As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
As Twitter destroys its brand by renaming itself X, Mastodon user numbers are again soaring | TechCrunch
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk's favorite letter "X," its open source competitor Mastodon is once again seeing usage numbers soar.
It's not just lemmy that's benefiting from Elon Musk.
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He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can't help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You've obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They're not doing that to lose. They're doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU'RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
Musk 'lost' when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he's burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.
That is quite fitting
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as "genius entrepreneur" which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can't think of a single net positive. I think it's an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can't fail, personally. He'll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn't his fault, "it was the libs" or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it's just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children's children.
So yeah, "bad" financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
Totally valid point.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don't think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Chop one head off...
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, "real cash", look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn't even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it's not all his money.
There was never a 44b "real cash" transaction.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn't mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he's going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the "make some statements" phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there's no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It's just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him "you legally can't actually walk away from this deal".
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I'm pretty sure it's why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can't unite if there's not a platform for us to do so on..
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that's all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn't need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
Really?!? That's surprising.
If it's active users increased I'd be surprised, but if it's not I wouldn't be, most people probably don't delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
I wonder if his goal isn't for Twitter to be successful. I'm wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I'm not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He's carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can't be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.