Musk Takes Control of Twitter, Immediately Fires Top Executives

spat

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Jsmegs77

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Maybe, just maybe, he did buy Twitter just to systematically dismantle it. We may never know… or care! Billionaires doing billionaire things

I have to say, it is highly amusing to watch the lib prog heads explode on a daily basis, especially since people of such persuasion had up til recently been Elon’s biggest cheerleaders.
:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:
 
99cummins

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Jsmegs77 said:
Maybe, just maybe, he did buy Twitter just to systematically dismantle it. We may never know… or care! Billionaires doing billionaire things

I have to say, it is highly amusing to watch the lib prog heads explode on a daily basis, especially since people of such persuasion had up til recently been Elon’s biggest cheerleaders.
:popcorn::popcorn::popcorn:
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He could be dismantling it just to destroy it or to rebuild it. Or maybe Twitter was just poorly run and he has to slash and burn to make it profitable. Or none of the above.
 
SonOfSun

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99cummins said:
He could be dismantling it just to destroy it or to rebuild it. Or maybe Twitter was just poorly run and he has to slash and burn to make it profitable. Or none of the above.
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Probably a mix of a lot of things.

Here is twitter's most recent annual 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:
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They lost 272.6M the most recent year, though there is a legal settlement in there for 765.7M, not sure what that particular item is from and if it will be continual or not. If the legal settlement wasn't there they would have a profit of about 490M. Not bad overall.

Twitter currently gets 85-90% of it's revenue from advertising. Musk said his goal was to have it be about 50%. The problem he has with advertising revenue is twofold; First, his management style and decisions are making advertisers flee. Second, with the economy slowing companies advertise less which means less advertising revenue. Musk has no control over the second factor.

Running a business that gets its revenue from advertising and personal interactions is very different from a manufacturing business (ie. like Tesla).

If anything Musk's buyout of Twitter made it financially worse even ignoring the advertising revenue losses. How? Musk debt financed 13 Billion of the purchase. The average interest rate on this debt is ~8%. What this means is that his purchase just saddled Twitter with an additional 1.04 BILLION dollars in interest charges to service that debt annually. Look at the balance sheets above and add a negative billion to the books. Recently Musk was talking how twitter loses 4 million dollars a day. Well, his debt backed purchase added another 2.84 million dollars a day in losses to those books. Ouch! Good thing honorable places like Qatar and the Saudis are in on it too by the way.

Musk is going to lose a lot of money on this purchase. He can afford it, but I can sure think of better things to do with 44 Billion dollars than buy twitter.


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spat

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SonOfSun said:
Probably a mix of a lot of things.

Here is twitter's most recent annual 10K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:
View attachment 179838
View attachment 179839

They lost 272.6M the most recent year, though there is a legal settlement in there for 765.7M, not sure what that particular item is from and if it will be continual or not. If the legal settlement wasn't there they would have a profit of about 490M. Not bad overall.

Twitter currently gets 85-90% of it's revenue from advertising. Musk said his goal was to have it be about 50%. The problem he has with advertising revenue is twofold; First, his management style and decisions are making advertisers flee. Second, with the economy slowing companies advertise less which means less advertising revenue. Musk has no control over the second factor.

Running a business that gets its revenue from advertising and personal interactions is very different from a manufacturing business (ie. like Tesla).

If anything Musk's buyout of Twitter made it financially worse even ignoring the advertising revenue losses. How? Musk debt financed 13 Billion of the purchase. The average interest rate on this debt is ~8%. What this means is that his purchase just saddled Twitter with an additional 1.04 BILLION dollars in interest charges to service that debt annually. Look at the balance sheets above and add a negative billion to the books. Recently Musk was talking how twitter loses 4 million dollars a day. Well, his debt backed purchase added another 2.84 million dollars a day in losses to those books. Ouch! Good thing honorable places like Qatar and the Saudis are in on it too by the way.

Musk is going to lose a lot of money on this purchase. He can afford it, but I can sure think of better things to do with 44 Billion dollars than buy twitter.


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The whole point of taking a business private as Elon has is so that you can ignore the instant gratification that wall street demands, and do things that hurt in the short term but pay off years later.

Things like designing rockets to land themselves so they can be re-used.

not sure if you remember, but 10 years ago that was considered magic, and since NASA stopped doing it because it was too expensive, it was considered suicide to try for a small start up.

Oh, and of course, before Tesla, electric cars were marketed at the Prius crowd, not the supercar crowd too. All about efficiency, nobody wants performance. That was considered a dumb idea as well.
 
SonOfSun

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spat said:
The whole point of taking a business private as Elon has is so that you can ignore the instant gratification that wall street demands, and do things that hurt in the short term but pay off years later.

Things like designing rockets to land themselves so they can be re-used.

not sure if you remember, but 10 years ago that was considered magic, and since NASA stopped doing it because it was too expensive, it was considered suicide to try for a small start up.

Oh, and of course, before Tesla, electric cars were marketed at the Prius crowd, not the supercar crowd too. All about efficiency, nobody wants performance. That was considered a dumb idea as well.
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I get what you are saying but Twitter *is* a public company, not in ownership (since Musk/investors bought it as private), but in that its product is all about interaction with and by the public. Companies like Tesla and SpaceX produce hard goods, ie. cars and rockets. Twitter does not produce a hard good, I can't resell "a Twitter", I can resell a Tesla car. This industry requires a different management style because of the public part of the product, the interactions - it is very different from tangible items. That's not even counting how the revenue streams are vastly different. It's like trying to run a fashion design enterprise the same way as trucking/logistics company, it's not going to work.

Either way, the 1+ Billion dollars a year to service the added debt is very real. With revenue streams like Twitter has, that's a fucking anchor that I don't see them shedding unless Musk ponies up an additional 13 Billion.
 
spat

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SonOfSun said:
I get what you are saying but Twitter *is* a public company, not in ownership (since Musk/investors bought it as private), but in that its product is all about interaction with and by the public. Companies like Tesla and SpaceX produce hard goods, ie. cars and rockets. Twitter does not produce a hard good, I can't resell "a Twitter", I can resell a Tesla car. This industry requires a different management style because of the public part of the product, the interactions - it is very different from tangible items. That's not even counting how the revenue streams are vastly different. It's like trying to run a fashion design enterprise the same way as trucking/logistics company, it's not going to work.

Either way, the 1+ Billion dollars a year to service the added debt is very real. With revenue streams like Twitter has, that's a fucking anchor that I don't see them shedding unless Musk ponies up an additional 13 Billion.
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You could be right.

And of course until this Twitter deal Musk has been the darling of the left.

He may have underestimated their vindictiveness.

Or he may end cancel culture, who knows.

That's what we're really looking at, is a battle for the zeitgeist.

But, certainly for a company like Twitter, the users are the product. I assume he knows this, but some of his actions do seem that he thinks they are the customers.
 
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