• @[email protected]
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    2461 year ago

    This is so wacky it’s astounding.

    You don’t buy a company for their servers or employees, those can be found elsewhere for the same price. You buy a company for its users and its brand. To throw away one of the most icon brands in the world, which is present in the footer of every major website in the world, is baffling.

    What is the end game here?

    • Chozo
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      1001 year ago

      What is the end game here?

      Bold of you to assume Elon has one.

      • Zorque
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        171 year ago

        I’m sure he has an end-game.

        It’s everything up to that point where he’s completely at a loss.

        • TwilightVulpine
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          1 year ago

          I think his endgame is just boosting his ego. He tried to get this X thing to stick since the PayPal days.

          We are just watching the midlife crisis of a guy with way too much money showing that billionaires are not immune to terminally online brain rot.

    • CodingSquirrel
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      1 year ago

      You don’t buy a company for their servers or employees

      Clearly he didn’t buy it for that either, since he chucked those out the window shortly after purchase. Pretty sure he spent billions of dollars to shitpost and create a safe space for nazis.

      • @[email protected]
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        321 year ago

        Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.

        Maybe I’m financially illiterate, but I don’t understand how that works. Like… if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn’t get me off the hook. If anything, I’ll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk’s debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        Lenders are not as stupid as you think. 75% of Twitter’s purchase price was paid by Musk himself or loans secured against his Tesla stock. None of that will be “written off”.

          • @[email protected]
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            1 year ago

            Tesla owns a huge and successful charging network, and most EV makers in the US are switching to Tesla charging ports in order to take advantage of it. In the process, this will make the smaller charging networks (like EA) even more irrelevant.

            If Ford happened to own all the gas stations in America, you’d have an idea of what Tesla is about to become. There’s a good reason why Tesla stock is priced so high.

              • @[email protected]
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                1 year ago

                Ford never dominated the US market for gas stations like Tesla does for chargers. Even if Tesla never builds another charger outside the US, it can thrive by dominating the US market alone. And the experience of EA and others demonstrates that it’s not so easy to set up a competing network.

                Of course Tesla might spin off its charging business, but that won’t worry investors. It just means that your Tesla share would turn into a share of TeslaCars plus a share if TeslaChargers.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        I hope the cash he got from banks is backed by his stocks in Tesla. But what do I know, look what happened to Silicon Valley Bank. Banks aren’t smarter in investing than the rest of us apparently.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Not only wacky but hideous? I mean if you are going to re-logo (forget that it be for idiotic reasons…) the least you could do is make the design look decent… this?? 😂

    • Pagliacci
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      251 year ago

      He bought the company to bootstrap his idea of his “X” app which he envisions becoming something like WeChat for the world outside of China.

      I think it’s a terrible idea that’s a solution in search of s problem. WeChat works in China because the government literally enforces it’s usage. The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.

      It’s the problem of trying to be everything for everyone. You end up with mediocre or bad solutions for many problems instead of great solutions for a couple of problems. It works when there’s no competition, see WeChat, but when there is competition that competition is going to beat you at their game because you’re too busy playing a dozen others.

      • StarServal
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        141 year ago

        It’s funny if that’s his endgame, since Meta is already closer to that achievement than he is, and their Twitter alternative exploded in popularity immediately thanks to Musk’s own incompetence.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        The rest of the world isn’t interested in a one-stop-shop for anything and everything.

        I’m not entirely sure this is true. Look at the constant posts and commenting on how people hate to deal with the complication of additional apps / sites. It’s a major negative of the fediverse, it’s one reason I think Signal shot themselves in the foot getting rid of SMS. It’s why people keep using Amazon or Netflix even as they get worse and worse and more expensive. Heck, I’m not even immune - I wish we had one fast and cheap way to transfer money rather than Zelle, Paypal, various bank schemes, venmo and on and on. I wish we had a universal shopping cart thing like Paypal checkout more widely adopted vs making ever more accounts and typing in all my details for a one time order from a different website (and this is one reason why people gravitate to Amazon vs individual sites).

        I’m not saying I’d like an all in one app, but I can see it potentially being interesting to people if it simplified their lives. I don’t think Musk and X are likely to be able to do it, but I don’t actually think there’s no interest.

        • Justin
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          41 year ago

          In most nordic countries, we have a single payment app that’s been codeveloped by the major banks. everyone has the app and it’s automatically connected to your checking account. We also have easy direct bank-to-bank money transfers at every bank. Most online stores in Sweden also use Klarna which saves your credit card information for you across all sites.

          I think it’s one thing to be the one stop shop for a single category of goods, but when one company tries to to be in every pie, it crashes and burns. Look at how much of a mess AWS is, or how Google closes a service every few months, or how Facebook is a cluttered mess.

          Low barrier to entry can be good, but you’re just opening yourself to exponentially more competition by trying to be in every market.

        • snooggums
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          41 year ago

          There is a kindle ground that people want between an app for literally every small part of something and absolutely everything in a single app.

          They don’t want 100 different newspaper apps to read 100 different newspapers when they all work differently.

          Twitter and Facebook serve different purposes and made sense to be separate.

    • Can-Utility
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      241 year ago

      At this point it’s foolish not to consider this as possibly the greatest tax writeoff in history. Elmo is setting himself up to never pay another dime in taxes the rest of his life. Not that he probably pays that much as it stands, but still.

      • roguetrick
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        211 year ago

        You can’t defer losses like this forever. You can throw your money in a fire, but in the end that’s not going to help you very much.

        • Can-Utility
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          81 year ago

          IANA tax attorney, and I’ve always had more time than losses, so I’ll defer to your wisdom 😅 I also didn’t claim he was smart

      • hh93
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        31 year ago

        But you won’t save more tax with this that you lost money with it?

        How would this ever make sense especially given that inflation is a thing?

    • Very_Bad_Janet
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      1 year ago

      which is present in the footer of every major website in the world

      OMG, I just realize that the little blue bird will be replaced with an X everywhere. A generic looking, forgettable X.

      I also realize that instead of saying “follow me on Twitter” or “I’m on Twitter,” people will say “follow me on X” and “I’m on X,” which sounds like you’re talking about Ecstacy or Molly. Very 1990s club kid. (He’s Gen X so I’m sure he’s well aware of how this sounds.)

      I am seldom a conspiracy theorist but I am really starting to think that he is deliberately trying to destroy Twitter, I mean X.

      • Pagliacci
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        81 year ago

        I don’t think so, his “X” idea has been around for a long time, he really thinks it’s his next big idea. I’m sure people have raised all of these concerns with him, but I doubt he’s listening. Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are ideas that he bought, this one is his baby. I don’t think he’s open to ideas or criticisms on it.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          Speaking of SpaceX, makes me wonder why he doesn’t just brand everything <name>X, eg TwitterX. Keep the X theme but don’t water down the brand. Then, if he hits the jackpot and becomes a multi-industry monopoly he can rebrand everything to just X.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        maybe he’s hoping that people accidentally mistaking the button for “close window” will drive up traffic

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Just to say you often do buy a tech company for it’s employees. But he fired most of them anyway so this move seem pretty on brand.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 year ago

      You don’t buy a company for their […] employees

      You can do that, and companies like Google have been doing it for years. The difference is that those companies are small teams of engineers, working on niche applications, that the big company wants to incorporate into them.

    • dismalnow
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      1 year ago

      This isn’t a logo. It’s a cry for help from a severely distressed mind.

      W̸͖͆H̵̡̹̖͂̂̑̅Ǎ̷̲̩͔̿͜͠T̷̩̫͗’̶̺̩͖͚́̚Ś̴̭̺̼̳ ̶̼̱̗̓̄̾H̸̡̗̫̝͘A̵͍̥̔̾P̸͇͎̾́P̵̙̦̀́ͅE̸̢̧̹͐͝͠N̸̫̲͙̘͝I̵̳͍͇̼̾̋̀̕N̶͚͖̪̒̈́̈G̵͕̱̓̃

      ̷̛̰̣̠͛͊ ̸̳̼̹͂ ̸̳͕̳̔̈̉͝ ̸̛̲̋̄͘ ̴͎͐ ̸̝̃̽̚W̵͓̙̏̄̀̉Ḩ̶͚͍͗͠A̷̢̹̥͙͑͐͆T̷̫́̉̄̚’̸̧͍͌͆͜Ş̷̗͚̻̓̉͒͠ ̶̣̯̬͑̈́H̷̘͛̇̚A̷̭͗̓͘P̶̭̠̔͒͝P̵̱̯̲̓͌͘E̵̡̪̣͇̕͝N̵͓͊̇̿̋Ì̷̭̯̠͗̈́͠N̴̬̹̲͔͑̈͝G̵͎̖̥͇̀

    • Xerø
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      101 year ago

      He bought it to destroy it for his Saudi backers. Billionaires like Musk and the Saudis make more money with Republicans in charge. Twitter and Reddit were too good at educating voters that would keep Republicans out of power, and hold murderous Saudi princes accountable, so they had to be destroyed.

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        Would have been easier to shutter it as soon as he had control of it. This is legit his best effort.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        I don’t think that was his goal, but it was probably why the Saudis were so eager to loan him the funds to buy it. This reminds me of a time I was talking to a climate-denying friend who cited something about NY using “methane causes global warming” to push anti-small farm bills on the basis that they had cattle (or something, I can’t remember exactly). The point being, sometimes it’s not a grand orchestrated conspiracy (eg “global warming is fake”) but rather malicious, opportunistic actors taking whatever advantages they can get. Billionaires don’t cause recessions on purpose, but their wealth certainly does increase during them anyway because of how the system has evolved to optimize for wealth consolidation through the independent actions of the capitalist class, and they’re not hurting enough to want to change it for the better.

    • StarServal
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      91 year ago

      What is the end game here?

      Musk: “Hey Everybody, look at me!”

    • Chariotwheel
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      61 year ago

      Yeah, man. People had various opinions on the quality of Twitter, but it couldn’t be denied that it was a worldwide known brand.

    • JeremyT
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      41 year ago

      My theory is that he’s wanting it as a tax write off or something since he was trying to back out shortly after putting in an offer.