No X shareholder in their right mind will object to getting a $45 billion valuation (including debt) when their latest valuations have the company at <$10 billion.
I don't think there are that many of them, and I think most of them are very much under the "Musk" spell. This would be the party to sue to block this deal, and it seems unlikely that they will.
Twitter still has a lot of users and if they stopped being used by offensive at times racist and awful, then Twitter could get more users, sell advertising and make money probably. Now that's all gone because Twitter could investors need w own a small piece of the giant over inflated Xai, which has value because of AI hype but it's future actual value is questionable. There are so many other AI companies, so what is it that xai can do that justifies an $80 billion valuation?
> if they stopped being used by offensive at times racist and awful, then Twitter could get more users, sell advertising and make money probably.
That's a big if, and I think most people would be pretty skeptical of the possibility of that happening. The fact that outside investors seem to value it at under $10B suggests that's a common enough opinion.
To me, "make money" only implies financial sustainability. Do you take it to mean unicorn levels of cash?
I had an employer taken over by PE and shredded, for the crime of only managing 10% profit margin. Apparently, to some, if 20% of revenue doesn't go into someone's pocket, your business is a corpse. I think the world needs to chuck that attitude in the bin.
Opportunity cost is what the business can earn by investing in something else, usually something less risky than what the business is doing. If the business cannot earn more than the opportunity cost, it's a losing investment.
Businesses often use an opportunity cost of around 14%, so if the business is earning only 10%, then they are losing 4%.
For example, if you start a risky venture that earns 2%, when you could invest the money safely in bonds at 5%, it doesn't make sense to do the risky venture.
It's not an "attitude", it's maximizing the use of the money.
This thinking by American business is why tariffs will never bring back whole sectors of manufacturing to US shores. It's not business American companies want to get involved with.
'if you start a ̶r̶i̶s̶k̶y̶ venture that earns 2%, when you could invest the money safely in bonds at 5%'
The US invented flat screen technology. The return on manufacturing didn't fit American business profit levels so they sold the technology off to overseas companies. Tariff's aren't going to fix that. They might artificially boost the return short term, but unless we are going permanent protected markets this sort of low return manufacturing isn't coming back, because of American management style, not 'Canada bad', not 'trade deals bad'. If anything a better cause statement would be to say 'American MBAs bad'.
The discussion way back when they interviewed executives about LCD patents/research being sold of was that they were just too low of a profit margin to bother pursuing. I believe it was a 60 Minutes piece but it may have been a nightly news piece at the time.
If business costs are lower offshore, that raises the profit margin for the busines to go there. It doesn't mean that offshore businesses accept lower margins.
Understood. But what you have described is an attitude. Another possible attitude is being happy to lose money, hand over fist. Somewhere in between, there used to be a multi-billion company that made a piffling 10% margin on revenue.
You need some diversity in a system to remain able to change. Very homogenous populations are more likely to be wiped out in a crisis. Maximal efficiency is not maximal meta-efficiency.
Well: with the exception of Q1 2020 they were profitable from 2017 until Musk bought the company. Their last year was lower due to a lawsuit settlement but they were making significant profits until his acquisition added huge debt service obligations and tanked revenue.
Yes, like a lot of tech companies they weren’t focused on profits until their CEO prioritized it over growth but from that point on they were profitable from 2018 on, with the aforementioned bad quarter when everyone cut spending at the start of the pandemic. The one-time deferred lawsuit payout in 2021 masked what otherwise would have been several hundreds of millions in profit.
The problem people had understanding them was that they weren’t Facebook or Google. The expectations of a money-printing machine were unrealistic but they had a solid middle-tier business with a large number of solid customers.
Actually I think that's a great observation! I hadn't thought of that one. But Facebook, open AI, Google, Microsoft have even more money than musk and I'm sure they wont allow that.
X is now state-sponsored media, not social media. it provides political echochamber for some portion of the population and nothing more than that any longer
the one way you can look at $45bn is ability to buy election(s). as long as there are enough sheep orbiting that platform the value is there - in buying election(s)
Anti-democrat journalists were given extensive access by Musk to internal files at Twitter and the best they could come up with is finding that the Biden campaign was sending emails with links to posts they believed were against Twitter terms of service, and Twitter employees then checked the posts, discussed internally, and usually agreed they should take those down. Some of the examples of tweets taken down by this process by the anti-Biden journalist were investigated by others and found to be pictures of Biden's son naked from his laptop. And the Trump presidency was also sending similar reports doing with the same results.
So the worse that Musk's personally selected journalists could find was a special process that political figures from both parties had where their abuse reports were getting prioritized.
It was a fair bit more than that. From the left-leaning guardian
> The most worrying issue the Twitter Files have exposed is the level of contact between the social media company and state security organisations. The FBI regularly holds meetings with Twitter executives, pressuring them to take action against “misinformation”, even when this amounted to little more than a satirical tweet, and demanding the personal data of users.
Take note of the "pressuring", in line with what was reported by Zuck.
I’d recommend reading the source claim. Those “FBI meetings” were an email asking if Twitter would reconsider allowing their commercial data provider to access the bulk firehose feed:
wait till january of 2029 and see what zuck will say about trump. or see what he said in 2021… zuck etc will suck dick to whomever is at the helm. come 2029 he’ll re-introduce gender menu with 365 options so we can switch gender each day of the year and will proclaim that 99% of new hires will be “DEI” hires to beat Trump administration previous record of “98% DEI hires” (and rising)…
Oh, I have no doubts about that. But that's not what missinformation is, IMO. You and I have no way of knowing if what zuck said in that instance is true or not, like a million other things CEOs say. You can't "trust" them when it suits your narative, but say it's missinformation when it doesn't.
Isn't that actually the point? Megacorps like Zuck's are beholden to the government to not break them up or pass laws they don't like, so they bend the knee whenever it's users or free speech taking the hit. Evidence of this not happening would be a non-corrupt government that breaks up the companies or repeals the laws that prop up their market dominance instead of every administration taking them up on the quid pro quo.
To prevent this you need social media to not have central gatekeepers in a position to censor things to begin with.
which is only possible with platforms like bluesky/mastodon/… which are decentralized but of course they have their own issues… I deleted all my social media accounts once I realized that nothing good can come from it and it is one of the roots of current insanity that is our society (especially USA but it is spreading…)
Well, I would have suggested that you put your money where your mouth is and buy out Fidelity et al, but it looks like you're off the hook for that statement.
However, secondary markets for these megacorps are relatively liquid, so the valuations are not actually completely baseless.
