It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.

  • appel@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Moob@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • appel@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • EliasChao@lemmy.one
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • kaba0@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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”.

        • Vlyn@lemmy.zip
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • appel@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • Ubermeisters@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      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…