Three Thoughts on the Ex-Twitter

Twitter, it seems, is in a lot of trouble. In an email leaked to the Wall Street Journal, Musk admits that, "our user growth is stagnant, revenue is unimpressive, and we’re barely breaking even."

Oof. I don't know if that's exactly true. Musk isn't quite known for his truth-telling - all the pronouncements of self-driving fleets of robotaxis and cyborg butlers have always had the ring of someone bullshitting for the media, who, in his defense, always uncritically printed what he said. But whether things are bad or catastrophically bad for Twitter doesn't really seem to matter. It had growth problems to begin with. Then it got Musk. Then it decidedly went downhill. Whether Twitter can ever be restored to a shadow of what it was in the 2010s is an open question, but another person would have to take the helm.

The Banks are now trying to offload some of the debt from their financing of Musk's purchase of Twitter. Whether they wanted to do this earlier or not is kind of an unknown - I doubt they'd want to take much of a loss on their big deal, but it looks like right now, they're expecting to price it at 90-95 cents on the dollar. So, they're expecting a loss of 5-10%...if they can find buyers. And maybe they can. But with Twitter's revenues stagnant, user growth stagnant, whew, good luck. I suspect they held on to the debt because if it ever became a problem, they could run to the government for a bailout, like in the financial crisis of 2008. I've got serious doubts that the company will exist in anything other than an eviscerated, Gab-like state in a few years time.

But in the end, none of this may matter. Why care about one company you run when you already (ostensibly) run...six? I don't know. Tesla and SpaceX are the ones that matter, at the moment, for now. The Boring Company is a grifting front, xAI hasn't done anything more than train a chatbot on Twitter data, and Neuralink is three dystopian short stories in a trenchcoat.

Or, and alternatively: why care about running any company when you can force your way into the mechanisms of the US federal public service, and throw a spanner in the works? In the last few days we've seen an email go out to everyone working for the US federal government that looks very suspiciously like the "are you hardcore y/n" email that went out at Twitter after he took over there. And yesterday, news that he seems to have found a way to wrest control of treasury payments. Seems bad? I mean, except if your name is Elon Musk, I mean. Plunging a country into chaos that statistically has a gun for every person seems bad, but what do I know? Then again, Canada's near the top, too, with a long tradition of long gun ownership. Everyone knows someone. I didn't want to live in interesting times. I just wanted to live well and make beautiful things. But here we are. The current circumstances an imposition of will and capital.