![]() Shortly after that, he offered to take the company private, to turn it into “the platform for free speech around the globe,” he wrote in a letter to its then-chair, by which he seems to have meant the platform for anti-Semitism, racism, and white-nationalist incitement. In the spring, he bought a large chunk of the site’s shares, promising to push Twitter to be friendlier to the political right. ![]() And the company-less than one-third the size of TikTok and one-tenth the size of Facebook, as measured by monthly active users-has turned a profit in just two of the past 10 years.īut Musk bought the platform for personal and ideological reasons, not financial ones. Its user base has stopped expanding in the United States. The company’s core microblogging product has scarcely changed since its debut in the mid-aughts. ![]() Musk’s Twitter purchase never made much financial sense. And he’s one of the few people on the planet with essentially limitless amounts of money to lose.Ĭaroline Mimbs-Nyce: This is what it looks like when Twitter falls apart But the social network is Musk’s to fund, not just run. Twitter looks likely to bleed users, advertisers, and money for the foreseeable future. The once–richest man on Earth took over a company losing $220 million a year and multiplied its losses by 10, if not more, according to one analyst’s estimate. Musk’s behavior raises many questions, such as Why?, Why?, and Why?! And Is he going to bankrupt this thing? He looks like he is trying to: On Tuesday evening, Musk vowed to resign as CEO of Twitter “as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!” He and whoever is foolish enough to succeed him certainly face a challenging year ahead. But Musk nevertheless spent 2022 lighting billions of dollars and his reputation on fire. Twitter’s new owner might have fared better than Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate who improbably saved Musk from winning the title of Tech Fortune–Craterer of the Year. Or at least probably not, unless you are Elon Musk. But take some consolation from the fact that you did not YOLO yourself into overpaying for an unprofitable social-media platform, publicly try to wriggle out of the deal, get lawyered into ponying up, liquidate billions of dollars of stock in a down market to do so, take over a company you did not really want, shitpost your way into a revenue crisis, quit paying your bills, antagonize your super-users, wink-wink at Nazis, and decimate your staff, all the while damaging your other, more lucrative businesses.
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