Elon Musk admits X 'may fail, as so many have predicted'

Because he's doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn't it obvious?
- No, you don't throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles, not even if you are as rich as Musk. Musk is (probably) a narcissist who thought he could make it work in his delusional mind.
  He wanted a mouthpiece for the MAGA crowd, and he probably thought the desire in the population for it, would make it succeed, if he made the platform embrace that. He probably envisioned himself as a great liberator, who would be celebrated for bringing free speech back to America.
  Musk has been losing it for a long time, and it seems to only get worse.
  
  Who could of forseen brands not wanting to advertise over hate speech that would turn off half their customer base? I'd love screenshots of my companies products floating around next to seasticas and racism.
  
  Also, I don't think a narcissist would intentionally and publicly humiliate themselves the way Musk has done (Not a psychologist).
  
  He’s being bankrolled to keep it up and running for the next election. It will be interesting to see if the money runs out.
  
  I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software. Historically, hardware was way more complex but the hardware problems have kind of been solved. There’s only so many ways to design a phone or laptop. Software, meanwhile, has only become more complex and challenging.
  
  No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles
  Why not? Elon Musk is famously on ketamine, ambien, and a whole slew of mind-altering substances.
  Given how the contract was written, and given how much Elon Musk fought against the contract, it was obvious that he made a short-term decision (likely while high on some substance), and then quickly regretted buying Twitter. Within a week or two, he started a court case to NOT BUY TWITTER, despite signing an ironclad contract.
  In my mind, its really fucking obvious what happened. Elon Musk partied a little bit too hard with some mixture of ketamine+ambien+alcohol, it mixed weirdly in his brain and he made a bad decision. A few days later, when he sobered up a bit, he realized how shitty of a decision he made but it was too late to roll things back.
  Everything else Elon Musk has done is just... shitty reputation management. He's trying to convince the world he's still got it, despite making a bad (possibly drug-induced) decision
  
  I wonder if he ever had it.
  
  "He cannot be that self deluded."
  Narrator: He was.
- I don't see the conspiracy.
  My assumption is the investors immediately got what they wanted. They are not stupid.
  Money men don't hand over money to these front men based on promises. This isn't a Hollywood movie. There was an immediate pay off.
  They got SpaceX stock.
  
  the only not-on-purpose piece was him having to buy it. idiot was forced to buy twitter, and then turned it into a "lets burn down a bastion of liberal speech" amongst his friends. he knows he wont suffer in any conceivable way, the saudis who fronted a huge chunk get what they want.
  this was all setup shortly after he was forced to buy it. every step he has made since is in the playbook of "ruining your business", including mistakes he has personally made before.
- I don't know. The way it's going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.
  Instead he's making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.
  The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he's making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he's just stupid and incompetent.
  
  You're saying the guy that has done nothing but look like a total fool for years could actually be a total fool? By the gods, I think you're onto something!
- Because he’s doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn’t it obvious?
  It is tremendously obvious, I agree. At one point it felt kinda hyperbolic to say, but not for awhile now.
  I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to speculate what's in it for him, but it's 100% obvious that's what's being done.
  
  He might call him self pro free speech, but he actually hates it (as long as it's not his own free speech). Getting rid of Twitter is a massive blow to free speech. One less platform where he and his companies can get outed and criticized on.
- I think that's obvious to everyone. But, if you're claiming he's doing it on purpose..... That's just some next level batshit conspiracy theory.
  
  Is it? He's either a moron or he's doing it on purpose. There is simply no other explanation.
  At this point it's just too many dumb decisions, if he had done absolutely nothing after taking over he'd be better off than he is now.
  
  Not sure I agree. I think it would be totally in character for him to want to destroy Twitter just because they forced him to buy it. He's a petty troll and can afford to lose that money just to show them.
- Like others have said, bullshit. He'll drive it into the ground and pretend that was his plan the whole time, like he's some undercover genius three steps ahead of everyone, when really he's just constantly playing catch-up with his narcissistic outbursts.
- That's like saying "my car may fail after I poured sand into the gas tank and replaced the electrical with speaker wires"
- People told me I was crazy when I said he bought it to shut it down. Look who he hangs out with, people with a fuckton of money who hate free speech. Very powerful people who control media empires and run oppressive regimes.
  He might be stupid, but the people pulling his strings aren't.
- I keep thinking there must be some high level plan here to destroy twitter for the good of humanity. I mean it's that or Elon actually just is that stupid. At this point the latter seems the most likely ...
  
  Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.
  
  You've got it back to front imo. Twitter was a useful tool for disseminating info, whether for protest movements, political movements, whatevs. Pre-Musk, there was a degree of control on twitter re disinfo, harassment, hatred etc. Now, it's no longer a useful tool for leftwing people to gather and share their thoughts; it's no longer a useful tool to disseminate information; it's no longer a tool for rallying protestors.
  Look at who invested (Saudi kingdom); look at when Musk took it over (mid-terms); it seems pretty obvious to me that the takeover was a very expensive purchase to make the actions of oligarchs & despots that much easier.
  
  If he was destroying it for the good of humanity he would have to somehow destroy the concept of it rather than a single platform.
  Probably best spending 40 billion on education in the harm social media can do lol.
  I really do think he's just delusional. I won't call him an idiot because there is clearly intelligence and talent in his head, but he's gone off the rails in some capacity whether it's mental health issues or power crazed or who knows.
  
  Twitter was not the golden bastion to humanity you think it was.
  
  What about Elon Musk makes you think he'd do anything for the good of humanity?
- That was my original thought when he came on and immediately fired 75% of the staff. It's not some savvy slimming down or cost-cutting. It was more like a wrecking ball.
  It was fairly clear that his overall desire was the make the platform less useful for liberals and more for conservatives. It seems like he is content to destroy it if he can't achieve the latter.

"Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by Dickless here." — Ray Stantz, Twitter engineer
- It's true. This man has no dick.
  
  Hmm could be are all his kids invetro?
  
  He has like 18000 children.
  Plenty of awesome people are dick-free, and being dick-ful in no way suggests competence or any other positive trait.
  Edit: ITT: omg tech bros are so toxic Also ITT: dick measuring
- How did all of these people replying to you never see Ghostbusters? It's criminal.

Sure it's his money but does anyone else feel legitimately frustrated at all the good that this money could have done?
Rich dudes have always had vanity projects, but there is no grand concert hall or library or university to come out of this. Just a ruined company with millions of wasted hours of effort. For nothing.
- The horrific opportunity cost inherent to having a billionaire class.
  
  Guillotine noises intensify
- Definitely prefer the vanity projects of the past. Libraries, city halls etc
  
  Yeah. X makes various things named "Rockafeller" seem downright "not a dumpster fire" in contrast.
- The nice thing about our economic system is that value is rarely completely destroyed, the money he paid for Twitter didn't cease to exist, it went to former Twitter shareholders.
  They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
  
  They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
  They use it to reinvest and hoard. Because that's what the investor class does, which is why they're useless.
  
  broken window fallacy
- millions of wasted hours of effort. For nothing.
  aah, Social Media in a nutshell.
  
  You make a great point. Let's spend hours and hours discussing it to death here. ;)
- The money isn't gone, it's just changed hands
  
  It doesn't work that way. Almost all of the money in the world is debt owed to someone else. Very few things are bought with cash. It is really credit on credit on credit on credit. And all of that depends on trust. My company gets product from your company today with the promise to pay in a month, your company does the same...
  When events like the Twitter buyout and burn happen it weakens trust. Which weakens credit. Which means the virtual money is gone.
- Could have just bought land in Kentucky and sat on it. Made a nature preserve. Give the beavers and deer a place to chill for a century or more. Pretty lazy way to do charity but it still would have been better.
- Hyperloop, boring tunnels, sending cars to space, etc
  Stop me when you've heard enough to believe this guy has obvious disdain for all of us.

For the record, It wasn't failing until Musk came in.
- It also wasn't really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
  I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he's been talked out of.
  
  It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However 8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it's much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.
  
  It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.
  
  Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
  Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
  
  i was no fan of twitter, but it was on a path to achieve some financial stability. It had plenty of value as a mechanism to distribute emergency (or other) information quickly. was and had being the operative words here.
- It isn't failing, Musk is failing.
- twitter was still operating on a hail mary for years, musk just made it more obvious and his erratic handling of operations put a few more nails into the coffin. sadly, the fediverse won't be the successor we all hoped for,

Once it fails then someone will buy it cheap and rename it twitter.
- If there's anything left to buy aside from tacky merch shirts. I'm sure the creditors will pick it clean and auction off the best bits to the highest bidder.
- Maybe, or maybe it'll be another Bebo level disaster.
  
  ...I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can't remember even hearing that name before.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
  originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013
  It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.
- Can't someone else just make Twitter now tho?
  
  Facebook tried with Threads but overcoming ecosystem inertia is hard.
- Bingo.
  And since won't get back all the staff he dismissed; they're going to have to just slap the Twitter brand on a Mastodon instance.

Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now,".
- Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever "great" is a bit of a stretch
  
  twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
- Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
- How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven't noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that's very minor
  
  I myself haven’t noticed any changes
  So you haven't noticed the 80% reduction in staff leading to incredible amounts of Twitter Downtime, the rise in hate-speech due to the firing of the moderators, the loss of mainstream advertisements, and the replacement with ridiculous low-quality advertising because the mainstream advertisers have grown concerned about the hate-speech?
  And you haven't noticed the increase in downtime as the website continuously crashes? The loss of the blocking feature? The inability to block Elon Musk specifically? (and how he keeps appearing on everyone's feed even when you try to get rid of it?). The loss of API access?
  Comment quality and overall quality of discussion has declined significantly on Twitter as well, as Twitter has fallen from top10 on the App/Play store to #55 or later, because it turns out that Americans are too stupid to search for "X" rather than "Twitter". There has been a precipitous decline in the already crappy quality discussion.
  Finally, Threads and Mastodon have sucked out many high-quality posters and sub-communities.
  
  For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word "tweet" was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
  But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren't strictly against the law. But he also doesn't apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn't like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn't all that great before he took over imo.
  
  If you don't notice the changes, you were part of the people he bumped up at all costs that turned it into a terrible service
  
  The "blue check" system which was previously used to denote verified users were who they claimed to be suddenly became a complete cash grab for $8 a month, even more for companies to have verified checks or sets of them? Then when not everyone was buying in those users were pushed to the top of replies to users posts. This of course caused tons of people to just get blocked outright because of their checks.
  Additionally i believe he has threatened to remove some companies handles because they stopped using them most notably NPR.
  Now he has floated the idea of removing the blocking feature because reasons? Who knows what he thinks. So the functionality has not changed a ton, for now, the quality of what you get has gone down.
  Oh also he made a specific exception and unbanned some user who posted literal child porn
  
  there's only been about 7,000 articles every week about it
  
  He had to inject his own persona into the platform by making inflammatory, discriminatory tweets and being a general troll on his platform, and then making unpopular decisions like forcing people to pay for a blue checkmark, increasing API costs, not banning Nazi posters, and of course, the nonsensical rebranding. It drove away people and advertisers who didn't want to be on the same platform as literal Nazis and bigoted TERF people, and companies who couldn't afford the ridiculous API pricing.
  Honestly if he had simply not used his own platform as his own bullhorn, he could have enacted some of the more unpopular changes to become profitable.
  
  Wtf?
  
  I'm sorry but if you didn't get mad at every reply on any decently large post being filled with NPC- ass boomer tier memes and replies and attempts at self promo, you might be a boomer NPC.

So with wildfires in Canada there's evacuation zones near me, but I can't click on some announcement links from the main site that shows the evacuation zones because they go to twitter and you need to log in now. I think they show some on other pages on the site but they do the quicklink to the twitter announcement in the sidebar so you have to click around a bit to get to it. Yes I know the name but whatever. My point being is when the social media site that was meant for short bits of info isn't good for emergency notifications where everyone can read, it's shitty and potentially harmful.
- Governments should either be operating their own systems for this or, hell I don't know, why not just spin up a their ready-to-go Mastodon instance or something else in the fediverse not subject to the delirious whims of a petulant muskrat born with daddy's money?
  
  Very much agree. I read that the Netherlands already did this!
- I’m sorry - as someone who has done some work with disaster response, this was one of my main concerns. When they threatened to take away NWS access to API without huge fees, I was honestly horrified. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but a lot of what my organization did was scour Twitter for official information and also personal accounts of folks who needed help/the conditions on the ground.
  It is honestly a travesty that a resource such as this can be reduced to literal 💩 when people need it the most. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I hope more and more folks/orgs migrate to a suitable alternative(s) sooner rather than later, but the damage has been done. There’s always a percentage who never do, and you can’t fix that.

X may fail. Twitter didn't fail. Twitter was bought by a twat who decided to shut it down piece by piece.
- Don't forget Twitter was already in big problems operating at a loss in a lot of its existing years. It's definitely plummeting even further with his decisions though.
  
  I wish I could operate at a loss and be given billions of pounds.

Oopsie we repeatedly keep taking away you most valuable organizational tools
The 1%
- This take is exhausting. It's like the political version of narcissism: here's how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!
  If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk's friend's companies or governments?
  You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?
  
  Control is the game for people with money and power whether it is graceful or not. Some of what Elon has done seems like he wants to control the narrative around his jet. Some of what Elon is doing seems like he just wants to keep testing the waters to see how many people still use twitter after crippling the system. Like some sort of “I slap them in the face and they ask to be hit harder- that’s how much power I have over them. People are obsessed with me”.
  I don’t think his goal was to kill twitter. His goal was to remain on everyone’s lips without his jet being mentioned. And if that’s at the cost of organizational tools being destroyed, so be it- in fact, destroying twitter has had more people taking about him than ever.
  
  Not to mention that the 1% already owned it.
  Though if anyone is thinking of spending close to fifty billion to destoy a social network then call me - I'll do it for a billion, or two.
  
  i implied no intent, you just filled in the obvious gaps and are upset about it.
- Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.
  In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they're organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn't do it because they saw somebody's sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the "Like" button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we'll all be better off with it gone.
  EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he's done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.
  
  Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him.
  DIsagree. He was trying to do one of his many pump-and-dumps and he fucked around and got found out.
- For real!? I cannot think of a worse cancer than twitter/X and the horrific abomination that it is cannot whither away quickly enough.
  What possible benefit has Twitter ever offered mankind?
  
  @dril

X? Can we collectively decide to forever call it "X, formerly known as Twitter" just to piss him off?
- I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called...
  
  TwiX is unfortunately already taken.
- I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an "sh" sound.
  
  Exitter is also a valid prononciation
- I saw someone on Mastodon say something along the lines of "I'll continue to deadname Twitter for as long as Musk continues to deadname his daughter" and I love that sentiment.
  
  daaaaaaamn. That's brilliant.
- Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don't mention X at all. That would piss him off more.
- Seems like it will be the website formerly known as existing soon enough.
- I just call it Twitter. Just like I call the (former?) rapper Kanye West. I don't cater to the whims of the 1% if I can help it.

In the same way that car fails when you deliberately drive it 100mph into a brick wall.
- So you've got experience with Tesla's autopilot function...
  
  Uh, no. Autopilot was not enabled during that crash.
  It disabled itself 0.25s before impact
  
  Nailed it.

Can we start a gofundme to persuade him to take over Facebook?
- No, do Jira next pls.
- If we make Facebook to go to place to talk about Elon he'll do it out of spite and narcissism.

Best part was he tried to chicken out of his own deal but the feds obv wouldn't allow him back off on his very own proposal to buy Twitter in the first place!
- the feds
  Delaware Court.
  Contract law is weird.
  
  Not really. He entered into a binding contract and agreed to bypass due diligence.
  That wasn't even offered by Twitter, he just agreed without any prompting.

"Here's 44 billion USD, I might fail though ¯(ツ)_/¯"
Genius.
- Especially because he could have bought it for so much less.

Good, shut it down. Time to end Twitter.

Now all he needs to do is to connect his own management of Twitter to its failure.
- Of all his managerial feats, I'm confident that one is beyond him.
- Wishful thinking

genuinely convinced he may have intentionally destroyed twitter to make the next presidential campaign operate on a different field.
sounds crazy but without twitter or reddit, how do "the youth" communicate? tiktok? insta?
- There's no reason to speculate his motives. It's obvious he didn't want to buy Twitter when he was forced by courts to buy it. He was being an idiot trying to manipulate the stock price. I know it's hard to believe a multi-billionaire can be an idiot, but it happened. There's no 4d chess move. Rich people are fallible as everyone else.
- Big parts of the youth did not use twitter. Twitter had at its peak about 500mio active users. Instagram has 2.4 billion, tiktok 1 billion, snapchat 750mio. The relevancy of twitter is highly skewed, because the media used it a lot.
  
  Wow crazy that so many people use those social media platforms. I have never used any of them.
  
  I mainly use Snapchat just to keep the pointless streaks going. Never seen an ad in Snapchat for years.
- Would that have been worth $44b?
  
  It wasn't worth that much when he bought it. At most, it was worth half that. One of the many reasons why Musk is a fucking moron.
- I'd say that's stupid, but so is every other idea he comes up with for it so who knows.

I have a feeling that that was the plan from the beginning.
The elite don't like seeing common people have an open forum where they can all talk about how terrible their lives are, that their terrible lives are caused by the elite and that the common people should figure out what to do about it all.
- It's perhaps stupider than that. The guy couldn't take getting made fun of on Twitter, so he bought and killed it.
  
  Rich people don't like being made fun of ... but you know what upsets them even more? Poor people realizing that they can make fun of them long enough and often enough to realize that the world should get rid of obscenely rich people.
- This is a really lazy take. The elite have forever wanted to control the common people through the manipulation of laws, economy, news,etc. That's why the Saudis put up the majority of the loan to enable Elon to buy it...so they could gain control over public dissent and white wash their abhorrent public image.
  Meanwhile, Elon's a glorified troll with a god complex, who wants to build his own clubhouse for more extreme right wing content.
  
  Which makes me think it did both things ...
  subverted a major platform where common people were actually debating real life problems with one another in a constructive way
  filled it with far right rhetoric to promote extreme ideology and keep people occupied, fighting and divided so that they can no longer organize against the rich
- That would imply him possessing ability to think that far ahead.
- I don't get this take - because if this was the plan, why not just shut Twitter down straight away instead of whatever is going on right now?
  The actions of the platform don't indicate they're trying to kill it, just that they have really bad ideas trying to make money off it.
- touch grass
  
  Lick boot.

thanks for nothing you clown
- I mean, Elon sucks, but I am kind of happy to hear Twitter might fully die. I've always hated the idea of forced character limits.
  The world needs more critical and expansive discussion, not additional reasons to summerize and minimize important topics into long headlines.
  
  In the case of longer form thought, Twitter provided links. What’s the problem?
  
  I think it's just a human problem. You or I may like to read long form journalism, but we're in the extreme minority. It's not dying because it was so hugely profitable.
  Logistically too, if you're trying to parse through the top 100 tweets in a day, and each one takes multiple paragraphs to get to the point, the amount of various viewpoints the average person is able to interact with shrinks dramatically.
  Granted, it seems like everyone is taking the forced brevity as an excuse to just write +1 to pile onto their side, since that's easier.
  
  ...they said concisely in a short internet comment.

- Read in Morgan Freeman's voice.

the guy didn't even want twitter. the whole thing is depressing.

The time of the Mastadon is at hand.
- I need some other stuff to follow on mastadon. I mostly used twitter for writers and bands. And Gritty. Now I'm looking for stuff to follow on mastadon and coming up short.
  
  The canonical way to get loads to follow on mastodon is follow @lisamelton@mastodon.social - she's basically a human version of the algorithm, and will fill your timeline with boosts.

And somehow it’ll be the “woke mind virus’s” fault. There will be no self reflection at all.

- What would be the objective here though? It just scatters users to other platforms. I don't really understand why anyone would want that ?

I wouldn't be surprised this is him urging his cult to buy monthly subscriptions. If we see higher tier subscription be introduced one of these days, that would be the reason for this fear mongering. That said, it's awesome that he's getting a reality check. You can be surrounded by as many yes-men as you want but people en masse don't care and even if they do, they love seeing rich people humbled. No one misses a good shitstorm.
- Doesn't matter. The subscription revenue, which ever musk taint sniffers said would take in billions, barely will probably offset 1 month of lost ad revenue for a whole year worth of subs.
  He has added a billion dollars of interest negative revenue at the same time he's lost half his ad revenue. That's a bad combo
  
  No doubt, am just trying to read a bit further up because I don't take him as stupid as he acts.

Oh no! Anyway.

🍌We're all trying to find the guy who did this

He can still turn it into a porn app
- Honestly, might've been better off trying to turn a porn site into an everything app. The internet was built on porn after all.
  
  Thank you for reminding me that the company best set to compete with YouTube is PornHub.

Space Karen destroys Twitter.

"Man internationally, violently and repeatedly stabbing victim in the face now warns that victim may die of facial stab wounds."

In May Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in the company then still known as Twitter, giving it a value of about $15 billion – or just a third of what Musk paid, The Wall Street Journal Reported.
I think even that was not realistic, and back in May things were not as bad yet as they are now at "The thing formerly known as Twitter". I doubt anyone would buy it at even half that now. Musk added a debt of $20 billion, that's about what it was worth at the time Musk bought it.
With that debt, the company became basically worth Zero. Even at the estimate when Musk bought it.
If the $20 billion debt was somehow removed, it would still be worth less than $10 billion. Meaning that its current actual worth is probably below negative $10 billion! Meaning the only value is the tax value of the deficit. And no creditors get paid. It's basically already bankrupt, unless someone pumps in more money, and I'm not seeing that happening with a company as bad as "The thing formerly known as Twitter".
Seems like the only way forward now, is bankruptcy and maybe reconstruction after selling the company without the debt for peanuts.
- Most of the value was probably with the brand itself. Which he then tossed away. Genius.
  
  Yes, and even the name is probably almost worthless now, he has massacred everything including the original name. It's to bad, because the original concept was OK, and could probably have survived without the insanity Musk brought.
  
  That was a truly insane decision. Of all the annoying and idiotic things he's said, "Soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds" is way up there.

- very ironic to create an entire community about the person you hate.
  
  To hate on them, obviously.

He accelerated it. If he had just left things alone, he’d be in a better place than he is today.
- Yeah. I wonder which microservice was actually important... Or maybe he needs one of all those people he decided he didn't need...

Stage 5: Acceptance

I wonder how much money the govt will give him now that he lost 44 bil... ya just know that is what will happen
- Yes hello I am Normal Citizen. Where do we go for the money?

Musk tried to fix something that was not broken, and it almost always is a bad idea.
- But he's a rocket scientist and a computer scientist!! (\s he's neither)

Man who bet billions that Twitter would fail is upset that it hasn't already.

It almost like he isn’t actually a genius but narcissistic grifter who can move money around.
- Who can move Daddy's money around. He never would've had a shot coming from blue collar origins.

Get on with it already
- Yeah. He needs to let X go so he can go manage SpaceX, Telsa and The Boring Company.

Regular effing Nostradamus

All of Musk's shit will fail, it's just a question of 'when' not of 'if'. That includes Tesla.
- I always thought that the name was changed to something way more unappealing and doesn't have anywhere near the same ring to it as "Twitter". It's kind of cringe imo. Like he was trying to make it seem like this was something so groundbreaking and new that it was deserving of one letter, "X". I'm not surprised it's going to flop.
- His projects, perhaps. Most likely not. He himself will never face consequences for any of the problems he has caused. Law doesn't exist for the rich. You can stall, bribe, move to a different country, buy immunity, buy witnesses. Do whatever you want and can to make the problem go away... and it will go away. Even if he does get convicted of anything punishment will be stern look and "now be good, okay?"...

“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
- “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
  I wonder this a bit as folks flock to Bluesky. I mean, Threads is just right out there, but Facebook always has been so that demographic was going to be there anyhow. The people flocking to Bluesky because they don't like Musk had better hope Jack Dorsey doesn't turn out to be nuts now, right?
  I feel like this whole debacle should have pumped up the various bits of the Fediverse more than it has.
  
  Dorsey really trusts Musk's "mission to extend the light of consciousness", which I think says enough.

"I've been drilling holes in the bottom of my boat to shed weight, but now I'm having trouble keeping it afloat and there's nothing I can do about it!"

I think he probably would have made it work. The death knoll was certainly changing the name to X.

moving the goalpost. twitter was originally developed to be a "news service" not a "social network"

Do a flip!

I sense a new dictionary definition of self-fulfilling prophecy coming up....

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta launched its X rival called Threads on July 5 and quickly amassed more than 100 million signups, Time magazine reported, citing data from Sensor Tower.
Musk's efforts to purge the platform of bots and turn it into a "super-app" don't yet appear to be working.
Activist Monica Lewinsky urged him and CEO Linda Yaccarino to "rethink" the move.
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it’s a critical tool to keep people safe online.- that woman
as an anti-bullying activist (and target of harassment) i can assure you it's a critical tool to keep people safe online.
In May Fidelity wrote down the value of its stake in the company then still known as Twitter, giving it a value of about $15 billion – or just a third of what Musk paid, The Wall Street Journal Reported.X didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 52%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Gee...who could have guessed?...

How long does it take to roll some video akin to tiktok and snapchat into it? Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID and root out all the dirtbags abusing the app at the same time. Texting and chatting is so last decade anyway just leave it as a remnant of its birdie roots.
If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.
- Weed out all the bots at the same time by demanding fotoID
  Fuck that, you'll also exclude most EU countries since that's an overreach of privacy.
  If it kills Twitter and Meta get a hit at the same time, it's only a win.
- Weed out all the bots at the same time
  They don't want to do that. That would destroy a significant chunk of their userbase and make X look weaker.
- If it fails Meta will likely have to be broken up, their monopoly on social media is outrageous these days.
  As if it doesn't deserve it already, regardless?
- What’s the point of copying TikTok? Given Elongs record, it would be done haphazardly and badly. But even if they pull it off, the audience won’t switch over. Or else they’d come back to instagram when they added TikTok features.

Dying is the entire point of it. If it dies, it becomes infinitely more difficult for the authorities to subpoena tweet histories of certain orange pieces of shit and his cronies.
It doesn't stop them from getting that history, of course.
But the legal rigamarole of trying to get tweet history from a company that technically doesn't exist anymore (It's X, not twitter), and later on no longer even functions (servers shut down), might just delay things long enough to make a difference in the upcoming shit-show.
- So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?
  
  And as if they didn't already subpoena that information before actually filing charges either. They were already investigating for months before Musk bought Twitter.
  This is one of the dumber conspiracy theories I think I've ever seen. Why are we attributing some clever political maneuver to Musk when it's clear he just made an unprecedentedly stupid business decision?
  
  The only "conspiracy" surrounding the Elon Twitter acquisition is his market manipulation strategies using social media.
  This is just dumb as fuck, there's no way he even cares about Trump let alone enough to devote billions to it. Billionaires don't care about the president because they know their economic future rests in the Senate and potentially judicial branch.
  
  I think the most logical explanation is that the Saudis paid Musk to kill it. Arab spring was organized on Twitter and a lot of Saudi dissidents were and are actively using it to expose and criticize their government.
  
  So the conspiracy is that Musk paid like 20+B and the Saudis paid another ~10B just to keep Trump out of prison?
  Think about it, it makes perfect sense.
  Err... Actually, let me rephrase that:
  Don't think about it, it makes perfect sense.
- They already got Trump's DMs from twitter. Twitter actually fought it and had to pay a $350,000 fine for not turning the DMs over immediately. I think that Musk doesn't like his fellow right wing cultists from being blocked/ignored by regular people and liberals. Hence his recent comment that he was going to remove the ability to block anyone on X. Of course lots of people immediately said that they'd leave because angry right wing stalkers doxxing them and such.