One of my favorite historians on youtube says "making predictions is betting against God" or something like that, and in the case of twitter, I don't really know what happens from here.
I don't have a very high opinion of Elon. I think he's taken a couple minor successes and used a stupid economic cycle to become obscenely rich with a few companies that don't make any money. Tesla is the world's smallest car company with the world's largest market cap. SpaceX is barely profitable despite working in government contracts. The Boring company is an abject failure. Hyperloop is an epic fail. Tesla Solar Roofs are a fail. Neuralink appears to be a limited success, but nothing remotely like what he was selling. Even among his "successful" companies, there's so many broken promises and outright lies. Where's the cyber-truck? Where's the electric transport trucks that cost less than rail? Where's the starships? Where's fully self-driving cars? Where's autonomous taxis that earn back the cost of your car in one year? Where's writing skills to your brain like The Matrix? There's just so many. For the one Elon, there's millions of would-be entrepreneurs who did basically the same thing and who failed cataclysmically.
We're also at the end of an era in my estimation. With inflation the highest it's been in 40 years, money is drying up and a lot of companies that were blowing up in a good way 10 years ago are blowing up in a bad way today. Tech companies rely more on that loose monetary policy than they realized, and we're starting to see the biggest names in tech nosedive. I don't think Twitter is any different in this regard. It doesn't do anything more than the soapbox instance I'm writing this on, yet it sold for 44 Billion dollars and requires over 3000 employees? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Musk sold this stupid purchase to other shareholders by saying he's going to create an everything communications company, and that's the sort of big vision he's famous for selling for cash then failing to deliver on.
That said, Twitter is so incredibly addictive to the people on it, I'm not sure they can stop. It's like smoking, just a hit of endorphins from arguing with people. It's destroyed careers just from people not being able to stop posting. Witness Kathy Griffin being banned and being so desperate for another hit of that twitter goodness that she signed in using her dead mother's account.
If the people on there can't pull themselves away from it, and the exodus to platforms like fediverse basically stops once the people come to terms with a different oligarch being in charge than they're used to, the advertisers will return because they will go where the eyeballs go.
So it'll be tough to see. It's an incompetent version of an "immovable object and irresistable force" situation where the marginal competence of Elon Musk will match up against the barely controlled addiction of the twitter userbase.
In the long term, I think the biggest thing he'll have to do if he wants to succeed is put a damper on his shitposting desire to "pwn the libs". They'll come back a couple times (and specifically the influencial ones, nobody cares about random dangerhaired basement dweller #293821), but if he dunks on them too much from the position he's in, they'll stop finding it fun and go find somewhere else to hang out. There's lots of big tech that would be happy to house them, especially at this moment where the reality of having to actually make revenue is sinking in for a lot of these companies.
If I were to make a holistic prediction, I think Elon Musk is a name we don't hear much of 10 or maybe even 5 years from now. His stocks are all bubbles, he massively overpaid for Twitter long after the tech bubble burst and it would have lost at least 80% of its market cap, he's probably loaded up on margin using that massive collateral, and as his assets crash (and it'll probably happen in the next year as the money runs out) he'll be stuck with margin calls and his companies could start to topple and he could face personal bankruptcy. At that time, we'll see if twitter just fails, or gets sold off to someone nobody expects like what happened with Yahoo. He's made too many promises and not followed up, and that's going to matter imminently.
I don't have a very high opinion of Elon. I think he's taken a couple minor successes and used a stupid economic cycle to become obscenely rich with a few companies that don't make any money. Tesla is the world's smallest car company with the world's largest market cap. SpaceX is barely profitable despite working in government contracts. The Boring company is an abject failure. Hyperloop is an epic fail. Tesla Solar Roofs are a fail. Neuralink appears to be a limited success, but nothing remotely like what he was selling. Even among his "successful" companies, there's so many broken promises and outright lies. Where's the cyber-truck? Where's the electric transport trucks that cost less than rail? Where's the starships? Where's fully self-driving cars? Where's autonomous taxis that earn back the cost of your car in one year? Where's writing skills to your brain like The Matrix? There's just so many. For the one Elon, there's millions of would-be entrepreneurs who did basically the same thing and who failed cataclysmically.
We're also at the end of an era in my estimation. With inflation the highest it's been in 40 years, money is drying up and a lot of companies that were blowing up in a good way 10 years ago are blowing up in a bad way today. Tech companies rely more on that loose monetary policy than they realized, and we're starting to see the biggest names in tech nosedive. I don't think Twitter is any different in this regard. It doesn't do anything more than the soapbox instance I'm writing this on, yet it sold for 44 Billion dollars and requires over 3000 employees? Maybe, but I don't see it.
Musk sold this stupid purchase to other shareholders by saying he's going to create an everything communications company, and that's the sort of big vision he's famous for selling for cash then failing to deliver on.
That said, Twitter is so incredibly addictive to the people on it, I'm not sure they can stop. It's like smoking, just a hit of endorphins from arguing with people. It's destroyed careers just from people not being able to stop posting. Witness Kathy Griffin being banned and being so desperate for another hit of that twitter goodness that she signed in using her dead mother's account.
If the people on there can't pull themselves away from it, and the exodus to platforms like fediverse basically stops once the people come to terms with a different oligarch being in charge than they're used to, the advertisers will return because they will go where the eyeballs go.
So it'll be tough to see. It's an incompetent version of an "immovable object and irresistable force" situation where the marginal competence of Elon Musk will match up against the barely controlled addiction of the twitter userbase.
In the long term, I think the biggest thing he'll have to do if he wants to succeed is put a damper on his shitposting desire to "pwn the libs". They'll come back a couple times (and specifically the influencial ones, nobody cares about random dangerhaired basement dweller #293821), but if he dunks on them too much from the position he's in, they'll stop finding it fun and go find somewhere else to hang out. There's lots of big tech that would be happy to house them, especially at this moment where the reality of having to actually make revenue is sinking in for a lot of these companies.
If I were to make a holistic prediction, I think Elon Musk is a name we don't hear much of 10 or maybe even 5 years from now. His stocks are all bubbles, he massively overpaid for Twitter long after the tech bubble burst and it would have lost at least 80% of its market cap, he's probably loaded up on margin using that massive collateral, and as his assets crash (and it'll probably happen in the next year as the money runs out) he'll be stuck with margin calls and his companies could start to topple and he could face personal bankruptcy. At that time, we'll see if twitter just fails, or gets sold off to someone nobody expects like what happened with Yahoo. He's made too many promises and not followed up, and that's going to matter imminently.
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