Initial reports had the Saudi investment fund being a relatively minor investor - in absolute terms it’s big, but less than a billion in a 44 billion deal doesnt give them much clout. However, the other day they published a memo indicating they are in fact the second biggest stake holder.
Anyone who bought Musk’s appeal as a free speech absolutist, please take yourself outside and kick your own arse.
Apparently, Elon Musk is going to charge $20 for people with blue ticks. God knows how much he is going to charge us ordinary folk.
I can forsee a massive backlash or some other social media nerd in his bedroom developing an alternative site to twitter then.
Uh oh, so now if Twitter can’t make it’s $1B/year interest note (up from $52M prior) and his equity partners get wiped out, he might not want to visit the Saudi Embassy? Yikes!
It’s not cashflow positive is it?
Could be fun
This yahoo link shows four years of cash flow. Operating cash flow has been declining. He would need to make up that nearly $400M of cash flow through cost cuts. Can’t really afford to piss the whole world off by tweeting weird conspiracy shit.
how someone spends $44Bil on a company that only generates $5Bil annually…
Tech is almost always over priced because the potential for future revenue growth is already built into today’s price. So buying twitter at market price for a profit play was difficult to understand. Doing it at a price 50% higher than the market makes that impossible without there being some form of integration plan (how can twitter make his overall portfolio more valuable)
but now we’re going into a global recession, on the brink of WW3 and one of the baddies is talking about dirty bombs … now he wants to monetize a free service?
hahahaha. good luck with that.
Hey, let’s create a car company from absolute scratch. Hey, let’s create a rocket company from absolute scratch. He’s not to be taken too lightly, but this one could be beyond his limit. Will be very interesting and maybe even entertaining to watch.
Space X is fair, but he didn’t create Tesla. He didnt even create the valuable part of what would be PayPal.
This is a technicality. His money made it possible from nearly the very beginning. His vision is definitely what made it successful. Amazing story, really. The guy was sleeping in the Fremont factory during that critical period in 2017 when they were trying to figure out how to mass produce enough of them to make a profit. For me, Tesla is more impressive than Space X, for which he pursued and received lots of government funding.
I don’t think it’ll be interesting, or entertaining.
I doubt we’re far off the monetization of all things web-based.
We already pay through the teeth for internet access. Meta will start charging for services pretty soon, as will IG, Tiktok, Twitter. once they’re done their data mining on us, they’ll charge us a user fee
we’re already seeing this with Playstation Plus network access for mutiplayer on PS5, and I believe MS is charging for XBOX as well. used to buy the games and the online portion was included but now we have to pay a free.
I suppose it will come down to whether people think it’s worth paying for.
I personally wouldn’t pay for twitter or facebook, especially if there was a free alternative.
The proposition is a terrible one. The content is the value. Verified users are providing that for free and that is what drives people to the site. And now they’re being asked to pat 200 bucks a year for the privilege? You can see people in Coms doing it, but messages from the Bristol city counsel planning division about downtown closures is a bonus for going on that site, not the reason you go there.
I think Parler people are going to migrate to Twitter, and Twitter people will migrate to a new platform that will take off, and be an improvement on Twitter.
Instead of having his shiny public square for the exchange of ideas and general discourse, Elon will be the proud owner of $44Billion worth of past its peak fringe media, full of loons.
Oh, and the Saudis and the banks will not be happy with him.
The deleted tweet can be seen here.
This is the second time I have seen a post by Biden ‘fact checked’ since Musk took over Twitter. I haven’t seen a post by anyone else ‘fact checked’. Has anybody else?