Musk Romney

[bigtree]

(self-obliging re-post from a month ago)

...many people are asking themselves today why Musk buys a faltering company for $44b, and nonsensically works overtime to attract people intent on disrupting and tearing the place down. But this is a classic 'corporate raider' tactic, for someone looking to flip an asset, gutting it and selling it for parts.

What if Musk's intention, and all of the money he's pumping into the venture, is to take Twitter down? It's not as if Musk isn't already exhibiting all of the symptoms of a foreign agent bent on establishing disruption and chaos in our nation's discourse.

That's been the republican model for decades, to invest billions of dollars a year into tearing down the very govt. they intend to control. To make govt. smaller, less effective, except for their moneyed interests in defense and other corporate ventures. It's a party of hack businessmen.

The alternative to accepting that the demise of Twitter is deliberate is that Musk is really just that, a hack businessman who somehow managed to fall upward, and doesn't seem to know how to get out of the way of his own ineptitude and absolute cluelessness or indifference about what his customers actually want or need.

[C_U_L8R]

1. A rich dictatorship would gladly pay

to scuttle Twitter and squash any notions of freedom in their citizenry. Saud got a bargain.

[niyad]

2. KNR

[bucolic_frolic]

3. Vulture capitalism is never addressed by our laws

It's just wanton free enterprise, survival-of-the-fittest, cutthroat capitalism, libertarian exercising his private property rights.

[Beakybird]

4. I think that he arrogantly thought he could run Twitter better.

I don't think Musk would want to throw billions of dollars in the trash. He's just an idiot, and I think he's going to cause incalculable harm to Tesla as well.
But your right to the harm the destruction of Twitter does to democracy.

[PatSeg]

6. I agree

When he initially offered $44 billion to buy Twitter, it was an impulsive move and later he wanted to back out of the deal. Now he is just being reckless and destructive. I don't think there ever was any plan, he is just like a spoiled child who wants what he wants and then throws a tantrum when things don't go his way.

On the other hand, Romney was a calculating corporate raider. He was destructive, but it was intentional to make money. Musk just wants to make chaos.

[Zorro]

8. I agree Musk's acquisition was impulsive

but I think he had a vision of using Twitter as a platform to experiment using AI to moderate and adjudicate content. He wanted to get from A to Z, but neglected to consider all the steps in between to get to his end goal.

[PatSeg]

16. That could be,

though I don't think he had really formulated a cogent plan before making the deal. Maybe flying into space went to his head because he seems to believe he can do anything without a real plan. He'll just coast on his "genius" I guess.

[bigtree]

9. chaos is a commodity

...information warfare has been a priority for autocracies and allies alike for decades.

Billions and billions are invested each year by people looking to influence debate or opinion, without any clear return on their investment outside of the political disruption they generate with disinformation.

ANY of our major adversaries would consider $44b a paltry sum to disrupt such an influential means of social discourse in this country, or divide off those influences which threaten their moneyed interests from promoting their views to the large twitter readership.

[PatSeg]

17. That is true,

I just don't understand what Musk gets out of the chaos. From most people's perspectives, he is on top of the world. What does he gain from this? What can foreign adversaries offer him that he doesn't already have?

[FalloutShelter]

5. How do you take agency away from oppressed masses?

Destroy their ability to get their stories and reporting out to the world.
How do we know about what is happening in Iran?
Ukraine? Egypt? … the list goes on.
Here in the US - keeping tabs on bad actors and getting the news out.

How is Musk not operating as an agent of chaos on behalf of global oligarchs and despots by shutting down an avenue for dissent?

He is crashing Twitter on purpose and I’d be willing to bet foreign actors are chipping in plenty of dollars to see this accomplished.

JMHO

[Voltaire2]

7. eh no, he is simply being a colossal fuck up.

Romney and Bain Capital indeed specialized in pillage and scrappage- but they did so to make a stunning amount of money.

Space Karen bought Twitter because they wouldn't let hate shitposters use the n-word, and kicked out presidents trying to overthrow the government via tweets. He way over-payed for it using a 'meme price' of 54.20 when twitter stock was worth something like 30. He then tried to back out of his own deal that twitter's board happily signed as HE VASTLY OVER-PAYED FOR IT. The corporate court in Delaware said 'nah - your deal your terms pay up'. So he bought twitter.

In buying twitter via a leveraged buyout he added 12B in debt to a company that was already losing 200m/yr. Twitter has no assets to scrap and pillage as its only asset is the twitter platform, so Electric Trump had a HUGE PROBLEM: he needs twitter to suddenly come up with 1B yr in debt service, and since it is running at -200m/yr profit, that is 1.2B/yr just to stay solvent. So the only thing he can scrap and pillage to increase profits are employees. This alone is not unusual in a leveraged buyout, layoffs almost always happen because of the increased debt. However this is where everything went south.

Musk walked in with attitude (widely circulated picture of Musk carrying a sink into twitter.) He made it clear that most of the employees were idiots compared to him, that they were all lazy slackers who didn't know how to do things right, and that with just a few new features Space Karen thought up all by himself, twitter, the new lean hard core twitter, would be reborn as twitter 2.0. And then, despite being warned it would be a disaster, he forced the roll out of his paid 'verification' idiocy that allowed anyone with $8 to pose as any human on the planet (including Electric Trump himself of course), and it was a stunning disaster.

Twitter's revenue doesn't come from subscriptions, it comes from advertisers. Those advertisers were on the fence after the takeover. They fled in droves after the blue check fiasco.

And then things got worse. He laid off half the staff. He laid off 80% of the contractors. He forced everyone to return to office, including people who physically cannot RTO, who turned right around and sued him. He violated labor regulations in multiple countries and in the state of california and twitter will likely face legal consequences from that. He had to try to rehire some of the recently fired people, as of course his executive team, all outsidedrs, had no clue who was essential and who wasn't.

He started publicly shitposting on twitter about how bad twitter software was, had a twitter engineer point out that he was wrong about how the software worked, and promptly fired that engineer. So much for 'free speech absolutism'. Then he had his staff search the internal slack logs and fire anyone who said anything bad about Musk there. Space Karen has a very fragile ego.

And then things got worse. He gave the remaining staff an ultimatum that they had to agree in writing to work '24/7' at the office or get sacked, and that they would all be continuously evaluated and only the 'A+' workers would not get fired. Apparently 75% of the remaining staff said 'no thanks we will take your severance package instead' and quit. The mass exodus caused a panic at twitter HQ and they immediately closed all the buildings.

This is not some 4D chess game. This is a person in way over his head who can't swim and doesn't even realize he is drowning.

[bigtree]

11. it's not that hard to tank a company

...and making money doesn't look to be the impetus behind all of this.

I don't buy that Musk is just some buffoon who got in over his head. I'm more of the mind that he's been put up to this, with whatever coersion or influence moved him, from people whose interest is in dismantling twitter, discrediting and muddling its influence.

There's really no reason to suppose Musk would care a whit about throwing a fraction of his wealth into the cynical enterprise.

[Voltaire2]

12. he is going to lose something like 30B of his own money.

That is a lot of money. It's somewhere around 20-30% of his wealth on paper, and as this is entangled with his TESLA stock, that paper wealth could also take a hit.

He wanted twitter to be a rightwing platform for his new rightwing buddies. Parlor and Gab and Truth are all failures. Twitter was where everyone went for 'what is happening right now' and to push their talking points about it. That was actually seriously dangerous. Instead he has accidentally cratered the platform. You are overthinking this. He's a fucking idiot.

[bigtree]

13. he has over a couple hundred billion more, and will make that up elsewhere

...billionaires who invest in politics don't make a zero-sum calculations about how their investment will be returned.

Investments are sometimes made by gazillionaires and their friends to neutralize foes, with less concern about immediate or clear profits. It's a game to them. It looks like a waste to everyone else, but it's like paying cash for a Lamborghini to them.

[Voltaire2]

15. It's 15% of his net worth.

And as almost all of that is tied up in TESLA, it is difficult and expensive for him to convert that to cash.

But sure, he blew 30B to kill the platform that put Trump into the white house. That totally makes sense.

[bigtree]

18. he's down to his last $205.9 billion

On October 28, 2022, after much speculation, he purchased social media platform for $44 billion. According to Bloomberg, he not only overpaid for the company but lost $10 billion in the process. Forbes’s real-time billionaires list shows a larger drop, bringing the richest man in the world’s net worth down to $205.9 billion.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/much-elon-musk-worth-buying-170631007.html

[moonscape]

10. Not just our national discourse, but take

down a vital global square, and with it all the evidence of corruption, Burn the receipts. China and Saudi Arabia have not been bystanders.

[brush]

14. IIRC Romney made money on his corporate raids/acquisitions.

It looks like the alternate about Musk is the real story...inadequate or poor due diligence.