The value of his purchase of all that billions was essentially:
The userbase
The branding
The software and the people that built it
Now that got rid of all three... Wasn't it 100x cheaper to just buy parler? Or just hire a single developer on Fiverr and start a defederated mastodon server
I doubt anyone could pay the man enough to blow 40 billion to tank a website. The moment you break something, the users will find a replacement and go there. This purchase was 100% ego. It changed no minds about Elon. His fanboys will still call this genius, and those who already knew he was a manchild are not suddenly thinking this was a mature, well-thought-out plan.
If the goal was just to shut down twitter that could have been accomplished day 1. My theory is he really didn't think he'd be stuck paying the high price he offered and now his goal is to file for bankruptcy after tanking the company, and to do it he has to look like hes trying to make it work.
Alternatively. He really is this big an idiot. It would be in line with the moron making an offer twitter couldn't refuse and then being surprised when they accepted
In a world . . . in which one man spends 45 Billion dollars to destroy a global communications juggernaut in the most assinine, ridiculous ways ever . . . It's . . . The Rebrandening!
I mean, if he bought Coca-Cola and replaced sugar with vinegar, it'd be news, right?
I remember visiting X.com in 2000 or so. Was a bank type website, which PayPal bought up. That’s probably how he got control of the domain. (ETA: more accurate answer below!)
X.com was the online bank that Musk co-founded and that some time after it merged with Confinity Inc. changed its name to PayPal (PayPal was a product of Confinity).
If I recall correctly, he had the x.com domain and tried to rebrand PayPal to X. The board went, "are you a fucking idiot?" and replace him with Peter Thiel.
He's been trying to call stuff "X" since he was an edgy teenager. He just never had the good sense to grow out of it, and he fell ass backward into enough money that we all get to watch him go all "Star Wars kid" over and over again in public.
LOL @ Star Wars kid comment. Gave me a good chuckle. But, that’s not fair to the real Star Wars kid, my brother was just enjoying being him, living his best life! You do him dirty by debasing him to Musk’s level 😂
The x.com domain was originally purchased by PayPal for over $8m back when Elon was still at the company. No one knows how much PayPal asked Elon for it back in 2017 when he bought it from them, but it was rumoured to be an eight digit figure.
Everything he’s done with Twitter is great. It was time someone brought it down a couple dozen notches. Here’s hoping someone will do the same to Meta next.
I'm on Twitter for a long time now and nothing really changed. No one left. People that lean left are bitching about the platform but continue to tweet. Previously, the same was done by right leaning people.
Twitter has lost over 10% of its users and engagement/monthly active users is down, Musk even admits they’ve lost users. Traffic is also going down with the API change/requirement to be on Twitter proper, as well as limiting the number of tweets one can see.
Considering how much a Twitter is bots, that means the number of actual people who left is actually much higher. So yeah, something did change lol just because you haven’t noticed it doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Edit: I’m not sure why you are talking about left and right users tbh. Seems like you’re kind of shoehorning a “both sides“ comment since no one is talking politics here.
Yeah nah, pretty much everybody of importance left the platform quite some time ago actually. Twitter truly has turned to shit too. All you see in your feed is the same extreme-right propaganda we've seen for 4+ years since the pandemic. It's just that now it's boosted by Elon's fuckery. Also, there's a reason why they're begging us to come back.
They created their own little echo chamber and now they have nobody to argue with. That's what happen when a far-right social media is created usually. They realize they aren't the powerhouse they thought they were and all of a sudden it's just "uh, where is everybody?!?!?"
If you want my opinion, it's 1000% deserved and they can suck my dick, I ain't coming back just to hear "VACCINE BAD ORANGE MAN GOD PLS JOIN US WE CAN KILL EVERYBODY THAT LOOKS LIKE A JEW!"
Well you're not on Twitter now, are you. Neither is anyone else. Also they're not tweeting anymore, they're . . . xing? And per the article that was the last email from the twitter.com domain (supposedly) so . . what, is it x.com now?