Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.
But calling twitter a "perfectly viable company" is part of the problem. It's comments like this that inflate the bubble. Twitter has thousands of employees who have done close to nothing for at least several years.
Facebook/meta are at least trying new things. Twitter seems to be afraid to make any decisions at all.
Make take on Twitter for the last 5+ years is that it grew into its potential, it has value as-is, but there isn't a growth or monetization story beyond what it already has.
The private equity downsize strategy is probably right--you have to get it into a leaner state to start printing money--but the execution is poor, and Musk can too easily fiddle with the wrong knob and drive away uses a la Tumblr.
> Musk made a bad call for sure. There's no obvious path to recouping that investment.
You people really miss the bigger picture from the business side of things - Musk now owns the most impactful social network on the planet. Having an additional $44 billion in wealth does not bring you anything that is actionable. Its just inert wealth. Only when its used, wealth actually becomes something meaningful.
And Musk bought the biggest social network on the planet with that money. At this moment, he can do anything from boosting his own projects and businesses through Twitter to creating entirely new paradigm like making Twitter into a Western Wechat.
(Im obviously not counting Facebook as a top social network at this point)
> Facebook/meta are at least trying new things
Meta is banking on something that may or may not materialize. Its a gamble. Musk is going to copy what's already successful elsewhere.
> Most impactful as measured by what? Twitter isn’t even in the top 10 for dau/mau
It generates a lot of the agenda in certain socioeconomic segments. It disseminates a lot of information to these segments. Those segments dont overlap with Reddit. And if Musk keeps the 'free speech' thing going, it can also attract the segment that Reddit addresses.
But calling twitter a "perfectly viable company" is part of the problem. It's comments like this that inflate the bubble. Twitter has thousands of employees who have done close to nothing for at least several years.
Facebook/meta are at least trying new things. Twitter seems to be afraid to make any decisions at all.