Musk calls Twitter verification system “bullsh—,” announces $8 monthly charge
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So... let me get this straight. He wanted to charge $20/mo for a system he says is bullshit? Am I missing something here, or....
He also doesn't seem to understand the concept of stolen credit cards, but maybe he just meant the cost to Twitter in all those chargebacks?
The more he talks, the more obvious he is in waaaaay over his head. Like, he can't even see daylight to tell which way he should swim. He clearly doesn't understand the Twitter business model at all, which would be fine if he admitted as much and hired someone like Shotwell at SpaceX to run things for him and Twitter was just a shiny bauble he could claim to own.
He also doesn't seem to understand the concept of stolen credit cards, but maybe he just meant the cost to Twitter in all those chargebacks?
The more he talks, the more obvious he is in waaaaay over his head. Like, he can't even see daylight to tell which way he should swim. He clearly doesn't understand the Twitter business model at all, which would be fine if he admitted as much and hired someone like Shotwell at SpaceX to run things for him and Twitter was just a shiny bauble he could claim to own.
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Who would buy it? Unless you could maybe get some of the top talent to come back, Musk has already done a pretty good job of hollowing it out of any value. All you have is the physical infrastructure, which is the easy part to build.
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Twitter has 400 million users globally. Let's call half of them bots. If every human pays, thats 1.6 billion bucks a year. About half a century to recoup his investment? What a brilliant businessman. Twitter can't survive on ads, I'm sure $8/mo will make up the difference.
200M people x $8/mo = $1.6B per month, not per year.
Assuming you got every single one of those 200M people to pay $8/mo. A good chunk of those accounts are bots, be they bots that track some asshole's private jet or just puts out spam replies to everything. Then there's a lot of people in countries where they live on a couple dollars a day, so $8/mo is completely infeasible. You probably only have maybe 50M people who could, theoretically, actually pay $8/mo... assuming you could get them all to pay. You'll probably only get <10% who are willing to cough up anything. My guess would be around 2-5M people, tops. Too lazy to do the math, but guessing it won't really be anywhere near enough to dig Twitter out of the hole it's in.
Said it before, and I'll say it again. The only way I see for Twitter to become a profitable company is to go in pretty much the exact opposite direction Musk seems to be going. Instead of leaning into the nazis, white nationalists, and *phobes of all flavors, you give all of them the boot. Implement a zero tolerance policy for intentional racism, hate speech, etc. Strangely enough, that still leaves a surprisingly wide variety of topics that you CAN talk about. Weather, crops, sports teams, movies, and so on. You get rid of all that human refuse, and then you go to advertisers saying how the platform may have fewer users, but they're more engaged and you don't have to worry about your ad for baby formula showing up next to a kiddie porn post for example. Unfortunately the company would likely shrink considerably and a lot of people would be out of jobs, but if we don't live in a disney movie. Maybe, over time, Twitter could grow back to its former glory size, but do so in a sustainable way and not one focused on growth at any and all cost.
Musks' plan is just going to see the platform turn into 4Chan and be a drag on his other businesses.
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IIRC, most of the loans were secured with Tesla shares. Pretty much the only thing of worth Musk has.
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And in somewhat related news, seems Musk is up to his usual slave driving, expecting people to work 24/7 if they don't want to be fired. This is exactly the sort of thing people got the shit beaten out of them, and even died, to prevent during the gilded age. This is what happens when the pendulum of power swings too far in favor of employers and why you should always support unions. Also why we need to get rid of this overtime exempt bullshit.
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twi ... 35331.html
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/twi ... 35331.html
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Elon was probably like that kid in the first American Pie movie who fucks an apple pie.
https://youtu.be/NCAOKR1jpp0
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Badly. The only real question is how bad. Complete and unmitigated disaster or like a tornado of shit inside a shit hurricane causing an earthquake to rupture sewage lines causing geysers of shit to spew into the air.
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It is great to see that there are so many people on here *smarter* than Elon Musk. I cannot wait to see what inventions they are about to unveil and hear how they have managed to stay under the radar with their clearly superior intellect and business acumen.I think we should all “watch and learn” when it comes to Elon, no matter how smart we think we are.
Name one thing Musk has invented.
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Being smarter than Elon Musk does not mean we’re inventors. I’d say we’re smart enough to know what we know, and know our limitations. Certainly none of us are haggling with famous authors because our ideas were shown to be publicly ridiculed on the platform we bought for ourselves.It is great to see that there are so many people on here *smarter* than Elon Musk. I cannot wait to see what inventions they are about to unveil and hear how they have managed to stay under the radar with their clearly superior intellect and business acumen.
Being smart doesn't mean one is incapable of doing dumb things (like waiving due diligence) or saying dumb things.
And whether or not Musk has personally invented, versus his team/employees doing the actual invention, there can be no argument that his companies are innovative. For whatever reason, other companies and entrepreneurs, with as much (if not more) resources, have been unable to replicate his successes.
If an Einstein-level intellect walks into a glass door, he is no less a genius.
Except that they're not innovative. EVs existed long before Tesla (which Musk didn't found), there are tunnels and underground structures dating back to WWII and earlier, plus things like the Transbay Tunnel, Chunnel, the underground subway systems in places like Paris, San Francisco, and New York which pre-date Musk's Boring company, by like, a lot. People have been working on biomechanics for ages. SpaceX is based off someone else's designs, and I don't think it's really a coincidence that the one company that isn't a total shitshow is the one company Musk has the least to do with in terms of day-to-day operations.
There's also the fact that the Boring tunnels that actually exist bare almost no resemblance to what was promised, Tesla isn't able to be profitable without violating labor and workplace safety laws... Not really seeing this "Einstein-level intellect" you speak of.
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Which is called constructive discharge/dismissal. Creating an environment so toxic that a normal person would rather quit that continue to endure it. Even with the weaksauce labor laws in the US, that is illegal.
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Being smarter than Elon Musk does not mean we’re inventors. I’d say we’re smart enough to know what we know, and know our limitations. Certainly none of us are haggling with famous authors because our ideas were shown to be publicly ridiculed on the platform we bought for ourselves.It is great to see that there are so many people on here *smarter* than Elon Musk. I cannot wait to see what inventions they are about to unveil and hear how they have managed to stay under the radar with their clearly superior intellect and business acumen.
Being smart doesn't mean one is incapable of doing dumb things (like waiving due diligence) or saying dumb things.
And whether or not Musk has personally invented, versus his team/employees doing the actual invention, there can be no argument that his companies are innovative. For whatever reason, other companies and entrepreneurs, with as much (if not more) resources, have been unable to replicate his successes.
If an Einstein-level intellect walks into a glass door, he is no less a genius.
Except that they're not innovative. EVs existed long before Tesla (which Musk didn't found), there are tunnels and underground structures dating back to WWII and earlier, plus things like the Transbay Tunnel, Chunnel, the underground subway systems in places like Paris, San Francisco, and New York which pre-date Musk's Boring company, by like, a lot. People have been working on biomechanics for ages. SpaceX is based off someone else's designs, and I don't think it's really a coincidence that the one company that isn't a total shitshow is the one company Musk has the least to do with in terms of day-to-day operations.
There's also the fact that the Boring tunnels that actually exist bare almost no resemblance to what was promised, Tesla isn't able to be profitable without violating labor and workplace safety laws... Not really seeing this "Einstein-level intellect" you speak of.
Elon is like Steve Jobs, in that his primary achievement has been to correctly implement, merchandise, and market other people's older ideas in a way that was appropriate to the unmet or latent demand of the market, but which wasn't particularly innovative per se. There's nothing fundamental that Elon contributed to the Model S, or the Falcon 9, or the Boring machine, that was actually his own brainchild.
There's something to be said for that to be sure, but Steve Jobs didn't go around making a bunch of completely ridiculous claims about products. If anything they tended to be undersold.
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Touché. So, allow me to refine my statement to say I'm talking about the functionality of products.
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Reminds me of a story I read years ago, back before the US adopted the chip and PIN system and we signed for everything. He would go around buying things and signing for it as "not authorized" to see if anyone would catch it. Only one place did.
The way the law is set up, if the retailer and/or credit card company doesn't spot and reject these charges, they're stuck paying for them. So what do retailers do? Throw their lowest paid employees on checkout lanes. The people who give the least number of fucks about anything going on with the company as a whole because they don't get paid enough.
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I guess we just have a different idea of humor on this level of the Tower.
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So, how long do you suppose it'll be before people flood Musk's DM inbox with stupid messages? And how long before various celebrities run screaming from the platform?
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And that's by the usual dumpster fire standards of Twitter.
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