I think it's interesting that this is the new narrative about the state of the company. I don't recall this being a common consensus before the acquisition, but likely tied to the financial revelations made public during/after the acquisition.
> I don't recall this being a common consensus before the acquisition
The company had issues prior, but the financial blow Twitter took the day the deal closed may be impossible to recover from. These were not hidden revelations that came to light, they occurred because of the price paid. It's looking increasingly likely Twitter died the day the acquisition closed, and actions since are proverbial deck chairs.
The acquisition saw Twitter experience quite a bit of self-inflicted brain drain. The fact that they have no legal/compliance dept and are making moves in violation of labor laws in multiple countries and in likely violation of Twitter's consent decree with the FTC also bodes poorly. That plus large personalities continuing to embrace Mastodon to the point that Twitter started blocking links to it.
On a personal note, Twitter feels more like Musk's personal platform now. Every single time I visit the Twitter website, the first tweet I see is Elon's. I don't follow him. Two people I follow happen to follow him. No matter how many times I select that the tweet isn't relevant, a new Elon tweet shows up. The only way to get rid of him from my timeline is to block him or unfollow everyone I follow that follows him, which seems pretty absurd.
Well structurally taking Twitter private has increased expenses by $1bil (the interest on loans) against last year's ~$6bil in revenue, so that alone is going to change the health of the company.
On top of that Musk has given guidance that he expects revenue to fall from $6b in 2022 to $3b in 2023. (This seems dramatic TBH)
I don't think there were revelations (this is all public info), the transaction just changed the fundamentals.
It's directly tied to the $1B/yr in additional interest payments being incurred by the debt used to finance the acquisition. Twitter pre-Elon was profitable. Twitter post-Elon is bleeding cash.
If you look at their reports, they were profitable in 2019 and 2020. 2021 would have been profitable except for a one-time lawsuit payment, and there’s no reason to believe that trend was suddenly going to change.
That number is curiously close to the reported cost of the new debt Musk added.
I don’t have inside information but considering how the acquisition reportedly started deterring ad buys almost as soon as it was announced, it’s very easy to imagine that they were in fact losing money in November but would not have been had the deal never happened.
There’s a difference between “not as profitable as I’d like” and “unprofitable”. The rest of us are talking about the positive net incomes they reported in recent years and would have reported last year except for that lawsuit payment. Especially here, I would expect someone to be familiar with the way tech companies have often been marginally profitable for years because they were focused on other metrics like growth. Twitter was often subject to unrealistic comparisons with wildly popular companies like Facebook or Google but since they were already doing it it there’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t have been a profitable medium-sized company.
> It's directly tied to the $1B/yr in additional interest payments being incurred by the debt used to finance the acquisition. Twitter pre-Elon was profitable. Twitter post-Elon is bleeding cash.
I think the loss of advertising revenue since (and because of) the deal is much bigger than the interest expense.
More likely the extra debt that Twitter is now saddled with since the takeover. They're most definitely in a worse financial position as they have to make enough profit to service the debt as well as keep the company running.
Prior to the acquisition, they were described typically described as marginal: influential but their user growth seemed to have plateaued and their profits were measured in tens or low hundreds of millions rather than the billions Facebook was taking in.
The only change after the acquisition is based on Musk’s decision to add new annual debt servicing on the order of 20% of their entire revenue and recognizing that removing moderation and welcoming extremists and sex traffickers back to the site probably isn’t the recipe for getting advertisers to significantly increase their spending.
Other than a lawsuit that’s as of yet unresolved, this seems to be the main source for your claim, from The New York Times:
> To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said.
People who believe Musk is being hounded for ideological reasons also believe that NYT is among the culprits.
You think if Google or Toyota or Maersk or HSBC or AT&T stopped paying rent on their offices it wouldn’t be a major news story? It would be because it would have a dramatic impact on their perceived solvency and their share price.
I’m quite familiar with the Elon fanboy who says “masterful move sir” when he sees Elon slam his dick in a car door. But you’re in a different category. Your response to dick destruction seems to be “nothing to see here, it’s a regular, normal activity. The mainstream media is persecuting Elon!”
Jack was a 3% owner with no real power to rein in his secret police. He was Rasputin in beard only. His top executives mocked him in not-so-private chats. Elon ain't having that and quickly axed the disloyal factions. That speaks to his acumen as a leader. It's arguable whether Twitter has a brighter future as a Blue Team party organ (partially subsidized by the surveillance state), or as a "public square" with diverse views. One bet is that the mainstream media have shit the bed with their partisanship and are now completely discredited, leaving the field open for a new trusted news source. That seems to be the bet Elon is making, at least in public. Doubtless, he has some other business interests tied up in owning Twitter and will have to work out political support beyond the DoD. But it is interesting to see the soft white belly of the State Dept and CIA/FBI exposed. Clearly, his enemies are not the people who control lucrative satellite contracts. Do your own math on that one. And there's always the simple explanation that Elon has some residual affection for classical liberal capitalism, a vestige of that ol' Valley Libertarianism typical of PayPal at its founding (and other 2000s era entrepreneurs and VCs). In this interpretation, what we're seeing at Twitter is partly a reassertion of entrepreneurial ownership interests against the managerial class of public/private mandarins.
If you're downvoting, please explain why. This was a comment in earnest and there have been some very pertinent points made in response, which further makes the narrative interesting and I've definitely learned of a few things.
I inferred no ideaoligic reasoning in my post. I only referenced financials I hadn't thought were public (which I've since learned were). Perhaps ideology is being injected?
People reading what you wrote are faced with uncomfortable introspection regarding the underlying ideology:
"Twitter now allows stuff i disagree with, so them being in financial trouble is good, because stuff i disagree is bad". Where as your post forces them to think through how is it that twitter is in financial trouble all the sudden, but not before, and whether that is an accurate representation of reality versus a narrative to appeal to the aforementioned bias. People go out of their way to avoid cognitive dissonance, so downvote.
With all due respect, that reads more like projection than serious analysis. Twitter had concerns about its financial prospects going back to before its IPO and major shakeups were predicted for years. When the 2016 elections lead to a big uptick in usage, the coverage was often along the lines that Trump saved the company by giving so many people something to talk about.
Twitter was a public company, so whatever financial issues were far more readily accessible before the acquisition. That alone should inform you of the true agenda of that narrative.
The amusing part is that this narrative is ultimately getting checked by reality - with each passing month of the company not immediately failing as per the media hysterics, people will have to face that uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.
> That alone should inform you of the true agenda of that narrative.
Agenda you say? You look at any business and see that they took on massive amount of debt, and said debt did not go to improve their bottom line. And calling that “financial issues” is an agenda now?
They switched equity for debt. This is normal when taking private a publicly traded business. Both the lender and the borrower know what they are doing better than outside commenters who have never spent any time studying "going private" financing.
> Both the lender and the borrower know what they are doing better than outside commenters who have never spent any time studying "going private" financing
It's pretty clear the borrower didn't know what they're doing when they made this deal. The borrower even tried to get the deal canceled (or maybe just renegotiate) by going through the court, and failed.
The lenders moved forward because they know the borrower is good for it. And the borrower can afford to lose even more billions and still function. The borrower can afford to make mistakes of this size.
I think you're confusing "this has been allowed to continue" with "all parties know what they're doing".
It’s normal but paying considerably over the retail price is less common. Musk effectively gave TWTR shareholders a multibillion dollar bonus, which is why they sued to keep him from backing out of the deal.
“Its normal” doesn’t mean “it’s not an additional expense imposed on the post merger company.”
Mergers where the loading of debt onto the company to finance the merger is a major cause of bankruptcy also aren’t that unusual. (For both public firms and firms taken private.)
Cashflow isn't the issue that people talk about re twitter? The narrative has very clearly been defined as "firing so many people that it won't be able to operate", where as the real agenda is purely ideological, as someone else mentioned.
There have been structural issues related profitability literally since around 2012, which is not something that relates to capital structure.
If you want to have any chance of being objective, you will include the cost-cutting that was done as well, which did improve the bottom line. At any rate, it will be very interesting to revisit all these threads a year from now. My bet is it will work out fine, but we'll see soon enough, right?
I don't know if you're understating the case on purpose, but yes, the MSM works in lockstep on every major issue, and coverage of Twitter is not exempt from that rule. When Musk bought the company, there was an immediate and total change in coverage about Twitter's technical and financial and political and ethical "problems", with stories of celebrities who've abandoned it and how "you too can find an alternative," etc.
And all of that was because Musk (lamely) threatened to increase free speech on the platform. They don't like that, the media.
> Bookmark button (de facto silent like) on Tweet details rolls out a week later. Long form tweets early Feb
Unless they are planning on bullying their users into switching to some mobile app (kind of like Reddit do), I don't see the point of adding a bookmark button that all browsers already implement.
A lot of applications, including Hackers News with its Favorites, include some sort of internal bookmarking. Slack, Teams, Instagram, Facebook (I think). It seems reasonable for Twitter to introduce this feature as well.
There’s been a dedicated button too right? Idk I personally stopped using it a few years back when I learned that it capped out at like 500 entries and overwrote my old entries.
I don't get it. Twitter bookmarks already exist and I've been using them for the past (roughly) 4 years when I want to save something but nit like it. Are they changing that?
It definitely can't be coming soon if it's been here for ages already though.
The vast majority of Twitter users are on the app, I'm sure. People sometimes put in their bios things such as "likes are not endorsements" or they will just like to bookmark. I upvote on here to bookmark.
Fear mongering by left wing media to discredit musk. Who did make a mistake in the price he paid, but will sell a part of spacex to finance Twitter. The company is fine, and needs cuts. This is not that different from what private equity companies do on a monthly basis
And built up a ton as well. The trendy thing's been buying up old fashion brands and doing a bunch of product and marketing work - Canada Goose jackets being a thing that everyone and their mom has to wear is a good example of that.
That situation is a bit different, because it was a private company that was acquired and then IPOed, which brought in a large amount of new capital.
Whereas Twitter was the opposite: it was already publicly traded and then went private. So there was no new capital. Instead, we see a ton of cutbacks.
They IPOd in 2017, where as Bain (IIRC) started that marketing+product thing a bunch of years earlier. Out of nowhere everyone on any big budget movie production was wearing a jacket with a canada goose logo.
The point is that the IPO was the payoff in the end that made the investment worth it.
Musk is not infusing capital, he's cut-cut-cutting to the bone. What's the endgame? At what point does Twitter become more valuable than the day he bought it at $44 billion?
I consciously avoid any product that comes from a private equity owned company because I assume it will be the cheapest crap they will be able to get on the shelf without it actually falling apart before you get it out the door. To be fair, fashion products which are ephemeral by nature might actually be a good fit for that. But as someone who's been on the receiving end of a private equity buyout, I want no part of that ever again.
Seems that way when watching from up here in Canada. Like somehow that country's intense obsession with football/team sports has taken over public discourse. And it's infecting discourse up here, too. It's awful reading comments sections. My team vs your team but framed around these ridiculous mis-characterized bundles of other people's opinions.
... Meanwhile there is practically no "left wing" in the United States mainstream... and hasn't been for a long time. Identity politics and cultural liberalism, sure. Stuff around the margins. Actual redistributive economics, unions, and worker's power? Not since Clinton. How stuff like the NYT or CNN got reframed by people as "left wing" is beyond me.
If there's a concerted press attack on Musk, it's not by the "left wing"; it's by one wing of the established business class in the United States vs another. The fights around Trump are similar. Competing economic interests, areas of control, which are framed in the public mind as being about "left wing" vs "right wing" ideological issues, but in reality these are only tangential.
Pretty much all the "public discourse" you're seeing is a tiny bubble. Day to day life for the vast majority of people here is unchanged.
As for your second point, you're playing a no true Scotsman game where the only real liberal is hyper focused on money. Identity politics has almost wholly consumed the attention of the American left. Even during a press announcement of a bill to legalize marijuana in MN, a good portion of the talk was about racial justice.
CNN has recently sacked a number of people or cancelled shows to get away from the blatantly partisan content they were producing. The NYT has had a number of controversies recently over internal fights among editors and staff that their coverage wasn't biased enough.
Meanwhile, redistributive economics marches on in the background. Trillions given out to everyone and anyone, plus long extensions of unemployment payouts during COVID. Municipalities playing with "UBI" schemes which are targeted at minority groups like BIPOC or gender non-conforming individuals.
Union support is generally unpopular outside of some groups, because unions have some powers here that would be illegal in most other Western countries, and that gets abused. Of all of the "left wing" positions, expanding unions is probably the lowest priority for that reason. I'll bring it up every time the topic comes up, because it truly is that important: the SEIU tried to take money from government benefits paid to mentally or physically disabled people in MN, and if I'm not mistaken, they are doing so in other states. Unions in the US are not what people in other countries expect when they wonder why American union participation is so low.
I don't think I'm doing a "no true Scotsman" thing, I don't think it's purism to try to use the meaning of words that held for a century to point out that the accusations about "left wing bias" in media, etc. are absurd.
But I think we actually agree more than disagree: all the cultural stuff has taken the place of actual left wing politics.
Because socialist politics in the west was defeated, politically, in the 80s and 90s.
The "right wing" won. There's no real anti-capitalism left. People who might consider themselves left wing are really just playing with cultural shibboleths, acting out a part, because stating actual left wing opinions (e.g. "we should nationalize the oil industry") is so far out of the political mainstream that you can become absolutely ex-communicated for speaking these opinions in public. They're so dead, that you look like a crazy lunatic.
And the corruption you're speaking about in the union movement, etc. is IMHO a product of that. They become ossified into guilds and mafia-like clubs (this has always been a pressure). Because actually within the union movement historically it was rank and file socialists & communists who were pushing the unions away from that kind of thing historically, and the lack of a principled radical movement in the unions leads directly to corruption. (Look up the Teamsters for a Democratic Union sometime, for an example)
Socialism does not exist as a political force in the United States, unless you ridiculously redefine socialism to mean "anything government does."
Is there a liberal media vs conservative media war in the US? Yes. I just think it's absurd to frame this around "left" vs "right". It again takes us back to these stupid football teams.
It’s a natural outgrowth of the Republican Party’s tack towards previously extreme positions: they’ve drifted away from the mainstream on so many issues that adherents are either faced with admitting they’re wrong about many things or having to dismiss entire fields as part of some inexplicable poorly-defined “left wing” conspiracy which changes scope whenever necessary to attack opponents or defend allies.
I'm still not entirely sure how social is going to survive widespread adoption of modern LLMs. It was bad enough with the bots and bad actors we had in the twenty-teens, but it's going to be increasingly hard to justify ad dollars spent on a user base that's 99.9% ChatGPT screaming[1] at itself.
Well 99% of what gets written by public figure social media accounts aren't actually written by the figure themselves but a social media/PR manager. And most people on social media aren't looking to talk to real people but just find bits of prose that confirm their biases 100% so, not sure it will matter. Though maybe the fog of "real or bot" just gets to be too much people lose interest.
That's the thing - people will notice their biases being confirmed 100% of the time. All of their admired figures agree with them, and all the people they dislike are humiliated in just the right way, so that Everyone Knows I'm Right. There's going to be zero consistency. All of which, dammit, yeah, you're right, we have that already, but this doesn't have a leash on it in terms of human time. Like everyone having their own personal 24 hour news channel, each filled with gladhanding yesmen.
I think it's interesting that this is the new narrative about the state of the company. I don't recall this being a common consensus before the acquisition, but likely tied to the financial revelations made public during/after the acquisition.