Posted on by Nathalie Tay
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In leaked email, Elon Musk admits defeat with Twitter.
12 Feb
“Our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even,” he wrote.
Musk’s own actions, including racist tirades, tantrums and personal insults, sent advertisers — the platform’s top source of revenue — running for the hills.
Twitter (X) has maintained that its financials are improving, the WSJ reports, with brands coming back to advertise on the platform.
But as the increasingly hate-filled microblogging site continues to embrace what it claims to be “free speech,” several key competitors, including Meta’s Threads and Twitter alternative Bluesky, have emerged as serious contenders.
Both platforms have seen a dramatic influx of new users fleeing X, indicating widespread disillusionment with Musk’s disdain for content moderation and embrace of the extreme far right.
Cutting Losses
Banks that loaned multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk an appreciable $13 billion for his ill-advised $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in late 2022 are getting ready to offload billions of debt they accrued as a result, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The hope is to minimise the hurt as they sell off the debt, a massive scar haunting the mercurial CEO’s disastrous social media platform shopping spree.
After a chaotic couple of years, and Musk seemingly doing his best to wipe out what was left of the platform’s largely ad-dependant revenue with increasingly erratic behavior, X’s finances have yet to recover.
The company is still drowning in accumulated debt while loaners are struggling with massive payments.
Now that Musk, the world’s richest man, has catapulted himself onto the political world stage by throwing himself at Trump’s feet, banks are seemingly seeing the moment as an opportunity to sell their debt without incurring huge losses.
DOGE
Trump loyalists are also reportedly furious with Musk over his DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) coup saying, “He’s getting too big for his breeches.”
Trump also appears to be fairly clueless about what it is DOGE is actually doing.
The President told Fox News that he had no idea where DOGE staffers were working, despite getting office space inside the White House itself, as reported by Wired magazine.
Trump directly addressed the subject of playing second fiddle to Musk, telling reporters that the billionaire “can’t do and won’t do” anything” without his approval.”
#BigBalls
Longtime government employees this week were also shocked to find that their new supervisors from Elon Musk’s DOGW Department include recent college and high school graduates between 19 and 24 years old.
One of the young men is apparently a former intern at Musk’s Neuralink company who goes by the online handle BigBalls.
Article excerpted from The_Byte, by Recurrent Ventures Inc and X.
