this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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"Fidelity is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion"

I found this funny.

(page 4) 50 comments
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 2 weeks ago

I just checked and it's worth nothing to anyone important.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 weeks ago

How to become a billionaire: Start with 54 billion

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wish, I wish... I wish I was a fish.

I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.

Like: we're going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We're going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.

You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.

But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I'd like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who'd be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.

I may as well wish I were a fish.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

I like your idea. But you'll have to settle for being a fish.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Impressive. I could not have done that.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 2 weeks ago

Elon Musk's greatest personal achievement has been his tireless work and incredible effort toward disproving the myth of Billionaire Exceptionalism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wonder when Mohamed bin Salman will be coming for his ROI on the $22B that he gave Elon for the purchase of Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If that $22B prevents another Arab Spring it's probably worth it to him.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

If he succeeds in using it as a propaganda platform to force the US into a fascist dictatorship, he will have gotten his money's worth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

Wow. That is brutal.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

As long as it’s still in operation and people view it as a valid platform, its numerical value is irrelevant. I won’t be happy until it goes away or is relegated to the likes of Truth Social.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

It has worth. It doesn't have value.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Elon is a genius at losing money.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 weeks ago

No wonder he is starting to get along so well with Trump

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

that's why he is the richest person in the world with 270B net worth.

look, i hate the asshole as much as the other guy, but changing meaning of words and underestimating the enemy never helped anyone.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

it's just that he could take big risks (not even a smart one) in investment because he didn't care about the money, he has so much that he can never lose it all, so of course if you can invest blindly you'll for sure win at some point

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

it’s just that he could take big risks

yes, that is definitely part of his success. and since this strategy got him to position of richest person in the world, it is pretty clear that "genius at losing money" is not really accurate description of situation.

as for twitter, he clearly is not in it for the money, otherwise he wouldn't be there to begin with. he originally hoped to buy position of cheered and admired hero and when he failed, he settled for a position of hated douchebag. infamous still means people know you, i guess 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It would appear that he didn't want to buy Twitter and was literally forced to do so. I think for him Twitter is a temper tantrum. He didn't get what he wanted so he's destroying everything around him as a result.

More to the point though, I do wonder why he didn't just pay the billion dollars to get out of the deal (with his 270 billion net worth - which by the way includes assets not necessarily liquid cash).

I don't know that he's not in it for the money. I think the point is to destroy it so he doesn't have to pay back what he borrowed to buy it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (14 children)

More to the point though, I do wonder why he didn’t just pay the billion dollars to get out of the deal

I don’t know that he’s not in it for the money.

your first sentence explains he is not in it for money, if money were the concern, eating the 1b fine would be logical thing to do (i am not fact checking that 1b piece of information, i trust you on this).

with his 270 billion net worth - which by the way includes assets not necessarily liquid cash

that's how it works, no one has 270 billion in cash

I think the point is to destroy it so he doesn’t have to pay back what he borrowed to buy it.

that doesn't make sense, destroying twitter doesn't absolve him of obligation to return money he borrowed.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

Like his buddy Trump!

[–] [email protected] 268 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Honestly terrifying that they still think it is worth that much.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

This is the stock market, the value is set by what investors think the value could be. Mostly, they're probably assuming people would come back if he sold it. Literally everyone knows the name Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I understand the basics. I still find it difficult to grasp why it is worth 9 billion.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This actually isn't the stock market, Twitter isn't publicly traded since being bought.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Just because it's not publicly traded, doesn't mean that there isn't stock nor that there's no market. Usually, you can technically still buy/sell the stock, just not as a random member of the public on a public stock exchange like the NYSE or FTSE.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

If someone were to buy it, ban the Nazis and get advertisers to come back it's still salvageable, I guess. The longer Musk owns it, the bigger the chance is that it'll become the next MySpace.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

I think MySpace is a more likely scenario that the former already.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

they still own the twitter trademark, that might be their biggest asset

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Which has been crashed and burned to a fraction of its value.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Since they don't seem to care about it, start using "tweet" for every social media post to devalue them further.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Tweets are a specific type of a microblog post you do on twitters. Have you tried tweeting, make your own twitter at https://joinmastodon.org/ today!

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[–] [email protected] 171 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (7 children)

And yet, he's still one of the what, 5 richest people on the planet?

He doesn't give a shit, and neither should you (as nice as the schadenfreude might feel). He got something worth more to him than plain old money - an established propaganda platform, which he is using as he intended - to war monger and otherwise interfere in politics to ensure fascism progresses as fast as he can help it. The "dent" (more like a surface scratch) it put in his finances is completely invisible and irrelevant to him.

And it should be to you, too.

He is NEVER going to end up without means or power, not even fucking close, unless we take them from him, and abolish the system that encouraged and enabled him to amass them in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

He's the actual richest man on the planet with a net worth of a quarter of a trillion dollars. The next richest person on the planet is Jeff Bezos with $197B

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

And I'll never own a house, yay

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Thanks, that's one race I definitely don't keep up to date on. All billionaires need to cease to exist.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (5 children)

What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.

Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.

Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price..

Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

The average family's cable subscription doesn't cost 20% of their net worth.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Well said, after losing access to twitter it's really hard to get information on game companies for example, since they don't have their own blog for you to RSS and get information about the newest game updates and what not, and they only post on youtube if they have a new trailer.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Yeah a lot of people miss the fact that the play for Twitter was never about money, but control. Owning one of the most popular social medias makes it easy to spread propaganda and amplify your voice.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If I remember correctly the evaluation of Xitter has been around $9 Billion for years so they're basically saying it tanked only a little if you adjust for inflation.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The value of Twitter when he bought it was $44 billion. We know this because his dumb ass bought it for $44 billion.

Regardless of what a sane person would pay for it, that was the value to him and so if the next highest valuation is $9b he lost $35b of value by overpaying.

You do raise a good point though. Twitter used to be valued at $9b when its value was speculative and the company was growing, now that we know it's shit and getting worse it's almost certainly worth less than that too.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

keep sliding

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 weeks ago

May it sink even lower

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