Elon Musk’s X is now worth less than a quarter of its $44 billion purchase price
Fidelity has cut its estimate of X's value by 79% since Musk's purchase | TechCrunch
"Fidelity is currently valuing X at about $9.4 billion"
I found this funny.
And yet, he's still one of the what, 5 richest people on the planet?
He doesn't give a shit, and neither should you (as nice as the schadenfreude might feel). He got something worth more to him than plain old money - an established propaganda platform, which he is using as he intended - to war monger and otherwise interfere in politics to ensure fascism progresses as fast as he can help it. The "dent" (more like a surface scratch) it put in his finances is completely invisible and irrelevant to him.
And it should be to you, too.
He is NEVER going to end up without means or power, not even fucking close, unless we take them from him, and abolish the system that encouraged and enabled him to amass them in the first place.
What is completely wild to me is that there are only 4 main apps: Reddit, twitter, instagram, and Facebook. Almost every public conversation happens on one of those platforms. And of those four platforms, one of them was bought by one singular person. Some people just don’t get the absolute scale of how much one person can just buy of our communities.
Like it or not, there are businesses on Twitter. Celebrities are easy to reach and talk to. Even companies use Twitter for support. News outlets post there. It’s a whole community. Was it a bit toxic? Yeah. But it wouldn’t have mattered. One guy bought it.
Similar to what you said, if you were to run the numbers on this I’m pretty sure owning twitter to Elon is not much different than owning a cable subscription to your average family. A whole community of tens of millions of people bought by one person and its success doesn’t matter. Capitalism is broken. And if you think that’s bad, imagine how he can affect your government when a Supreme Court justice goes for a small small fraction of the price..
Edit: I did the math and it turns out that twitter has lost so much money that this is no longer a cable subscription. It’s about a 6% yearly loss to Elons net worth, dependent on his current stock values. Which means it’s not cable, but about the cost the average person spends on food in a year ($10,000 yearly cost to a 200k net worth). Still insane.
Well said, after losing access to twitter it's really hard to get information on game companies for example, since they don't have their own blog for you to RSS and get information about the newest game updates and what not, and they only post on youtube if they have a new trailer.
The average family's cable subscription doesn't cost 20% of their net worth.
A cable subscription isn't a depreciating asset, though.
Yeah a lot of people miss the fact that the play for Twitter was never about money, but control. Owning one of the most popular social medias makes it easy to spread propaganda and amplify your voice.
And I'll never own a house, yay
Thanks, that's one race I definitely don't keep up to date on. All billionaires need to cease to exist.
Not only that, but the folks who helped bankroll him saw what social media could do to organize protests and evade censorship and wanted to reduce its power. The Saudis saw the Arab Spring and shit their collective thobe.
PayPal and Tesla and SpaceX been pretty big successes. But Twitter is a real fuckup for him. It shows that his judgment and temperament and perfect boy genius mystique have all jumped the shark in a big way.
But Twitter is a real fuckup for him
Except it clearly fucking isn't, it's doing exactly what he bought it for, including convincing people like you to feel sympathy for him and his "loss", which is equal parts hilarious and really fucking sad. You're looking at his life from the point of view of a poor person, something he never was and never will be, yet he's still so easily manipulated you in to feeling bad for him (and the billions he's lost, leaving him... still the motherfucking richest person on the planet), and even fucking (think you) relate to him and the idea that he can "fail" just like you can, using you as a living breathing mouthpiece to make his life easier. Not yours.
perfect boy genius mystique
I just threw up a little in my mouth, thanks.
Musk did not buy this as an investment. He bought it to flip elections and manipulate public opinion.
Tesla is writing him a check that will cover the entire purchase price, and Saudi Arabia and Russia will pay the operating costs.
Active users are what matters; if they lost 75% of their users then I'm paying attention.
Aren't 75% of the users Russian bots? Lol
I think you're giving the guy too much credit. Sometimes things are as they seen. He just didn't like the moderation scheme on Twitter, made a gesture buying it, fumbled a little bit and overbid, then after having been forced to acquire it tried to turn it into something closer to what he wanted it to be.
I think it’s even pettier than that. He’s the loud guy on the forum who literally bought the site so he could be admin.
Honestly, everyone needs to listen to the episode of Search Engine about Elon. It’s such a clear narrative of what happened between the Iron Man cameo and now. It’s pure hubris - someone who is very unlikable desperately hungry for love to the point where his brain bust a fuse.
We'll never know since Musk is nurturing a state-funded "user"-base that will always keep their numbers inflated
If he's trying to flip elections, he needs to at least pretend it's being operated in good faith.
I agree 100%. Liberals retweeting how Elon is losing money is actually making him money
Elon Musk's greatest personal achievement has been his tireless work and incredible effort toward disproving the myth of Billionaire Exceptionalism.
Couldn't have happened to a douchier bag.
The funny part was when he said he was a free speech absolutist, but then he started restricting the free speech of people he doesn't like
Oh, and you've never been a total and complete hypocrite with global consequences before?
I actually check Twitter from time to time and it is slowly dying. Ken Klippenstein was one of the accounts I was following and now he's gone too.
The hypocrisy!
We knew this was going to happen before he made the purchase.
Everyone said, the best way for Elon to keep his money was to change very little, or even take a hands-off approach.
Masnick suggested this would happen
It was that and so much worse. Moral of the story: Running a huge social media service is hard. Maybe don't assume that because you're a billionaire you're the best at doing stuff.
Meanwhile he is on track to become the world's first trillionaire
I think the purchase was more about welding power than any financial gain
He tried to back out, I don't think any of this was about anything. He's just a dick with a weird sense of humor.
First step to becoming a billionaire: start with 1 trillion
Hasn't his wealth kinda flatlined lately though? X is doing terribly, Tesla is struggling a bit, I think SpaceX is at least doing well.
I don't think he's going to be a trillionaire any time soon.
Now, call me crazy, but if I was optimizing for maximum welding power, I'd start with oxy acetylene and at least try a few other options. How would buying a website even be a good start?
No wonder people are making fun of him!
Would you not agree that he has a tool of influence with X? I see that as the main aspect of why you'd still buy twitter, even though he knew he wouldn't earn money with that.
I mean the people at Twitter were very happy to sell it off. Remember how they actually sued to force him to go through with the deal and succeeded in stopping him from backing out?
Even if he’d managed it as well as the prior stewards, it was always a losing business.
If the price offered is actually a good price then I think they might have some obligation to shareholders to pursue it. (Many of the people making that decision likely also being shareholders.) Like if someone offered you more than what your stuff is worth but tried to changed their mind, wouldn't you pursue that? I don't think that's any sort of indicator that they thought it was a sinking ship. It's just in their best interest to take a good deal when they get one.
"Maybe don't assume that because you're a billionaire you're the best at doing stuff."
This is literally every second generation billionaire. They seem to have the tendency to believe that their success is solely due to their intelligence and not at all due to their parents' connections and money.
Masnick's post is well put, but also a disturbing reminder of how much power nation-states can exert over the Internet.
I mean, yeah we all knew he overpaid, but losing over 75%? I didn't expect that.
Masnick gives 20 levels of development. Elon stopped here:
Level Two: “We’re the free speech platform! But no CSAM!”
And that's about it. Ex-Twitter has copyright infringement, hate speech and doesn't give a fuck about local laws unless the law actually has teeth (Brasil, anybody?).
and then he fires trust and safety and it gets riddled and plagued with csam
The way to make it hurt is to establish a replacement that keeps discussions away from trolls and hate propaganda.
If they influence the election to their desired outcome, then the value won't matter. The damage will have been done.
Is elon a Trump fan?
Yes, he gets a raging fascist boner every time someone fails to assassinate Trump because he thinks it's the cue to go full Nazi but really he just keeps jumping the gun and making it far too obvious deeply part of Trump's ongoing fascist takeover schemes and really not the guy we should have any significant government contracts with
Uhm... Yes. Like a lot.
Yes, trump has also offered him a spot on his cabinet
I just checked and it's worth nothing to anyone important.
its worth comes from being able to influence world politics. Does he seem like someone who cares or needs money?
True, but that power is also diminished greatly as more and more regular users abandon the site. No eyes on the propaganda makes it worth a lot less.
Yeah I’m sure I’m not the norm but I’m actually shocked when I see companies advertising their talent’s twitter accounts on tv broadcasts. I truly can’t believe that site is still mainstream after everything that’s happened.
Idk then I look over and see trump as a presidential candidate and ugh… I guess I’m just still not comfortable/accepting of how far off the rails things have gone 🙁
He didn't bilk Tesla shareholders into his huge pay package because he doesn't care about money.
Does he seem like someone who cares or needs money?
He got a massive load to buy Twitter, so yeah, he does.
Elon is a genius at losing money.
No wonder he is starting to get along so well with Trump
Like his buddy Trump!
that's why he is the richest person in the world with 270B net worth.
look, i hate the asshole as much as the other guy, but changing meaning of words and underestimating the enemy never helped anyone.
Didn't he pay too much for it in the first place?
Yea. He made a baseless offer before investigating. And the. Got called on it.
paying too much is when you buy a ubisoft game. what he did is officially the worst deal since the financial crisis.
It is amazing how some people can fail upward
Musk is and always has been an incompetent yet lucky scammer.
Twitter will be bankrupt within two years.
!Remindme 2 Years
Ho wait it's not working here
How to become a billionaire: Start with 54 billion
Posts about value are ads. Stop give exposure to this guy or his companies
And may it continue to crash and burn. It’s just 4 chan at this point.
It’s like 4chan but it didn’t know where the line was for the amount of right wing people to be on a social media and ran a marathon
4chan at least had a consistent brand of being the anti-social network and being full of Nazis, weirdos, pedophiles and people who are just anti-social for the lulz. You couldn't ruin 4chan.
Twitter's image was being the "internet town-square for serious thinkers" with politicians, scientists, journalists and a small but good measure of standard shitposters. Loosing that brand diminishes it's value massively. Unfortunately neither Bluesky nor Mastodon was able to catch that clientele yet.
May it sink even lower
My first thought is 'I can't wait for it to turn zero' but then I realize that 79% decline from 44 billion still means it is worth 9.24 billion.
And that is still a shitload of money.
But on the plus side, this idiot is 34.76 billion poorer
I doubt anybody would buy it for a tenth, tbh.
I'm confident you could unload the property for $4B easily enough. That's somewhere in the neighborhood of $10-100/unique user amortized out over the life of the loan, which would be a steal via any other advertising medium.
Twitter still has real value. Hundreds of millions of people still use it, even in its deplorable state. And under new management, I'm confident people would flood back in.
Something tells me its value is not monetary for Musk.
While probably true, this still probably gets him all wound up.
I remember thinking twitter was bad before he took over
It's now a complete shadow of what it was even just a couple of years ago. Just a quarter of its value seems generous
Twitter was useful.
X is just useful idiots at this point.
I wish, I wish... I wish I was a fish.
I wish there was an instrument other than the stock market whereby private individuals could combine their funds to perform hostile take-overs, and then manage them by pre-agreed conditions.
Like: we're going to buy Twitter, build an AP interface on it, federate it, and operate it like a non-profit. We're going to have a set of these S core values, with yearly votes on changes proportional to investment. No single investor can own more than T percent of shares Investors can sell their shares, or buy shares. Stock will never spilt. Management salaries, combined, can never exceed more than M% of non-management combined salaries, and run it as a Holocracy. Or, maybe, shares can only be sold to employees, who have to sell to other employees when they leave.
You know; try to design a good operating model that avoids the pitfalls of other companies, and can adapt when the model demonstrates perverse incentives. Put more thought into it than my ramblings above.
But ten billion dollars is a lot of money to put together, and the rules I'd like to see necessarily exclude the sort of profit-only driven capitalists who'd be able to contribute heavy loads, and would limit the amount that could contribute.
I may as well wish I were a fish.
I like your idea. But you'll have to settle for being a fish.
Good news. Paraphyletic groups are bullshit that shouldn't exist and if we get rid of them, then you actually are a fish.
same as my GameStop shares
That's a good start, now keep going
Impressive. I could not have done that.
It was never worth 44 billion USD
False, because someone paid that much for Twitter.
It was worth 44bn to it's former owners.
If he succeeds in using it as a propaganda platform to force the US into a fascist dictatorship, he will have gotten his money's worth.
he himself is worth less than that at least morally
He is a net loss for humanity is the currency is moralistic.
We be deep in the red between Trump, Bezos, this clown and many other "captains of industry".
Idk, he popularized electric cars, it has to count for something. But yes, net loss.
A real socialist! Took money from the rich to give it to the poor (minded). /s
They should tweet that
But then , they'll get banned 😛
Isn’t Musk all for free speech ?
Absolutely! He simply has a very original take on "freedom", but we all know that's a tricky word to pin down, so don't think about it too much, and leave it to the big dogs to tell you when your freedom is being protected.
"Free speech for me, but not for thee" lol
If I remember correctly the evaluation of Xitter has been around $9 Billion for years so they're basically saying it tanked only a little if you adjust for inflation.
The value of Twitter when he bought it was $44 billion. We know this because his dumb ass bought it for $44 billion.
Regardless of what a sane person would pay for it, that was the value to him and so if the next highest valuation is $9b he lost $35b of value by overpaying.
You do raise a good point though. Twitter used to be valued at $9b when its value was speculative and the company was growing, now that we know it's shit and getting worse it's almost certainly worth less than that too.
I guess my point is that it isn't worth an article in mid 2024 because it really only repeats what has been said a million times a about the subject. Even before it was bought. No one else would've paid much more than $9 Billion at any point because it is legitimately insane.
Twitter has worth?
It has worth. It doesn't have value.
Tesla is next. I'm not sure even he can fuck up SpaceX but I'm sure he'll give it the ol' college try.
If that $22B prevents another Arab Spring it's probably worth it to him.
Brutal murderer Mohammed bin Salman
Still this much? Damn dude cooled off
%79 so far
Wow. That is brutal.
I don't have the whole context so I might be missing some things, but the whole thing looks to me like "look at how much money I have to burn and how much I don't care".
He didn't even want to buy Twitter, just manipulate the stock price by talking about buying it. Dumbass signed too much paperwork and waived too many rights, though, and found himself obligated to buy it anyway. Pretty sure he tried to fight it and lost.
So now he's trying to not burn all his money, but he's fucking terrible at it, so he's just becoming a laughing stock.
Except a lot of the investor capital wasn't his lol
Ouch.
As long as it’s still in operation and people view it as a valid platform, its numerical value is irrelevant. I won’t be happy until it goes away or is relegated to the likes of Truth Social.
I used to enjoy how they always use dumb photos of Leon in these articles. Now I just hate seeing his face.
So basically it is more what twitter was really worth anyway
Keep digging, "Leon".
Twitting little twat waffle tears down trust.
Honestly terrifying that they still think it is worth that much.
they still own the twitter trademark, that might be their biggest asset
Since they don't seem to care about it, start using "tweet" for every social media post to devalue them further.
Which has been crashed and burned to a fraction of its value.
If someone were to buy it, ban the Nazis and get advertisers to come back it's still salvageable, I guess. The longer Musk owns it, the bigger the chance is that it'll become the next MySpace.
At least the MySpace guy was able to run a fun site, cash out before social media became crazy, and spend the rest of his life having fun with that money.
Trump will lose, and Musk will be holding on to a useless site that serves nothing. He'll probably sell for a fraction of what he paid (not that it was his money in the first place), but by that point it'll be too late. Twitter will be long dead.
I think MySpace is a more likely scenario that the former already.
I wouldn't be surprised if part of this remaining value is because the Japanese internet still heavily relies on it as a platform, even if the west has begun moving elsewhere.
I was going to say that they could have stopped the headline at "quarter" as far as I'm concerned.
This is the stock market, the value is set by what investors think the value could be. Mostly, they're probably assuming people would come back if he sold it. Literally everyone knows the name Twitter.
This actually isn't the stock market, Twitter isn't publicly traded since being bought.
I understand the basics. I still find it difficult to grasp why it is worth 9 billion.