Look at the sheer scale and number of massive, malicious mistakes that one of our billionaires makes, while having ZERO impact on their tangible quality of life or lifestyle. None. Their ego score goes down and nothing else changes. The people they laid off suffer, never them.
Remember that when some pro-market capitalism class traitor nitwit inevitably tries to shame struggling people for daring to get a latte, eat Avacado toast, or get an education based on learning and growing as a person rather than solely insatiable greed.
People in the little club basically have to rape dozens of people to finally be permitted to fail, like Harvey Weinstein.
You aren’t poor because of “your bad decisions,” you’re poor because of a relatively small, insatiably greedy, powerful group of people that demand and expect almost all of the capital value your effort produces to go directly to them.
Wasn’t the Twitter buyout for a significant portion of his wealth that he like, claimed he didn’t even have?
All those people say things like “well they’re risking their wealth!” he seems to be a pretty good example of someone who “risked a lot of their wealth”, objectively fucked up and should have lost at least most of it, and has come out essentially unscathed.
If you can collosally fuck up a whole company, and your wealth doesn’t even move, what are you even risking? At all?
Another part of being a billionaire is saying you have it when it’s prudent, and saying you don’t when it’s not.
He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.
One of the neat tricks you can do when you’re wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don’t have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren’t doing great.
Obviously, since the company is private now we don’t get as much insight into financials.
I can’t figure out why BlueSky never comes out of invite-only. It would absolutely crush Twitter in this moment when there is so much demand for a direct replacement.
I wonder why revenues aren’t great. /s
He sold a few shares to get the money, besides also taking up loans and gifts from others in his billionaire club.
mush never intended for twitter to become profitable. his only real incentives here are:
a. use saudi money to help kill twitter with some plausible deniability (for legal reasons) b. try my favorite ‘business tactics’ because i have nothing to lose
he has been very successful at these intended actions
Except it also impacted his other companies because of the public perception of his competence changing drastically.
yeah, thats where he needs ‘plausible deniability’. he can say, ‘but i triiiied to make money, those damn libs canceled me’
If it were that easy to cancel a billionaire, this world would be so much better.
Machiavellian oligarchs obviously exist, but I’d have an easier time believing someone like Warren Buffet could do something like that than someone with such a proven track record of recklessness, grandiosity, and fragility of ego.
Elon is more Donald Trump than Mitch McConnell. Maybe the Saudis were smart enough to recognize that, and that his bad ideas would tank the company, but I don’t buy Elon being in on it.
He’s a fancy lad blood emerald heir who thinks he’s Nikola Tesla
I’m not buying that story. It gives him way too much credit and is simply implausible. I believe the reality is Elon has an incredible imagination, issues with executive functions, and lacks empathy. He’s not a mastermind James Bond villain and he’s not as smart as people think he is. Left to his own devices, he makes bad decisions and is easily carried away by ideas that are interesting to him at the time.
The only reason it’s still alive is because we’ve got an election in 10 months
And that Nazis could scurry out from under their rocks, moving from fringe places like truth social into a major platform. Finally they could show up in normie feeds – until the normies catch on and leave them in their filth again.
These numbers are relatively easy to explain. Elon Musk is a fucking idiot.
I’m not a finance guy but I agree with this statement.
So ordered.
whap
I’m waiting for him to get kicked out of Tesla if they still have a board, haha. His acts of removing things like Disney + and such do to political arguments is a direct impact on purchases. I don’t think streaming in the front seats should be, but investors should easily know that limiting buyers will devalue the company over time.
And ZA is waiting for Elon Musk’s return. EFF and ANC Youths gonna pelt him with protests.
28% to go!
Pretty sure a genius like Musk can make that happen! Look how well he’s done so far, and in only 1 year.
Rookie numbers! I’m sure he can push the value below zero if he just tries hard enough.
72% so far
If trump wins the election he will funnel taxpayer dollars to Elon through his other companies like space x or Tesla for a reward for destroying twitter
Do you think trump would funnel more than the 2.5 billion+ in government funding 6hat has already been handed to Tesla?
If it benefits him yes
Fair, but I’m not convinced dump has any idea what benefits him anymore except cheeseburgers and not being in jail. Same for em to be honest.
Living rent free.
Yeah, people who think about the consequences of a potential Trump presidency that has a decent chance of happening less than a year from now are just suffering from TDS, am I right?
As others have said this purchase didn’t really fuck up his overall lifestyle.
Yet when the topic of raising taxes on these people comes up they all freak out, like if they have to pay an extra 20% on their wealth they will be living on the streets.
He is set for life no matter what.
There is only one way to hurt him- to humiliate him. To hit his ego. Booing him at the Chapelle show, for instance.
All we can do is keep doing that sort of thing until Real Life Iron Man becomes Real Life Terrence Howard as War Machine and gets replaced with some other asshole billionaire that sycophants will worship instead who hopefully will be mildly less insufferable.
I can think of other ways to hurt billionaires
Not ones which don’t involve mobs with torches and pitchforks and they have well-paid, well-trained, well-armed security teams to deal with them.
I’m all for eating the rich but this fucker looks rancid.
We’d only need to eat one or two. Do it publicly, for the whole world to see. The rest would get the message and straighten right out.
No it has to be pretty thorough, the othersll just use their funds to better insulate, and change laws
The US has an addiction with simping for billionaires. In the rest of the world, only politicians oppose it ('cuz “lobbying”). Not the general public.
Buying a multi-billion dollar brand and then rebranding it has got to be in the top 10 all time most smoothbrained business decisions ever, right up there with New Coke and Blockbuster not buying Netflix.
He probably could have started his own social media site to compete with Twitter for 1/1000th of the cost and still have all the Elon poleriders hop on board. It would still be exactly as shitty as X is today, but it could have been done without destroying something somebody else built up. Not that I care, because fuck Twitter too, but if we’re looking at this from a purely strategic perspective it’s so blindingly obvious this was a bad business move.
Every Business School 101 class will use this as a case study
he fucked himself into being forced to buy twitter with his big fucking mouth.
only then did he go shopping for who would want to help pay for this mistake… hmmm geee who would want to topple a bastion of liberal communication… in walks the saudis with more money than they know what do with.
What do Saudis get from this?
Looking forward to Twitter losing the remaining 28% of value.
Social media as it’s worse.
Facebook, Instagram, X and WhatsApp, all toxic waste.
At least there are platforms like Lemmy, where people (most of the time) share knowledge in an “anonymous” environment, which is actually brilliant for passing on information to the next man, without the toxication and promotion of suicidal tendencies.
Social media in the common sence always was a cancer in our modern society.
One of the best thing I did till this day was to never have open a Facebook account. I see that as a personal merit!
Don’t worry, they made one for you. :p
It’s infuriating to see how little consequence fuck ups like this have for his personal net worth. If normal people would fuck up this badly they would be bankrupt.
But somehow if you’re super rich or doesn’t matter at all how much you screw up.
The caption of his meme standing with a sink in the building after purchase said “let that sink in” but it should have said “I’m going to sink this company”
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Ooh, that’s not bad.
Next he should destroy Meta and Amazon. The internet would become a better place.
If the company’s private, which means its stocks are not tradeable anymore, what’s the point in measuring the company value at this point?
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Meh, the Saudi’s are covering his losses, that’s the deal.
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What do the Saudis gain from this?
The end of the weapon that brought on the Arab Spring. They hate Twitter with the power of a thousand suns.
Banks who loaned Elon money hold a bunch of Twitter stock. They want to eventually cash out.
Can these measurements be used as losses to offset taxes?
Typically, losses in one year can be used to offset profits in following years, but not indefinitely… maybe three years tops IIRC. But that would mean the company would have to become very, very profitable profitable, which is doubtful.
They changed the rules under the Tax Cut and Jobs Act and losses can be carried forward indefinitely.
Yup of course they fucking did. Can’t have corporations paying their fair shares after all, that’s a concept as ridiculous as cold fire.
TIL, thanks
Regulatory capture is awesome, isn’t it?
Because the money still comes from investors even if it’s not publicly traded.
Who knew fascism wouldn’t be the rage?
Twitter the thing you do on the shitter
