1 yr. ago • 96%

X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it

www.theverge.com X is officially worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it

A steep drop from Musk’s $44 billion purchase price.

A year after he bought Twitter for $44 billion, Musk thinks the company is now worth $19 billion, a 55 percent drop.

Let's recap what he did to Twitter, I will go first:

Changed the original name Twitter to X.

84 comments

Is anyone else surprised it's even worth that much?

87
- A lot of journalists, politicians and influencers are really reluctant to let it go. I guess those are the ones still keeping it somewhat afloat.
  
  It should be more publicly shamed if you keep being a part of his insanity.
  
  68
  
  It's because no other social media platform currently meets their requirements. Other platforms either functions significantly different from twitter or it lacks the reach that a politician needs in order for it to be worth their time.
  
  -3
- Yep. I mean in the end it has no product. It's just billboard/ad space, in the world of commerce. Sure, it's a lot of ad space, but ad space in the digital world is also effectively endless, so the percentage still isn't actually that relevant as it can shift in a moment's notice.
  
  Say... if a neonazi buys the platform and brings all his friends with him.
  
  But beyond an office he's not even paying for and so on, Xitter got... nothing. They have no actual product that can be liquidated, no supply chains worth any money, nothing to rent/sell out beyond said adspace. Like many digital companies they rely entirely on hype for all their perceived value.
  
  19
- Honestly it's probably not... Estimates aside, who would even want to buy Twitter in its current incarnation?
  
  6
  
  It still has a big enough user base and brand recognition that they could put things back on course if they really went for it. The only permanent damage is the brain drain from firing a lot of people that has experience in running twitter.
  
  11
- Pretty sure it’s worth fuck all.
  
  4
It was never about the money. Musk is turning a once-valuable information space into a fascist shithole. That was always the goal.

42
- Yeah, I don't believe that. Turning it into a fascist shit hole might have been a goal, but losing billions doing it isn't.
  
  He's an arrogant fuck who wants everyone to believe he's a genius. Blowing that much money makes him look like a moron.
  
  33
  
  He is rich enough that it literally doesn't matter. This was "expensive" for him on paper, but hardly life changing.
  
  2
- Once valuable? Fuck that. Twitter has always been and always will be Jerry Springer for the Internet. It's fun to watch some toothless hooker throw a shoe at a priest until Grandma finds out you are on their as 4chan gaslighting the priest and the hooker.
  
  The value is pure entertainment. Anyone that takes it more seriously has not seen it for what it is.
  
  3
  
  This is why it bothers me that so many government agencies and officials use it to communicate with the public.
  
  It’s almost as if there should be an official government service / platform specifically for that purpose. A state run Twitter. (Maybe they could use mastodon under the hood.)
  
  3
- once-valuable information space
  
  I personally would dispute every single word in that sentence
  
  3
  
  Even people I know who use Twitter a lot don't think this, I'd hate to meet someone with this level of Twitter brain.
  
  0
It's obscene that someone can destroy so much value and not go bankrupt. It should not be possible.

37
- The value only exists on paper. He halved it, he can double it. Happens all the time.
  
  13
  
  he can double it.
  
  You must be buying all the shares you can then!
  
  Narrator: he wasn't
  
  9
  
  he can double it
  
  Can he, though? Or was the worth inflated beforehand?
  
  6
Let's put this another way.

That ~25 billion, heavily absorbed by foreign investors, has bought influence on worldwide events/elections and allowed those that previously hated the platform to sabotage it internally, likely to a post-election failure.

Makes you wonder to what degree we have a "useful idiot billionaire" situation, with other interests (countries?) steering the out of control train to their benefit.

34
Don’t forget him allowing all the banned Neo-Nazis back on! Advertisers just loved that.

31
Bring back shadowbanning.
Uses user data to train AI models.
Limits replies to verified users only…

Elon has made so many terrible changes to Twitter. I’m happy to be out and migrate to Mastodon and WireMin since last December. Using Mastodon to track up to date news and WireMin to stay connected with a few friends who also left Twitter.

Now I just look at Twitter like it’s the house burning down across the street.

19
- 'Freedom of Speech Not Reach', I was like isn't the same thing with Shadowbanning? It's so disgusting that he keeps claiming Twitter is the place for online Freedom of Speech but look at what he did.
  
  11
  
  Controlling the narrative is why he bought it.
  
  44 billion is chump change to him. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find his sole motive was to silence critics now that he got outed as a massive douche.
  
  I rememy when i could call him a massive douche and a faux-engineer and people would pile on as though he actually built the cars himself. (Fact: he’s not a Tesla founder. He bought Tesla. And made them call him a founder.)
  
  14
The worst thing he did was change the name. I mean, everyone knew twitter. Now you have to qualify it with "Musk's X"

16
- I just call it Twitter.
  
  25
  
  Now it's shitter™.
  
  16
- X (formerly known as Twitter)
  
  17
  
  $19 billion (formerly known as $44 billion)
  
  29
- "X, the social networking website formerly known as Twitter".
  
  Maybe we should call it TSNWFKAT, like Prince did for a bit.
  
  6
  
  So close to having NSFW in it. What a shame.
  
  1
- And he wants to make it a Everything app, thats terrible
  
  5
  
  And the Superapp attempt will fail
  
  2
- Xcrement.
  
  1
Permanently Deleted

14
I'm sure the value will come back. Valuing X at $19B puts the value of the whole alphabet at $500B, which seems low for an established technology which has been in continuous use since before the time of the Roman Empire.

The US GDP is $24 trillion, and all the financial reports supporting that valuation use the Roman Alphabet. The Alphabet is essential to justifying the value of the entire US Economy. I think it's reasonable to value the worth of the alphabet at 8% of GDP, which would give X a fair value of $74B.

See, haters? Elon really is a financial genius. Numbers don't lie.

14
- Actually, Alphabet is currently valued at 1.56 trillion dollars.
  
  https://g.co/kgs/Tchkeb
  
  16
  
  Wow X, you suck: Pull your weight! Look at how much the other letters are worth!
  
  9
- Come on. Obviously not all letters in the alphabet are worth the same. X is not that popular even if you take into account its different uses like ':x', 'xoxo' or 'xxx'. Not that many words use x and if one day it collapses and becomes unavailable you can just substitute it with 'ks' like 'seks' or 'meksican'.
  
  7
- The meat of those financial reports rely on Arabic Numerals and everything is OK over there, right?
  
  5
That's the value he think it's worth, not what someone would actually pay for it.

12
- He doesn't even need someone who is willing to actually pay for it. Just someone to say they will, even if they have intention to.....
  
  1
I don't think it was even worth half of what he paid for it when he paid for it. Musk is a complete god damned moron. I'd be surprised if the company was even worth $19 billion when he bought it for $44 bn. And there's no way in fuck that it's worth $19 bn now. Absolute dogshit assessment. Not that I'm surprised, mind. It's Musk's assessment, after all.

9
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23108357/redacted-version-of-exhibits-a-j-to-letter-to-the-honorable-kathaleen-st-j-mccormick-from-edward-b.pdf

read page 83 and following pages: text messages from Elon around twitter 😂

6
I just read the news somewhere that they introduced two payment tiers for monthly subscription. Good luck keeping users. There's not a single social network that charges people use. No matter how cheap.

6
He could have just donated all of that to the Signal foundation if he wanted to protect free speech.

5
- It's about the attention. Narcissism.
  
  2
Many of his decisions have not been good.

5
It was never worth what he paid for it, and his "enlightened" changes have only made things worse in terms of value.

One big thing that must be bad for advertisers is that generally, even people without a Twitter account (I've never had one) generally needed to view posts from some businesses or services. So they still had people coming by and serving ads to them without an account.

But now that you cannot even see comments on a tweet and if you're somehow able to get to a list of tweets (it usually just forces you to the login screen) you cannot get ANY useful order from it when not logged in.

Believe it or not, I think the majority of people won't create an account with a gun to their head like this. As such, the advert revenue is already down from people like me.

Furthermore, though, I suspect businesses will eventually work out that Twitter is no longer a suitable bullhorn to use to deliver promotion information or to offer customer service, and will start to move away. That's not going to help Twitter or their advertisers out either.

But, I don't think he ever planned to make it profitable. I think this weird anarchy he's iteratively implementing was what he decided to do, as soon as he was forced to finish the acquisition.

4
all because he was dying to make that joke with the sink

4
- What was the joke? I mean I saw him walk in with a sink but what what was the joke because that was random af
  
  4
  
  "let that sink in"
  
  I didn't get the joke either.
  
  2
How many times will they reuse this image where his jaw is doing something super weird? This time it's gotten some fancy graphics but it's the same flipping image. I must have seen it on 10 different articles.

4
- Probably his fillers shifting around so you might as well make fun of him, for that and his ass to head hair transplant.
  
  3
  
  Not saying you shouldn't make fun of him. Just tired of seeing the same photo on every Musk-critical article.
  
  2
Act like a child and you get a toy, Elon.

3
Is the curve linear?

2
At Elon Used Auto, they are slashing prices below 50%. Don't delay, come in today and get free undercoating.

2
I don't even know where to begin on twitter, never really got into it.

1

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