Twitter: Elon Musk blames 'activist groups' for earnings drop

[Scott]

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has blamed "activist groups pressuring advertisers" for a "massive drop in revenue" as the company makes sweeping job cuts in an effort to save money.

The billionaire owner of Tesla tweeted that "activists" raising concerns about how Twitter is moderated are "trying to destroy free speech in America".

It came as Twitter made widespread job cuts around the world on Friday.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63521713

[SunnyinBangrak]

These big companies are totally out of line. If they didn't pull their advertizing when Twitter dishonestly blocked major news outlets and factually true stories(1) which didn't benefit the democrat party just before the 2020 election, why start now? Misinforming voters like that seemed to me to be major election interference, right out in the open, and what did they do? Absolutely nothing at all. So, why now? 

 I am boycotting any product from any of these woke companies that are pulling Twitter ads. This is because I think they are acting like this out of petulant spite, and not any honest concern over "disinformation", as we already see they have no issue with fake narratives so long as they promote leftist causes.

 

supporting evidence for claims made

(1)https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hunter-biden-story-was-total-mistake/

[Pattaya Spotter]

Elon's definitely got himself in a financial pickle (even if he is the richest person I  the work) buying Twitter for a frothy price at the peak of a market top. Since then, stocks in general are down around 30% and social media stocks, like Twitter, are down double that...but of course Musk had to buy it at his top of the market price he offered back in April (I believe). He also slathered $ 11B on to its books in debt to help finance the buyout and so has over $ 1B in annual interest payments to banks to find from a company that only had about half that much in free cash flow last year and has only been marginally profitable a couple years in its over decade of existence. It looks to me the whole thing could easily go up in flames with losses on jobs, the banks, and the new private owners at some point.

[Chomper Higgot]

Oh dear.

 

1 hour ago, SunnyinBangrak said:

These big companies are totally out of line. If they didn't pull their advertizing when Twitter dishonestly blocked major news outlets and factually true stories(1) which didn't benefit the democrat party just before the 2020 election, why start now? Misinforming voters like that seemed to me to be major election interference, right out in the open, and what did they do? Absolutely nothing at all. So, why now? 

 I am boycotting any product from any of these woke companies that are pulling Twitter ads. This is because I think they are acting like this out of petulant spite, and not any honest concern over "disinformation", as we already see they have no issue with fake narratives so long as they promote leftist causes.

 

supporting evidence for claims made

(1)https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hunter-biden-story-was-total-mistake/

So no new Audi for you then.

[Chomper Higgot]

I I said in the earlier Musk Twitter thread, Musk has bought himself a headache.

 

The business revenue comes from advertising, who but the ‘My Pillow Guy’ wants to see their business advertised alongside hate mongering, lies and misinformation?

 

Take a Tylenol Elon. 

[Bluespunk]

Hyperbolic hysterical buyers regret. 
 

#whatewereyouthinking

[SunnyinBangrak]

15 minutes ago, Bluespunk said:

Hyperbolic hysterical buyers regret. 
 

#whatewereyouthinking

The only people upset here are the left. The left making emotional rants likely because Musk now controls the digital town square and will stop the ludicrous one sided censorship which the dems have relied on. Hardly suggests buyers regret, does it?

 

 I think his plan to charge $8 a month for a blue tick is genius. He'll make a fortune after they calmed down enough to realize they will lose their voice(and adoring fans) without Twitter.

#neversaystartyourownplatformagain

Edited November 5, 2022 by SunnyinBangrak

[Chomper Higgot]

3 minutes ago, SunnyinBangrak said:

The only people upset here are the left. The left making emotional rants likely because Musk now controls the digital town square and will stop the ludicrous one sided censorship which the dems have relied on. Hardly suggests buyers regret, does it?

#neversaystartyourownplatformagain

“#neversaystartyourownplatformagain” 

 

Which reminds me, how’s ‘Truth Social’ doing these days?

[Bluespunk]

5 minutes ago, SunnyinBangrak said:

The only people upset here are the left. The left making emotional rants likely because Musk now controls the digital town square and will stop the ludicrous one sided censorship which the dems have relied on. Hardly suggests buyers regret, does it?

 

 I think his plan to charge $8 a month for a blue tick is genius. He'll make a fortune after they calmed down enough to realize they will lose their voice(and adoring fans) without Twitter.

#neversaystartyourownplatformagain

No, it’s musk who’s upset and making emotional rants, hence his activist groups being responsible for tw*tters problems claim. 
 

As to your second paragraph, tw*tter problems with users declining was an issue prior to his purchase. 
 

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18213567/twitter-to-stop-sharing-mau-as-users-decline-q4-2018-earnings

[SunnyinBangrak]

1 minute ago, Chomper Higgot said:

“#neversaystartyourownplatformagain” 

 

Which reminds me, how’s ‘Truth Social’ doing these days?

market cap of $650m, not bad for one chaps part time hobby-horse is it?

 

cant find any data from the last month or two, but..

 

"Trump’s truth social platform ranks 14th on the Apple app charts.

Truth Social’s rank on the Apple App Store charts is presently 14 in the US, based on its download history. The app is only accessible on iOS devices."

https://world-wire.com/truth-social-statistics/

 

All in all, looks a roaring success. I would have expected nothing less from the business and dealmaking guru.

[Bkk Brian]

How can you justify firing the entire human rights team? Shame on you. The decline of this platform will directly impact the human rights of millions around the globe.

 

Twitter is instituting company-wide layoffs, including the elimination of its entire human rights team. Companies have a responsibility to employ people who are essential to the protection of people's rights — this includes content moderators, trust and safety teams, and others.

 

[JayClay]

1 hour ago, SunnyinBangrak said:

Trump’s truth social platform ranks 14th on the Apple app charts.

Truth Social’s rank on the Apple App Store charts is presently 14 in the US, based on its download history. The app is only accessible on iOS devices."

https://world-wire.com/truth-social-statistics/

 

All in all, looks a roaring success. I would have expected nothing less from the business and dealmaking guru

Any established app that's only available on a single platform can't be considered a "roaring success" in any reasonable definition of the word.

Edited November 5, 2022 by JayClay

[FritsSikkink]

48 minutes ago, JayClay said:

Any established app that's only available on a single platform can't be considered a "roaring success" in any reasonable definition of the word.

Truth Social 

• • #47 in Social Networking

[JayClay]

2 minutes ago, FritsSikkink said:

Truth Social 

• • #47 in Social Networking

Thank you for confirming 

[Chomper Higgot]

2 hours ago, FritsSikkink said:

Truth Social 

• • #47 in Social Networking

And Musk just entered their ‘offering space’.

[Scott]

TECH

 

Twitter co-founder Dorsey apologizes for

growing the company ‘too quickly’ in wake of mass layoffs

 

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey apologized Saturday for growing the company “too quickly,” a day after the company laid off approximately half of its employees under new owner Elon Musk.

“Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment,” Dorsey wrote in a tweet. “I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.”

 

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/05/twitter-co-founder-jack-dorsey-speaks-out-after-mass-layoffs.html

 

[onthedarkside]

Confusion and Frustration Reign as Elon Musk Cuts Half of Twitter’s Staff

 

The layoffs hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning units, the teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments

...

"By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company."

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/technology/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs.html

 

[Jingthing]

17 hours ago, Chomper Higgot said:

I I said in the earlier Musk Twitter thread, Musk has bought himself a headache.

 

The business revenue comes from advertising, who but the ‘My Pillow Guy’ wants to see their business advertised alongside hate mongering, lies and misinformation?

 

Take a Tylenol Elon. 

A genius who lacks maturity. His entire Twitter adventure already a massive clustermuck (sic).

[Jingthing]

One word: Mastadon.

Twitter -- Parler 2.0.

[bendejo]

I haven't been following this: when I read the news and see that smiling chimpanzee face I keep scrolling.

US$44 billion?  (I think Buffet bought a large chunk of North American railroad infrastructure for $50 billion.)  It sounds like we are in dot com bubble 2.0.  Truth is Twitter has no secret sauce, anyone with the dosh can put together the engineers and the hardware to do the same thing, and for a hell of a lot less $$$.  (I think of the current titans of internet entities only Google is sitting on a secret yet-to-be-cracked algorithm, the one that the two lads came up with in 1998).  Facebook is banking on, and hyping, technology that does not exist yet -- shades of 1997.

Oh, but the brand recognition!  The user base!  Yeah, sure.  Remember Myspace?  AOL?  And for those who remember 1990s pre-internet technology: Wordperfect, Lotus 123, dBase, Novell, Borland development software, to name a few; all were used in nearly every business that utilized computers. 

Recalling his comments when all this started I got the impression EM's goal was to be the most well-known person in the world. 

At the end of the day Twitter is just a chat site.  I would guess they own a good chunk of real estate to house all those server farms, probably the only true assets should he be forced to liquidate.  With all this supply chain problems and chip shortages we're told about maybe he can get some return on selling second-hand hardware.

And now we can guess who will buy out Tesla when his nibs is forced to sell. 

 

 

[Bluespunk]

Just keeps on getting worse...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/05/elon-musk-doesnt-know-what-hes-doing-says-former-twitter-executive

[Chomper Higgot]

Musk has just started selling the blue verified account logos and in doing so has totally undermined their value.

 

He obviously thinks reputation is something to be bought and sold.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by Chomper Higgot

[Jingthing]

9 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

Musk has just started selling the blue verified account logos and in doing so has totally undermined their value.

 

He obviously thinks reputation is something to be bought and sold.

 

 

I heard that you can buy a verified checkmark without being verified. 

Of course that would be insane.

Can someone clarify?

[JayClay]

10 hours ago, onthedarkside said:

Roughly half of the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated

If this is true then either Twitter was being run in an extremely resource-wasteful manner before, or they now no longer have enough staff to continue functioning properly.

 

No well-run company can survive such cuts without extreme effect on the products/services they provide.

[billd766]

On 11/5/2022 at 5:51 AM, SunnyinBangrak said:

These big companies are totally out of line. If they didn't pull their advertizing when Twitter dishonestly blocked major news outlets and factually true stories(1) which didn't benefit the democrat party just before the 2020 election, why start now? Misinforming voters like that seemed to me to be major election interference, right out in the open, and what did they do? Absolutely nothing at all. So, why now? 

 I am boycotting any product from any of these woke companies that are pulling Twitter ads. This is because I think they are acting like this out of petulant spite, and not any honest concern over "disinformation", as we already see they have no issue with fake narratives so long as they promote leftist causes.

 

supporting evidence for claims made

(1)https://nypost.com/2021/03/25/dorsey-says-blocking-posts-hunter-biden-story-was-total-mistake/

They have the right to advertise where and when they like, in exactly the same way that you have the right to buy their products or not.

 

I don't expect that they will be heartbroken if you don't buy their products.

[bendejo]

He sure is behaving like another person who is constantly in the news.  In a few days he'll be wearing orange spray-tan.

 

 

[stevenl]

And now he is hiring back, apparently the mass layoff didn't go to plan.

[SunnyinBangrak]

On 11/6/2022 at 12:57 AM, Jingthing said:

A genius who lacks maturity. His entire Twitter adventure already a massive clustermuck (sic).

Massive clustermuck hey?? Sounds like Musk played a blinder here and is laughing all the way to the bank - despite earlier reports to the contrary. 

 

"Since Musk’s dramatic takeover, Twitter’s monetizable daily user (mDAU) growth has accelerated to more than 20 percent, while “Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly,” according to an internal FAQ obtained by The Verge that was shared with Twitter’s sales team on Monday to use in conversations with advertisers. Per the FAQ, Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs, “crossing the quarter billion mark” since the end of the second quarter, when it stopped reporting financials as a public company."

 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23445476/elon-musk-twitter-user-growth-all-time-high-advertisers

[billd766]

1 hour ago, SunnyinBangrak said:

Massive clustermuck hey?? Sounds like Musk played a blinder here and is laughing all the way to the bank - despite earlier reports to the contrary. 

 

"Since Musk’s dramatic takeover, Twitter’s monetizable daily user (mDAU) growth has accelerated to more than 20 percent, while “Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly,” according to an internal FAQ obtained by The Verge that was shared with Twitter’s sales team on Monday to use in conversations with advertisers. Per the FAQ, Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs, “crossing the quarter billion mark” since the end of the second quarter, when it stopped reporting financials as a public company."

 

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/7/23445476/elon-musk-twitter-user-growth-all-time-high-advertisers

I had never heard of the verge so I Googled it. Then I did another search and ended up with Reuters who I have heard of, and they tell a different story.

 

To be fair these were posted before Musk took over.

 

But people choose to read and believe the news stories that they want to believe nowadays and ignore the ones they don't like.

 

I am not, never have been, and never will be a Twitter user. I prefer to read a story, rather than have it truncated to 480 characters including punctuation and spaces.

 

https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/

 

Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show.

 

Oct 25 (Reuters) - "Is Twitter dying?" billionaire Elon Musk mused in April, five days before offering to buy the social media platform.

The reality, according to internal Twitter (TWTR.N) research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla (TSLA.O) chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.

 

5 minute readOctober 27, 20222:46 AM GMT+7Last Updated 12 days ago
Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show
By Sheila Dang

Oct 25 (Reuters) - "Is Twitter dying?" billionaire Elon Musk mused in April, five days before offering to buy the social media platform.

The reality, according to internal Twitter (TWTR.N) research seen by Reuters, goes far beyond the handful of examples of celebrities ghosting their own accounts. Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla (TSLA.O) chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.

These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”

 

https://www.outlookindia.com/business/where-did-the-tweeters-go-docs-show-rapid-decline-in-active-twitter-users--news-232696

 

https://www.wionews.com/world/where-did-the-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-report-suggests-528400

 

https://gizmodo.com/twitter-losing-heavy-tweeters-as-elon-acquisition-looms-1849701365

 

https://canadatoday.news/ca/exclusive-where-did-the-tweeters-go-twitter-loses-its-most-active-users-internal-documents-121890/

[placeholder]

Looks like Musk is pigging out on humble pie:

 

The Six Biggest Takeaways From Musk’s Groveling Call With Twitter Advertisers

Amid a mass exodus of advertisers, “Chief Twit” Elon Musk took to his newly purchased social media platform on Wednesday to assure companies that Twitter will remain a safe space for their brands. In an hour-long livestream, known as a “Twitter Space,” Musk cajoled advertisers with promises of robust content moderation and account verification practices. The billionaire faces a formidable challenge: shoring up Twitter’s revenues without alienating the highly vocal band of right-wing users who initially celebrated the acquisition.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-six-biggest-takeaways-from-elon-musks-groveling-call-with-twitter-advertisers

 

Musk fans should note his "promises of robust moderation".

Edited November 10, 2022 by Scott