- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Still seems way overpriced. Doesn’t even have name recognition anymore.
I’d guess that $19 billion is the value where if someone bought it and did their best to undo everything and get it back on track, that’s how much it would be worth.
The problem with measuring value is you have to quantify what that $19 billion actually is. Like you could say it’s the share price times the number of shares, except now twitter is privately owned we don’t have a market share price anymore.
Theoretically what someone would pay for it. The buyer always has plans to make it better.
Or the textbook definition, the present value of the sum of all future profits.
The buyer always has plans to make it better.
That’s an interesting claim to make, especially on this post 😄
Indeed very interesting. It is a fundamental principle of finance: Investors seek to maximize utility, but this is under the axiom of complete rationality. And even if that condition is met (which I doubt), the utility function of money is not concave at all levels, for example leftmost of the graph, before the price of food. I think that after some point, utility becomes flat and Musk is way beyond that point. Additionally he seems to be a risk loving investor, not a risk averse.
it’s x’s own current valuation, to calculate stock options to give to employees
I wonder if that’s a portion of why it’s devalued so much. I mean I know there’s a dozen or more other reasons but brand recognition could very well be one of them.
Take a look at their user data over the past year with the name change date in mind.
It’s is absolutely ASTONISHING how fucking moronic and empty headed Elon Musk is. A literal idiot with all the money.
Boy are you going to have a real egg on your face whenever X becomes a successful blogging/dating/banking/investing app \s
People recognize it, just not as X lol
They surely still own the twitter name right
Can any trademark lawyer in the audience tell us how long before, if Musk lets the trademark lapse, some rando could come along and make a Twitter clone while literally just calling it “Twitter?”
Meta is being told to drop the “Threads” name, it would be hilarious if they changed it to “Twitter”
Yeah it’s never going to be called just “X”, it’s always going to be “X, formerly twitter”.
Just like Prince the whole time he changed his name to that symbol.
Prince wanted people to call him Prince. He changed his name to that symbol to get out of a shitty contract with Warner Bros.
“Warner Bros took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing took to promote all of the music I wrote,” Prince once said in a press release. “The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36107590
Elon changed Twitter to X because he’s a babyman who never got over the fact that PayPal didn’t like the name.
I really wish xitter had have caught on.
I thought it was valued at 15 billion when he bought it? Maybe that’s how much he received from the Saudis.
I don’t get that platform. I just signed up for mastodon and am not sure I’m feeling that either.
I feel like these Twitter-style sites are just …like… Keyboard warriors. It’s just smug post after smug post.
It honestly creeps me out. Like I see all these popular political posts by profile icons I recognize… But every post is just whinging…
Who are these people and why do they get popularity and even mentioned on the news as truth when their posts have no sources and are just bullshit political emotion. Then you read a news article that “Twitter is cancelling…”. All because there was one post about with someone acting like a dick.
In its ideal form, a microblog style site could literally provide an online version of a collective consciousness of society. It would be a live feed of normal people’s thoughts.
Except in reality it’s porn, smug posting, corporate advertising, vitriol, and propaganda all fueled by algorithms written to keep mofos scrolling.
It was good for two things: on the ground news, and speaking directly to businesses to resolve customer complaints.
Which Elon ruined since most businesses are abandoning it. But man at one time if you complain on twitter and tag the company in it your problem would fix pretty fast. Doubt that would work today.
Which is dumb you have to take your support request public before you get sny sort of help
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Yeah. I pretty much only used Twitter for live event updates.
Porn, smug posting, and vitriol? Sounds like collective consciousness of society to me.
You don’t get advertising or algorithmic crap on Mastodon, and they have reasonably reliable filters to hide most porn I think
Would the collective consciousness actually be interesting to read?
Honestly the format is good for stuff like quick business headlines and rumors that you could use if you’re trading (basically free “squawk”, given that professional squawk services cost a lot). It’s also good to quickly spread the word during protests or similar.
But I agree that all of that is still offset by the huge amount of smugness and “ratio” competitions.
Yeah that’s a fair summary. It’s brands doing announcements and ads, and people being assholes. Why would I be interested in either?
Any social media that involves Followers are destined to be bin fires.
I tried mastodon, some of it is sweet, but eventually you voice a different opinion to someone with lots of followers, and get attacked by the tribe.
All depends on who you follow. If you follow people who make stuff (art, software, etc) then you’ll find your feed a lot more upbeat.
Still, on another platform (such as Lemmy) they could make more meaningful posts.
I think the whole point is that it gives media companies something to pretend is “news,” and everyone else something to be pretend-outraged over. Full stop.
I’m with you. Lots of randoms giving their opinions on something that other randoms can show their support for? Huh… alright, I guess.
To put this in perspective, they lost an average of $2B per month in value. According to HUD, there were about 582,000 homeless people in the US last year. $2B per month is enough to house all of them nearly 4 times over if you assume $1k per month in housing expenses.
What a monumental waste of resources that could have made a difference. Musk just sucks
It’s not real money, though. It’s all just speculative value based on estimates of future revenue.
The real barrier to ending homelessness is the large number of real estate vacancies that are held open to prop up the price of the housing market. Twitter’s lost value has nothing to do with that.
But the 44B was payed, so they do/did exist. Now he could have just NOT bought twitter and spent half of this money on the poor et voilà no more homeless for at least 4 years.
But you are right with the rest.
But the 44B was payed, so they do/did exist.
It was mostly debt swaps. Elon traded equity in Tesla for equity in Twitter.
Well akschually probably about 22/23 billion were cash according to reuters.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/how-will-elon-musk-pay-twitter-2022-10-07/
According to a Reuters calculation, Musk had about $20 billion cash after selling part of his stake in Tesla through multiple transactions in November and December last year and April and August.
My mistake. I mistakenly thought he’d simply swapped the Tesla stock at face value, rather than cashing it out via a brokerage.
No problemo. I usually don’t give a shit about this kind of stuff, but if a single person buys for such a huge sum, I maybe look into it.
There is no “real” money. It’s all speculative based on what value people assign to it. For example, you may have noticed that the US dollar has become worth significantly less in recent years. Shares and fiat currency just have different volatility.
The US dollar has outpaced nearly every other global currency. Five years ago you’d get 100 yen to the dollar. Now you get 150.
But cartelization of the supply chain means we don’t get to see the benefits of low import prices. The difference all goes to business profit, while real increases in material and labor get passed on to the consumer.
Netflix buys anime for pennies on the dollar and sells it back at escalating rates. They spend less and we pay more.
The US dollar was just an example so this discussion is tangential to the point I was trying to make. That said, your argument does not support an increasing value of the dollar - it only says it has increased in value relative to other currencies. But I’m sure you know that inflation has been staggeringly high which means you get less food on the table for a dollar, and salaries have not been keeping up.
Or put in other words, if you were to invest in US dollars instead of shares then you would have seen the value of your portfolio going down, in terms of what it can get you at Costco.
That said, your argument does not support an increasing value of the dollar
Increase in exchange value means the cost of imports fall.
You’ve missed the mark on two counts:
- Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter and bring it into private ownership. I’m saying had he just left well enough alone, he could have used that money for other purposes
- Your point on adding more supply to the real estate market to prop up prices is the opposite of Econ 101 - more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices. Mental health is a much larger barrier to receiving help for the homeless.
I used to volunteer weekly with homeless and housing insecure people in Philadelphia and untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.
Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society. Anyway, my point was simply to illustrate what a magnificent waste of resources it was to buy Twitter.
Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter
He raised $20B by using his own (highly inflated) Tesla stock as collateral. So this wasn’t new money, it was a swap. He covered the balance with Twitter’s own equity as collateral (which is a big reason why he’s been so cavalier with its devaluation). This new money was effectively just to keep a business in the red from running out of operating income.
more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices.
Not under a cartel. And real estate markets are increasingly cartelized, with large vacancies kept off the market clearing rate in order to prop up the book value of the rest of the market.
untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.
Which creates a vicious cycle, sure. But the solution is to reclaim vacant real estate from speculators and use it as real housing.
Building more investment properties and vacant luxury units to increase book value of real estate does nothing to reduce homelessness.
Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society.
All services that are best delivered to housed populations. What’s more, they’re services with a universal application. You don’t just need to be homeless to benefit from professional counseling, education, and public health care.
But, again, sky high real estate costs make these services prohibitively expensive to expand into neighborhoods.
Delivering these services at cost requires local governments to reclaim vacant real estate kept open at above market clearance rates and turning it over to public sector service providers.
all the people that imagine their home prices are as high as they are, will fight tooth and nail to prevent this. the empty house market is crazy, just look on a “social home sharing site”. houses are hotels for the few.
As someone who sees my property tax bill jump 10% / year, I have no interest in rising real estate prices. I’m not selling any time soon and I use my house to live in rather than to invest.
Lol it’s not worth anything near that much
It’s all gonna fold once interest rates get high enough. Didn’t he borrow like 13 billion?
If only more people would move to Mastodon it could drop another 50% in value!
Please don’t put more pressure on us, we’re already telling people to do that.
Haha I’ve been trying too.
Mastodon got a shout out on the latest Some More News, which was cool.
Anything that helps demonitize Twitter is good in my opinion!
WORTH 19 BILLION TO WHO??
No one willing to buy, so it ain’t worth shit
Aquaman might go for it
Makes sense.
Almost immediately after buying it, Elon enshittified the site - and not only that, but changed it’s branding from one of the most recognisable names/logos in the world to a fucking “X” (almost always suffixed with “formerly Twitter” so people actually remember what the fuck it is)
almost always suffixed with “formerly Twitter” so people actually remember what the fuck it is
This continues to bring me such joy.
Ditto - and I hope it angers Elon with every mention
It’s not even a unique X. The exact X they’re using as a logo already exists as a Unicode character 𝕏
Wow, that makes it even worse. Couldn’t even be bothered to pay someone to make a logo, just stole it from Unicode
I was expecting much less than that. o_O
That’s because it isn’t worth nearly that.
It was estimated at around $20 bil when he bought it. Since then he has more than cut revenue in half. The value today is at most $ 10 bil.
Except Musk has added a burden of $ 20 bil in debt, causing interest cost of $1.5 bil per year.
Twitter was not earning money when Musk bought it, but now it operates at huge deficits, and has huge negative internal value.So the company has a net negative value. The only value may come from losses being tax deductible to a buyer. But that too is worth way less than the debt. Any value is completely speculative, based on a belief against evidence, that the company can still be turned around.
And tax deductions on a loss are still a loss. Tax write-offs are a partial mitigation. They’re taken off income, not directly from taxes.
If your tax rate is 25% and you write off a $100 loss, you still lose a net $75. Yeah, if you make negative money you may avoid some taxes entirely, but not all. There’s still payroll tax, property tax, sales tax, and more that are isolated from corporate income tax.
A write-off will never make a company that’s losing money before taxes profitable. They just soften the blow.
My understanding is that tax write-offs are deducted from the revenue, as in profit is revenue - expenses - write-offs, with different things being written of over different periods of time. So, let’s say vehicles are written off over 8 years, and I buy a truck for 40,000$, I can deduct 5,000$ each year from my revenue, meaning my taxable profits are 5,000$ less each year.
Whether a multi-year or single-year write-off, it’s still coming off taxable income, not taxes owed.
That truck doesn’t become free. If your tax rate is 25% and you manage to write it off at 100%, you saved 10 grand in taxes. Which is nice if you need the truck, but if you don’t actually need it you’ve actually wasted $30,000.
That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying.
Profit and taxable income aren’t the same thing.
The value of twitter isn’t its revenue but rather its userbase. Which is still extremely strong.
Doesn’t change the fact that the value when Musk bought it was estimated around $20 bil.
With an added debt since that of a similar amount of around $20 billion. It still ends up zero, even with the 20 bil worth of it’s customers.
With the reduced revenue, the value of those customers are also reduced.So no matter how strong it was, it doesn’t change the fact that it hasn’t gotten stronger, and their value is no longer enough to balance the debt and deficits.
So you genuinely think twitter is worth 0$? If so, you are dumb. corporate debt means nothing when the main value you have is intangible, nonliquidatable assets. Twitter is still worth a lot of money, even with it’s debt and revenue decline.
Twitter is still worth a lot of money,
No it’s not, people putting more money into it, are more likely to lose than to earn on it. The thing formerly known as twitter, is a dead man walking, it will only be able to continue for as long as people accept not getting their money, or putting money into it at a loss.
Of course the millions of users have value, but the company does not, because the debt is higher than the total value. Only way to continue, is a restructuring where a lot of people will lose a lot of money, but they may accept it as better than losing all.
Elon musk managed to push half his loss onto other people, by borrowing $20bil in Twitter. I suspect they will not be happy, and Elon Musk’s word will be worth a lot less after this.
I mean that’s based on what Elon said, so that’s vastly over estimated.
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…Yaccarino said that revenues grew in the high-single digit percentage…
She should start her own line of perfume. Desperation, by Linda Yaccarino.
Guaranteed to make you smell Musky.
She’s gotta be getting some serious compensation to throw her reputation in the garbage like this. I just can’t see how it makes any other sense for her in the long run.
Its funny how this headline keeps coming up every couple of weeks with a smaller number each time.
I dont know how they generate these evaluations, and honestly I dont even trust they are accurate. Or care, my life is fully uneffected by the success or failure of that site.
But it is always funny to read the new nearly identical headline with the number shifted down by 1-4 billion from last time.
Companies such as Fidelity give an estimate on how much they are value after analyzing the finances of the company I think.
Fidelity does this because they invested in Twitter alongside Musk, and as a bank they are required by law to disclose the current value of their assets. They come up with a value of their stake, then the rest of us divide that by the percentage Fidelity owns to get the value of the company.
Is it, though?
Its a digital message board on some overpriced servers.
Is this the wikipedia-argument back at him? The whole twitter post history could fit on a single hard drive, so why are people paying for it?
That argument is unfair anyway, cause what fits on a hard drive gets bigger every year.
No it’s completely fair because the value of information deflates as we gain better ability to store it! /s
And there’s endless examples of a small well ordered thing being far more expensive than essentially the same thing less ordered in bigger volume - a room full of carbon dioxide, a bag of coal, a diamond…
Considering that almost every public lib continues to use it, there is something to it, even if only the network advantage.
And a lot of consumers on it
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$19 billion is still a lot. Boys, lets try to bring it down to $19 million
Let’s bring it down to $19.00.
I’ll buy Twitter for 20 bucks!
I’ll raise ya 20 and this toenail
Do… I keep the toenail?
Sorry I ate the tonail already
Elon Musk is the owner of Twitter so he gets to keep the toenail and 20 Bucks, unless he takes whatever you or anybody else gives as a better offer.
:(
I mean if yoy want you can resell it, really it’s an investment that will only appreciate in value
I’d buy that for a dollar
Present hall pass.
This guy has the attention span of a circus flea, doesn’t he?
I’m high af and buying Twitter. Hate speech is lol because I feel unloved. Advertisers you go now, you damned J’s. We don’t need qualified staff for 2.0 I know how to paste code. Ok now we’re gonna make hella $ with “verified”. Shit. Ok I gotta unplug some servers and refactor. I know PHP. A child looked me in the eyes but he couldn’t see into me like I know the others do. Now we’re X for some reason. Now we’re revenue sharing. I like to lie. Now we’re subscriptions, babby. No we’re gonna facilitate financial transactions in a challenge to the banking sector now cuz they got my nuts in a fukkin’ vice here Linda!
Transforming Twitter into an ‘everything’ app is a terrible idea. Why? Take WeChat, for example. Initially a messaging app, it now incorporates a multitude of services including short video clips similar to YouTube, Twitter-like posts (for friends only), a wallet linked to a bank card, and more. One of my Chinese friends said, ‘You won’t find anyone in China who doesn’t use WeChat because it has everything we need!’ It seems that users are quite satisfied with the services WeChat provides.
However, they may be overlooking the drawbacks of such centralized applications:
- Privacy issues: Identity verification is required; without it, most features are inaccessible.
- Censorship: I suspect that all communications are stored on a central server, with algorithms designed to detect sensitive content or keywords related to politics, NSFW material, etc. Since it’s linked to your identity, you could easily end up on a blacklist.
- Account suspension: The developer has the power to suspend accounts at any time due to the centralized nature of the system.
- Security risks: If someone gains access to your phone or passcode, they could access your money, your contacts’ information, and your personal details, since it’s an ‘everything’ app.
- Manipulation: Show those news that the country or the company want us to, hide those that are not helpful to them.
These issues and risks are inherent in centralized platforms and social media but consolidating them into an ‘everything’ app only amplifies the risks. My friend mentioned that WeChat hasn’t introduced a subscription fee yet, but Twitter and other services have.
I mean, an ‘everything’ app might be feasible in a restricted country like China, in the United States? Hell not! But, Big Tech and governments have the monopolistic power to make these things happen, so we have to find alternatives. The sooner we migrate, the sooner we can reduce the risks that I mentioned above.
The digital world is incredible, but also dangerous. It’s best that we start protecting our own privacy rights, our right to speak freely, and our right to control our own minds and discern the truth.
Wechat als always had the backing of the central government. They got funding and, probably more important, the government slowed or outright banned other apps. The Verge has a good piece on it.
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Pretty soon he’ll have so much control over his platform that he can practically cron kings and manipulate outcomes to fit his personal political agenda.
Huh… do kings normally consist of commands that need to be run on a regular basis at scheduled times?
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When you say “not as fast”, what does that mean?
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So when you compare social media platforms your main metric for choosing one over the other is file transfer speeds?
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Why are people writing comments with chatgpt?
Wait, what gives away that this is a ChatGPT comment?
Bullet points and tone of voice
However, they may be overlooking the drawbacks of such centralized applications
My guy it’s wechat. It’s china. The drawbacks are that they are chinese.
Nobody questions the drawbacks of your entire life being on an app and you being valued on a social score.I’m only starting to realize now that the Fediverse kinda follows the unix philosophy of purpose-built interconnectable pieces interfacing with each other. It’s much better than the alternative of just slapping everything into one cumbersome pile.
I’m not very well versed in the Fediverse so this may be wrong.
No, you’re right. Theoretically, you could even have a single login for multiple Fediverse sites (Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc.).
Technically speaking, I believe you could even comment on this thread via Mastodon if you wanted to since both Lemmy and Mastodon use something called the ActivityPub protocol. But the reverse isn’t true since Lemmy isn’t configured correctly to view Mastodon content.
Wow! That’s kinda insane. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anyone do that. Perhaps it’s just invisible to outsiders, because it’s that seamlessly integrated?
You would still be able to see if someone commented from a Mastodon instance. Their username would say something like @username@mastodon.social.
Those are all pros for Musk, he’s an ego maniac and wants all that power to be able to manipulate and control people.
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