Yep, and it will. I predict within 3 years.
Could X go bankrupt under Elon Musk?
Submitted 11 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67599937
Comments
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
DingoBilly@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Such bad journalism. Sucks how much reporting has gone the drain with clickbait bullshit titles like this.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I’ve noticed a general pattern that if the title ends with a question mark, the article is not worth your time
DingoBilly@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Yep. Exactly my thoughts.
dynamojoe@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s a better guideline than Betteridge’s Law. My reflex when I see such a headline is “Why are you asking me?”
nucleative@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Asking if X will go bankrupt is not the right question. Elon has many untapped reserves of cash that he could use at any time to continue to pay the bills.
The guy just needs to speculate publicly on a cool sounding idea and a billion dollars in cash will fall out of a tree somewhere. That is his level of social status.
Bankruptcy happens when a company is imminently falling apart because there is no cash and a creditor repossessing things may disrupt other higher priority creditors. Therefore a judge needs to add order to the process which puts a legal hold on a lot of things. Unless Elon has some dramatic personal meltdown way beyond what we’ve already seen, that’s really unlikely.
The real question is… How does Elon plan on making a profit from this thing if he’s insulting those who are paying his bills today? He did float the idea of creating a super app that might handle payments and many other features. That has the potential to be a massive profit center if executed with precision. Perhaps the Twitter user base can be converted… Which would mean advertisers are no longer needed.
I would not be surprised if such a thing is in the works and would be announced when it’s almost ready to launch.
hypnotoad__@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“Just wait everyone, Elon is actually being smart this whole time” I just don’t buy it.
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 11 months ago
He can pay for it, but would you dump money into a burning pit over and over and over again, after you already dropped around 1/8th of your total worth into a failure? Especially when you only bought it because you were forced to by law? Musk has been directly asked if he would subsidize it more with his personal fortune recently, and in response he whined about who would be at blame for it going bankrupt. I dont think hes going to put anymore of his money into it.
Even in Twitter’s fully profitable years where it made 1.5bil lre buyout, that still would barely service its new yearly debt. That was before he lost 30% of the userbase and 50% of the total advertising, including nearly all of the large advertisers.
His current replacement for losing all those advertisers and 100s of million of dollars? Paid twotter blue, which apprently is about 300k out of 400mil users, or less than 0.1% of total users. As you can imagine, their 3mil/yr is no even relevant to the 100s of millions/yr shortfall his behavior has caused.
His “lets be wechat” idea is also ludicrous. He has said that he thinks X can take over 50% of all banking in the world, which by the numbers is all of US, Europe and China combined. This means taking over an area that already has native apps that are entrenched and making billions, but also convince all Europeans and Americans to abandon banks and put their money into an technically unstable platform run by a loud and proud antisemite. This ignores that Americans and Europeans already have “use an app for banking” like google pay and apple pay, but apprently vastly prefer using cc/debit by a ratio of 90%. The apps are already on all our phones, and most no one uses them.
So yeah, his “hail mary” is to eliminate huge, state supported rivals in China, and to change all of the 100 billion dollar banking landscape in the US/Europe where no one wants an app to do this.
ArugulaZ@kbin.social 11 months ago
It was morally bankrupt shortly after Seth McFarlane left too long under a heat lamp took over. In addition to all his other failings, Elon looks like McFarlane jerky.
rustyriffs@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I was going to say you’re doing a disservice to McFarlane by making that comment, but he probably would’ve found it funny too. Carry on 😁
nutsack@lemmy.world 11 months ago
couldn’t he just step down as CEO or sell the company?
firewyre@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It’s well on it’s way
BilboBargains@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Meelon Husk
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Let’s hope it doesn’t, I don’t want those racist idiots joining any of the other social networks. Let it become the acceptable 4chan… to siphon off the scum of the internet so that we don’t have to deal with them.
eran_morad@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I hope so, for the lolz
aleq@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I think Twitter is going down, may or may not go bankrupt but I think it will lose relevance. Wonder if it will be replaced. Lots of people (myself included) kinda assume that bluesky, mastodon or some other twitter-like service will take over. But Twitter is not really necessary, so I don’t think it’s a given that something will take its place.
IonAddis@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The one big benefit I enjoyed with Twitter was following artists and scientists I would never have had such casual access to learn from in any other way. Being able to watch pros in their fields talk about their topics was something I never would have had access to. And because it’s short form folks were more likely to post than on a blog or something.
Without social media the shop talk goes entirely behind closed doors, which is a loss for my ability to casually learn.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Twitter is also great for announcements. Band you like puts out a new single or album? They’re touring? Twitter was great for that. I used it for that, books/authors, and a handful of other media that was similar where I was waiting for release dates. Mastodon and the others don’t seem to have drawn those entities to them so they aren’t as useful for those things. I don’t really know what can replace it if it doesn’t have the popularity.
dragontamer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Just do what we did in the 00s. Follow those scientists’ homepages and read their bibliographies that show where they cited information from.
shadowspirit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
[deleted]EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 11 months ago
yo dat big
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 11 months ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The companies paused adverts after an investigation by a US organisation, Media Matters for America, flagged ads appearing next to pro-Nazi posts.
In a fiery interview on Wednesday, Musk also used the “b” word - bankruptcy, in a sign of just how much the ad boycott is damaging the company’s bottom line.
Mark Gay, chief client officer at marketing consultancy at Ebiquity, which works with hundreds of companies, says there is no sign anyone is returning.
When Musk puts chief executives “in his crosshairs” like this they will be even more reticent to be involved with X, says Lou Paskalis, of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory.
Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, adds: “It doesn’t take a social media expert to understand and to know that publicly and personally attacking advertisers and companies that pay X’s bills is not going to be good for business.”
According to the New York Times, which got hold of the pitch deck Musk was giving to investors last year, X was supposed to bring in $15m from a payments business in 2023, growing to about $1.3bn by 2028.
The original article contains 1,032 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
jaidyn999@lemm.ee 11 months ago
It won’t fail because of money. Musk has enough money to fund it out of his petty cash forever.
If it fails, it will fail in the same way the newsnet failed - it becomes full of angry old men screaming about Israel and guns.
zeppo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Does he have the desire to do that, though? It seems more likely to me that he’d sell it first. All of the attention it’s created seems to be something he desires, though.
ohlaph@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Hopefully. It’s a huge pile of trash.
froh42@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Now even Betterige’s law is dead.
r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru 11 months ago
If he doesn’t do something about the blatant racism on Twitter, I could see this happening. If he does do this, all the shit stains like Tim Pool will start spouting off about how the platform doesn’t support “free speech.”
Railcar8095@lemm.ee 11 months ago
He’s doing something about the racism, just not what he should be doing.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Why would he do anything about the blatant racism that he spreads personally?
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
No. Whoever wrote this doesn’t understand bankruptcy.
If things got really bad creditors would take control and sell the business to shareholders who would install a clean CEO who would entice advertisers back.
No one would utter the b-word.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Twitter isn’t public, though. Elon took it private when he took over, so there aren’t any shareholders beyond Elon and the Saudis who chipped in money to buy it.
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
That doesn’t preclude what I said though.
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JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 11 months ago
We should be so lucky. But aren’t the losses so far not that much compared to the market value?
DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
It’s market value is nil if there are no advertisers.
zeppo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
There’s still plenty of value for someone in the activity data, user list, and archive of text.
zeppo@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The purchase price already exceeded the real market value, which is why the former board was persistent in pushing the deal’s completion. A normal price at the time would have been about 20% less. Estimates since then have been even lower, like maybe $20 billion. So most of the loss is in market value, not cash expenditure or lost revenue.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Watch the stockmarket. AFAIK it already went down by a third or so.
hal_5700X@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t care. But it will be good for people who are addicted to it.
misk@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
While bankruptcy is plausible, in such event debtors would simply change who’s in charge of the platform, per article. It’s wouldn’t be the end for Twitter for sure.