By 44 billion dollars?? I don’t think people quite yet comprehend what a stupid purchase Twitter was. It’s replaceable. The market is getting redundant. And your risks are way too high with your biggest customers leaving and not being able to be replaced. If Woj left for instance, that’s a big driver of business that cannot be replaced by let’s say Rich Bucher. There’s only one Woj or Shams… which I guess is two but still you get the point. Twitter’s assets are the big names who drop news you can get in real time. That’s why people who don’t care about the news or sports news generally are not on Twitter. Which is why not that many people are on it and those who are on it because of their hobbies tend to over-inflate its value. The only reason it’s a successful news feed is because of a handful of users. Users who could leave on a dime. More than anything that’s what the advertisers are signally concern for. The real story though is what’s happening at Tesla… holy crap.
Good take. Twitter is only used for news and sports? Que? Do you even use Twitter? If anything twitter is vastly underused due to mediocre leadership. What's the scoop on Tesla. I must have missed it
It's a bit difficult to have this conversation with someone who apparently doesn't understand the difference between operating cost and valuation.
Twitter's money making revenue mostly comes from the fact that people in power use Twitter to get the news. The content that attracts the pundits, polticians, billionaires, media celebs, celebrity "journalists" to retweet a story is what gives Twitter the most money. That type of content has a specific type of "ad friendly content".
I don’t tweet myself, but I check it a few times a day for news updates and mostly sports updates since political news is much more real time given how good the big outlets are like WaPo, NYT, and local NBC/ABC, etc. So I’m basically their ideal daily user. Woj really imo is a huge lynchpin to watch. All of the “people” that actually post on Twitter constantly are people like that Will guy for the Rockets who cracked the algorithm to insert himself onto Rockets fans timelines who were looking for tweets from Clutch, Bima, and Feigan, but instead get blasted with 20 new tweets about how KPJ should top 5 in MVP runnings. That’s basically what Twitter is now to an extent. It’s the same with political news. People want news drops from David Wasserman on election calls and end up getting 30 tweets from some guy who just posts “Breaking!! Like this tweet if you want to see Trump in jail!!” So my opinion is people are there for Woj, or Clutch, or their equivalent in other infotainment industries, but have to sift through basically bots which are often real people making a career out of acting like a bot. So if just a handful of Woj’s left, the business is basically toast. Tesla on the other hand.. their stock has basically tanked. It was over inflated for sure beforehand but it’s a historic drop.
I don't use it for only news. I have an account where I have 0 followers (I'm not a content creator and purposefully don't want any followers). I use it to follow local emergency depts, local PD, local schools, experts (from medicine to photography), local businesses, and reputable news sources. I think it's hard to replace twitter because of these gov-social-local connections that provide fast useful instant communications. FWIW, I have a FB account (way before any of you probably) for a similar purpose. FB is so bloated I haven't touched it for years. I had high hope for Twitter when Musk announced he was buying it. Turns out, he is a loud abrasive idiot - I hope he assigns a CEO and goes away from running Twitter in such a public dumb way.
It’s even more difficult to have a conversation with someone who spreads QAnon conspiracy theories. No I’m not a CEO like you but yes I do understand the difference jackass. It’s called making a point. And you could certainly make a case that any investors looking to buy any company would certainly be calculating personnel infrastructure, and workforce reputation/Glassdoor etc. So yeah an operations and HR nightmare actually does ultimately impact valuation based on everything I’ve witness in that process. Now my experience is at the manager/director level mostly with equity investors, but do have some experience being part of my last company getting bought by a C-Corp. Yes they paid a huge amount of attention to Glassdoor and actually used our great reputation to justify in their final presentations some of the financial risks. Again I’m not a big shot CEO like you of course but yeah I do know a couple things here and there about valuation and operating costs.
I do love the recent developments of ATW being a a CEO. His 10 years of pondering about Muslim immigrants on a NBA team message board gives him the relevant experience.
Tesla's glassdoor ratings and reports of Musk being a tyrant didn't stop Tesla from becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Yeah you are right that like you I do use it for those updates as well with local stuff. I like my weather guy here a lot and our school district alerts etc. Still it’s still becoming more clear how little it’s used as a “public town square” and mostly for people like you and me who don’t post but get a collection of news and updates we need. Unclear how replaceable it is to get the random collection all in one place. The issue is fragmentation of those alerts if Twitter went away. I’d have to be getting alerts from the ESPN app, alerts from Nextdoor on local school stuff, etc etc. Twitter is consolidated nicely I must add. It does however have that bot problem which makes getting those alerts more taxing than it should be.
I can’t get my president to sign off on a 500k contract on business I just won this month but apparently this one here can type 500 posts an hour about how Paul Pelosi is secretly a gay sex club provocateur who is into some kinky hammer to the head foreplay. Get me that CEO gig please! speaking of real work, I’ve wasted enough time this morning on CF so it’s time to go fill out some TPS reports myself. Man I wish I was a CEO so I could stay here all day and tackle more Elon Musk topics and crack more Qanon theories.
I think Elon alone proves how little time investment is required in being a CEO. Dude is CEO of like 5 massive companies and has time to ponder about whether Paul Pelosi is gay. These time management skills of these CEOs is impressive.
I think advertisers only care about two things about a platform, 1. engagement/ROI on their ad placements 2. Content that appear with their ads The first one is probably what is driving advertisers away from Twitter because for whatever reason, engagement is down and they are not getting their money's worth. The second point is more subjective, but it just doesn't make much sense for a company to risk brand image when a website they advertise on has polarizing content that can piss people off. Youtube was the first to do a heavy handed approach with pulling advertising abilities on all contents they deemed controversial because they were losing ad revenue. If Twitter didn't make money from ads before, they sure as hell won't be making money now if moderation is loosening. The reality is that advertisers wants to place ads on the most vanilla pg13 content as possible. So it's really up to Elon to balance "free speech" with ad revenue. Really can't have both imo. Reddit, Youtube have all kow towed to their advertisers by moderating contents. On Youtube for example, the contents that gets the most ad placements are like, DIY Hobbies, Vlogs, Sports, Music videos, Cooking etc. Any content that has to do with anything controversial or political are demonetized.
I was a supporter of Musk and invested in Tesla 10 years ago. I still think Musk is a genius and I still support some of his ideas especially getting to Mars. That doesn't mean he's infalliable. Intelligence and ability isn't always evenly distributed. Ego also can get in the way of ability and we've seen many otherwise successful people sabotage themselves because of their own ego.
I always wonder how much ads are placed on twitter vs the other social media giants like FB/IG/Youtube. Twitter almost has an monoply on "tweets" from verified celebrities, and news sources. No other platform really offer the same thing. But it seems like advertisers spend way more money on the other platforms.
It's easier to monetize on other platforms because users tell platforms like IG, Facebook, TikTok, what you are interested in. You watch videos and pictures about decorating, you get furniture ads etc. Twitter is all over the place.
We all know about brand safety issues. We suspected the mass layoff that seems indiscriminate to functions would impact support and that article confirmed support team just disappear. The engagement performance is interesting - someone who knows how ads are targeted might understand the drop. There is a blindness among some that think it's just going okay, that the media is portraying this too negatively. There is a master plan. Perhaps some of that, but Musk's style has done much damage to Twitter. I never imagine he would be this adhoc and crazy about running a business. My opinion of him as a great businessman has gone way down. It's shocking to witness.
