https://arstechnica.com/?p=1897185
Confidence in Twitter has hit what might be an all-time low just two weeks into Elon Musk's tenure as owner. Yesterday on a call, Musk told Twitter staff that bankruptcy is a real possibility, as next year Twitter could face billions more in losses.
The Verge posted a full transcript of Musk's staff meeting, where different employees attempted to find out what their priorities should be to help Musk keep Twitter afloat as the economy remains unstable. Musk kept his responses brief and said top priorities included growing Twitter's user base by 1 billion (while critically monetizing more users), compensating creators on the platform, and improving Twitter search. In short, he asked his remaining team members to go "hardcore" to make Twitter "more compelling," so he can sell that product to users, or else resign. One of his biggest and out-there ideas, which he says is "definitely happening," is tweaking Twitter to become a digital payments platform.
"If you have a compelling product, people will buy it," Musk told staff. "That has been my experience at SpaceX and Tesla."
[...] Musk told employees on the call that his experience has led him to believe that paranoia is necessary to survive a recession, and Musk's paranoia about Twitter extends to his employees. The New York Times reported that Musk refused to pay out scheduled bonuses to employees until a payroll audit confirmed that all of Twitter's employees were "real humans" and not "ghost employees."
[...] Musk repeated his top priorities, directing staff to envision a Twitter that works more like a financial institution, where digital payments are sent as easily as direct messages, creators can get paid more than they would on platforms like YouTube, and average users can generate higher interest on payments accounts held right there on Twitter.
"That's definitely a direction we're going to go in, enabling people on Twitter to be able to send money anywhere in the world instantly and in real time," Musk confirmed, detailing plans to link debit cards to Twitter accounts and even issue checks to users so they can pay rent from their Twitter accounts.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 13 2022, @08:47AM (7 children)
because banks have never gone bankrupt
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Sunday November 13 2022, @10:00AM (2 children)
Let's become a car wash! Let's become a fast food chain! Let's become an architectural consultancy! Dammit, there must be some way to make this clown car work.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:42PM (1 child)
> Dammit, there must be some way to make this clown car work.
Good punch line, car analogy++ !
I was expecting, "There must be some way to make this spaghetti|underwear|tweet stick to the wall."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:29PM
Especially from "driverless"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:04AM (3 children)
I guess he is hoping for a massive government bailout program, since he is clearly to big to fail, to cover the 44 billion dollars he is currently out of pocket (his own and/or others).
Is he trying to merge Twitter with Paypal (that he sold to ebay)? While the idea might be interesting to his userbase -- to pay for all things via twitter. I think most of the rest of us will pass on that offer. Most people already have a bank and don't need the pain of getting a second one. Certainly not one that is only accessible via tweets and fired half it's staff recently.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:51PM
> I guess he is hoping for a massive government bailout program,
He's got one automatically, in the form of a huge tax loss to offset the profits from Tesla, SpaceX and his other profitable companies. With a total loss of $44B he won't be paying taxes for years (how ever long you get to spread out the loss, per IRS rules).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:05PM (1 child)
Facebook has its own crypto, bank and money transfer system.
Probably a way to compete with them, while being protected by the government.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:26PM
Considering that more and more people are moving (all) their banking transactions into an App I guess there is a market for it. Not for me personally but then I'm not the market. So in that regard it might make sense for him. He can also then easily get his $8 for the blue verification bird without having to share any of those $8 with anyone else etc. While getting the transactional banking aspect of it into Twitter might be nice, but at the same time probably hard if he just shitcanned half his staff -- possibly including a large chunk of his developers. I'm in that regard more inclined to believe that he wants some kind of legal protection that comes with being a bank.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Sunday November 13 2022, @10:08AM (3 children)
How about reversing the decision to let Twitter become an ultra toxic free for all? Or would that be too sensible?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: -1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:40AM (1 child)
No such decision was made.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Sunday November 13 2022, @01:48PM
Yes it was. Please try again.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday November 13 2022, @03:55PM
Another couple of weeks and the Twitter problem will disappear all by itself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by janrinok on Sunday November 13 2022, @10:12AM (8 children)
Perhaps he thinks that by becoming a bank it will make the government think he to too big to fail, and that they will subsequently throw bucket loads of cash at him?
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:24AM (5 children)
I think there is something like that going on. Some kind of protection. Elon Musk did create an online bank that went on to become paypal. I assume he knows the game.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:25PM (1 child)
PayPal was never a bank. It was very carefully not a bank so it wouldn't have to follow banking regulations. Which has led to serious problems reported by PayPal's users like their money just disappearing from their PayPal account, or it being allegedly there but effectively frozen while PayPal uses it to collect interest or pay off somebody else.
As people who just lost their life savings in the crypto company collapse learned the hard way, banking regulations exist for a reason.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Informative) by sgleysti on Sunday November 13 2022, @04:16PM
Along with the corollary: Don't put your life savings in a newly created, unregulated financial instrument that has all the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme, variants of which have been gamed by the fraudsters that started them, variants of which have been known to fail hard, and variants of which have been hacked with resulting loss of funds.
I'm not the happiest about the fact that my retirement savings are in the stock market, but I don't have an awful lot of options.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday November 15 2022, @10:41AM (2 children)
A common misconception that Musk does nothing to quell.
Paypal as a servce was started by a company called Confinity under Peter Thiel. Musk was co-founder of x.com, a copy of Paypal which became its rival. Confinity and x.com later merged as companies, and the combined company decided to axe the x.com money service and name in favour of Paypal. Musk was not happy and was sacked being an arsehole. After that the company was renamed as Paypal.
Musk did not found Paypal, did not like Paypal and never even worked for Paypal.
Musk still owns the x.com domain personally, and it sounds like he might bring it back into use as part of this Twitter banking notion.
(Score: 2) by Username on Tuesday November 15 2022, @12:50PM (1 child)
Interesting. Why do you think I said Elon Musk created paypal? I said, "Elon Musk did create an online bank that went on to become paypal."
Thanks for proving my point, I guess?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday November 15 2022, @01:52PM
Musk's company X.com had a money service x.com which did not go on to become Paypal.
Paypal as a service, originally belonged to the company Confinity, and was a rival to the x.com service. X.com, the company, then merged with Confinity and for a while the merged company was called X.com and both the Paypal and x.com services continued. Then Musk was sacked. Then the x.com service was merged with the Paypal service using the Paypal software and the company was renamed Paypal. The Paypal service has continued throughout, from a time before Musk was involved.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:59AM
The laws that are currently being written to regulate social media to prevent fake news and pedophilia will require verified accounts for networks that hope to make money off advertisements. So, he's hoping to piggy back on that combined with the banking and online money transfer regulations to create a WeChat clone where everyone will use Twitter for small deals and payments while businesses and politicians will use Twitter as their official public voice. It's a solid plan that only really needs Twitter's existing brand and insider's knowledge of the regulations proposed which he already has.
It's consistent with everything he says and does as well as the Gmail changes and Facebook desperate plunge into the Metaverse.
As for free speech in general, the laws will probably target ad money (congress can control trade but not speech) so sites like Soylent and Fediverse SNSs won't be affected. In fact, we/they'll largely benefit if Mastodon current growth is any indication.
compiling...
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by crafoo on Sunday November 13 2022, @03:45PM
He knows central bank digital currency is being introduced next Spring. He knows that all transactions will be online and cash will be outlawed. It's a smart move. He must bend the knee and kiss the Jew ring first.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @10:54AM (2 children)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Username on Sunday November 13 2022, @01:20PM (1 child)
The whole thing is entertaining.
Millionaires getting angry that a billionaire wants to charge them $20 to continue to be apart of the aristocracy that now is contaminated with such filth as samolians.
It's like a movie.
Who do we side with? The millionaires that might lose their clubhouse? The billionaire that did the takeover? The nigerian scammers that are verified good boys? I wonder if they'll settle it with an internet version of a golf tournament like in caddyshack. Probably have some incompetent employee just accidentally nuking the whole platform turn to get rid of bugs too.
(Score: 2) by Username on Sunday November 13 2022, @01:26PM
Stephen King launches his brand new 100 million dollar internet boat in the metaverse, just to have it instantly sink when Musk hits it with his bigger 250 million dollar internet boat.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by drussell on Sunday November 13 2022, @11:26AM (5 children)
He's just throwing random shit at the wall to see what sticks, now isn't he?
The lack of cluefulness in Musky world is absolutely stunning and the sheer size of the dumpster fire is immense!! (Yet, it is immensely satisfying to watch burn!)
Over yonder, up the road you can even also see Zuckerburg still dumping entire tanker loads of fuel into his smouldering dumpster, hoping it will be too wet to follow suit or something, not even realizing he's already set even his own hair on fire because he has his VR goggles on. Maybe he thinks it's water?! Who knows with these guys...
Dang, I wish I were a cartoonist, there is so much poignant imagery here to behold! That Hindenbird [geekculture.com] one sure is funny, yet there could be so many more absolutely epic ones!
Grab some popcorn folks, this is gonna be a great fireworks show!!
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday November 13 2022, @01:46PM
Ones like this are a bit of a chuckle...
https://i.imgur.com/2DPXzIf.png [imgur.com]
...but does anyone have any that really give you a good belly laugh, a roll on the floor type feeling?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:14PM (1 child)
In case you hadn't noticed, that's been his business strategy for his entire life. The idea that he's some sort of engineering genius is complete hogwash: He's not even an engineer. He's also not an entrepreneur: His entire career in business has been buying up other people's businesses and taking credit for the things that happened without him.
The reason the Twitter purchase has backfired so badly is that nobody actually needs Twitter to function. Some people think they do, but they don't, and as soon as they stop using it for a bit they realize it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Sunday November 13 2022, @05:07PM
I sure don't but I heard differently from a journalist. Supposedly in that line of work Twitter is how you let other people know you exist and how you keep track of what's going on. S/he said it was a necessity.
So if Musk can find enough journalists to provide the income to cover $44 billion ...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:36PM (1 child)
Yes, that's exactly what he's doing. A careful owner would let things run for a few months before changing business directions.
That said, brainstorming ideas is not bad. What's weird about Musk is that he publicizes this. It would be far better if he would keep his stream-of-consciousness private, and publicize what he finally decides on. But he's never worked that way - look at the history with Tesla. And, frankly, this is how he wound up forced to buy Twitter: opened his mouth, and inserted his foot.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday November 14 2022, @09:48AM
This is what happens when you smoke far too much weed.
Don't get me wrong... I have some good friends that smoke copious amounts of weed; but they are not billionaires able to buy large companies. (Than again, if they had a lot of money, they would just smoke and not give a damn about working at all.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Troll) by jahaven on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:17PM (4 children)
Sure, twitter has a compelling product for communists to create chaos and disorder on democracy countries, and also helps a lot this communists to remain in power as much as they can.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:35PM
You say that, but it's fascists who have been using social media to build power and stoke genocide around the world. The communists don't use Twitter, they use their own locked down social media platforms, which is also a problem but has nothing to do with the decisions of Musk or any other capricious capitalist. I think that's the point.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:47PM
> Sure, twitter has a compelling product for communists ...
Sure, twitter has a compelling product for extremists of every flavor ...
ftfy.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:19PM (1 child)
I'm not sure who exactly you're calling "communists" here: Neither China, Russia, or North Korea run their governments by a philosophy remotely resembling communists, regardless of their names.
But there's an easy way to take away their power to do this: Pay no attention to Twitter. Nor click through to any articles that are "Hey, this is what people on Twitter are saying about this topic" which news organizations love to write because they take approximately 30 minutes to churn out. And if someone comes on the TV and you're watching your news for some reason, change the channel immediately when it comes to discussion of the latest tweets.
That way, foreign governments who want to influence the US will have to do it the old fashioned ways: Illegally finance political campaigns, and/or supply their favorite politicians with hookers and blow.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 13 2022, @03:52PM
Funny thing, I've never paid any attention to Twitter...but somehow it still became a platform for foreign influence on the USA (and etc).
It's kind of like politics--for years I ignored politics, caught up in my interesting engineering work & hobbies. Then one day I woke up and noticed that politics wasn't ignoring me.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Sunday November 13 2022, @12:51PM
Picture a world in which anyone can simply pay for their message to reach millions of Twitter users. Speech is free as in freedom, but not free as in free beer. Tweets routinely fund shadow political organizations. The rich and powerful, officially exempted from the system of "free" speech by their access to "paid" speech, can finally say whatever they want without consequence. Absolutely none of it is parody, of course, especially not against poor activists. Of course, well-funded activists will still be able to reach their audiences, across the whole neo-nazi to antifa spectrum. Twitter becomes a solid 5% about what should be done in Israel. LGBTQ and people of color are nowhere to be seen. Real humor, and humor stolen from those groups, is never really replaced. Fast food chains still manage to get in some good zingers though.
Meanwhile, Musk is buried under a mountain of money laundering lawsuits, and everybody of average or above average intelligence has moved to Mastodon, where content moderation is totally a solved problem.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday November 13 2022, @02:05PM (1 child)
If you turn Twitter into a bank, you're only 6 letters away from bankruptcy.
(Score: 4, Funny) by inertnet on Sunday November 13 2022, @03:11PM
Going twitrupt.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday November 13 2022, @03:30PM
SpaceX is aimed at government contracts and corporations. Tesla is aimed at right people who want a status symbol. Neither of them are in any way trying to have any kind of mass appeal. Yeah, they want to look sexy, and everyone should like them, but the actual user base is very small and very far away from Joe Everyone.
Twitter on the other hand is dealing with those Joes. And a nontrivial amount of these Joes consider it fun to screw with people and also don't give a fuck what these people think of them.
Elon? Maybe take a glimpse at reality next time before you blow your money on something stupid?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by istartedi on Sunday November 13 2022, @10:33PM (3 children)
Please bring back the ability to localize trends. I see that as a signpost on the road to oblivion. I used to be able to localize trends, and it cut out a lot of the inflammatory stuff that centered on national politics, racism, etc. as well as stuff I didn't care about like Emo bands.
When they took localization away, I got no trends but the shitty ones that everybody else got, no longer tailored in any way to my tastes, and the categories are pretty lame too. Anybody follow programming on Twitter? It's pretty much a never ending stream of how you can become a $millionaire by learning JavaScript and/or taking some guys course and following him and liking his tweets, possibly tied in with crypto. Bah!
The other thing he needs to do (and this may be a more intractable problem as it's akin to the way SEO has ruined search) is he needs to stop the "stan"s. ie, he needs to crack down bloody hard on people who campaign to get things trending. I suspect this won't happen though because not only is it a difficult problem, it may also bolster his ad revenue. The revenue is probably maximized by having a large number of people page-viewing shit, as opposed to a smaller number of people page-viewing quality which gets us in to the whole "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded" scenario that Twitter seems to be.
As for making it a bank, that'd be funny because it'd sort of bring his career full circle since he was involved with PayPal which was *almost* a bank--the regulators decided they didn't need to regulate it, which was probably a mistake. At least if the Bank of Twits is established, it should be regulated.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2022, @08:39AM (1 child)
It's healing:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2022/11/14/japanese-twitter-trends-shift-away-from-politics-to-pop-culture-after-curation-team-is-laid-off/ [forbes.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by istartedi on Thursday November 17 2022, @01:30AM
That's not necessarily good though. If I want pop culture (I maybe want a little, but not a lot) there are a lot of places to go. I'd like to be able to taylor the trends. Since my original post, Musk has given employees an ultimatum via email that essentially boils down to: Work at unsustainable startup pace, or take a few months severance and quit.
Were Twitter a true start-up with early options giving people the possibility of being set for life, or a company with a world-changing mission like SpaceX or Tesla he might get many competent takers.
Twitter is neither of those things. It's an established advertising-driven social media company. He's proven us wrong before, but this does not look good.
Spoken as somebody who's done startup, I would take the severance and never look back... and sort of did that at an established company in order to "drop out". Musk may be living in some sort of delusion where he thinks everybody should be like him. I don't disparage his ability to be on all the time and burn the candle at 3 ends, but that's rare air. Most people (myself included) just burn out at some point.
To reiterate, I could be proven wrong, but this is looking like a Boring Company from here on out.
Also, Japan's shift could be a reflection of their culture. Here in America it seems like I'm being fed more conspiracy content lately.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by wirelessduck on Tuesday December 06, @01:56AM
https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=52303&page=1&cid=1279853#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by oumuamua on Monday November 14 2022, @02:09AM
as captured by that Bertolt Brecht quote https://www.genolve.com/design/socialmedia/quotes/If-you-want-to-steal-money-dont-rob-a-bank-open- [genolve.com]
Only better money maker would be to turn it into a online casino.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday November 15 2022, @10:47AM
The best parody of Musk's situation that I have heard is that he bought Twitter to edit a tweet, and it didn't work.