Musk says Twitter value is down to $20 billion, calls firm an “inverse startup”
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To be fair, if they're using Musk worshipers as the standard man, they may very well be right.
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Even if he knew what he was doing, Twitter was not going to make enough the cover the 1.5 billion yearly in interest payments on the debt. I think the biggest profit it has made (the years it didn't lose money) was a few hundred million. So what was the plan? Was there a plan? Just to lose money yearly until the debt payments are done? Then why not just sell more Tesla stock and pay cash?
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Let me guess, that "point" that Twitter was 4 months away from running out of money was October 27, 2022, the day Musk bought the company and saddled it with $13 billion in debt, with a $300 million interest payment looming in Q1 2023 (of approximately $1.5 billion in payments due annually).
I'm also guessing that the next point Twitter will be months away from being out of funds will be shortly after April 1, 2023, when all the legacy blue checks go away, and many people and companies and organizations abandon the platform instead of paying extortion to try and prevent easy impersonation and theft of accounts.
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I've got a brilliant reverse startup idea myself. I just need a few investors to give me $20 billion or so, and then I'll blow it all on cocaine and hookers.
It will end where startups usually begin: with me sleeping in a garage.
It will end where startups usually begin: with me sleeping in a garage.
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I think the word you're looking for is Shutdown
Congratulations Elon, you're an idiot.
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The clusterfuck continues unabated.
The sheer hubris of this disastrous adventure just boggles my mind. Literally BILLIONS burned in service of his ego. Yeah, sure it will be worth $250B. Did he come up with that fantasy while being self-driven in a Cybertruck?
The sheer hubris of this disastrous adventure just boggles my mind. Literally BILLIONS burned in service of his ego. Yeah, sure it will be worth $250B. Did he come up with that fantasy while being self-driven in a Cybertruck?
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Captain Trips
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Yes - Elon Musk and the most hardcore of the remaining hardcore employees.
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You would need to pay me $ to take on stock in a privately held company that musk runs. at best he is going to play games to devalue the stock while remaining similar base value, at worst (and likely) he is going to do that, very dramatically tank the value even further AND do something extremely stupid that breaks the corp veil and exposes shareholders to liabilities just by holding on to that stock.
ie, sure ill take 100$ of stock but only if you also raise my compensation by 500$.
ie, sure ill take 100$ of stock but only if you also raise my compensation by 500$.
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His value in Tesla likely would've dropped by far more than $13 billion if he had sold any more Tesla stock, since it would've driven the price of Tesla down even more, he would've had to sell even more shares, and what he had left would be worth even less. Losing the ~$23 billion he personally invested into Twitter by it going under may actually be better than the value in Tesla stock he would've lost by selling more of it.
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Well, if his business is an "inverse startup", shouldn't he be the inverse of hardcore? How about, "softshell"...
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No, no, see, if he can cut costs to less than $500 million, by firing more employees, not paying vendors anything, and giving remaining employees useless stock options instead of pay raises or other benefits, then Twitter may actually make a profit. Who cares if it's actually sustainable?
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There are nearly 8 billion people on Earth. You just need to sell $32 per person and he'll make that $250B.
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
”Now, everyone knows that companies should try to grow. What my business plan pre-supposes is… maybe they shouldn’t?”
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For anyone believing a word this man says I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
I’m afraid Elon might take the phrase “halt and catch fire” too literally.
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He's fucking up Tesla by making promises and predictions that will never come true; a fact that is slowly beginning to rise in the awareness of the Musk acolytes who bought Tesla stock AND haven't dumped it by now.
The more hands-on he is in the day-to-day running of any established company, the more catastrophic it is for that company. That goes back to the days when Thiel (Yes, Peter Thiel, one of his butt buddies that helped Mush avoid the consequences of his own stupidity back in the day) set Musk up as CEO in a couple of companies that Musk promptly ran toward the ground fast enough to get fired before crashing and burning. Musk has only ever found "business success" in start-ups, but like a dead fish, he starts to smell bad for the company the longer and closer he is to it.
He's mostly hands-off with SpaceX's day to day operations, unlike he is with Twitter.
If Musk hadn't founded Tesla, he'd have been fired from it long ago for making promises he can't keep and selling self driving as vaporware to the gullible folks who were unfortunate enough to believe Musk had the ability to do with Tesla what a corporation with far more resources and experience is still struggling to reliably do. The end result is that Tesla sells generally low-quality, poorly built EV's these days relying on mystique and gall more than hardware and ability.
And with Musk using it as his personal piggy bank to try to keep Twitter afloat, I'd say he's likely to do significant damage to Tesla before Twitter collapses under the sheer weight of his incompetence.
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You must be reading about a different Elon Musk than the rest of us. Because this one is clearly a terrible businessman and an overall jackass.
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Honestly, I wouldn't have gone in with you on that deal before Musk bought Twitter.
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I'm not sure how it works for these big mega purchases but for capital gains tax in say, your brokerage account, you don't have to pay taxes on your losses but still have to pay them for any gains. As far as I can tell there's no way selling Twitter at a loss will somehow give him a net gain on taxes in following years, especially when his assets would only be taxed when liquidated anyway. Not to mention the interest from the debt taken on for the purchase...
People have some weird ideas about taxes and I often see "it's for a tax writeoff" trotted out as something to somehow defend his stupid decisions.
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I fear the M.C. Escher-like innerworkings that helped him come up with the $20 billion number.
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Musk is a case study in why billionaires need a consigliere like Charlie Munger.
Or, more indirectly, why we shouldn't have billionaires.
Or, more indirectly, why we shouldn't have billionaires.
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I don't know how stupid you'd have to be to buy all the "inverse startup" and "250bn valuation" crap
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He hasn't founded Tesla. He wants to be called founder, but became a shareholder quite early.
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Might not be the best analogy seeing as you can at least describe all of Escher's weird work in mathematically sensible ways.
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Who the hell, that is still in his right mind, still listen to this fool....
What a fucking clown.
What a fucking clown.
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Does an "inverse startup" mean it is going from $44 billion to $0? Maybe he will be right this time.
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According to the interwebs, Twitter was valued at $33 billion before Musk made his offer. He's loaded it with $13 billion in debt, and $(33-13)billion = $20 billion. So I guess that explains his valuation of it now. I have a strong suspicion that more financially savvy people might peg it a bit lower than that though, especially given a large volume of pending ex-employee arbitrations, lawsuits, unpaid bills, and the prospect of financial liability for failing to comply with EU requirements on a number of issues.
So what do people guesstimate a more realistic valuation to be?
So what do people guesstimate a more realistic valuation to be?
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Reading through that, I think I can see a motive for this statement: Trying to build back up the platform to attract back advertisers. At this point, if the advertisers don't think the platform will stay around, it won't because they won't give it money and it'll go bankrupt. He has to stop that spiral, and if he can get just a few advertisers back by saying 'ok, we've hit the bottom, we have a plan, I know where we're going', then it's worth it.
Even if it's just air.
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