this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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A lot of stories like this have been coming out, but it's not clear that they foretell the doom of Twitter as so many people are assuming (or anticipating).
Donald Trump's various businesses showed long ago that large companies aren't necessarily harmed by shitty practices like not paying bills. And mid-2010s Reddit showed that a social media platform, once established, can survive terrible technical deficiencies (remember when Reddit was crashing daily?), simply because people tend to be too lazy to move.
Most likely outcome is that Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego.
"Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego."
Twitter's big problem on this front is the massive amount of debt that Musk saddled it with in order to purchase it, which the company now has to make quarterly payments on. Twitter was very close to turning a profit pre-buyout, but thanks to Elon it now has to pay ~$1.5 billion dollars in debt service annually at the same time that it chased away something like half of all its advertising income. That's why he's laying off all his employees and skipping out on the company's bills.
That's very true. That's why Musk was talking up his plans to turn Twitter into some kind of super-profitable super-app (a la WeChat)... but that's definitely not materializing, because how many people would trust Musk's Twitter enough to use it as a super-app?
I think Twitter will have to end up defaulting on those loans. The banks will be pissed off, but they'll have to work out some kind of face-saving deal with Musk to write off the loans, because at that point only a masochist would want to run/own the company. But who knows.
@Virtim @cyd Origin of the most problems trade – twitter cannot pay because of trades, people are lazy because they need to trade. Solution: works on creating trade-free products and services