he could make a greenfield platform a success.
Bad analogy. Social media platforms are natural monopolies. The utility of a car doesn't grow with how many other people own that model. By contrast, Twitter's utility is basically just a function of the fact that all the relevant players use it.
If this was the case, Facebook wouldn't have needed to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. Or hell, there wouldn't have been FB because MySpace would have been king forever.
Network effects are real and they can help sustain engagement and mindshare but given how easy it is to move fluidly between multiple forums (social or no), the next competing platform is one compelling reason for engagement away.
> ...Social media is a cesspool right now,...
He would have greater impact if he used his account to not add to the cesspool, then. Much more than if he bought the company and kept tweeting like he does.
Why should he?
Like what?
And haven't we already established that no amount of money thrown around is going to actually fix "hunger around the world" or "health care around the world". How many billions have already been dumped down that hole to little effect?
And idk why your so cynical about results. Just one example is Bill gates helping with polio vaccines.
Anyway I thought you were asking for better ways to actually help the world then buying Twitter. Plenty of research needs funding.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7049a1.htm
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/polio-outbreak-s...
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/polio-cases-now-caus...
He could also do much worse.
Then don't you think people shouldn't have so much money that they can literally control society? What a facile stance.
Edit: parent comment cleanly and completely changed due to my response, what a world. Cowards.
I think the online giant platforms are another problematic avenue of control, I don't object to that characterization, but I'm really saying that saying "other's money is none of your business" can't be a good-faith statement in a world where money can control livelihoods and laws with such ease.
It absolutely can. I have no problem with the fact that money can buy politicians.
I have a problem with the fact that politicians can be bought in the first place.
Which are 2 completely different issues. If you had loads of money, you’d play the game too.
Well, you can, but it’d be massively hypocritical and an opinion that’s easily dismissed
If anything, we should not only be scrutinizing the hell out of Musk’s stated intentions, but also scrutinizing those people in the Twitter organization who have the power to manipulate the public message, and ensuring that there are checks in place to keep falsehoods and anti-democracy messaging out of social media.
I mean, really, “mind your business!”? So let’s pretend it’s some other mega-billionaire, shall we? We sure has hell don’t want the likes of Putin purchasing twitter, do we? Give your head a shake.
Edit: ah, shit, I see later in the thread you double down. What a waste of my time. Don’t bother responding, IDGAF.
Why not both?
I think you’re giving him too much credit here. It’s male appendage measuring at this point, like with most three comma club members.
So you're gonna bundle people with $999B and $1B together, just like that?
Musk have a case against him by the SEC (tweeting about taking tesla private), it seems like they can win it, and he might be forced to stop using twitter.
Now I can imagine it hard for the SEC to enforce such a role if it's his private company.
So in a sense he's using that money to secure his best tool to marketing / growth which is definitely worth 50Bn$ for tesla alone (then add all his other ventures now and in the future)
(And please explain how publishing stoner and dogecoin memes is worth $50billion to Tesla... ;)
Just like last time.
Bullshi!t proven.
Is buying twitter an example of that? He may make a buck but I'll 100% disagree.
And what? You think he earned 260 squillian dollars?
No, his shares were brought to that level through the demand of those who purchased shares in companies he owns.
It's not 'his' 'fuck you' money at all.
At this stage, he's using societies capital for entertainment value ... the support for him is cult like.
The whole spectacle is obscene and pathetic.
Don’t think for a moment that he does not pay a team of promotionists. Every public forum is monitored and “influenced.” He is not a completely stupid person and he obviously understands social media. Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces. It is very much in his best interests to spend pocket change amounts to counter all criticism. It is absurd to think otherwise.
The problem is, being smart and thinking misleading people via online influence is smart aren't the same thing. moistly, in mistaking intelligence for oppression, I think you are dooming yourself into accepting a potentially false belief. Many very intelligent people value integrity.
You asks us not to think for even a moment. Fuck that. What happens when we do? The finances at Tesla are public knowledge because it a public company. They don't have an advertising department. It seems reasonable that Elon might not believe in paid promotions as much as some people. So a reasonable person might entertain the thought that -- and now we've transgressed your command to not think for even a moment.
> Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces.
I'm not being paid by Elon Musk to post this. I publicly declare right now that I will retract my assertion that you are trapped in an epistemic pit and give you one hundred dollars if you can prove that at least four people in this thread are being paid by Elon Musk to counteract criticism. I will welcome this public disgrace if you teach me better, because I strongly believe that accepting criticism from you so that my beliefs are more accurate is not absurd, but of great benefit to me.
> Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces.
Claim 2
> More the fool you, though, if you naïvely believe that the ultra-wealthy don’t manage their public image!
In one you claim that people in this thread are doing it. In the other you claim that it is a thing which is done. These are two different claims.
You think people who disagree with you are fools, because you think misleading others is wisdom. I think you can escape, because I think you know that Putin is a moron. Do you agree that it was stupid of him to spread misinformation, ultimately resulting in deception prospering so much so that he lost sight of the truth, leading to ruin? If it was stupid for Putin, then why can't it be stupid for others? Look, you point to Pharaoh. He is dead, his empire is dead, and his fancy pyramid didn't help him. You point to politicians - Hitler killed himself. You point to Scientology - do you think them clever and wise, that they have the truth; I don't. Why are you pointing at idiots? Why are you pointing at dead men? Why do you think they are so clever?
If you had evidence that people were being paid, you wouldn't need to point to unwise dead men! Get out of the pit. Where is the oppression you claim? Where are the people being paid? Where is your evidence? Show me a check. Show me a paystub! Show me an account name which can be hired through an online service. Show me that I'm wrong that your beliefs are not rooted in your preconception that it is wise to mislead. I confess that I believe that it isn't absurd to be corrected. Criticize me! Point out my flaws! I will be better for it.
I am not talking about claim 2. I am talking about claim 1.
Also, from the Hacker News site guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I eagerly await the day you present concrete evidence of your claims that many here are being paid by Elon Musk to promote him, but I grow more and more certain with your every reply that you have no such evidence. If you did have the evidence, you would collect a hundred dollars quickly. Since you don't, you call me a fool and pretend I speak drivel. I could call you a liar for that, but I won't. I think you are confused enough that you believe your own false claims. I completely forgive your insults.
However, I must insist you not see yourself as wise in your own eyes. You who proclaim that others should not "think for even a moment" have no place whatsoever mocking at cultists.
A lot of people downvoting, so I'll expand; It's fair to give the benefit of the doubt given that Tesla is helping combat climate change and SpaceX is about becoming multi-planetary. These are civilization level problems and solutions.
The idea is to make twitter a TRUSTED public square. He suggests open sourcing the algorithm and making all moderation actions visible to the public. Makes sense as transparency is needed to rebuild trust in the platform.
Musk has since long ago pursued a publically disclosed plan for Tesla, for the company to release progressively more affordable electric vehicles, so the current growth rate in number of vehicles sold could very well be sustained for years to come.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. There is no reasonable case to be made that Tesla has not had a massive impact on pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. And most people consider that to be good for the environment, even if you now don't.
[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
That's a rather extreme assumption. The article you linked to also gives the more representative figure of 14,800 miles for "U.S. average energy mix (23% coal-fired, plus other fossil fuels and renewables)".
To put things in perspective there are only 12 states that are majority coal powered (according to 2017 numbers[0]):
1. West Virginia - 93.2%
2. Wyoming - 85.7%
3. Missouri - 79.8%
4. Kentucky - 78.2%
5. Indiana - 73.2%
6. Utah - 70.5%
7. North Dakota - 64.5%
8. Nebraska - 59.8%
9. Ohio - 57.2%
10. Wisconsin - 55.1%
11. New Mexico - 54.8%
12. Colorado - 54.3%
[0] https://stacker.com/stories/3356/states-producing-most-elect...
[1] https://electrek.co/2019/10/21/tesla-model-3-100000-miles/
[2] https://www.findmyelectric.com/blog/how-long-does-a-tesla-ba...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...
Do you have a bone to pick with EVs? This seems cherry-picked/straw man to me.
The 80k+ you refer to assumes electricity is sourced 100% from coal, which happens never in the US.
Even West Virginia, a haven for coal, it’s only 88%. Wyoming is also in the 80s. There are a few in the 50-70 range, but most states are sub-35, with many being 0.
[edit] For our most populous states, CA checks in at 0.1%, NY 0.1%, FL 7%, and TX 16%.
https://www.nei.org/resources/statistics/state-electricity-g...
This article shows how US sources of electricity have changed in the past 20 years or so.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/24/climate/how-e...
Contrary to what you state, I would say that EVs are doing a good job at lowering overall emissions from passenger vehicles, and this will become more true as renewables increase their percentage in our electricity production mix.
The “U.S. average energy mix” comparison of 14,800 is much more accurate.
Not to mention the equation gets more and more favourable to EVs with each passing year.
As for mistakes, the company can afford many small to intermediate missteps and still accomplish what I described, because the company's momentum is already pushing it to accomplish these achievements.
The grid has not responded well, that is history. Fast Charging stations are a huge draw, and home recharging raised the bar for substations everywhere. It will take decades to respond.
Battery advances - well that's a crystal ball I don't care to gaze into.
And company momentum is a myth. Cash flow is king - the day you don't make payroll, you close. It's a markov chain with a terminating condition. Play any markov game long enough and you reach that node and its all over. So a gamble every time.
As for batteries, you don't have to bet on battery advances, just the scaling up of manufacturing, which is already underway.
So assuming that most of those two million sales weren't in lieue of the sale, or at least use, of gasoline powered cars, doesn't seem reasonable to me.
But let's be extremely conservative in our praise of Tesla, and say that the company took one million gasoline powered cars off the road and replaced them with electric cars. That is quite the accomplishment if you accept the premise that electric vehicles are better than gasoline-powered ones for reducing the impact on climate.
I don't think it's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to [highly debatable claim] based on uncritically accepting other [highly debatable claims].
Regardless, "helping combat climate change" is at best an incomplete description of Tesla, in the same way that Nestle is not perfectly captured by "Good food, good life" ; these are potential side-effects, rather than inarguable core missions.
We should be wary of accepting the slogans of profit-driven organisations as the truth. Wendy's is focused a lot more on selling than locating beef, for example.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/timabansal/2021/05/13/how-green...
One can praise Tesla while still acknowledging that it should not be blinded trusted to always work in the public interest, and also while recognizing Tesla's contributions alone are not enough for human civilization to get to zero carbon.
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, the vast majority if not all other companies in general, is not an honest way of addressing these inadequancies and challenges you highlight, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
I kinda like A LOT not having tail pipe smoke around me all the time on the streets...
The analogy is about misusing a high minded principle to further selfish - or even morally negative - ends.
It is, indeed, a good analogy.
a. Nothing Musk is doing or wants to do with Twitter is immoral.
b. Even if you disagree the scale is totally wrong, but in analogies the sense of scale matters.
Some fine example of antebellum Southern imagery there.
I love practical joke, keep 'em coming!
Do you mean to say that the majority of people believe this is how private companies should operate? If so, Id love to hear your reasoning for thinking that, because I would disagree heavily.
Saying racist stuff is legal, but its still going to get you kicked out of almost every bar, with few to no complaints from other patrons.
I totally believe that you would do that, I don't believe that Musk would do that, a guy so petty he once cancelled someone's Tesla order after he dared to make a 'rude post' on the internet, with an interesting justification about the nature of private businesses' ability to discriminate:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/694802955170553861
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk...
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-offered-5k-remove-...
It certainly wasn't an attempt to silence a critic, which is the thing people say he'll start doing when he gets control of Twitter.
Would you be happy knowing that all the criminals in your area now have easily accessible information on when you're home or not?
There's nothing stopping someone doing that. It's only someone gathering information that anyone else could and tweeting it. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
I would gladly accept that in return for hundreds of billions, with which I could afford some former special forces bodyguards. And house guards for when I'm not home.
The data isn't "completely public". It takes non-trivial skill and effort to access this data.
I sure don't know how to do it.
It significantly rises the bar from "a whacko" to "a whacko with technical skills to access FAA monitoring system"
When some billionare buy private jet he is aware about fact that his jet can be easily tracked. If person decide to be a public figure he have to deal with fact that he'll be tracked around.
> While Twitter does not report its average revenue per user, one independent analyst pegged Twitter’s ARPU at about $17 in 2020, around one third of Facebook’s.
Twitter is being mismanaged or at least not living up to the theoretical potential when compared to its peers. It might never get to facebook ARPU levels, but it can approach it
https://digiday.com/media/the-rundown-twitter-bets-on-long-f...
If you are holding yourself out as a growth company but also paying dividends, it creates a mixed message, because if you are growing shouldn't the money be better spent on growth than just giving it back to the shareholders?
My guess is layoffs aren’t considered as an option since it would signal that they’re throwing in the towel and don’t believe in their own growth trajectory.
[0] Average salary here is a conservative guess
It makes it impossible for the board to say no without having a good reason. They have a fiduciary duty to examine the offer and determine if it is best for shareholders to cash out at this price. And the answer to that is it probably is because Twitter has never had a good path to long term profitability.
So yes, he is having a laugh. I am sure if they agree he will find the money. He just doesn’t care. He sees a poorly run company that is making decisions against his freedom of speech ethos. It is an easy target.
It's akin to buying your way into the opinion section of every newspaper if not in magnitude, certainly in direction.
If he really cared about freedom, he'd just make a new platform with the $54B. But it's not about that. At best it's a laugh, at worst it's about control.
In general we have laws against tracking individuals.
What he does seems legal but it doesn't make it good or ethical.
FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time. It's a legitimate security risk for those planes and people who use them. It's an abuse of the system.
In fact it's not even Musk's plane, he just owns the company that owns the plane, Falcon Landing LLC. The twitter account didn't actually know if it was Elon Musk being flown or a bunch of burros being ferried back and forth between US states.
>FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time.
You're right, the FAA made the system open so that anybody could do this, not just this kid.
Freedom of speech has to come with some caveats or its dangerous as it can be used as a weapon.
Twitter is a media weapon, and Musk knows this. This is a platform for Musk to push his agenda.
Why is it that people that have an agenda assume that steps towards neutrality are simply an opposing agenda?
Correct, but journalists, politicians and companies do, which is all it needs. Twitter has been way more influential than it deserves to be for a while now.
(Goes and buys The Washington Post)
With Twitter all he seems to care about is the idea, the name, the userbase and some of the technology. I don't think turning $45b into $100b is a top priority, there are easier ways doing that.
What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology?
If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.
If you remove ads and surveillance Twitter isn't 60 lines of Perl. Just their frontend, without even getting into problems of scale, is already much heavier than sixty lines. It also happens to have been an influential technology export [1].
You can find more than sixty projects, not just sixty lines of Perl, open sourced by Twitter. While some of them are related to ad tracking and surveillance not all of them are [2]. Although I haven't checked, I would be shocked if any of them are below sixty lines.
The idea that modern tech companies can be replaced with sixty lines of code is exceedingly naive. There are certain problems that naturally come up at scale like the regular failure of hardware, hot users, persistent dedicated attacks by intelligent malicious actors, and regulatory requirements around data handling which, even taken alone rather than together, demand more than sixty lines of code to adequately address.
Twitter may be simple in theory, but you are quite clearly provoking a straw man conception of the value of Twitter's technology. If you weren't, you wouldn't need to lie or exaggerate to the point of absurdity.
[1]: https://getbootstrap.com/2.0.2/ [2]: https://opensource.twitter.dev/projects/
> What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology?
The person you are responding to is largely repeating first-party accounts of motivation - Elon says he believes that producing greater transparency in algorithmic moderation and active moderation at Twitter, understood as a technology owned by Twitter, is a core ideologically rooted reason for the takeover. You can get this first party account of motivation by listening to the TED interview with Elon Musk which covers the topic of why he feels Twitter should be taken private and why he feels it would benefit from having its moderation practices be incredibly transparent to the point of open sourcing the entirety of Twitter and making their moderation process public.
The world being as unpredictable as it is, the conversation may also move to another medium tomorrow.
Doing anything on Twitter scale has significant technical challenges.
There's no way he gets into Tesla without giant government cash incentives.
He lies quite a lot about his business intentions and reasoning. It's not surprising that people don't trust him and wonder what the real reason is, since no one believes the reason he's giving (other than uncritical Musk fanboys).
Are you sure that you're not confusing failed predictions with malevolent lying?
Lie. Full self-driving is not feature complete in 2022, and won't be for years.
"Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." - Elon Musk in 2018 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1026872652290379776
Lie. Funding was not secured. Musk is still doubling down on this one.
There was an incident where the EPA gave the Model S a range of 391 miles, and Musk got upset and claimed the left the key in the ignition overnight, which the EPA denies. Musk provides no evidence, but neither does the EPA, so I guess this one is "Makes weird claim contradicting a government agency that has no reason to lie", but I am inclined to believe the EPA over Musk. (https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244556/elon-musk-lie-epa...)
These are a small sampling of examples, you can look at Musk's statements over time about Tesla, the Hyperloop, and his future intentions regarding the various bizarre whims he adopts monthly, and there's tons of stuff where exaggerates and overstates, but also plenty where he straight up lies and completely misrepresents the truth. Particularly with anything Tesla related, he's actually more straight up about SpaceX capabilities, for whatever reason.
In fact I'm not sure this really has much to do with NTs and autistics. I think this sort of dynamic occurs all the time even between people who are very similar (but never identical!) to each other.
That's not really true is it? My understanding is that it's actually the smallest of its immediate peers in social media. And perhaps the same in the field of the broader definition of media.
As a separate issue, my personal sentiment on social media, like a number of others I know, is that it has all become a steaming pile of toxic garbage, not unlike the pile of junk mail I dutifully retrieve from my physical mailbox once a month (and even then only so that the mail person has room to add more). My concern on a deal like this is that if that sentiment takes off in the mainstream a property like Twitter could experience a MySpace style collapse overnight.
1. News such as an HN post which is a ... twitter link
2. News in an article or on TV that reverences a ... twitter link
3. Social media referencing a ... twitter link
There's a lot more than appears at first, even if you aren't consuming news on Twitter or Tik Tok a lot of it is being broken there.
Twitter is a great way for Musk to get into social media without having to get users and build the infrastructure. He can compete at a worldwide level with Facebook on day one.
Weido and Wechat may have more users, but they aren't newsmakers. Just like there's more people at a Def Leppard concert than in the White House, but the White House makes news.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/04/1003284948/trump-suspended-fr...
Nobody cares about Facebook, even though it's hugely used it's a dead letter.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31110766
Please learn how comment threads work.
The operating income of a superyacht is also negative. But billionaires keep buying them.
Some people get to a point in their lives where the numbers no longer matter.
To its shareholders, Twitter is a business. To someone who can buy Twitter, it's a hobby.
However he is into multiple businesses that are deeply embedded with politics and governments. Electric cars, space program contracts, telecommunications - all need the right kind of governments to succeed. Twitter has shown to have large effect in politics, it makes quite a bit of sense to own and control that thing if you like to own and control the government.
If his motives are purer, it also makes sense to try to improve the society with a portion of your wealth. You don't have to donate your money to the cancer society, you can engage in philanthropy through building something good instead.
I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6.
Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks.
Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM.
Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself!
This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple:
1. Be Elon Musk
2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter
3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture;
4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible;
5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture.
6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)!
If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.
I don't buy in at those PEs, but I clearly should have as the track record has shown has shown. The future remains uncertain, his goals are still incredible to the point of being uncredible, and his delivery on those goals has been real and incredible. What a conundrum, no wonder people are talking about it so much. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the meantime we have reusable space rockets and actual progress on a process of transformation away from ICEs.
On the one hand, my god what they are doing at SpaceX, Starlink, (and even some parts of) Tesla are incredible! And I suppose without Musk playing carnival barker, these things aren't possible.
On the other hand... the approach is so slimy and really should not be celebrated the way it is.
It's a similar feeling with Martin Shkreli. He did some fraud, but he also gave all the money back to investors and started the ongoing conversation about Rx pricing.
Twitter is a lever to all the journalistic organizations on Earth. Its impact is not measured by its operating income.
Anyone remember the Musk tweet about how his AI is so much better than anyone in the market realizes?
Did no one notice that this is all happening within a month or so after Twitter added a dislike button?
Would both positive and negative sentiment data for one of the largest under-monetized repositories of social data have any value to an eccentric billionaire with some major AI R&D focus?
He's not buying Twitter to defend the first amendment.
He wants the data for his AI stuff. That's just not nearly as popular a PR slant.
He's definitely demonstrating how toothless the SEC is. It's just good at empty threats. I'm not sure what the bigger joke is: the SEC or the financial industry's multiple private watchdog corporations like FINRA which masquerade as public regulatory bodies.
Either Twitter is a private company and they can ban whoever they want for whatever reasons they want, or they’re a public square and we need to make sure that everyone can read the tweets they want to read.
I’m fine with either option, but I’d prefer a little less hypocrisy from everyone who praised Twitter when they banned certain accounts. You can still follow terrorist groups on Twitter but the previous US president is banned. That is insane, and I don’t care how many people disagree with that statement. It’s still true.
It may be beyond you, are you also saying it's beyond all Twitter's investors too? Have you asked them?
By generally accepted rules of engagement the totality of investors think that Twitter is worth 30% less than what Musk is offering.
That's the difference between Twitter's market cap and Musk's very tender offer.
There's no better way of asking investors how much they value a stock than by allowing them to bid in an open market.
Purchase like Twitter are to seize the platform; period.
Dissenting opinions, and bans, then become whatever the owner of the platform desires.
How do people not see the actual value of Twitter, which goes well beyond money.
So if the stock price stays above $50 he has not lost any money
Some things are actually more important than money -- Twitter can offer enormous power in setting a national narrative even if little economic benefit for Musk.
I'm always skeptical about this. Twitter is dominated by journalists, celebrities, and tech people. Only about 23% of American adults have twitter accounts. Only 46% of those even open it daily. Of the active users 10% account for ~95% of tweets. Among those, ~70% identify as Democrats, and certainly aren't going to be swayed by Trump getting back on twitter.
It just isn't clear to me that twitter even matters in the realm of US politics. Voters just aren't really there, and when they are they predominantly aren't engaging. When they do, they're mostly democrats tweeting at one-another.
Now they are syndicated in a number of other papers, discussed broadly on social media, cable news, local tv news, and across a number of new podcasts. Their reach is probably a good bit greater than the ~5 million subscribers. I would also note that 100% of subscribers are getting news from the NYT, because well obviously, so that's something. They do seem to have some sway on Democratic primaries sometimes, and do seem to shape opinions among a certain class of people. What does that all add up to? I don't know. Do they matter in the realm of US politics, probably, but I'm no sure how to quantify it.
A lot of the news articles talking about the effects of facebook focus on how many people "saw" a particular post. Given how those impressions are gathered, I'm no convinced that a significant percentage of those impressions resulted in people actually reading the post or even the headline, let alone that resulting in any real world outcomes.
I think the people that build social media applications want everyone to think that they have the power to shape discourse and outcomes, and newspapers who's ad revenue is undermined by social media also want us to believe social media is dangerous. Those two things do not make it true.
In 2020, Biden received 81,000,000 versus Trump's 74,000,000; the difference is 7,000,000.
Facebook may well be more powerful, but Twitter is still matters.
I REALLY doubt it. Of the 28,000,000 daily users, mind you that means they open it once a day, 70% get news from the app. Of those only 37% say it increases their political engagement. This is roughly 7 million people who report any change in political engagement in the US as a result of looking at twitter. These people are overwhelmingly democrats living in big cities. I'm just not convinced that such a narrow, concentrated slice (2.7% of adults) of the the US population is really that big of a deal.
Now you could make a case that twitter maybe matters more in other places outside of the US, but that's not really related to the trump/no trump issue that I was replying to originally.
The context is that the 2020 Mostly Peaceful Protests, a worldwide pandemic, and extreme political polarization weren't normal, either.
The counterargument was that the example given was actually in 2021, and the given example of crazy (Jan 6 2021) was less crazy than 2020 (BLM protests).
No.. it assumes Musk is only trying to maximize his net worth with this move, which is a ridiculous assumption.
It's hard to put a price on the propaganda machine and it's network effect.
It's not really about making money with Twitter.
- edit -
@McLaren_Ferrari: I disagree it's a misguided purchase, it makes sense to me from his stated goals.
But maybe you can sell the world's richest man your financial consultant nightclub analogy and save everyone.
Trump didn't own any media back in 2015-2016. He won because he sucked the air out of the room by making hyperbolic statements and riffing off the huge news cycle generated by his hyperbolic statements.
A good and effective PR team and a charismatic deliver is all you need and it comes for much less than 40B.
This is what kids learn in nightclubs fairly early: if you want to command the club you want to be a DJ. Owning the club will leave you with both a huge hole in your pocket and in the shadow of the DJ every given Friday.
The answer to Musk "problems" is to become a good public speaker and work on his in person social game, not monopolizing an online platform on which he has by far the biggest account already. Pushing on a string that's what it is. That's about the only thing he can do to expand his virality, owning the platform is kinda redundant.
Real life still happens offline (thankfully)
My math is that Musk’s twitter activity very reasonably increased Tesla’s market cap by more than 5% which is what he is offering to pay.
Going back to Trump I think that he going quiet after losing was not an effect of him being banned from Twitter as much as it was about the post defeat depression, mixed with fear of retribution for Jan. 6th now that he was out of office and also a part of him wanting to be Presidential and not critique his successor.
There are no rules in Twitter that prevent Musk from engaging in Pumps&Dumps so he'd have to do something Trump-esque to be banned. Spending 40B to secure the capability of inciting violence and unlike Trump avoid getting banned seems way out of whack. Besides inciting violence doesn't pump a stock.
Twitter operating income for 12 m/e 31 Dec 2021 was negative. For the q/e 31 Dec 2021 it was $0.167B. Why he thinks Twitter is worth $45b is beyond me. What would Warren Buffett do? Well, he wouldn't buy Twitter, that's for sure.
* Time will tell, of course. I've been wrong before. But the whole thing seems like madness to me.