It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.
It’s not his money though, so your theory hasn’t really fallen apart. Some of it his money but he’s been hanging with the saudis and murdoch.
Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?
I wouldn’t buy Twitter, fire everyone, chase off a lot of the good people and then change the name. If I felt like Twitter was the only plan, I would have negotiated a fair price, worked with the people on what was already working and wasn’t, kept everyone on until you knew how it ran, kept the worldwide, known name and probably paid my rent, lol. I’m not a “genius” in business, but I do know that this is probably the best I could have done.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him “you legally can’t actually walk away from this deal”.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
I wonder if his goal isn’t for Twitter to be successful. I’m wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I’m not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He’s carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can’t be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
As someone who doesnt use twitter… yes this was totally worth it!
I’d be bummed out but happy I have an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
I’m sure the previous execs are crying into their wads of cash. So much sympathy for them.
Lol. Like if they gave a shit they would have forced that buyout to go through.
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
If you said it was the final nail in the coffin, sure. But for that to be the only reason?? Why??
Are you one of those “my brand truck is better than yours because … bowtie” types?
You are jumping into conclusions. See my other answer here https://lemmy.world/comment/2511227
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
I deleted all of mine and move to mastodon when I heard Elon was possibly going to buy it. I’m glad I did, because who knows what he has all implemented since then.
I am sure my account was never “deleted”, even under Jack, but at least I know I gave the best chance for my data to be deleted.
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
So smooth sailing right? Right??
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren’t for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
they’re prob ddosing themselves for failing the purity tests.
I had one tell me “you know nothing about communism, stop talking,” and I was like, oh, that’s right, I know nothing despite being well informed about the history of workers movements going back to the 1840s, Das Kapital, the Manifesto, and despite these noble ideals, the fact that every single communist government relied on purges to accomplish its goals, formed an exclusionary ruling class, and were corrupt as fuck. Fucking teenagers and their black and white thinking.
But you see, that wasn’t real Communism. Communism is a great and perfect egalitarian society by definition, so when it inevitably devolves into just another brand of stratification and oppression then it’s not Communism anymore. Next time it’ll work, though. We’ll still follow exactly the same formula that’s failed spectacularly every time it’s been tried, but this time it’ll work. For reasons. And if you say otherwise you’re just a status-quo liberal (never mind the fact that those supposed status-quo liberals are the ones implementing real tangible change that actually affect peoples’ lives while all the Communists do is endlessly wank about some glorious revolution that’ll happen some time in the nebulous future.)
When people say stuff like that it’s not about politics, it’s straight up about gatekeeping.
At least it’s open for collaboration so people who can or help contribute to fix bugs for them are able to do so. That’s the beauty of open source, anyone can help out.
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
I’ve been trying to stick to Mastodon and ditch Twitter, but honestly, even though I’ve gotten into the habit of using Mastodon every day, it’s pretty hard for me to resist accepting information from Twitter.
It’s ok to get information from places like X/Twitter or Reddit. It’s even fine to have an account. But it’s better to post your OWN material to platforms that best align with your sensibilities.
My issue with Mastodon is that many big companies still use Twitter/X as their main way to publish news outside of of their websites and press releases.
It’s all about what matters most to you.
I’m not usually interested in what big companies have to say, but I follow some journalists who fortunately cross post to Mastodon, but all discussion takes place on elmo’s X site.
What? I’ve been using Squawker and lately it stopped working because monkey boy elon borked something again in the twitter api. No tweets for me.
Can we have something nice here please? I miss when the internet was nice, and you were allowed to talk to each other about whatever you wanted.
TRON FIGHTS FOR THE USER!
You have pretty skin.
Throughout history, the wealthy always have a habit of congratulating themselves on work that others have created while doing their absolute best to mess everything up.
I don’t know what’s going on here but I’m just glad to be part of something.
Thank you! I got it off the back off a well fed lady!
Honestly, I joined Twitter begrudgingly in 2015 after ignoring it for years only because I thought it might be easy to keep up with some interesting news before it hit Reddit… and it worked for a while…
Now, I just wonder why I’m still there at all.
I also don’t.see why I might want a mastodon account at this point though… I don’t feel like I need a replacement for something that I never really liked…
Apparently, as a competitor of any major platform you just need to get close to the features your adversary has and wait for that site/service to start the process of enshittification, let’s see if reddit makes more blunders
I feel that reddit is already at this stage. It started feeling more like a half-bombed corporate minefield so I decided to flee the site one week ago. This site feels much more like things should be. You can even browse on a decent site on your phone.
Try Voyager/WefWef from a browser, it improves the UX a lot
Why are people so fucking addicted to Twitter? It’s just people posting a few sentences about shit I see on the Internet already. But what do I know, I’ve gone my entire life without using the stupid shit. Maybe I’m not taking into account how many people want to be internet celebrities with their parroted tweets and recycled jokes. Why is it so hard to make another site where dumbass celebrities can feed 2 lines to the drooling masses?
Twitter culture (depending on what parts of twitter you were on) was really hard to explain. Unless you used it and really knew how to, you don’t really get the benefit from it. Its feed structure combine with post length and algorith meant that it was really easy for you to know what other people were saying about things going on right now (reality shows, football matches etc). It also made searching for news so easy (due to its Trending feature), so you were kept in the loop about things.
The meme culture of Twitter was also very unique. I can say with absolute confidence that Twitter memes were bomb (before Musk ruined it). Way better than any memes I’d come across on Reddit or Lemmy so far.
The only problem is you had to take Twitter in small doses. Stan culture and cyber-bullying culture were real negatives of Twitter. Certain people on that app were unhinged and that went unchecked because of how echo-chambers were set by the algorithm. You really had to check yoursel to make sure you weren’t being corrupted, especially because cyber-bullying was so normalised there (at least in my experience).
I’m there for the artists. A ton of artists share their artwork on Twitter because of the enshittification of deviantART. I am not sure where they will end up now.
It was really good for artists and entertainers (streamers included) to gain a following
Wouldn’t you have to care about nfts though? I feel like I’d rather have their art on a T-shirt.
that’s cool. The Masto instance I’ve been on for the last half year is no longer available and I’ll have to start over because I didn’t have a main and a back up account like I ended up with on Lemmy, but sure, that’s alright. I have no idea what happened, the instance still has a blank page up, but it ain’t Mastodon.
I was finally feeling moved in but now, kaput.
I don’t think this thing was really ready for absolutely everyone on Twitter to bail onto it, is the problem. I don’t think it was ever supposed to be. It was always supposed to be like a clubhouse for people who didn’t mind being the dweebs of the internet.
Sounds just like Lemmy and any other fediverse service.
Good, isn’t this what people want? Twitter to shut down? I’ve been hoping he just closes up shop and gets rid of it.
His ego is too big.
There’s an ethical consideration when you sell a company. Dorsey and co. took a big payout and this is the result. I was thinking earlier about how this probably wouldn’t have been happened if you had an even equity split across the company’s employees.
I don’t think I cared about Twitter, the entire duration of its existence, and now there’s a whole new thing that’s apparently the same and I still don’t care about
