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[–] 216 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (14 children)

Look at the sheer scale and number of massive, malicious mistakes that one of our billionaires makes, while having ZERO impact on their tangible quality of life or lifestyle. None. Their ego score goes down and nothing else changes. The people they laid off suffer, never them.

Remember that when some pro-market capitalism class traitor nitwit inevitably tries to shame struggling people for daring to get a latte, eat Avacado toast, or get an education based on learning and growing as a person rather than solely insatiable greed.

People in the little club basically have to rape dozens of people to finally be permitted to fail, like Harvey Weinstein.

You aren't poor because of "your bad decisions," you're poor because of a relatively small, insatiably greedy, powerful group of people that demand and expect almost all of the capital value your effort produces to go directly to them.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Wasn't the Twitter buyout for a significant portion of his wealth that he like, claimed he didn't even have?

    All those people say things like "well they're risking their wealth!" he seems to be a pretty good example of someone who "risked a lot of their wealth", objectively fucked up and should have lost at least most of it, and has come out essentially unscathed.

    If you can collosally fuck up a whole company, and your wealth doesn't even move, what are you even risking? At all?

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.

    One of the neat tricks you can do when you're wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don't have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren't doing great.

    Obviously, since the company is private now we don't get as much insight into financials.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    mush never intended for twitter to become profitable. his only real incentives here are:

    a. use saudi money to help kill twitter with some plausible deniability (for legal reasons) b. try my favorite 'business tactics' because i have nothing to lose

    he has been very successful at these intended actions

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  • [–] 78 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    These numbers are relatively easy to explain. Elon Musk is a fucking idiot.

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  • [–] 56 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (6 children)
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    [–] 33 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    As others have said this purchase didn't really fuck up his overall lifestyle.

    Yet when the topic of raising taxes on these people comes up they all freak out, like if they have to pay an extra 20% on their wealth they will be living on the streets.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    He is set for life no matter what.

    There is only one way to hurt him- to humiliate him. To hit his ego. Booing him at the Chapelle show, for instance.

    All we can do is keep doing that sort of thing until Real Life Iron Man becomes Real Life Terrence Howard as War Machine and gets replaced with some other asshole billionaire that sycophants will worship instead who hopefully will be mildly less insufferable.

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I can think of other ways to hurt billionaires

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Buying a multi-billion dollar brand and then rebranding it has got to be in the top 10 all time most smoothbrained business decisions ever, right up there with New Coke and Blockbuster not buying Netflix.

    He probably could have started his own social media site to compete with Twitter for 1/1000th of the cost and still have all the Elon poleriders hop on board. It would still be exactly as shitty as X is today, but it could have been done without destroying something somebody else built up. Not that I care, because fuck Twitter too, but if we're looking at this from a purely strategic perspective it's so blindingly obvious this was a bad business move.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    he fucked himself into being forced to buy twitter with his big fucking mouth.

    only then did he go shopping for who would want to help pay for this mistake... hmmm geee who would want to topple a bastion of liberal communication... in walks the saudis with more money than they know what do with.

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    [–] 21 points 2 years ago

    Looking forward to Twitter losing the remaining 28% of value.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    It's infuriating to see how little consequence fuck ups like this have for his personal net worth. If normal people would fuck up this badly they would be bankrupt.

    But somehow if you're super rich or doesn't matter at all how much you screw up.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Social media as it's worse.

    Facebook, Instagram, X and WhatsApp, all toxic waste.

    At least there are platforms like Lemmy, where people (most of the time) share knowledge in an "anonymous" environment, which is actually brilliant for passing on information to the next man, without the toxication and promotion of suicidal tendencies.

    Social media in the common sence always was a cancer in our modern society.

    One of the best thing I did till this day was to never have open a Facebook account. I see that as a personal merit!

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago

    The caption of his meme standing with a sink in the building after purchase said "let that sink in" but it should have said "I'm going to sink this company"

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (13 children)

    If the company's private, which means its stocks are not tradeable anymore, what's the point in measuring the company value at this point?

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    [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Who knew fascism wouldn't be the rage?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago

    Twitter the thing you do on the shitter

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    seems like every decision has been carefully designed to do the most damage possible to the brand, while still being mostly legal.. although using twitter to troll legal systems worldwide also seems intentional..

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    [–] 7 points 2 years ago
    [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    Maybe it’s time for another rebrand…. ‘Ex’ formerly X formerly Twitter.

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