this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Enough Musk Spam
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When you buy a business you are buying the brand. This guy is a moron to throw away the most valuable part of his purchase.
One of my favorite examples of a pants-on-head level of branding stupidity was when buy.com was bought out by a japanese company that renamed it Rakuten.com. Most of buy.com’s value was, honestly, in the domain. I know that Rakuten is a large company, but their name is meaningless to the majority of American consumers. I could never even remember whether their name was Ratuken or Rakuten. If I remember correctly (this was about a decade ago), I had used them occasionally for PC parts when they were competitive with places like newegg.
This is so much worse than that. I still think he’s just lashing out in a clinically diagnosable level of narcissistic rage, but I’ve started losing the argument against people who thinks he’s burning down twitter deliberately. Other than locking the doors and shuttering the site, I can’t think of much that he could do that would destroy the company faster.
I am a partisan of the "Elon didn't want to buy twitter, just do a small amount of stock manipulation and now he's running it into the ground to cut his losses" theory, but honestly at this point I'm surprised at how far he'll go and he definitely seems more and more incompetent. Halon's razor also tells me it's incompetence, so I don't know what to think.
I never liked twitter to begin with so I don't really care but yeah it's wierd.
The rich are reducing and removing the ability of the poor to communicate, and more importantly, coordinate.
If that's the case, They're doing a piss poor job of it.
You could have stopped at "this guy is a moron". He has proven the factuality of this statement over and over again at this point.
Exactly. Twitter is a staple in brand design. The platform sucked, but the branding was onpoint.
The Twitter bird is hands down one of the best corporate logos. It's simple and recognizable without any accompanying text. I'd put it at the S-tier with Apple, Nike, and NBC.
A cool little thread from one of the creators of the logo, on how they came up with it
https://twitter.com/martingrasser/status/1683266038602010624?s=20
Considering a lot of his financial backing for the acquisition was from the saudis, and since he already was upset about people making fun of him on Twitter paired with him being an immature manchild kept afloat by generational wealth and public money it makes sense he simply bought the platform to destroy it. The Saudi autocrats didn’t like the free speech issues it caused for them, and Elon just wanted his critics under control the devaluation and destruction are not much of an issue for him.
Ribbit
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised. Elon fucked up making an offer for a company that was way too much. He was forced to buy a company for more than it was worth, and for more money than he had. Who would give him the money to do that except someone who wanted to own the platform for other reasons? And now he's transparently doing everything possible to kill the platform, and everyone is like "Oh wow, Elon is suddenly so bad at business!" He's always been a petulant manchild, but he's not this inept. These are deliberate, calculated choices meant to do exactly what is happening, namely to kill Twitter.
To be perfectly clear Elon has never been exactly good at business.
There's a reason why SpaceX, his most successful company, just treats him like a figurehead and Gwynne Shotwell actually runs things.
Very strong belief is rich = smart and the whole 4d chess excuse.
Where is this from?
I read it in some articles I don’t remember during the process, but a quick google search turned up this for example:
https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musks-twitter-takeover-faces-backlash-over-saudi-financing-1755606
Interesting. I was unaware of other investment groups gone into coalition to make it happen. I was aware of several banks that are on the hook for $44billion though. All of which will definitely not see that money. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Mizuho, Barclays, Societe Generale, and BNP Paribas.
The fact that such massive loans were taken out to make it happen doomed twitter from the start. The interest alone on these loans makes any monetisation strategy impossible. The company was never going to be able to pay it back.