Current Events > So Twitter will never die, will it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Despite Elon's attempts, looks like it's still alive and well. "Well" not being the best choice of words of course.

Look at the Elon simp, putting X in his username. Smdh

Not until there's a replacement

It's already dead, it's "X" now.

There was billions tied into the branding Twitter had and Elon "desperate to make up for lost revenue so I'm going to charge for verification of identity" Musk just pissed it away like it was nothing.

Elon himself has admitted it has been bleeding money every day, so IDK how long it has to live. Big companies don't typically die overnight, it's a long slow process.

What you need is an easily accessible alternative with a sizable user-base, which none of the competitors really have yet. Twitter either needs to become nigh unusable with Elon pushing this subscription shit more, or the alternatives have to be worth moving over and starting over for companies and creators.

I think it's a matter of time and a competitor putting some money and marketing behind a replacement.

Twixter has become a laughingstock.

Myspace is still technically alive.

Twitter (or whatever stupid name Musk gives it) doesn't have to go out of business to "die" in the sense of forever losing the popularity and prominence it once had.

MC_BatCommander posted...

Elon himself has admitted it has been bleeding money every day, so IDK how long it has to live. Big companies don't typically die overnight, it's a long slow process.

as i understand it, it was bleeding money before he even bought it. but after he gained decision making power, he thought it best to stab it a dozen more times, just to be sure.

Twitter has become a place of viral videos and news. Its not going away

Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

Look at the Elon simp, putting X in his username. Smdh

Lol

Sometimes I wonder if Twitters data it collects from the use base. Long term wise could be beneficial to StarLink. I may just be giving too much credit where it may not be due.

Noname12 posted...

Twitter has become a place of viral videos and news. Its not going away

lolololol

Dat_Cracka_Jax posted...

Look at the Elon simp, putting X in his username. Smdh

I made a topic suggesting I change my name to The_Twitter_Dawg.

As long as I get up to the minute Fantasy Football injury news, I'll never leave Twitter.

myspace is still alive. give it 20 years when all the kids who aren't born yet say twitter is for old people just like youngsters did for facebook.

Noname12 posted...

Twitter has become a place of viral videos and news. Its not going away

That's what it was, Trump has actively worked at hindering that.

Depends on how you define "dying". Keep in mind that Myspace is somehow still around, but today, it's barely even a shadow of the titan that it was back at its peak in the mid-to-late '00s.

I expect Twitter/X/Elonland/etc. will end up gradually fading into irrelevance and being functionally replaced for most people by another social media site (once one pops up that doesn't immediately suck, of course) rather than, say, suddenly suffering a catastrophic server fire and/or hack-attack that immediately kills the site or something.

Musk is the richest guy alive. He can just keep pouring resources into it to keep it alive, no matter how much he messes it up.

What's Twitter I only know X

Aressar posted...

Musk is the richest guy alive.

That's no longer true, thanks to all the value he lost purchasing and mismanaging Twitter. The Muskrat has been knocked down to #2, with Bernard Arnault (the first French person to ever top the list of the world's richest billionaires) overtaking him this year.

He can just keep pouring resources into it to keep it alive, no matter how much he messes it up.

That might be true, depending on where he's pulling those resources from and how many of them he can consistently access. Most billionaires don't actually have a whole lot of liquid funds available to them at all times ( la Scrooge McDuck, who famously takes "liquid funds" literally via his Money Bin), with their wealth instead being tied up in property and investments.

Musk would either have to sell off some of his assets (which even he wouldn't be able to do forever), take out loans to keep Twitter afloat (and if any bank is foolish enough to lend to him now, with how much debt he's taken on with the buyout and will likely never be able to pay off, they'll almost certainly be going belly-up soon), or siphon funding away from his other companies to prop up Twitter (which might well be thorny from a legal perspective and which would almost certainly kill the public's and the investors' faith in said companies, as they can no longer use that money to pay employees or shareholders, conduct R&D, service existing products, etc., which would inevitably end up with Musk's companies pumping out inferior products and services compared to their competitors with no accompanying decreases in price). He has options here, but they're not as infinite as you might think, and all of them would put him further down the list as he either loses assets, accumulates more debt, or both.

So I take it the Twitter domain name is going to be changing too? When's that gonna happen?

SpawnShadow posted...

That's no longer true, thanks to all the value he lost purchasing and mismanaging Twitter. The Muskrat has been knocked down to #2, with Bernard Arnault (the first French person to ever top the list of the world's richest billionaires) overtaking him this year.

Uh, no. He's still at #1 at about a quarter trillion as of July 2023.

These things are constantly changing and going up and down is because of stock prices, not the actions they're necessarily taking.

Anyone who still uses Twitter at this point has only themselves to blame.

Twitter is spiraling. It's lost two-thirds of its value since Musk bought it, and it's not going to get any better, since Musk is utterly incapable of making anything even slightly resembling a good decision.

If Twitter can survive operating for a decade while losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, I really don't think that we should expect it just to up and vanish because Elon mismanaged it for one year.

s0nicfan posted...

If Twitter can survive operating for a decade while losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year

Is this officially verified somewhere? Could very well be true, also sounds like something Musk made up when he was trying to get out of the deal.

s0nicfan posted...

I really don't think that we should expect it just to up and vanish because Elon mismanaged it for one year.

You realize there's a pretty significant change between them continuing operations as usual and Musk's takeover taking several actions that have negatively hurt the company and dug an even heavier financial hole coupled with the hundreds of millions it was allegedly already losing, right?

Musk drove away more advertisers, fired necessary staff that he later needed (because he's a dumbass), and now changed the name to "X" for some vainglorious nonsensical reason even though the Twitter brand was worth about 4bn, which he pissed away with this needless rebranding.

Kradek posted...

Is this officially verified somewhere? Could very well be true, also sounds like something Musk made up when he was trying to get out of the deal.

This was common knowledge before the takeover. 2018 and 2019 were the only years in the company's history where it actually turned a profit. If you Google "Twitter profit over time" there's pages of articles detailing it, but if there's some particular source you would like I'm sure I can hunt it down.

To your second point, Elon has absolutely continued to tank their revenue from an advertiser standpoint, but I haven't really seen anyone analyze how much he reduced their operating costs, either. 6,000 employees were fired, and if we assume that they were making 50k a year on average that's $300 million a year saved just from pay, not even counting benefits and things like that. So it's kind of tough to get a clear picture of what their profits are going to look like given that they both lost a lot of advertisers but also a lot of recurring expenses. And all of that assumes that elon's new tactic of nickel and diming people isn't actually paying off.

s0nicfan posted...

This was common knowledge before the takeover. 2018 and 2019 were the only years in the company's history where it actually turned a profit. If you Google "Twitter profit over time" there's pages of articles detailing it, but if there's some particular source you would like I'm sure I can hunt it down.

Nah, you're good, it checks out.

s0nicfan posted...

but I haven't really seen anyone analyze how much he reduced their operating costs, either. 6,000 employees were fired, and if we assume that they were making 50k a year on average that's $300 million a year saved just from pay, not even counting benefits and things like that.

Not sure if we'll ever know the truth about that. Musk took the company private and immediately started lying about how awesomely he was doing at managing it and how swell things were going. However, considering he gave them severance packages and then found himself having to rehire many of those same people, it definitely seems like he just foolishly went "how many people we have, 8000? Let's cut 3/4 of that" and didn't stop to think about who he was actually firing, as indicated by the necessary tech people he had to rehire and the legal team he fired and then found himself running afoul of violating contracts over people he fired because he no longer had that legal team to tell him he's putting himself into legal jeopardy (I believe that's what it was over, I know he fired people he wasn't supposed to and opened himself up to lawsuits). Once again, a very short-sighted business move for immediate "hur hur we save money hur" objective. I have a few other examples of how people he fired hurt the operations of formerly Twitter, however not trying to write an essay here. It's almost like the capitalist instinct to fire as many people as you can and operate with a barebones skeleton crew often leads to poor performance and results.

s0nicfan posted...

And all of that assumes that elon's new tactic of nickel and diming people isn't actually paying off.

We actually know that whatever money he's making with No-longer Twitter Blue (I guess we call it "X black" now?) does not even begin to make up for the lost ad revenue.

Musk claims he lost 50% in ad revenue, it's projected that Twitter Blue will only make around 27.8m/yr and compared to the 1bn/yr interest payment he has for buying the company was just another dumb idea that shot himself in the foot.

https://en.as.com/latest_news/how-many-people-have-subscribed-to-elon-musks-8-twitter-blue-service-so-far-n/ #:~:text=QZ%20estimates%20that%20existing%20Twitter,million%20short%20of%20that%20figure.

According to that article, Twitter would need to have 10.4m premium subscribers to cover that 1bn interest payment and they're currently 10.1m short of that goal.

I don't know the full details on the other companies he's acquired, however Musk actually has quite a reputation for buying companies and then making them worse, if how he's ran Twitter after buying it demonstrates a continued pattern from him acquiring Tesla and SpaceX, then I can see why people say that.

Was Twitter ever profitable? I suppose it'll stay along until making money matters in the tech industry

Jabodie posted...

Was Twitter ever profitable?

It was very profitable to its former owners when they sold it for $44 billion

The demise will be like a slow leak.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I try. Guess I'll post in every single Twitter topic from here on out.

Antifar posted...

It was very profitable to its former owners when they sold it for $44 billion

And before the Elongated Muskrat bought it and promptly saddled it with the debts he incurred to buy it in the first place, it was just about to break even thanks to the money that advertisers were pumping in. And then the Muskrat proceeded to be very smart by instituting policies that scared away the advertisers (e.g. restoring the accounts of Nazis and pedophiles, falsely labelling "cisgender" a slur, basically killing any sort of moderation, etc.).

IMO if it survives this Musk saga then it's a quintessential example of "too big to fail".

s0nicfan posted...

This was common knowledge before the takeover. 2018 and 2019 were the only years in the company's history where it actually turned a profit. If you Google "Twitter profit over time" there's pages of articles detailing it, but if there's some particular source you would like I'm sure I can hunt it down.

To your second point, Elon has absolutely continued to tank their revenue from an advertiser standpoint, but I haven't really seen anyone analyze how much he reduced their operating costs, either. 6,000 employees were fired, and if we assume that they were making 50k a year on average that's $300 million a year saved just from pay, not even counting benefits and things like that. So it's kind of tough to get a clear picture of what their profits are going to look like given that they both lost a lot of advertisers but also a lot of recurring expenses. And all of that assumes that elon's new tactic of nickel and diming people isn't actually paying off.

It was a public company that was taking in investor money due to a perceived value. A lot of tech companies work on that model. That factor is gone for the most part. Elon Musk has now taken all of that on.

If this was still a public company with Musk as the CEO we'd be seeing a very different story as I don't think many people are all that confident about the future outlook.

On top of that this company has been racking up a whole lot of incoming lawsuits so we'll see how that goes.