Even that seems wildly overvalued. https://t.co/FRZq58R4tT — Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) October 30, 2023 I assume this is happening now because the IRS, or the banks which are his creditors — or both — are pressing Musk a littler harder than he can handle? Per the NYTimes: X, the company formerly known as Twitter, handed out …
Late Night Open Thread: Elon Musk, Plate-SpinnerPost + Comments (45)
… A company-wide meeting on Thursday, the year anniversary of when Musk took over Twitter, hosted by Musk and his CEO of a few months Linda Yaccarino, was mostly an ad nauseam going over the various product changes to the platform, according to two people present for the video call. These individuals requested anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. Their identities are known to Insider. Both described the call overall as “scripted,” but it wasn’t without off-kilter comments.
During the call, Musk attempted to take a tone of excitement for what X will look like over the next year, the people present said. X will in 2024 be a “fully fledged” dating site, he insisted, as well as a digital bank. These details have not been previously reported, although other elements of the call were reported by The Verge as was the email that went out to staff right before the call by Fortune.
Musk did not get into details of how exactly X would become a dating app, if there was any user demand for such features, or what further product changes would be made to turn it into one, one of the people present said. However, the idea is in line with Musk’s push for features that require payment, as most dating apps today are some form of subscription service…
Getting more users to give X payment and banking information ties in with Musk’s long-held desire for X to offer full payment and banking services to users, part of his ambitions to create an “everything app” like WeChat, one of the people present said. “He wants people to pay for everything,” the person noted. Musk said during the meeting he expects X to be capable of functioning as a bank by next year, the person added, whether or not users want it to be.
“It doesn’t seem to be what users really want,” the person said…
Ed Zitron, at his (unpaywalled) Substack, on the plate-spinning “Junk Bond Trader”:
Elon Musk is not an inventor, a creator or an innovator. He is not a thoughtful leader or steward of companies, nor is he worthy of any title that suggests he has been the active force behind any major accomplishment by any company…
No, Elon Musk is far more of a modern-day hustler, a nihilistic master of the art of financial plate-spinning and theoretical value. He is, in many ways, quite innovative, but only in the sense that he has repeatedly found ways to swindle the media and the financial markets without ever having to make or do anything. His joyless, banal and destructive path to becoming the world’s richest man is fueled entirely through exploiting the weaknesses of society. To quote Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, Musk has a “Ph.D in man’s ignorance,” and can cleanly see where rules can be bent or broken entirely without creating any real existential threat…
Musk realized early on that by crafting a certain persona — the modern day trailblazing innovator with his hands in the future — he could take advantage of the emotional (and at times deeply illogical) nature of the markets, manipulating large cadres of investors into believing that he was a kingmaker.
And nowhere have the markets been more thoroughly hoodwinked than by Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, where he successfully conned banks like Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays into giving him $13 toward the $44 billion purchase of a massively-overvalued public company. A year into the acquisition, Twitter is worth a tenth of its purchase price, its value destroyed by the very kingmaker the banks had hoped would turn their investment into easily-floggable debt rather than what may go down as the worst acquisition in tech history…
Musk took advantage of the greed and arrogance of financiers that have crafted a market that responds to signals and vibes over good company financials. A company can firmly sit in the red for years without fear that their stock will drop as long as they can show revenue growth, and a stock like Tesla’s — one decoupled from rationale or fundamentals — can soar based entirely on the bloviating of a 53-year-old man-child. Musk’s facade had been carried by the fact he had, for the most part, made good investments and then left the companies in question to actually build the things, operating as an awkward carnival barker, calling questions he didn’t like “boneheaded” and “uncool.”
The problem was that Twitter, for the most part, is totally unlike any other company that Musk has owned or had a hand in creating…
… Musk cannot encourage “more” of Twitter, because Twitter is already so vast, and monetizing an experience that is already free hasn’t been particularly successful. Twitter Blue has just over a million subscribers, and they’re “superspreaders” of disinformation, weakening the core “tweets” product that actually makes Twitter money.
One might argue that Elon’s sell-the-sizzle playbook is antithetical to Twitter as a company. Twitter had, until 2022, become notable less as a company and more as an institution — a place where news was broken, arguments were had, and discourse brewed. By making Twitter more conspicuous, Musk has somehow increased scrutiny while reducing traffic, because much of the press around Twitter is telling you that the core product is worse, and its creators (and leadership team) are part of the problem. While Musk can temporarily distract from build problems with the cybertruck by driving one to an F1 race, his near-autonomous ability to drive press to his products is a never-ending advertisement for why Twitter sucks and you shouldn’t visit it.
It’s hard to guess where things go next. Musk could offer to buy the debt at dirt-cheap prices, but the banks will likely refuse, demanding instead that he continues to make his $1 billion interest payments. Twitter itself could file for bankruptcy, as the debt is held by the company itself, which would likely lead to a fire sale and the company’s acquisition by another big tech giant, assuming that at that point there’s much left of a platform crumbling on a daily basis…
He turned a wildly imperfect, barely profitable but incredibly influential global town square teeming with up-to-the-moment info and organic conversations and turned it into a failing pay-to-hate vanity messageboard
— John DeVore (@JohnDeVore) October 30, 2023