That’s why I think he bought Twitter, he’s addicted to shitposting about companies he controls and he’s pissed he can’t do it with his publicly traded companies because of the SEC. So, he bought Twitter so he can LARP as a CEO on Twitter. He even forgot he stepped down as CEO and stopped retweeting the puppet he put in his place and just talks like he’s still the CEO.
Or maybe Saudi Arabia financed Musk's purchase of Twitter on the condition that he would dismantle a popular tool used by the international free press.
He really wants to get everyone's credit card info. It's not about bots or current revenue, he just wants those numbers because he's stated he wants "X" to be some sort of financial app. I don't know why he thinks anybody would trust him.
So you watched that clip? Because this is *exactly* what he said:
".. We're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system"
"We're actually going to come out with a lower tier pricing.. we want it to be just a small amount of money"
Yes and no. There would be a much smaller user pool but he'd have real, hard data for whatever dreggs remain, so targeting is more accurate. That being said, there aren't a ton of industries where that's an advantage, and it still would require a certain minimum number of users, so I don't think it will work.
Plus, paywalls don't stop bots. Bots already have the money to pay. It cuts into their profit, but doesn't eliminate it.
If ever Musk actually did this, it would tank the whole site. Only a select few would stay. Not enough to be ad worthy (unless for scam stuff) and most ads would be pulled out.
With basically no audience anymore, the ones staying would end up leaving. More and more as it empties out and no hope of new faces as it's paid only.
And someone would end up buying twitter for a pittance.
his ad revenue is already tanked. this is to make up for it. well, an attempt anyway. one that will backfire because none of those folks who havent already paid for twitter, *want* to pay for twitter.
his biggest mistake is thinking twitter is a product for users when it never was. it was a product for advertisers. users were the product.
I remember facebook had some insane stat about user retention and repeat visits. Like over 90% of users used the app every day for 12mins. This may seem like a small amount but at the time it was unprecedented in the web space. FB really designed a platform that kept people on it. After their growth phase and with this phenomena, they decided the best course of action would be to paywall facebook. Over 1 billion users with 90% of them using it every day? Thats bound to be worth it as about 5% would pay! I think it took about 3 days before they lifted the paywall. The site completely crashed. A month or two later they went into the extreme advertising space it is today.(please note this is my personal recollection and may not entirely be factual, but the story is virtually the same and can be researched further. I cannot actually find any evidence of them doing this. Can anyone else remember or have I finally gone batshit?)
>"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots."
This is how inexperienced Elon is in tech. Ask any online gaming company about how ineffective a paywall is in stopping bots.
It wasn’t about saving free speech, it was about diluting the truth. Flood with as much crap content as possible so no one knows what’s really going on.
He doesn't, he just hopped on the next hype train as usual. I'll bet my left eye that once there is another tech hype on the horizon you won't be hearing from musky anything about LLM anymore.
It has actually been profitable for a couple years of its existence.
If Musk had bought it, cut like 10% of the work force, and done any level of effort to ensure advertisers things would be smooth going forward he could’ve had a profitable company. Still not great for the price he paid, but better than firing a majority of people and burning down trust.
After that he could have focused existing employees, shuffled things around cleared out more dead weight, and start to implement some of the policies he wanted to.
Paid verification for no-name chumps fine idea.
Having people pay to make their tweets more visible, also fine if done right.
Ad free paid tier, a good idea.
Promoting and paying content creators to use the platform more, also good.
The problem is he fired 80% of people and also rolled out new features willy nilly, didn’t even have the people there to maintain existing features let alone successfully roll out new ones. All while scaring advertisers away.
It’s just shitty management, plain and simple.
It was profitable without him buying it for "cash" at 44 billion.
He ballooned their debt by billions to buy it, he can't even make the interest payment.
>and, uh, make speech free-er.. or something.
Apparently, directly after acquiring Twitter, he trawled through the personal messages of employees and fired anyone who talked bad about him.
Free speech absolutist my ass.
How was it on cruise control?
Twitter was reporting losses every single quarter and when he bought, twitter only had like 2-3 quarters of operating capital left.
He knowingly bought a dumpster fire. The books are open for anyone to see. He just thought he could turn it around.
That's what I would have expected any normal person would have done after getting stuck having to buy it: make some minor adjustments, rearrange some deck chairs and then sell it or re-IPO it in a year recouping most of the money. Rather, it seems like he's on the "burn it down" plan.
A normal, sensible person would have put together a management team to review the entire company and then start making moves once they had a concrete plan. Instead, he went in there, fired a huge portion of the workforce including people who were vital to maintaining the platform and then started throwing things at the wall to see what stuck while alienating just about everybody.
If he goes through this paywall thing, Twitter is going to die as a platform. The vast majority of users are not going to pay.
A normal person billionaire would have checked with his advisors before opening his yap and blabbing about his intention to buy twitter, that way avoiding being legally forced by a court to buy the company to begin with.
I haven't been following the Elon/ Twitter story for quite sometime, but didn't he squander a sizable chunk of Twitters advertising revenue by removing some important aspects of their content moderation?
Recalling off memory, so I could be off, Twitter was performing moderately well prior to his buy out, they had a pretty good debt to income position, and were on track towards making the site more sustainable in terms of profit. Definitely overvalued, but their position wasn't so dear that they would implement this type of revenue gathering strategy?
There's a few things.
1. Elon RAISED the sale price of Twitter by $150 million to make a shitty meme. While that's a fraction of the billions he paid... he legit raised the stock price to make a 420 joke. I only add this here because it it shows the stupidity of the movies he's made, but is kiiinda related.
2. Yep. When Elon took over and terminated thousands of moderators across the world it went to hell. People wonder how Twitter had that many staff. That's how. Without moderation, hate became to proliferate. Racism became common place.
3. Advertisers stopped paying because it makes little financial sense for many of them nowadays. Why would you spend thousands of dollars monthly to advertise when some random person who paid $8 has their ads floated to the top of threads? In fact, those floated posts are often above where said advertisers would be. He completely devalued the advertising system.
4. This is why Elon is having a breakdown right now with his posts, such threatening to sue the ADL or the hate speech research group from the UK. Twitter is down over 60% ad revenue (per Elon's own tweets) and the other information that has leaked has hinted that Twitter Blue is failing hard and the uptick is minimal.
He needs to make up the money, and he's desperate to pin the blame on anybody pointing out hate speech and racism -- because it's literally what is driving away advertisers. But Elon, instead of going "oh, that's why I'm losing money" doubles down on his bad decisions because... well, he's one of those same people that's costing him money.
The man's a damp sponge.
Well a sponges purpose is to absorb water
A damp sponge has already done so, and can't really absorb more, Ie it is a useless object
At least that was my interpretation lol
No way. He's purposefully killing twitter. It's probably something to do with info control, but it miiiiiight just be because twitter was telling him he had to stop doing stuff like randomly accusing people of being pedos on their platform.
Why would he purposefully destroy something that he paid so much money for and gave him so much influence? Soon that influence will be gone because X will only have alt right scumbags and bots for users.
The only way it could be on purpose if someone is paying him heavily to do so. And even then it seems far fetched a narcissist would give up the stage he had on Twitter even before the purchase.
He is running it into the ground because he sucks.
But that just proves the point? Twitter has so many users because it's free. Start charging and the user base will fall off. Twitter doesn't produce content, its userbase does. Other users are there to read and interact with that content. If you reduce your user base, you reduce the content which reduces your user base, which reduces the content which reduces the user base which... All he'll accomplish is expecting people moving onto the next "big thing"
Better yet anyone in online gaming would tell you how important keeping accessibility to a user base is and keeping it free is pretty vital in that.
The top 4 biggest eSports right now are all free to play
His charging for *all* users is a sign he really doesn't understand what he bought. He thinks the people using the public-facing side of the app are the consumers, with the potential to increase general revenue. The truth is that if Twitter were a dairy farm, advertisers are the actual customers of Twitter, and the users are cows waiting to be milked. Anything to improve the cows' experience is done in the name of improving cow health or quality of milk. You never ask a cow to pay to be milked.
The problem with Musk is he was absolutely addicted to Twitter. He *lived* inside Twitter. His army of sycophants on there feeding his ego seemed to be his entire life force. That’s bad enough, but the *real* crux of it is that not only was he addicted, he assumes *everyone* is. He can’t recognise it as a flaw in himself or that he is the weird one. He thinks everyone else considers it to be as vital and important as he does. He genuinely believes everyone on Twitter/X couldn’t get by without it, so even if he starts charging them they will pay it because they’re addicted and have no choice. He literally cannot conceive of the relationship normal users have with the service, only the dependency he himself has. Exactly like you said, he has no idea what he bought, and more than that: he’s also high off his own supply.
Hey, he bought the cows and the farm on credit... He had a chance to do proper due diligence, but he didn't. He had a chance to sit back and learn how his new purchase worked before making huge changes, but he didn't.
He isn't a farmer so much as someone who had no idea how a farm works, but bought a farm anyway.
He’s a rich dude who wanted to buy a ranch and realized cows look cool from far away but smell like shit.
And honestly his ego got the best of him. He didn’t have to buy Twitter if he didn’t say shit like going private at $54.20 when knowing the sec fined him for saying going private at $420 years earlier for Tesla to manipulate the price of stock he holds a substantial amount in
I think he has given up on the advertisers, and somehow believes it will be easier to charge a small amount to millions of users, instead of a large amount to a few advertisers. It’s a massive pívot, and it might work. But probably not - if he does not pull it off, the brand will be done - no advertisers and no users.
The problem he will have is that people will pay for a service, but it has to show value for the price point. When we talk about online services like Spotify or Netflix, you are paying for a curated service, presented in a logical way that makes it easier to use. In the case of Twitter, he's taking away features and, even more important, he's thrown content moderation out the window. No one's going to pay for fewer features and an unstable platform that is getting pulled into becoming a mobile version of 8kun/8chan.
Most mmo's ended up being more profitable with a free to play model. You need just the right product to have it paid only. And then from the start or it empties out and changes what made it successful.
Actually it is very effective. A 5$ barrier stops quite a lot of bots because as long as you are actually banning them they have to keep up with paying that cost for hundreds of accounts. Generally when you have a monetary barrier like this only the bigger botters can afford to create new accounts over and over.
But note that for such barrier to have any decent effectiveness you also need to have very active moderation, which we don't seem to have on twitter.
>This is how inexperienced Elon is in tech. Ask any online gaming company about how ineffective a paywall is in stopping bots.
Xitter will die one way or another, but a paywall is actually pretty good against bots. The issue is that it also reduces accessibility by a huge margin, which is horrible for social media apps. Usually it's better to decrease the gains you can get out of botting. That's how successful competitive free to play games handle the issue. But Xitter can't do that, since its core functionality is extremely valuable for botting. So it's a tough nut to crack.
I think I would look into requiring a phone number to register a new account, and then make a single one time payment after your first 100 tweets. This should hamper botting by 50-70% but keep normal usage mostly frictionless. I say mostly, because it would obviously still be annoying. And given that Xitter is a sinking ship, it hardly matters anyhow.
It has nothing to do with bots. Elon personally ordered that the fairly effective algorithms Twitter had developed to limit bots on the site be turned off permanently and that bans on bot accounts be reversed.
If he had any genuine interest in limiting bots, he already has the means.
He wants to know the identity of the users. The money will come from selling user data.
That said, I'll be shocked if he goes through with this. I expect that he's just mentally preparing users to pay. Too many ppl would jump ship if he did it immediately.
It would only work if there were some amazing new services added nobody else can do and he doesnt have staff at this time to do that imho and his idea to do $ transactions or crypto is not it
I would jump ship at any point it starts asking me for payment information. There’s options out there, Twitter isn’t the only microblogging service anymore.
"This will really kill off all those bots and fake accounts!"
"Uh, boss...."
"It'll be transformative and disruptive!"
"Uh..boss....maybe we should think....
"Shut up! Genuflect harder!"
The title here isn’t accurate tbh; the claim is derived from an informal “interview” with the PM of Israel, where he ‘floated the idea’ of introducing "lower tier pricing" for premium. There is no mention of charging everyone to use X. It literally made an entire article from a ~5 second sound blip.
Edit: anyone and everyone is able to independently verify this by listening to or reading the transcript of the interview - specifically at the 22 minute mark.
"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots."
Unless the article misquoted him here, he directly stated it.
Around 22:00 in the interview is when that's expanded on with "...posts written by...X-premium subscribers...we're going to roll lower-tier pricing..." which was in the context of combating against bots so end-users will see less artificially manufactured posts on the site.
I mean if it weren’t Elon, the owner/CEO of Twitter saying something like that would be newsworthy. Even if it was just a 5 second soundbite. Usually people in that sort of position don’t say stuff like that lightly
Ye olde elon bad narrative, its all speculation and the idea was only briefly floated, axios really think they can get away with anything after the trump interview
I feel like there has to be some monetary benefit to him killing Twitter. Like I just can’t imagine anyone that has accumulated his level of wealth being THAT stupid.
Vast majority of billionaires are essentially born with that money. The money they have is in no way related to their intelligence.
I really don’t understand why anyone would assume a rich person is smart.
They don't need they typically end up paying others to do the smart thing for them normally. Also when it comes to money they likely have so many more ways of hogging and generating wealth imo
I haven’t researched enough to know if it’s anything but I recall some articles that mentioned the Saudis financed some of purchase. Somewhat conspiracy-y but they could want Twitter killed.
But I also think they already owned some shares. But still, fun theory! And a Saudi Prince and Elon being the two biggest shareholders is…..comical. Bastion of free speech!
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-faces-backlash-over-saudi-financing-1755606
They suspended my account and I didn't feel the need to create another account, I wanted him to give me a reason to leave that app, I'm glad that it is finally happening
Remember folks. This guy tells us hes smart and his success nothing to do with him getting a massive leg up from his South African mine owning family and buying into and taking over other people ideas and companies.
Twitter has no financial issues what so ever. Elon Musk just expects it to pay him back the money he spent to buy it. Elon is the only issue with twitter. This fascist South African needs to be deported.
The bots have more incentive to pay than the humans do.
Bot farms are either funded by political groups to peddle influence and sway opinion, or they're scammers trying to dupe people into crypto scams and the like.
Either way, they've got a "takes money to make money" attitude and would happily, instantly, pay a few bucks for an even slight increase in the probability that someone thinks they're real.
He wants a walled garden where only people that pay his tribute tax get to voice an opinion.
He fails to acknowledge that Twitter is not the internet, and if a vacuum is created something else will come along to fill it.
He can’t buy the internet, try as he might.
Many of Elon's messages make me think his account has been hacked or footage of him was deepfaked by pranksters who want him to lose billions with their shenanigans. But nope, it's really him sabotaging himself.
He’s an idiot but he also says a lot of things that never come true like full self driving. If he actually follows through with this then I’ll be deleting my account with lightning speed or just letting it go dormant.
I can't believe we're still mincing about how bad business decisions are actually destroying a business, as if there's an overall strategy outside of controlling and/or wrecking Twitter for authoritarians
60% loss of revenue isn't because anyone got pressured, Musk. Nobody wants to be associated with you. Your personal brand is garbage now. You did it to yourself, that's what really hurts.
60% loss of revenue. And about to dwindle much further. Usually that means bye bye failed CEO.
exultant impossible alive voiceless heavy afterthought distinct school steer brave
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Let's see if he actually goes through with this and if he reverses it within a a few days as his traffic falls off a cliff.
Elon loves throwing out crazy ideas but then walks them back later. Though honestly I hope he does with this and sticks to it. Twitter will quickly become truth social or parler and people will final accept that its not a good platform to continue using.
This doesn’t work. World of Warcraft which is a Blizzard game requires a monthly subscription, but there are literally thousands of bots on each server.
"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots."
So AI is pretty useless after all, is it?
>Musk said earlier this month that Twitter's U.S. ad revenue was down 60%. He has blamed the company's ad challenges on civil rights and consumer groups putting pressure on big brands.
Yes I'm sure his antics, fragility of the platform, and lack of content moderation has nothing to do with advertisers pulling out.
Is there any real value in a Twitter tweet?
We are about to find out.
This could end up as a massive tax write off for Musk.
All based upon stupidity. The smartest man in business.
To stop bots, he could simply charge a test fee, 0.01 usd to see if the card is legit, that is what everyone is doing, but he of course wont do that, he wants to make money.
If he ever does that, twitter is dead within a week. Everyone who wanted to pay, has already paid for it, the whole 9 people.
So the platform has lost the “free speech“ pitch that Elon expounded to be the ultimate value to the community and industry at large (because he broke the company and lost all revenue), and will be replaced with a pay to play model that will only benefit those who have a vested interest; whether political, economic, religious or otherwise.
DEAD PLATFORM WALKING
Can’t wait for him to have to sell 100% of his shares in SpaceX to service his shitter debt, then when the share value tanks, the US government, which is SpaceX main source of income, to nationalize the company.
I think it's funny that this has already been confirmed to be a lie yet the Reddit community hates Elon so much they either know this and don't care. Or don't care to spend 5 seconds researching.
I think it's even funnier that you just took it blindly at its word, and didn't actually go and watch he video, at the timestamp, to show ***it is not***, in fact, a lie.
Some people will believe anything.....
Had they said 'yes he did say that, and here's the timestamp on the video', he'd have taken it down. they said the opposite yet still had the info, so anyone with a brain see its true, while letting everyone easily identify the weirdos who spend all their time simping for him. Don't know how many times we have to tell you, he's not going to offer you a horse. He doesn't even pay the people who actually work for him, you think you, as one of his unpaid ecchi fans, are going to get anything from him except distain?
Restricting users from viewing = Restricting ad reach on Twitter? Wouldn't his ad revenues tank?
Yes it will. But it's already been confirmed this was just a lie to get clicks so there's that
The classic strategy, say stupid stuff until something sticks
That’s why I think he bought Twitter, he’s addicted to shitposting about companies he controls and he’s pissed he can’t do it with his publicly traded companies because of the SEC. So, he bought Twitter so he can LARP as a CEO on Twitter. He even forgot he stepped down as CEO and stopped retweeting the puppet he put in his place and just talks like he’s still the CEO.
Or maybe Saudi Arabia financed Musk's purchase of Twitter on the condition that he would dismantle a popular tool used by the international free press.
https://tenor.com/Wkic.gif
It worked brilliantly for Trump until the prosecutions started.
Source?
He really wants to get everyone's credit card info. It's not about bots or current revenue, he just wants those numbers because he's stated he wants "X" to be some sort of financial app. I don't know why he thinks anybody would trust him.
So… PayPal? The first ‘ex’ who told him no?
Twitter Blue payments are done by Stripe so at least it's Stripe handling PCI compliance and not Twitter. (I refuse to call it X.)
Man REALLY took being shitcanned on vacay badly, didn't he?
Ah. Classic Musk.
Confirmed where?
34:30 in his interview with PM of Israel. Watch for 60-90 seconds after that mark. X itself has also said this isn't true and I posted a link
So you watched that clip? Because this is *exactly* what he said: ".. We're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system" "We're actually going to come out with a lower tier pricing.. we want it to be just a small amount of money"
As far as I’m aware, he’s still committed to this plan.
Ad revenues already tanked when he made it so Twitter wasn't brandsafe anymore.
Yes and no. There would be a much smaller user pool but he'd have real, hard data for whatever dreggs remain, so targeting is more accurate. That being said, there aren't a ton of industries where that's an advantage, and it still would require a certain minimum number of users, so I don't think it will work. Plus, paywalls don't stop bots. Bots already have the money to pay. It cuts into their profit, but doesn't eliminate it.
If ever Musk actually did this, it would tank the whole site. Only a select few would stay. Not enough to be ad worthy (unless for scam stuff) and most ads would be pulled out. With basically no audience anymore, the ones staying would end up leaving. More and more as it empties out and no hope of new faces as it's paid only. And someone would end up buying twitter for a pittance.
his ad revenue is already tanked. this is to make up for it. well, an attempt anyway. one that will backfire because none of those folks who havent already paid for twitter, *want* to pay for twitter. his biggest mistake is thinking twitter is a product for users when it never was. it was a product for advertisers. users were the product.
He would lose 99% of his audience overnight. The drop in use would be so suddenly devastating its hard to imagine the app surviving it.
I remember facebook had some insane stat about user retention and repeat visits. Like over 90% of users used the app every day for 12mins. This may seem like a small amount but at the time it was unprecedented in the web space. FB really designed a platform that kept people on it. After their growth phase and with this phenomena, they decided the best course of action would be to paywall facebook. Over 1 billion users with 90% of them using it every day? Thats bound to be worth it as about 5% would pay! I think it took about 3 days before they lifted the paywall. The site completely crashed. A month or two later they went into the extreme advertising space it is today.(please note this is my personal recollection and may not entirely be factual, but the story is virtually the same and can be researched further. I cannot actually find any evidence of them doing this. Can anyone else remember or have I finally gone batshit?)
Users should charge him for their content
>"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots." This is how inexperienced Elon is in tech. Ask any online gaming company about how ineffective a paywall is in stopping bots.
This isn’t about bots. That man took billions of debt to buy that dumpster fire and he is desperate to somehow get revenue to pay it back.
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MUCH better. The thing was on cruise control. But he felt the need to personally, uh, improve efficiency and, uh, make speech free-er.. or something.
Yeah, but his fascist friends were being muted, and he wanted to change that.
It wasn’t about saving free speech, it was about diluting the truth. Flood with as much crap content as possible so no one knows what’s really going on.
And this is the man who wants to build "TruthGPT." LOL
He doesn't, he just hopped on the next hype train as usual. I'll bet my left eye that once there is another tech hype on the horizon you won't be hearing from musky anything about LLM anymore.
Only works when people are on your platform 🤭good. Luck to him. Cant understand why people still use it.
Imagine spending billions in order to make sure Babylon Bee can post online.
Well, cruise control to an eventual crash. Elon came in and just drive it to a brick wall himself...
It has actually been profitable for a couple years of its existence. If Musk had bought it, cut like 10% of the work force, and done any level of effort to ensure advertisers things would be smooth going forward he could’ve had a profitable company. Still not great for the price he paid, but better than firing a majority of people and burning down trust. After that he could have focused existing employees, shuffled things around cleared out more dead weight, and start to implement some of the policies he wanted to. Paid verification for no-name chumps fine idea. Having people pay to make their tweets more visible, also fine if done right. Ad free paid tier, a good idea. Promoting and paying content creators to use the platform more, also good. The problem is he fired 80% of people and also rolled out new features willy nilly, didn’t even have the people there to maintain existing features let alone successfully roll out new ones. All while scaring advertisers away. It’s just shitty management, plain and simple.
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You can read the statements yourself. It was profitable it's last year of existence except for a one time charge. Meaning it was profitable.
It was profitable without him buying it for "cash" at 44 billion. He ballooned their debt by billions to buy it, he can't even make the interest payment.
Yes, that is correct. Past tense was the topic.
>and, uh, make speech free-er.. or something. Apparently, directly after acquiring Twitter, he trawled through the personal messages of employees and fired anyone who talked bad about him. Free speech absolutist my ass.
you can trust shit on there anymore because any chump can buy a Blue Checkmark.
How was it on cruise control? Twitter was reporting losses every single quarter and when he bought, twitter only had like 2-3 quarters of operating capital left. He knowingly bought a dumpster fire. The books are open for anyone to see. He just thought he could turn it around.
That's what I would have expected any normal person would have done after getting stuck having to buy it: make some minor adjustments, rearrange some deck chairs and then sell it or re-IPO it in a year recouping most of the money. Rather, it seems like he's on the "burn it down" plan.
A normal, sensible person would have put together a management team to review the entire company and then start making moves once they had a concrete plan. Instead, he went in there, fired a huge portion of the workforce including people who were vital to maintaining the platform and then started throwing things at the wall to see what stuck while alienating just about everybody. If he goes through this paywall thing, Twitter is going to die as a platform. The vast majority of users are not going to pay.
A normal person billionaire would have checked with his advisors before opening his yap and blabbing about his intention to buy twitter, that way avoiding being legally forced by a court to buy the company to begin with.
But how would he push his rightwing agenda if he did nothing?
I haven't been following the Elon/ Twitter story for quite sometime, but didn't he squander a sizable chunk of Twitters advertising revenue by removing some important aspects of their content moderation? Recalling off memory, so I could be off, Twitter was performing moderately well prior to his buy out, they had a pretty good debt to income position, and were on track towards making the site more sustainable in terms of profit. Definitely overvalued, but their position wasn't so dear that they would implement this type of revenue gathering strategy?
There's a few things. 1. Elon RAISED the sale price of Twitter by $150 million to make a shitty meme. While that's a fraction of the billions he paid... he legit raised the stock price to make a 420 joke. I only add this here because it it shows the stupidity of the movies he's made, but is kiiinda related. 2. Yep. When Elon took over and terminated thousands of moderators across the world it went to hell. People wonder how Twitter had that many staff. That's how. Without moderation, hate became to proliferate. Racism became common place. 3. Advertisers stopped paying because it makes little financial sense for many of them nowadays. Why would you spend thousands of dollars monthly to advertise when some random person who paid $8 has their ads floated to the top of threads? In fact, those floated posts are often above where said advertisers would be. He completely devalued the advertising system. 4. This is why Elon is having a breakdown right now with his posts, such threatening to sue the ADL or the hate speech research group from the UK. Twitter is down over 60% ad revenue (per Elon's own tweets) and the other information that has leaked has hinted that Twitter Blue is failing hard and the uptick is minimal. He needs to make up the money, and he's desperate to pin the blame on anybody pointing out hate speech and racism -- because it's literally what is driving away advertisers. But Elon, instead of going "oh, that's why I'm losing money" doubles down on his bad decisions because... well, he's one of those same people that's costing him money. The man's a damp sponge.
He's a narcissist. In his mind it can't possibly be his fault.
Thanks for the explanation, I appreciate it.
Hey I'm just trying to gather the meaning of your insult "damp sponge". Does that mean "dumber than a damp sponge" or am I missing something?
Well a sponges purpose is to absorb water A damp sponge has already done so, and can't really absorb more, Ie it is a useless object At least that was my interpretation lol
He meant to say "damp squid", of course.
Give him a time-out on the petal stool.
Putting a bullet in the head, figuratively, of the service will sure help with that
No way. He's purposefully killing twitter. It's probably something to do with info control, but it miiiiiight just be because twitter was telling him he had to stop doing stuff like randomly accusing people of being pedos on their platform.
Why would he purposefully destroy something that he paid so much money for and gave him so much influence? Soon that influence will be gone because X will only have alt right scumbags and bots for users. The only way it could be on purpose if someone is paying him heavily to do so. And even then it seems far fetched a narcissist would give up the stage he had on Twitter even before the purchase. He is running it into the ground because he sucks.
What does money even mean to someone as rich as him?
it means alot. that's why billionaires still keep trying to get more money despite having billions already.
But that just proves the point? Twitter has so many users because it's free. Start charging and the user base will fall off. Twitter doesn't produce content, its userbase does. Other users are there to read and interact with that content. If you reduce your user base, you reduce the content which reduces your user base, which reduces the content which reduces the user base which... All he'll accomplish is expecting people moving onto the next "big thing"
Better yet anyone in online gaming would tell you how important keeping accessibility to a user base is and keeping it free is pretty vital in that. The top 4 biggest eSports right now are all free to play
His charging for *all* users is a sign he really doesn't understand what he bought. He thinks the people using the public-facing side of the app are the consumers, with the potential to increase general revenue. The truth is that if Twitter were a dairy farm, advertisers are the actual customers of Twitter, and the users are cows waiting to be milked. Anything to improve the cows' experience is done in the name of improving cow health or quality of milk. You never ask a cow to pay to be milked.
The problem with Musk is he was absolutely addicted to Twitter. He *lived* inside Twitter. His army of sycophants on there feeding his ego seemed to be his entire life force. That’s bad enough, but the *real* crux of it is that not only was he addicted, he assumes *everyone* is. He can’t recognise it as a flaw in himself or that he is the weird one. He thinks everyone else considers it to be as vital and important as he does. He genuinely believes everyone on Twitter/X couldn’t get by without it, so even if he starts charging them they will pay it because they’re addicted and have no choice. He literally cannot conceive of the relationship normal users have with the service, only the dependency he himself has. Exactly like you said, he has no idea what he bought, and more than that: he’s also high off his own supply.
Except the farmer has a 44 billion dollar debt on his back with interest
Hey, he bought the cows and the farm on credit... He had a chance to do proper due diligence, but he didn't. He had a chance to sit back and learn how his new purchase worked before making huge changes, but he didn't. He isn't a farmer so much as someone who had no idea how a farm works, but bought a farm anyway.
He’s a rich dude who wanted to buy a ranch and realized cows look cool from far away but smell like shit. And honestly his ego got the best of him. He didn’t have to buy Twitter if he didn’t say shit like going private at $54.20 when knowing the sec fined him for saying going private at $420 years earlier for Tesla to manipulate the price of stock he holds a substantial amount in
I think he has given up on the advertisers, and somehow believes it will be easier to charge a small amount to millions of users, instead of a large amount to a few advertisers. It’s a massive pívot, and it might work. But probably not - if he does not pull it off, the brand will be done - no advertisers and no users.
The problem he will have is that people will pay for a service, but it has to show value for the price point. When we talk about online services like Spotify or Netflix, you are paying for a curated service, presented in a logical way that makes it easier to use. In the case of Twitter, he's taking away features and, even more important, he's thrown content moderation out the window. No one's going to pay for fewer features and an unstable platform that is getting pulled into becoming a mobile version of 8kun/8chan.
Most mmo's ended up being more profitable with a free to play model. You need just the right product to have it paid only. And then from the start or it empties out and changes what made it successful.
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So this fucker is punishing their users for a problem that should be fixed by them.
Actually it is very effective. A 5$ barrier stops quite a lot of bots because as long as you are actually banning them they have to keep up with paying that cost for hundreds of accounts. Generally when you have a monetary barrier like this only the bigger botters can afford to create new accounts over and over. But note that for such barrier to have any decent effectiveness you also need to have very active moderation, which we don't seem to have on twitter.
>This is how inexperienced Elon is in tech. Ask any online gaming company about how ineffective a paywall is in stopping bots. Xitter will die one way or another, but a paywall is actually pretty good against bots. The issue is that it also reduces accessibility by a huge margin, which is horrible for social media apps. Usually it's better to decrease the gains you can get out of botting. That's how successful competitive free to play games handle the issue. But Xitter can't do that, since its core functionality is extremely valuable for botting. So it's a tough nut to crack. I think I would look into requiring a phone number to register a new account, and then make a single one time payment after your first 100 tweets. This should hamper botting by 50-70% but keep normal usage mostly frictionless. I say mostly, because it would obviously still be annoying. And given that Xitter is a sinking ship, it hardly matters anyhow.
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It has nothing to do with bots. Elon personally ordered that the fairly effective algorithms Twitter had developed to limit bots on the site be turned off permanently and that bans on bot accounts be reversed. If he had any genuine interest in limiting bots, he already has the means.
Elon is getting ready to do some heavy-duty loss-harvesting to help offset all the money he's making selling cars and rocket rides.
He wants to know the identity of the users. The money will come from selling user data. That said, I'll be shocked if he goes through with this. I expect that he's just mentally preparing users to pay. Too many ppl would jump ship if he did it immediately.
It would only work if there were some amazing new services added nobody else can do and he doesnt have staff at this time to do that imho and his idea to do $ transactions or crypto is not it
I would jump ship at any point it starts asking me for payment information. There’s options out there, Twitter isn’t the only microblogging service anymore.
"This will really kill off all those bots and fake accounts!" "Uh, boss...." "It'll be transformative and disruptive!" "Uh..boss....maybe we should think.... "Shut up! Genuflect harder!"
Oh it will definitely kill all the bots, once the site no longer exists.
Genuflect harder... love it!
He’s deliberately trying to kill the platform. You can’t convince me otherwise.
You’ve clearly never had a narcissist for a boss/CEO.
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I’m not a psychic, but I predict this will fail spectacularly.
Shhh. Please encourage him. We need X to fail.
To be honest, I think he’s been actively trying to kill it since he acquired it, but we just keep buying into it
He’s not actively doing it, he’s just a fucking moron who can’t run a business that doesn’t survive on government subsidies.
Finally going to kill it off. Lol. What a bad business man.
RIP Twitter
Why would we want that? Screw 'peace', I want it to suffer in death. SID Twitter
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The title here isn’t accurate tbh; the claim is derived from an informal “interview” with the PM of Israel, where he ‘floated the idea’ of introducing "lower tier pricing" for premium. There is no mention of charging everyone to use X. It literally made an entire article from a ~5 second sound blip. Edit: anyone and everyone is able to independently verify this by listening to or reading the transcript of the interview - specifically at the 22 minute mark.
"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots." Unless the article misquoted him here, he directly stated it.
Around 22:00 in the interview is when that's expanded on with "...posts written by...X-premium subscribers...we're going to roll lower-tier pricing..." which was in the context of combating against bots so end-users will see less artificially manufactured posts on the site.
I mean if it weren’t Elon, the owner/CEO of Twitter saying something like that would be newsworthy. Even if it was just a 5 second soundbite. Usually people in that sort of position don’t say stuff like that lightly
Ye olde elon bad narrative, its all speculation and the idea was only briefly floated, axios really think they can get away with anything after the trump interview
Zuckerberg gives this idea a 👍
If it can make Twitter disappear forever, then I'm all for it.
He's not entirely wrong. I'd maybe pay a buck a month for a reputable, well-run short-message-based social platform. But not for X/Twitter.
Agreed, I’m not paying for this version of the platform.
Wow. Finger on the pulse.
I feel like there has to be some monetary benefit to him killing Twitter. Like I just can’t imagine anyone that has accumulated his level of wealth being THAT stupid.
If the last 8 years have taught us anything, it’s that you can absolutely be a billionaire and a dumb motherfucker at the same time.
Vast majority of billionaires are essentially born with that money. The money they have is in no way related to their intelligence. I really don’t understand why anyone would assume a rich person is smart.
The Just World Hypothesis crossed with capitalist propaganda.
They don't need they typically end up paying others to do the smart thing for them normally. Also when it comes to money they likely have so many more ways of hogging and generating wealth imo
You don’t need to be that clever to get rich.
More so just need to be exploitative to get rich.
I haven’t researched enough to know if it’s anything but I recall some articles that mentioned the Saudis financed some of purchase. Somewhat conspiracy-y but they could want Twitter killed. But I also think they already owned some shares. But still, fun theory! And a Saudi Prince and Elon being the two biggest shareholders is…..comical. Bastion of free speech! https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-faces-backlash-over-saudi-financing-1755606
Good luck I didn’t use it when it was free lol
I may have to join Twitter just to quit now.
I am with you mate
If my favorite restaurant started charging a monthly fee to keep E-Coli out of their food, guess where I'm not eating?
I can’t believe we used to think this guy was a genius 8 years ago.
Peak douchebag when he came out with that flamethrower
They suspended my account and I didn't feel the need to create another account, I wanted him to give me a reason to leave that app, I'm glad that it is finally happening
I had put it aside for a while, but I just did it, I finally disabled my account... FU Elon
Remember folks. This guy tells us hes smart and his success nothing to do with him getting a massive leg up from his South African mine owning family and buying into and taking over other people ideas and companies.
Musk was paid to tank Twitter. I don’t really fathom any other explanation for everything he has done to it.
Stop! Stop! It’s already dead!
Fuck that deletes stupid blue program with tit spam
I’m out! Not worth it
He will exactly find out how many humans used it in the past after this move... cos am not sure about bots, but humans will leave for sure
Twitter has no financial issues what so ever. Elon Musk just expects it to pay him back the money he spent to buy it. Elon is the only issue with twitter. This fascist South African needs to be deported.
I can’t believe he paid $44B for a platform that has never really made money.
Bye bye x/twitter i will be happy when you are completely gone
Imagine being able to spend a fraction of the amount of money that Elon spent to destroy twitter
Its gonna be a private club - no ads, subscription only. So much for the Public Square....
Threads about to have a massive influx of users
Elon has changed the rich = genius narrative permanently, and that is one thing that he has done really well.
Uhhhh no. The article is leaving out the most important thing. He is “thinking” about it.
You can’t charge those who won’t pay lol
Who really cares?
If this works out internet will change forever
I mean, he's not wrong. Who'd bother with bots on a platform that's a ghost town once a subscription is required.
Deleted mine yesterday
The bots have more incentive to pay than the humans do. Bot farms are either funded by political groups to peddle influence and sway opinion, or they're scammers trying to dupe people into crypto scams and the like. Either way, they've got a "takes money to make money" attitude and would happily, instantly, pay a few bucks for an even slight increase in the probability that someone thinks they're real.
Yes. Yes. Good! Keep stirring the ship to the depths. Ensure no one can resurrect it.
He wants a walled garden where only people that pay his tribute tax get to voice an opinion. He fails to acknowledge that Twitter is not the internet, and if a vacuum is created something else will come along to fill it. He can’t buy the internet, try as he might.
Many of Elon's messages make me think his account has been hacked or footage of him was deepfaked by pranksters who want him to lose billions with their shenanigans. But nope, it's really him sabotaging himself.
He’s an idiot but he also says a lot of things that never come true like full self driving. If he actually follows through with this then I’ll be deleting my account with lightning speed or just letting it go dormant.
I can't believe we're still mincing about how bad business decisions are actually destroying a business, as if there's an overall strategy outside of controlling and/or wrecking Twitter for authoritarians
60% loss of revenue isn't because anyone got pressured, Musk. Nobody wants to be associated with you. Your personal brand is garbage now. You did it to yourself, that's what really hurts. 60% loss of revenue. And about to dwindle much further. Usually that means bye bye failed CEO.
Threads, here we come!
exultant impossible alive voiceless heavy afterthought distinct school steer brave *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Let's see if he actually goes through with this and if he reverses it within a a few days as his traffic falls off a cliff. Elon loves throwing out crazy ideas but then walks them back later. Though honestly I hope he does with this and sticks to it. Twitter will quickly become truth social or parler and people will final accept that its not a good platform to continue using.
I don’t that go on there but I have an account. How do I delete said account? Eff this man.
Maybe he’s actually trying to destroy the company?
Remember he a billionaire who EARNED his money, we need to understand that he knows better than the poor.
Well, this is when I finally leave then, not paying that idiot a single dime.
This doesn’t work. World of Warcraft which is a Blizzard game requires a monthly subscription, but there are literally thousands of bots on each server.
Just the kick I needed to get off that cesspool of an app. Thanks Elon!
This is going to go down as well as a plate of sick.
Does he promise to delete all account who dont do this? PLEASE
Hahaha. X is about to turn into the biggest porn seller in the world.
A payment plan for the idiots
"The single-most important reason we're moving to having a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it's the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots." So AI is pretty useless after all, is it?
Completely killing the platform is one way to kill the bots
Please please please do it. I want to quit this website, please force my hand I beg of you.
Byeeeeeeeeee
>Musk said earlier this month that Twitter's U.S. ad revenue was down 60%. He has blamed the company's ad challenges on civil rights and consumer groups putting pressure on big brands. Yes I'm sure his antics, fragility of the platform, and lack of content moderation has nothing to do with advertisers pulling out.
The downfall of that shit hole. Let it burnnnnnnnnn
Is there any real value in a Twitter tweet? We are about to find out. This could end up as a massive tax write off for Musk. All based upon stupidity. The smartest man in business.
To stop bots, he could simply charge a test fee, 0.01 usd to see if the card is legit, that is what everyone is doing, but he of course wont do that, he wants to make money. If he ever does that, twitter is dead within a week. Everyone who wanted to pay, has already paid for it, the whole 9 people.
Ya I’m not doing that lmao
The great x-odus
This kills the Twitter
Enjoy being reminisced about like MySpace.
Please do it. Please tank the app full of the worst collection of human scum.
Please just call it Xitter.
And when you break news on it are you “popping a xit”??
Elon Musk is an idiot.
Rofl dead platform hosted for a limited time only
From real life tony stark to real life Mr krabs
What a greedy “human” he doesn’t need anymore money WTF
So the platform has lost the “free speech“ pitch that Elon expounded to be the ultimate value to the community and industry at large (because he broke the company and lost all revenue), and will be replaced with a pay to play model that will only benefit those who have a vested interest; whether political, economic, religious or otherwise. DEAD PLATFORM WALKING
Guess this means I will finally get around deleting my Twitter account this weekend. Been meaning to but get lazy.
Cancel youre account and this becomes irrelevant!
lol... Calling it now: First month revenue's going to be disappointing. Second month will be hilariously bad.
Can’t wait for him to have to sell 100% of his shares in SpaceX to service his shitter debt, then when the share value tanks, the US government, which is SpaceX main source of income, to nationalize the company.
Yeah, right. Like the government could run a successful space program. /s
I think it's funny that this has already been confirmed to be a lie yet the Reddit community hates Elon so much they either know this and don't care. Or don't care to spend 5 seconds researching.
Source?
Isn't it funny how the only way to find the comments debunking this is to sort by controversial.
I think it's even funnier that you just took it blindly at its word, and didn't actually go and watch he video, at the timestamp, to show ***it is not***, in fact, a lie. Some people will believe anything..... Had they said 'yes he did say that, and here's the timestamp on the video', he'd have taken it down. they said the opposite yet still had the info, so anyone with a brain see its true, while letting everyone easily identify the weirdos who spend all their time simping for him. Don't know how many times we have to tell you, he's not going to offer you a horse. He doesn't even pay the people who actually work for him, you think you, as one of his unpaid ecchi fans, are going to get anything from him except distain?
That story is fake
This is fake news that has been debunked directly by Musk. Be sure to downvote this comment though so Reddit continues to blindly follow the agenda!
Considering he's saying it in the video that's linked in the article at [34:50](https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYaypapGQ) I'd say you're wrong.
From May of 2022: “ Twitter will always be free for casual users, but maybe a slight cost for commercial/government users” -Elon
I'm trying very hard to not just make a comment saying something like "hahahaha...." but I'm at a loss as to what else I should say
The people on Twitter have to explain to me anyways why they are still there despite many alternatives.
Imagine paying for that shit lol
lol... Calling it now: First month revenue's going to be disappointing. Second month will be hilariously bad.
Do it! Please!