Elon Musk is in “Bonkersland”?

My favorite so far…

 

This is, not good for business.

 

When I learned of the eight dollar fee (originally 20 it was hilarious how fast he lowered it) I just assumed the charge was to continue to have the checkmark and that new checkmark applications would go through the same vetting process before paying.

But holy shitballs no it was pure pay-to-play. What a dunce.

 

Twitter will be behind a paywall within a year. Thats how important free speech is to Elon.

 

Just take that 44 billion and flush it down the toilet

 

Musk has revealed that Twitter had been paying 400 dollars per employee for "food services." WTF?

 

Okay, a former employee is saying it was more like 2o to 25 dollars per day per employee. Which is still a bit bonkers but makes a lot more sense. Kind of a billionaire moment of "how much does a banana cost? 10 dollars?" by Musk to say "400 dollars" as a ball park for more like 25.

 

i wouldn’t say that’s settled. My guess is just having that service has a lot of fixed costs - many which might have been ignored by the person that cited 20-25. Musk is providing a total cost number in the annual budget and dividing out meals served. If Twitter home base really have been 10% full most of the time then I’d say the food costs were very high if they didn’t trim the team. And it doesn’t sound like they did.

 

True. But no matter how you spin it, the cost is nuts. I could feed a staff well for less if it is being assumed to be a daily need.

 

The food is one of the perks for keeping employees at the office for longer. I assume having a food staff probably allows them to categorize expenses differently in their accounting rather than having Indy bring in cold Chick-Fil-A fries every day.

Is Elon axing the whole thing? Will be interesting now that he is demanding employees spend "at least" 40 hours a week in the office how it would go if the perk was completely removed. Would be a double whammy to an already severely demoralized workforce.

 

I kind of wonder what the overhead cost of twitter is. Seems like you could really bust it up and still stay in the black. And maybe that is why Musk has no problem running folks off.

 

I think it was way too much. He is good with people leaving and firing people to help boost cashflow. That's just my opinion.

 

According to most he already has so mission accomplished.

 

Ya, I'm not so sure. If he gets it lean but still profitable, then grows that profit margin slowly year over year, I could see him making it back directly. Even easier, if he gets it lean and increases the user base, he could take it back public in two years and make it all back then walk away at his leisure.

He just has to not kill it.

 

Will be tricky. Twitter wasn't making money when he bought it. His deal to take it private has added a 1bn/year expense to finance the debt. My guess is the firing of 4K employees will roughly wash that out after the one-time expense of their severance. The big issue is companies pulling their ad dollars while he tries to chase off the content creators that bring people to the platform so he can sell ads in the first place. Best thing for him would be to try to wait for the current turbulence to blow over. But he hasn't been able to stop himself from routinely showing himself to be a buffoon on the platform over the past 6 or 7 years. Just today he claimed he fired an engineer over twitter for publicly responding to a tweet of his claiming an uninformed and outright falsehood about how part of his now product works. Do the likes Ford and GM care about that specifically so much? Probably not, but as long as Twitter and Musk continue manufacture outrage and controversy about the platform, it continues to give them pause about where to ad spend. The smartest thing would be for him to shut up for a couple months. I fully believe he will attempt to slowly move Twitter behind a paywall and if that happens, it's dead.

 

Yep. But there is a path towards not messing it up where it could work out. If he chooses it.

 

How many companies has he failed at?

 

Well, that's hard to answer directly because he merges failing companies with successful ones. Like Solar City/Tesla Energy. And he has "failed" in some circumstances but sort of intended to do so, like the Hyperloop. Some people speculate he is similarly tanking Twitter purposely for some reason. Could be because he is pivoting it to something very different, he is trying to get his partners to spook and sell to him for pennies on the dollar, or it is somehow in his interest just to collapse twitter (which doesn't make sense to me).

 

It's definitely intriguing. One thing for sure it doesn't look like he is going to waste much time with whatever his plans are.