So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

I'd suspect they've had a substantial drop in active users. And the big factor is it's impossible for them to keep up with innovations now as it's running on a shoe string with an owner that is toxic. On top of that, they're losing more money than ever before due to advertising revenue disappearing. Instead you've got a tiny fiscal stream from those who want to pay for verification.

How do you think your posts have any credibility with lines like: "That will continue to upset people who think that they know better than Musk and his investors."

Given the staggering loss in value at Twitter since Musk got his hands on it?

That's a lot of 'upset' people, given that is anyone with the ability to actually pay attention to what is going on.

Going to repeat something I said before but reading above article made me laugh again with the mad quoted Musk Tweets as I don't view Twitter much.

"Whoever controls the teleprompter is the real president!"

Oh dear. I am just imaginging a world where he goes and says something like that about Xi Jinping on his platform and boosts it to his gazillion followers (would have to be by accident!)…speed records broken on agile use of any Undo/Delete option, so much abject kowtowing it bores a hole in the ground perhaps?

Ultimately, what you or I post here about Twitter/X doesn't matter. There are people who hate Musk for taking away what they thought was their space. It never was. They just provided content that could be monetised.

Twitter/X is a very powerful marketing tool that manages to bypass the tradtional gatekeepers in the legacy media (broadcast and print). Trump, in 2016, realised that and used it effectively to dominate the news cycle. In the 2020 campaign, Trump was banned from Twitter and it removed one of his maiin ways of reaching voters.

The importance of Twitter/X in terms of political influence seems to have been missed by those who complain about Musk and all the bad things he has done. Musk purchased political influence when he took over Twitter. The upcoming US presidential election is going to generate a lot of business for X. More importantly, with much of the pro-Democrat element in management having being removed, X could have a major effect on who becomes the next president of the USA.

Regards…jmcc

Suggest you go back and re-read the post you replied to, because you seem to have replied to an entirely different post, and this tangenital mini essay only serves to underline your previous claim was without foundation.

Multiple posters have pointed out to you how Musk overpaid for Twitter, how advertisers have fled the platform and its disastrous finacial results under Musk in lost value.

Your claims for Musk's financial wisdom have zero credibility, foundation or merit - further demonstrated by your inability to respond to those points directly.

Your fixation on "There are people who hate Musk for taking away what they thought was their space" seems to be blinding you to basic facts. That is errant strawman nonsense. They didn't make Musk overpay for Twitter. They didn't make Musk do all the stupid, counter productive things he has done to drive advertisers away. They didn't make him rebrand to X in an act of gigantic marketing folly.

The different structure may well affect the US elections - but that is at the expense of its finances, let's not pretend otherwise, that would be an entirely bad faith argument or demonstrate total ignorance of Twitter's finances. And let's not pretend it is being done out of any free speech championing, as is disproved by Musk's actions on the platform, it would be an entirely bad faith argument.

Their API pricing has pretty much put off any platform utilizing them tbh, it's ridiculously expensive so I can't see it being particularly profitable. The reality is they're losing more money than pre acquisition and far less innovative in terms of technology.

So you think there's a long game being played?

Musk is playing 4D chess and us common oiks are too stupid to understand it. or so his supporters would have you believe.

In spite of the fact he was forced to purchase Twitter? Can you point to any credible source that indicates Twitter is improving under Musk? Eg via technologic improvements or increased revenue

Twitters revenue was 4.4bn in 2022, the year he took over. It was 5bn the year before he took over. Real 4D chess from. Driving away your biggest source of revenue is business genius.

Costs under control doesn't mean a whole lot if he managed to halve all the ad revenue. On top of that, they need to be making more rather than less post takeover due to the fact the company is saddled with debt of the massive purchase price.

They've also lost 15 percent of their active user base which I don't think any other social media platform has faced at that speed. Numerous downtime events since the takeover as well which isn't gonna help.

Dealing with bots when the place has multiples of the bots it used to is comical.

I thought most musk simps had fled this sinking ship by now.

Regards Musk4Lyfe

Bots and scams are more prominent than ever before. Getting costs down is great and all but it's not great if it causes more and more platform instability. And killing off technical innovations means that they can't compete with other platforms.... Nobody wants Twitter to be their everything app but that's his idea of innovation… Have you any proof that there's any substantial uptake for API functionality? Iirc, most major platforms eg consoles have removed the ability to tweet instead of paying. The fact Musk isn't come out with any big figures to indicate major profits indicates that there simply aren't.

It's somewhat fascinating to watch posters struggling to find any way to indicate the takeover as a success. Meanwhile both Tesla and Twitter are in serious trouble long term.

The user generated content, (the tweets, the interactions and the locations) are valuable data. In addition to posting using bots, people also try to scrape this content for free. This kind of activity is not immediately obvious but content scraping has been a major problem for all large websites for decades. With AI and the need for data to train AI, this content, and the content from all large websites has become quite valuable. The New York Times has already taken legal action against one well known AI operation. Ryanair has also successfully sued companies scraping its website.

Twitter only ever had two profitable years. It probably would have struggled to make a profit even if Musk didn't take it over. Musk overpaid for a company with a lot of problems. Some of them were dealt with by cutting costs. Others will take a lot longer to fix. That kind of discussion might be beyond the scope of this thread.

Regards…jmcc