601–610 of 761 posts
All these Twitter Blue subscribers who thought they could buy views and engagement must be thrilled that they're now competing for a very limited resource
My first thought on reading this was: "I'm going to unfollow some high volume posters in that case", so they will lose some followers too.
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How does Spotify lose money? Audio isn't nearly as big as video files. Likely they are just going to make the free tier absolutely suck.
Are they still paying exorbitantly for podcaster exclusivity?
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To some extent she is also probably there to play the same "say yes to Elon about some dumb idea and then get the team to implement a somewhat less dumb version and convince him it was his idea all along" game with him that Tesla and SpaceX leadership reportedly does.
I’ve always wondered what it’s like to work for a CEO where you simultaneously 1. can’t say no to him, and 2. can’t implement their hairbrained ideas without killing your product and then being blamed for it. I heard a rumor (who knows if it’s true) that in the early-ish days of Amazon, they had an entirely separate backend and frontend just for Bezos that would only display if his account was logged in. So when he a…
When I try to imagine this, what I do is think about US or British politics after 2015 or so. And then I feel enraged. And I conclude that this is what it would be like, only closer, more immediate, and more sickness-inducing.
Musk, Trump, Boris Johnson: ever-present, narcissistic sociopaths who inject themselves into everything and ruin lives, up close and further afield.
I have no idea whether the Bezos story is true, but the sound engineers working for the Beach Boys apparently really did eventually set up a mixing desk for Murry Wilson (the Wilsons' overbearing, abusive father and interfering manager) so he could make his idiotic changes whenever he wanted, but that only affected what he heard:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/featu...
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This is some pretty dumb mental gymnastics to retcon a motivation. The simple explanation: he made an offer for Twitter, then the market (and Twitter’s value) crashed, and he tried to avoid paying the now-vastly overpriced fee he was on the hook for.
His offer was always well above fair value, which is why Twitter's board took him to court to enforce it.
Twitter had traded above that price as recently as five months earlier, and had traded in the $60s and even $70s for most of 2021. Twitter's stock had cratered in early 2022 along with many other tech stocks (Facebook went from $330 to $220 in that period).
At the time, the Board could have argued that the current stock price was artificially low due to market forces, and that it wasn't an accurate reflection of the company's prospects. That's especially true because Boards have access to non-public information and longer term forecasts.
When the board agreed to the merger, it signaled to investors that sophisticated insiders on the Board and their financial advisors did not believe the stock would be reasonably likely to reach the offer price in the near/medium term, on a risk adjusted basis, and thus the acquisition is superior. That's important intel for investors, and one of the reasons why failed mergers are so risky.
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Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give. And ironically enough, blue currently works as a crappy version of advertising thanks to the reply ranking. The promises of prioritizing "high-quality content" never came true; all we see are mid takes and, if you speak Mandarin, AI-powered sex scambots. Well, worse for us plebs. Not sure if it's worse for the buyers.
> Blue sales ultimately can't hope to come close to what big brand ads used to give. I don't know, I think the hope is there. With these rate limits and some Fermi estimates, we can guess what Twitter's hoped-for revenue per user might be. Suppose that this move is designed to move regular users over to Twitter Blue, and a regular user might ordinarily see 2000 tweets per day. Suppose further that Twitter would show…
Twitter has over 12 billion USD in debt though, and with rising interest rate the interest payments are going to be an absolute drag on financial performance. Those payments MUST be met, otherwise Musk will not own Twitter at all. Scaling down user numbers is unlikely to help. Even 3% interest rate on 10b is 300 million per year.
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>>We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. Odd statement given that Fidelity just cut its valuation of reddit, but increased it valuation of Twitter.
> The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund has reduced the market value of its equity stake in Twitter for a third time, now putting it at $6.55 million. That’s down from the nearly $20 million the Fidelity fund valued its stake at in October. From today, according to https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value-08c64... . It doesn't sound like it increased its valuation of twitter in any way tbh.
In reality that was a month ago, and on June 30th they increased the value
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation...
Incredibly bizarre way to intentionally kill your app, even after all the other nonsense he's been doing. Even if I were willing to pay for something as cringe as verification, 6000 posts a day is laughable for an app like Twitter. I hit the rate limit on my "unverified" account in about 5 minutes. I've been waiting for $newApp to get enough users to be fun, and this only motivates me more to be the change I want to…
The cherry on top is that even if you pay, you still get ads.
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I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and ta…
>>I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital >>I don't think this high interes…
> There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
There's no indication that your statement is true either, I think in a 5-10 year span we'll have lower rates simply because virtually every economy is in population decline. In any case, the Twitter and Reddit flubs weren't due to higher interest rates. SVB was, this isn't.