Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.

Good point Ohoitnik.

Twitter is the ad-dependent print newspaper bought out by private equity that now needs to service its debt, and the first order of business is to sell off the real estate, lay off staff, hike subscription costs and hope the core customer base doesn’t notice everything is worse.

https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1587512647578095617?s=46&t=7TzGQX0ditfuhPsPyVApKA

Oof.

This should probably be a separate thread but why are leveraged buyouts even legal?

Yep.

Musk is already planning on heavy cost cutting on Twitter, and they made over 4 billion in ad revenue last year.

When he says they can't afford to run the service on ads alone what he means is that they can't make back the oversized amount he paid for the service on ads alone.

Good thing interest rates are going down too

There may be a mass exodus of advertisers anyway, if he is correct on the percentage of "bots" on the platform. I was hoping that would come out in court.

Most advertisers would be basing their spend off click through and conversion rates rather than eyeballs, so I don't think that would have made a huge difference tbh.

elon musk is so good at negotiation he paid $44 billion for something worth ~$10 and then as his first order of business he proposed a $20 monthly subscription and immediately revised that down to $8 because Stephen King told him to fuck off. brilliant stuff

https://twitter.com/chillmage/status/1587522464699256833?s=46&t=7TzGQX0ditfuhPsPyVApKA

It's also wild that the guy is a literal billionaire, and yet can't grasp the really really obvious point that if the multimillionaire won't pay $20, he also won't pay $8, because the specific dollar values aren't relevant to "is this worth paying for"

https://twitter.com/fraserjstephen/status/1587534858099851264?s=46&t=7TzGQX0ditfuhPsPyVApKA

Tumblr coming in for the deathblow by letting you post naked pics again

https://twitter.com/lilysimpson1312/status/1587587272266100736?s=46&t=7TzGQX0ditfuhPsPyVApKA

Anyone who knows the history of the internet knows everything started without moderation. There was no account verification and moderation back in the day. I could spoof your email, IP, nickname, and everything else about you. The only thing that was really protected was your login to your local server. Even then there were were ways to login as you through the internet.

Free speech existed and no one wanted it. IRC and Usenet (especially alt.*) were not able to be moderated when I started. The best you could hope for is to get a provider blacklisted from some feeds so they propagated less. My dial up admin doxxed the people who threatened him with blacklisting to me. We actually became friends over it as I went ballistic on their real lives with the info.

Eventually people got tired of free speech and spam. Moderation and verified accounts popped up because no one wanted the spam anymore. People ran to moderated discussion groups and chat because they wanted better, and they did not want their efforts hijacked and destroyed by someone else. You got an official login because if you tried to have a nick or a set up place to chat we spoofed you, hijacked your channels, and shit all over them. We used to have wars with eachother because it was a competition and shitting oin nobodies was boring so some of us went after bigger targets because they were more fun.

You cannot market for advertisers using influencers when you allow for spoofers to shit all over everything. On top of this you have the racists frothing at the mouth to make twitter the next stormfront. No one is going to go there when you give Nazis and racists access to spam insults to kill everything that is not white nationalist into oblivion. There is a reason stormfront is not the default on the internet for advertising and speech despite it being around forever.

If dipshit elon has not studied internet history then he will learn. Some of us were there when this shit started and it is always the same. It has been done before.

The software he supposedly used to inform him of how many bots were on Twitter said that Musk's account was a bot account. Nor is it particularly hard to find out if an account is ran by a bot or not. There's a number of different, free, browser plugins that will if an account is a bot or not.

Nor are bots limited to pushing a particular political agenda. A good chunk of them are used for scams. Cryptobros love them to hype their crypto and get a bunch of suckers to invest before doing a rug pull. People who want to be social media influencers will use them to try to get noticed. And many bots, who don't make any effort to hide that they're bots, post information that folks might be interested in knowing about. Such as the location of yachts owned by Russian oligarchs, Elon Musk's private plane, hourly porn pics, or when an AI program has spit out a result.

Elon's private plane spits out hourly porn pics on twitter?

I think he should force everyone to pay to not see that and he will get his money back real fast.

Anyone for 84 hour workweeks? https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-staff-layoffs-long-hours-shifts-work-jobs-2022-11

FF and UA will be here momentarily to tell us this is all fine, it's how the world works and if you don't want to work at least 90 hours in the face of this, you're a lazy kid who doesn't deserve the shit wages you're on and should shut up about how they aren't enough to afford rent AND food.

Though the rent angle seems to be covered by the whole "having to sleep in the office" crap.

Accept the terms or quit.

I don’t know why they wouldn’t just all threaten to quit. Twitter doesn’t have so many staff that they couldn’t all get jobs elsewhere throughout the Bay Area in 2 months. Particularly since non-competes are unenforceable in CA. Not like they have any equity in the company now. Maybe they’re counting on Christmas bonuses or something? Or were promised some other bonus?

Or because not everyone can afford to suddenly be without a wage?

I can't believe you would think it was wrong for us to ban someone posting lynching pictures in response to black posters, spamming the N word across the board, or being a literal Nazi.

I can.
My respect for him has withered to a crisp, crumbled to specks, and blown away.

and then some.

Thats because they didnt know any better. I still have dozens of go.com emails and yahoo emails I keep active that arent traceable.

Conspiracy Theorists Turn On Elon Musk Over 'Satanic' Costume (dailydot.com)

Look out, here it comes right on time.

Always the most extreme example to dress up "free speech for me but not for thee" enough to pretend it's presentable.

Next will you pretend you're the first to think of calling anyone who says anything you dislike a "Nazi"?

Anyone who's working at Twitter in tech or tech management can afford to be without a wage for 2 months, except maybe new college grads, but they're going to be useless for this kind of work.

Those "most extreme" examples are literally ones that we have had here.

Your meme casts a wide blanket. If you were given the controls to WF would you permit people spamming the N word, lynching pictures, and allow literal Nazi supporters to post?

There's nothing extreme about slippery-sloping literally every fucking thing under the sun though.
That's perfectly rational.

How about Borgs lying to the hosts to get us taken down?
That's literally the exact "fire in a crowded theater" example.
We don't even have to conjecture that shit.