I can't imagine a $44b investment can recoup anything of significance through $8 verification of celebrities. If every human on earth were a celebrity and all got on Twitter and were all verified, then you'd be making back most of your money.
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So that would put you in the "so there's a chance" pool of users. I don't think that's a big market. I think the vast market is "heck no."
How many verified accounts did Twitter have before Elon? A million? Maybe 2? Even if everyone started paying, it's not enough. From Elon's rhetoric, it seems time is of the essence. Cost savings from the layoffs won't kick in until February. He wants to flip the advertising to more targeted impulse buying (like Instagram). It can work but that requires a lot more advertisers paying a lot less.
In the past, there were several big companies looking at Twitter as a acquisition including Disney. Everyone of them concluded that the juice wasn't worth the squeak. Any new investor he finds is going to come in with Twitter at a vastly lower valuation (probably in the $13-18 billion range). It's not looking good. While it's easy to make fun of the loud mouth billionaire, there are people's livelihood on the line.
Being rich certainly doesn't prove you are not lucky. I realize you said "just luck", which is different. Still, I think it's important to remember how important luck is in being rich. It is a pet peeve of mine that the media and many Americans seem to believe that being rich establishes that someone is a genius, or close to it.
Beyond that, remember that being really good at something doesn't mean that you can't also be really bad at other things. Put another way, just because you are intelligent doesn't mean that you are not as capable as the next person of being incredibly stupid. For example and to bring this back to basketball, look at Michael Jordan. Outside of playing basketball, he hasn't been very successful.
I will go on record as saying I will be completely shocked if Musk turns Twitter into something bigger and better than what it was.
Oh, to be clear, I was not implying that Musk had made his hundreds of billions through genius alone. I think there was a good bit of luck in it. I think that is the case of darn near every successful person. Heck, look at Zoom... there have been other video conferencing apps around for a while. Zoom happened to be in the right place at the right time when an unprecedented global pandemic happened. Viola, the company is suddenly worth exponentially more than it was pre-pandemic. There was some luck in that, for sure.
Still, Elon has turned multiple enterprises in multiple fields into highly successful businesses. There is more than luck going on with him. Does that mean he has the magic formula to make Twitter actually worth what he paid for it? I dunno about that but we have to acknowledge that his track record means he should not be dismissed as a total crackpot (which some do seem inclined to do).
Wanted to revisit this. Word has come down this morning that they’ve disabled Twitter Bkue because of the impersonation issues. I guess $8 wasn’t much of a deterrent. Who could have seen this coming - except the myriad of people who said it would be a problem.
This remained up on Twitter for 18 hours...
...in case you are wondering why advertisers might be abandoning the site.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhSrxKrW...jpg&name=small
And here is the above referenced Chiquita Bananna one...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhSvDtoU...g&name=900x900
Someone should create a fake account for Twitter itself and put up a job posting for a competent CEO.
I was very amused by this:
Attachment 15121
This whole craziness might actually be costing me money personally. I own some Eli Lilly stock. Lilly was a victim of a fake verified account yesterday which posted that insulin would now be free. Lilly had to respond and like five other fake verified accounts showed up with more strange posts. Anyway, LLY stock is down 5% today and many people think it is a direct result of the fake tweets. Granted, there is a general rotation out of healthcare today, but LLY seems to be losing more ground than the others.
Here's another gem:
https://twitter.com/JoshuaPHilll/sta...XJUKxOY6QTjZzw
That’s why the old system worked well. I followed the people I wanted to follow and many were verified. Therefore, if I saw a tweet from them with the check mark, I knew it was coming from the right account (always have to judge the veracity yourself).
That’s the whole reason for me to use Twitter. To get news about certain topics that I care about from sources I trust. If I have to verify myself that the account is legitimate now, why am I bothering with Twitter at all? They cease to have a reason to exist.