Paper billionaire provocateur Elon Musk has officially taken over Twitter, leaving people who have endured the stench of the backed-up truck-stop toilet of social media to be able to connect with others to have to decide whether to continue to hang on despite having a working moral compass.
Musk, in the months leading up to the acquisition becoming final, had floated the idea of reversing the site’s moves to issue lifetime bans to flagrant liars like Donald Trump and abhorrent racists like Kanye West, in line with his dystopian dream of making Twitter into an end-times virtual town square.
The bigger challenge, it would seem, would be figuring out a way to make Twitter profitable. The site reported $5.1 billion in revenue in 2021, with a net operating loss of $493 million.
The bulk of the revenue – $4.51 billion, 90 percent – comes from advertising, a paltry sum relative to what Meta, the name that Facebook is using now, because why not, reported in 2021, $114.9 billion.
Musk seems to think that he can take overall annual revenue for Twitter to $26 billion by 2028, by boosting ad revenues to $12 billion and raking in $10 billion from subscriptions, which, you knew that had to be coming.
The world’s paper wealthiest guy didn’t invest $44 billion of other people’s money – his deal to buy Twitter is being funded by $13 billion in debt financing, $12.5 billion in loans against his stock in Tesla, and $21 billion in equity financing – to create a virtual town square.
The rubber hits the road when it comes time for Musk Twitter to actually try to extract the money he projects from the marketplace.
Twitter’s advertising revenue is at the low level that it is because, frankly, it doesn’t work – though to be fair, Meta/Facebook advertising has become similarly ineffective, which is a big part of the reason why Meta has lost more than two-thirds of its paper value in the past year.
Even Google is struggling in the digital ad sphere, reporting a $1.8 billion drop in ad revenues in the third quarter of 2022.
It’s not that the tech giants are going to go away – we’re not about to give up the addiction to our screens, which is more and more becoming hard-wired into our DNA.
But we may be getting to the oversaturation point with respect to the screens and the advertising that supports them that not that long ago seemed to be generations away.
Basically, we’ve been getting our cute-dog and bad-car-crash videos for free for the past 18 years, but we don’t like all the ads, and if we’re going to be asked to pay for it and have to look at a long line of ads, do we really need the cute-dog and car-crash videos?
Donald Trump, with his flailing Truth Social, has been learning this lesson the hard way. Truth Social and the other social conservative social media were rolled out based on the idea that there were millions and millions of right-wingers who wanted to be able to post hateful, racist, left-dragging content, but had nowhere to go, because the Metas and Twitters of the world had cracked down on hate speech.
Turns out it’s more like there are more like tens and tens of thousands of people who want the Truth Socials and Parlers, and even those folks realize it’s no fun when the only other people there are other knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers.
Musk may already be aware that his town square won’t work if the lying, race-baiting flame-throwers scare away the rest of us, but I’ll be honest, I don’t care one way or the other if he does or doesn’t.
You’re not going to see a lot of people shed a tear if a paper billionaire fool and his paper billions are soon parted.
Me personally, I’ve been going back and forth on whether to stay on Twitter, given what Musk has said he’s going to do, and for now, I’m staying, even if he lets Trump and West and the other spewers of lies and hate back on.
It’s a minor act of defiance, but I’ll make note of the companies backing the service, and spend my money with their competitors out of spite, and otherwise hang on for free as long as free Twitter is around.
It’ll be like just hanging out in the mall with my friends when I was a teen.
As long as I don’t have to buy anything, and the guy who owns it pays the bills to keep the lights on, it might be fun to see what kind of trouble we can get into.
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Chris Graham
