Twitter has dropped in value almost 80% since Musk bought it. Twitter is this weird zombie unicorn which keeps attracting money while mostly losing money on net. I don't think its useful to use it as an example.
I'm very surprised people are really taking advice from freaking Twitter for how to handle a silicon hardware company. Also the lack of empathy for fellow developers, but that's a sadly rising sentiment. Crabs in a bucket.
The only reason Twitter isn't a dead husk is because network effects are really damn strong. That's it. The attrition to Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever won't be as drastic as the Myspace days when single percentages of the current internet populace were connected.
You don't get network effects with hardware, especially since most people these days buy laptops and won't bother to specify an intel chip (if available at all).
Dropped in projected value as a company irrespective of the stock which you can't buy now because its private per individuals with large stakes.
Their financials tanked as advertisers fled the platform or reduced spend drastically. It's now basically a money pit that at present trajectory will continue to burn money until Elon's other ventures can't afford it. Given his wealth he can keep losing a billion or two a year forever even if people stop buying his overpriced poorly built cars.
I predict however that eventually it looks less interesting and they try a rebrand as twitter with 90% less Elon for 2x the advertising dollars (for real this time) and borrow as much money and assets as possible and eventually exit.
advertisers are free to join the platform back. Could it be that allowing people to publish 200 word texts just isn't that great of a business? Also, I can't help but notice the similarities in the arguments about censorship ("It's their platform their rules"), then when the wrong person buys the platform, suddenly that argument gets put to rest.
Why would they when bots are up, engagement with valuable users down, and your ad could play opposite nazi shit.
Censorship is when the government won't let you publish something. It's not when Twitter doesn't let you post something, it's not when your post isn't shared, it isn't when Pepsi won't pay you to run ads, and it's not when users stop engaging.
All of these things are things people are morally entitled to do.
Elon is the wrong person because he's ruining it and because he's doing so in service not to a different tax or economic policy but in service to evil.
I maintain that no owner of twitter really understood what they had, either before or after Musk. Twitter was really good at news if you knew who to follow and you had direct access to a lot of experts in various fields. They had to put an enormous amount of effort into dealing with misinformation, but couldn’t figure out the balance between that and mass market appeal. The result is that they financially treaded water.
Musk thought that what people wanted was raw unfiltered “free speech”, but he thought his kinds of views were restricted. The result was when he got control, the guardrails were mostly removed and a lot of users recoiled, and advertisers left due to the desirable users targets disappearing as well as having their ads shown next to questionable content. Then he contradicted himself by blocking accounts that hit his ego.
I’m a geopolitical nerd and loved twitter, but finally gave up on it when I started getting fake news as well as promoted tweets by musk himself, whom I didn’t give a shit about his at best bizarre opinions. The blocking of third party clients meant that I couldn’t even filter client-side anymore (RIP Tweetbot).
