HACKER Q&A
📣 smooke

Is Twitter worth more or less $$$ since Musk bought it?


He bought at a pretty high price, there's been a lot of controversy since, advertisers are reportedly dropping out... but staff is 1/3rd ppl/cost and reportedly traffic is up. Curious how that puzzle fits together


  👤 acdha Accepted Answer ✓
Musk's high-interest loans added the equivalent of roughly ⅓ to ¼ of their total reported annual costs (excluding the one-time lawsuit settlement) so a large fraction of the people he sacked are cancelled out for years to come by debt service.

Traffic going up doesn't directly correlate with revenue — it depends on ad sales to be anything other than a cost and by all accounts advertisers have been hesitant to stick with the company. There's a reason why Gab, Parler, Truth Social, etc. struggled and unless Musk can convince mainstream advertisers that people are not going to see their ads next to extremist content those revenues are going to decline.

I would also be very skeptical about numbers without much detail because we know that bot activity has gone up since the teams which dealt with it were decimated and there have already been news reports about e.g. China taking advantage of this to drown out unfavorable stories.


👤 p-e-w
Twitter is priceless.

It's a megaphone heard by a quarter billion people.

It has double-digit market reach in many countries.

It can probably swing any election by five points or more. Ask yourself what that is worth.

$44 billion is nothing. Twitter could unhinge a nation and destroy any individual or elected official. Twitter is real power. Real power cannot be measured in dollars.


👤 tjpnz
Twitter's now on the hook for a $13 billion dollar loan, they've lost advertisers hand over fist and they've now got potential legal issues on the horizon due to the way some employees were let go. They're worth considerably less now no matter how you look at it.

👤 slimebot80
Elon was dragged kicking into buying it after he shot his mouth off.

So you need another Elon to overspend substantially.

Sure you can price it, but finding a buyer is a seperate issue.


👤 paulpauper
That is the rub when it comes to private companies. There is no way of knowing. It's not like Twitter stayed public and changed manangment...nope. Fully private. So a big fat black box. That is one of the benefits of going private: no transparency. No reporting. The only way of perhaps getting some glimpse is with traffic analytics.

👤 sourcecodeplz
Difficult to say. Some people left but others have replaced them, maybe 10fold. I think it really pushed some who had old accounts or no accounts at all to start using it.

The Musk hype factor is real.


👤 mhoad
This isn’t even close. It’s substantially worse off at this point.