The Wall Street Journal editorial page is obsessed with Elon Musk and Twitter:
Two-thirds of their featured opinion pieces are about Musk and Twitter. Why are conservatives so preoccupied with Twitter? For that matter, why is everyone so preoccupied with the fate of America's 15th biggest social media company?
Short answer: no.
Ask anyone under the age of 35 about Twitter and watch the blank stare.
Ah. I thought there was a bit of a "MySpace" ring to it.
For whatever reason, Musk is a magnet that draws coverage, just like Trump. People love to read about arrogance. Also, a huge percentage of the media lives on Twitter, so to them it is extremely important. I find it humorous that all the Twitter pundits immediately came out with Tweets saying something like wait and see what will happen, don't delete Twitter yet! The pundits are terrified their audience will go away now.
Can you list the top 20 USA social networks?
I still ride for MeetUp.
This list says it is #4.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/248074/most-popular-us-social-networking-apps-ranked-by-audience/
I mean, not to be Captain Obvious, but Twitter was the source for one Donald Trump telling liberals to go f themselves five to ten times a day for four or five years, and then, said Twitter banned Trump.
Now, Musk is tweeting or whatever about remaking Twitter, but no one knows if that means inviting Trump back.
I mean, of course conservatives are all over it.
This X 10
Twitter is a symbol (there are so many) of the victim mentality that afflicts so many conservatives. Battling the imaginary enemies that have caused you to suffer is reason d'etre the Culture War Party, its no surprise that the White Knight taking down the imaginary enemy is a big freaking deal.
Or the victim loving negros. In the end, black activists are just another cultural conservative movement that needs to be gone.
These same cultural conservative morons work with wall street elites in bringing thousands of central American scabs to take away the black man's jobs.
Is it just me or did Elon Musk vastly overpay for the company?
I really don’t know the details but thinking maybe he traded vastly over valued Tesla shares for vastly over valued Twitter shares.
To some degree he is actually financing it with personal loans against vastly over-vauled Tesla shares*. The best indicator that he is overpaying is that in the average leveraged buyout the purchaser puts up about 10%. Musk seems to be paying well over half. This is likely because commercial funders don't like to see the interest payments for the deal exceed annual cash flow. Twitter does not have much of that because it does not have a good way to monetize their users. Fortunately Musk has said he is not doing it to make money. Which, given pretty much anyone else would be, is why his price is higher than anyone else would pay.
* if he ever gets the margin call on this, he in addition to Tesla and Twitter are probably screwed.
"vastly over-vauled Tesla shares"
No other car company is growing as fast, not even in China.
It's the leader in EV's, a technology that is clearly revolutionizing the auto industry.
These two things justify high valuation. Everything is pointing up for Tesla.
Part of it is that Twitter is the social media platform journalists use the most.
The national chit chat community must always be up on the latest chit chat and Twitter is their heroin.
In the fever dreams of the right, Twitter is the cool kids’ table at the cafeteria they’re not allowed to sit at. The resentment runs strong in this particular tribe. For them, Musk is the Geek Hero they hoped for in high school, but who never showed up.
"Elon must fire the entire liberal staff or they'll sabotage his policy!" is a frequent sentiment on Trumpropaganda websites. Replacing them with devout Trump cultists, presumably.
Truth Social proved how well that worked.
Frankly, Truth Social is a fabulous product. Fabulous. And tremendous.
Ask your pro-Musk friends and acquaintances this question: "Say Iran bombards Twitter with inflammatory anti-Semitic lies and misinformation, inciting Americans to attack Jews. Is it your position that Twitter should do nothing?"
Watching them squirm trying to find an answer they can reconcile with "free speech" is entertaining.
"Pro-Musk friends" are straw men used to prove that anyone who doesn't hate Elon Musk is a member of his cult. That they don't exist ruins a perfectly good Musk-hate posting.
What's the percentage of news articles that have embedded tweets vs percentage of news articles which feature embedded social media posts from anybody else? It's a big deal.
What is ESG? Is it a food additive?
Close. It's an additive that makes you wanna dance, if you get my drift.
Because it is used extensively by the people writing the opinion pieces and so therefore Twitter is the most important of all social media companies.
Which underlines my point that Twitter is for twits.
Exactly right.
Twitter is reporter-crack for a huge swath of reporters.
Dudebro is reporter-crack for business reporters.
This isn't difficult.
I made a *silly* comment on there last October and got banned .
Your attitude is odd, given your penchant for criticizing the media baron, Rupert Murdoch.
On the one hand, you find it troubling that a media baron can wield the power of an oligarch and destroy democracy. On the other hand, you see no red flags with a man worth over 10x that of Murdoch, becoming a social media baron.
We're walking right into the peak Second Gilded Age and the Fed Bank has fueled this with cheap money.
I’m not.
I suspect that conservatives are in for a disappointment. Musk is fairly right wing in his approach to economics but he is NOT, in any real sense, conservative. Indeed, Tesla represents the very antithesis of conservatism; it stands for tree-hugger environmentalism, progress, and accepting climate change as very real and threatening.
Tesla and modern conservativism just don't go together.
Agreed. They only like him right now because he's making the libs cry.
"Conservative" is now just a label that some on the right like to slap on themselves to hide the fact they're raging authoritarians and racists. They like Musk's libertarian leanings, the fact he is a white South African from a former apartheid country, and anything to do with crypto because they just love the snakeoil.
Racists against who? They don't like being "white". Sounds like Zionist to me.
Patton once said that "next to war, everything else shrinks in significance." Oh how I wish that were true (or should be true considering what's going on in Ukraine) right now. Instead we're talking about Elon Musk and Twitter.
Let's start off with the fact that Musk inherited his wealth from his family's emerald mines in Apartheid South Africa. He did not create Tesla and electric car, he simply bought it with that wealth. Now having established that, we can say at least Musk actually has companies which create real things: cars, rocket ships, solar panels, boring equipment. But for whatever reason he's going to leverage a good chunk of his wealth (much of it in Tesla stock options apparently) to buy a social media company, one which makes nothing and has a hard time making a profit since its inception.
Or a fool and his money are soon parted. That's probably a better explanation.
The question then becomes why? Why become another Mark Zuckerberg or Peter Thiel? Why go from making real things to 140 characters (which Thiel has lamented ever so)? The only answer I can think of is this: It's much easier for him to buy and use a company like Twitter for whatever influence he may think he will do him good than make things. Making things and dreaming things like space travel and colonies on Mars and electric car infrastructure, that's not only hard, it's damned expensive. And its a market that's still heavily dependent on government. During my radical libertarian days I often wondered why the space "things" like exploration couldn't be privatized to expand it and then we find out in the real world, the biggest buyer a company like Tesla has is the government itself. Musk must realize this as well and figures the only way to make sure that government at least has a friendly ear and doesn't fuck with his businesses is to buy a media company for that very influence.
The why, for me, is simple. Musk thinks he can enhance the public good, and make some money while doing that. Pretty much every venture he's done since PayPal (You left that out), has been that way. Even PayPal could be construed as advancing the public good, though.
Is that true? Does his version of "public good" coincide, or even overlap with yours or mine? Those are very relevant questions.
(For me, there's clearly overlap, and just as clearly not coincidence)
No, billionaires are all raging, paranoid, arrogant egotists, and Musk has several beefs with Twitter he wants to avenge. He is very mad at the kid who Tweeted the location of his private jet, he's still sore about his SEC fraud charges due to misleading Tweets, he wants to hawk his snakeoil crypto, and he is mad that a bunch of his bros have been banned from Twitter for racist and other nonsense. He's arrogant enough to think that being the smartest kid in the room means he can turn a profit when others couldn't. It mainly boils down to the latter--these guys always want to show they are the smartest in the room, and want to ram it down everyone else's throats.
What's wrong with "we care about the 15th largest social network bc it disproportionately attracts people in Big Tech more than other networks?"
Anecdotally (not worth much but still) my non-millionaire coworkers in software, across several jobs, care lots about Twitter, for whatever reason.
I betcha Gen Z changes this around once they dominate the 30-40 age bracket, and instead of "billionaire takeover of Twitter" we'll have "billionaire takeover of {short form video platform here}".
"why is everyone so preoccupied with the fate of America's 15th biggest social media company?"
Not "everyone". But "everyone in the media".
I can't remember where I read it, but I saw an analysis of Twitter that seemed spot-on:
Twitter is the way that the non-cool media kids get to relive High School, only this time they are the stars of the show, the blue checks that everyone wants to friend and be noticed by. These are people who (if they are being honest with themselves) are perfectly aware of what a dumpster fire journalism is, and how their jobs may not exist next year. Meanwhile their entire reality their entire lives (the old ones are maybe 30yrs old) has consisted of the internet and social ranking, very little "touch grass". So what do you expect? Naturally they
(a) think Twitter is the most important place on earth (because it's the only place on earth that actually validates how wonderful and important they are)
(b) think what happens on Twitter are the most important events on earth.
But don't be fooled. This is a collection of points that apply to a very particular subset of America
- in media
- out of touch with real reality (ie don't report on anything in the physical world, very little touch in fact with the physical world, or even anything outside the cosmopolitan anglosphere)
Even on Twitter, look outside that narrow clique and you'll see very different responses, from glee to indifference.
Most people in the USA don't even know this is happening and most don't use Twitter so don't care. They may have a vague idea that this crazy Musk guy that builds electric cars and rockets is buying something big, but they really have no idea what is going on.
I saw a stat in the NYT a day or so ago that made me chuckle. Not only is Twitter much smaller than Facebook or TikTok, it has less revenue than the Bed, Bath & Beyond chain of stores.
Same point. I read it has less revenue than Olive Garden.