The monetization currently is bringing revenue less than one percent of their ad revenue. With no signs of improvement.
That’s like having to go to work 100 miles away, intentionally crashing your car and going like “well, looks like putting on my running shoes this morning turned out right all along!”
His approach is to start giving out empty promises and make false claims about having something he doesn't have, and then the government and gullible investors give him billions. He just tweeted "X Corp investors will get 25% of xAI". You know xAI, the company that has shipped nothing but 3 screenshots of cringe humor. He's looking for investors again.
The effectiveness of this approach is starting to run out.
The reason Twitter's so deep in the red right now is because of the leveraged buyout by Musk. Pre-acquisition Twitter was, at worst, treading water. Musk's mismanagement is what's causing Twitter's current poor financial state.
Twitter wasn't in the red. It was roughly break even, with way over half of quarters in past 5 years profitable pre-Musk. You bought a history rewrite peddled by Musk himself. Twitter was never a failing company. It was just a mediocre company. But now... now it's a rapidly failing company, propped up by Musk selling a few billion in TSLA shares late last year.
There is a lot here to be think about. Three most interesting points to me are
1. These companies have bottom-of-the-barrel moral standards and don't care what one person on Twitter is Tweeting. This has to be political manoeuvring of some sort.
2. A lot of advertisers were quitting Twitter a while ago weren't they? But it has been months now. If they're still quitting, that suggests the flood of quitters is more of a small trickle. So this the first time all these companies have quit? Or is it that the media companies are quitting this round?
3. Musk is still the wealthiest human on the planet (in history? I expect in nominal terms he's the wealthiest in history). Twitter is a bit of a political sideshow for him. He might even decide to run it without ads, that'd hurt him financially and be a win for the rest of us.
This is an odd take. Today on Twitter I saw an ad for a whites-only dating service with the photo of a celebrity who very likely did not endorse the company with the use of a racial slur (with an "r" at the end). Whatever you think about the "moral standards" of the companies in question, it makes sense that they would not want to put their brand on the same platform that would serve these ads alongside theirs. That doesn't seem to be political maneuvering but very basic advertising sense.
You're not agreeing with nytimes.com - they think that Musk's tweets are the issue here. You're suggesting it is who Twitter accepts ads from. And I'm suggesting that it is likely nytimes.com - or the companies reported on, or both - are engaged in political manoeuvring because we know their moral standards are remarkably low. if it means they can get eyeballs where they want them.
If companies were motivated more by not wanting to associate with caucasian dating sites (although to be honest why that would be a problem I don't see, what is next - banning gay dating sites? People have weird preferences and there are dating sites for all of them) then presumably the Times would be obliged to report on that.
It matters for the same reason that ads work- subconsciously. Seeing an Apple ad next to racial slurs means you are more likely to think of racial slurs when you think of Apple, or Apple when you think of racial slurs.
Apple obviously doesn't agree with or are they responsible for those views but we can't change how human minds work. At the end of the day they do not want the association in people's heads.
> 1. These companies have bottom-of-the-barrel moral standards and don't care what one person on Twitter is Tweeting. This has to be political manoeuvring of some sort.
Or they just don’t want their brand associated with such posts. As kids these days say, “They don’t want no smoke”.
These companies are about making money. Getting associated with controversial stuff is bad for business.
Lots of companies quit then returned. I don't know if these ones are in the first batch of quitting, but it may be the second time for them rather than "a trickle".
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to refer to heads of state as having the wealth of the state. Musk can effectively spend all of his wealth if he chooses to (after paying his debts). Heads of state really can't, except on the state itself. Not even absolute monarchs.
Your reply wouldn't make any sense to Octavian (Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus) whose lifetime was marked by frequent episodes of intercepting state funds and adding them to the already stupendous coffers of his family fortunes and using those to divert state armies to his own personal power plays.
As a time traveller you'd have little chance of making your case to Octavian, Divi filius (aka "son of a god") that he was bound by some modern rules applied to mere "heads of state".
As a time traveler I'm fine. Because in those time travel fantasies I've already ascended to godhood on the Prime Material Plane, and am time-travel gating to Rome in a bolt of lightning during the Flavian era 6 months or so before the eruption of mount Vesuvius to order the Senate and Legions to take action to relocate the inhabitants of Pompeii. (Seriously, I almost never think of the Roman Empire unless prompted to do so by others, but this is a genuine daydream of mine.)
Roman leaders were often grifters, and Octavian was a particularly notable example. Cash for favours, absolutely massive embezzlement… he did pretty well for himself; it wasn’t the state’s wealth, at least not after he’d stolen it.
> Musk can effectively spend all of his wealth if he chooses to
Ehhh kind of. Within certain limits he can liquidate all his stocks and other assets, sure, but unless done over a very long period of time what he winds up with at the end is far less than his theoretical wealth. And even done over a long period of time probably. There isn't actually the demand on the market to liquidate all his assets at the susposed market value, and Elon dumping assets would further reduce said demand.
I'm just saying that there aren't state powers that would literally stab him in the back to prevent him from doing so. Even Stalin would have had a quick death if he tried to spend the entire wealth of the USSR on himself.
And the gold medal in mental gymnastics goes to...
Twitter has never been a great platform to advertise on, the quality of the advertisers has dropped dramatically this year, and companies are distancing themselves from the clown show. There is no secret conspiracy. Advertising on Twitter just doesn't make sense.
Not sure why the downvotes - this definitely seems to be a coordinated effort, rather than one off brand-management exercise by IBM, but to what end I have no idea. Evidently Media Matters is somehow inciting this?
The reason for the lawsuit [1] seems to contradict itself; it's against spreading misinformation on X, while invoking the principle of allowing misinformation on X?
> "But for speech to be truly free, we must also have the freedom to see or hear things that some people may consider objectionable. We believe that everyone has the right to make up their own minds about what to read..."
So... "Let [Media Matters] say what you [consider objectionable], and [let us make up our own minds about what to read]."
I do get that that shouldn't preclude lawsuits for slander/libel... but suing people out of existence with "thermonuclear" lawsuits seems to be roughly the same type of tyranny as the censoring he's taking a stand against.
Ultimately this sort of thing gets justified as "I'm picking on people my own size", or "I'm defending the regular person against these other powerful entities".
Even billionaires like to think of themselves as Robin Hoods.
Definitely agree with that. And it's media vs. media, so they both have to sell a narrative since the stronger story, not who's actually right, will win.
Haha, the US is leaning towards the right wing, and Elon probably has an advantage in doing what he did. Similarly, he mentioned that AI needs to stop, but then proceeded with AI projects. He says what grabs attention to divert from what he truly wants to do.
This guy would be considered a genius, admired and respected worldwide, a living legend.. if he'd never opened that Twitter account. But he did, so he's just another eccentric rich idiot.
I think he needs the twitter hype and bots to boost his brands and stock value. I wouldn't be surprised if he were funding these bots to boost himself.
The attention he got because of Twitter has always been overwhelmingly negative, by his own doing. Do you think the guy who founded Tesla and SpaceX needed any more media attention?
There was a legal agreement that allows him to call himself that:
> The company was incorporated as Tesla Motors, Inc. on July 1, 2003, by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning.[12][13] Eberhard and Tarpenning served as CEO and CFO, respectively.[14] Eberhard said that he wanted to build "a car manufacturer that is also a technology company", with its core technologies as "the battery, the computer software, and the proprietary motor".[15]
> Ian Wright was Tesla's third employee, joining a few months later.[12] In February 2004, the company raised US$7.5 million (equivalent to $12 million in 2022) in series A funding, including $6.5 million (equivalent to $10 million in 2022) from Elon Musk, who had received $100 million from the sale of his interest in PayPal two years earlier. Musk became the chairman of the board of directors and the largest shareholder of Tesla.[16][17][14] J. B. Straubel joined Tesla in May 2004 as chief technical officer.[18]
> A lawsuit settlement agreed to by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009 allows all five – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – to call themselves co-founders.[19]
In Ireland, Kilkenny is legally not a city, but there is actual legislation saying that it is _allowed to call itself a city_. This seems a similar principle, and it’s rather silly; ‘founder’ has a commonly-understood meaning.
SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink, Neuralink, Boring Company, are you serious that because of some dumb tweets and a questionable personality or political views not everyone agrees with, you think history will overlook all of this? Not a chance, sorry.
He's the CEO of six companies and still finds time to tweet throughout the day. I'm more inclined to believe that these companies are successful despite him, not because of him.
It clear he's a great 'salesman' in terms of raising capital and spruiking up share prices, and he's turned that toward some interesting concepts.
What is also interesting is part of the act is pretending he is the genius behind the ideas and has a hand in the novel engineering of them, which makes some of his fans love him, and anyone with subject matter expertise on whatever technical things he's saying realise he's half a moron or at least shameless.
It's not only that he's raised capital for/funded interesting concepts, it's that he's (mostly) successfully spent money on interesting concepts that the majority of people in the media and in those industries said were not viable.
Even if these insights into specific industries aren't his own, he's savvy enough to recognize their validity and bring together other people who can make those insights reality.
At the same time, he has his fair share of boneheaded boondoggles.
> pretending he is the genius behind the ideas and has a hand in the novel engineering of them
Musk has always been brutally transparent with investors. The personal genius schtick isn't one he pulls when raising capital. (It does play well to a lay audience.)
It's a bit of both, isn't it? I do remember the "production hell" perspective, but also many over-optimistic predictions along the lines of "I swear we'll have full self driving by the end of the year" for 5 years.
I’m actually starting to believe that the more companies he is a CEO of, the better they will do, as he will have his attention divided between them all and less time to negatively impact them on an individual level.
You can simultaneously accept that these organizations Musk, and others, built are remarkable while accepting that his current personal behavior is unacceptable and is not in his self interest.
History is littered with entrepreneurs and inventors who lost thier marbles.
Agree. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Tweeting is some sort of energy/mental/payxhological outlet for him i.e we may not be able to have one without the other? :)
A person can be remembered for the companies they founded, professionally, and at the same time be remembered as, personally, "just another eccentric rich idiot".
