• Foggyfroggy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As if everyone didn’t see this coming a mile away. It’s like that Austin Powers scene with the steamroller

      • fryrus@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        It reminds me of the series finale of Dinosaurs! where Earl is out in charge of a mega project and it causes an issue so they do another mega project to fix it and it keeps going until he causes an ice age and the extinction of his race.

    • Firenz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      On Thursday, Twitter announced content creators would be able to get a slice of the site’s ad revenue, seemingly to encourage more creators to join the site. To be eligible, the creators must have Twitter Blue and have at least 5 million impressions on their posts in each of the last three months.

      Among the creators who now get monetized off Twitter: Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed “misogynist” online influencer, who was indicted in Romania on charges of human trafficking, rape and setting up a criminal gang.

      Why do that when you can structure the platform to do it instead? It was already a cesspool but this is next level.

    • CyPhD@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s such a goddamn shame that he’s now some sort of Alt-Right icon in their quest for “free speech” cause I’ll admit that I used to look up to this fuckin guy.

      Take us back a few years, before COVID, and when SpaceX was doing their cool shit - I was fucking pumped about the guy. He was pushing forward in the realm of space exploration and I was absolutely fucking jazzed about it! Or at least that was the appearance; I know that SpaceX has a different company structure to Tesla where Musk can’t interfere as much.

      Fast forward to now and I gotta ask: dafuq happened?

      But I know what happened - he really was always kinda like this. It’s just that now - it’s going to be a really big damn financial mistake for him and good riddance. He’s definitely not some scientific genius - he’s just some emerald mine legacy that wanted to throw money at that sort of image.

      • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        You don’t get that sort of money and power by being a good person. The signs were always there for us to see. But so many people were complicit in the whitewashing.

        Elon, as a monster. Was born into white supremacist apartheid south Africa. But even among privileged sheltered white children there. He was privileged far beyond. Attending only the better more exclusive private schools. And while his father and their family love to dance around the fact whether or not he had dealings in or was complicit in all the apartheid. Who are we kidding of course he was complicit and dealt in apartheid. Again you don’t get wealthy by being a good person.

        If you look into everything Elon has done at every company he’s been involved with. He’s just the money. Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla. He’s contributed nothing of value beyond the money and privilege he was born into. Failing in and ever upward trajectory to this point. Literally at Tesla the one thing he contributed that wasn’t money or his name, was a proprietary charger plug design that he pushed. In hopes of licensing it out to other companies. In a world where those companies had those same funds but No Elon existing. Things would have played out nearly identically. Elon was never any sort of Tony Stark normal should we want a Tony Stark.

        Special fun fact. Elon’s current stepmother is also his younger step sister. Now in the interest of full disclosure no there is no incest involved there. Just grooming and pedophilia. That’s right every time someone makes a tweet about pedophilia etc to have Elon Musk commenting “concerning” . It is mearly a Freudian totem to his father. Basically the equivalent of Elon saying “papa?”. Elon claims distance and estrangement with his father. Yet emulates him deeply in his sexuality and behavior. Whether or not the two actually are estranged or if this is just yet another lie upon all the other lines that Elon has told. It should be very disquieting and concerning.

    • reverie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Or maybe load billions more in debt onto a company that was just barely treading water

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      Yeah, pay the people that are already being paid to post by right wing think tanks. Genius idea.

      • vimdiesel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is so true. 80% of the blue marks are right wing bot accounts that post -nothing- but about politics. I hope someone does a study to see how many are Koch brother vs. China vs. Russia. It would make a great thesis for some aspiring master’s student.

        • jonne@infosec.pub
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          Unfortunately hard to do without free/cheap API access. Looks like both Twitter and Reddit want to make it hard for researchers to work out where the biases in moderation really are, while throwing some selective internal documents to some journalists in their camp.

    • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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      Yes the fact that this is going on apparently should clearly mark everything he says as bullshit. If the platform was really that in trouble and insolvent basically pissed off every single business partner and gotten rid of most of the staff. And yet the apparently has the funds to pay out right-wing parrots. Shit only adds up one way.

      • BNE@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Remember y’all - the first allies to Mussolini’s Fascists were industrialists and business owners who used them to attack workers and left wing organisers

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      His old business partner Peter Thiel failed to start up a rival to Twitter, so Musk came along and saddled Twitter with $13 bn of debt to kill it.

    • JeffCraig@citizensgaming.com
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      Yeah man… It’s not what he’s saying that is losing him money… he’s just completely lost the ability to effectively run a company.

        • radix@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/109572674700288958

          He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

          Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.

          Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software & Elon Musk is saying the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.

  • turbulentMagma@lemm.ee
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    Maybe if he didn’t make stupid ass decisions while being fucking obnoxious things wouldn’t be this way

    • athos77@kbin.social
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      Ah, but he has a way out!

      Linda Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal marketing executive, recently took over the CEO position from Musk – he’s likely betting on her advertising experience to bring them back.

      See? It’s not his fault things are going poorly, it’s hers!

      • takeda@kbin.social
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        Yeah, it is the stereotypical glass cliff, with the twist that everyone knows that Elmo is still responsible for all decisions and she has nothing to say.

        Because Elmo is that kind of genius.

        • Sharkwellington@lemmy.one
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          Thank you for sharing this, I had no idea the Glass Cliff was a thing but now I’ll be looking for it in the future. I remember the same thing happening on Reddit with Ellen Pao.

          • takeda@kbin.social
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            Yeah, I first learned about glass cliff when reading about Ellen Pao, it’s probably one of the best examples of it.

      • DrQuint@lemmy.world
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        Meanwhile she just probably went “oh girl, a job the world doesn’t expect me to succeed at? Woo, failing upwards!!!”

      • Dioz@lemmy.world
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        In the weeks after Elon Musk acquired Twitter Inc., hundreds of advertisers paused spending on the platform, wary of the changes the mercurial billionaire might bring to the social media platform. Months later, many still haven’t returned, despite efforts by Twitter’s sales team to woo them back with steep discounts and new safety tools. From September to October of last year, the top 10 advertisers on Twitter spent $71 million on ads, according to estimates from Pathmatics. In the past two months, that figure dropped to just $7.6 million, a decline of 89%, the research firm said. Twitter’s top ad customers historically have included marquee names like HBO, Amazon, IBM and Coca-Cola. Despite a slight uptick in daily users since early 2022, Twitter’s revenue has fallen by 50% since October as a result of a “massive decline” in advertising, Musk said earlier this month. Major brands such as Mondelez International Inc., Coca-Cola Co., Merck & Co. Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. and AT&T Inc. still hadn’t resumed ad spending on the platform as of February, according to Pathmatics.

        Major media agencies like IPG and Horizon Media, which advised clients to pause or consider suspending their Twitter campaigns after Musk took over, have not yet encouraged marketers to return, according to people familiar with the situation. One media buyer said that their firm’s initial recommendation to clients after Musk took over was a “red light,” as in, stop spending. They’re still advising clients proceed with caution — the light has changed to “amber” — as the company still appears to be in a chaotic state. Twitter is preparing to remove verification from accounts that don’t pay a subscription fee, and in recent weeks Musk got into a public spat with a disabled ex-employee. This week, the company disclosed that its source code was leaked online.

        Musk has taken steps to shore up advertiser confidence. Shortly after the billionaire acquired the San Francisco-based company in November, as hate speech made a resurgence on the platform, Twitter tried to win back wary ad customers by rolling out a new product that would let marketers block their ads from appearing alongside tweets that contain certain keywords or images — called adjacency controls. “If it’s like a train accident or a war scene, then probably a family-friendly brand is not going to want to advertise right next to that,” Musk explained at the Morgan Stanley technology conference in early March.

        And late last year, as the company scrambled to win back marketers who had fled, Twitter started offering advertisers major discounts – in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars in free ads – if they would start spending again. Twitter is no longer broadcasting those deals, but several advertisers said they know they could get them if they did want to return. The company didn’t respond to requests for comment about its advertisers.

        One of the biggest barriers to spending more, advertisers say, is Musk’s own behavior on Twitter. In the past month alone, Musk defended the cartoonist who created “Dilbert” after he went on a racist tirade and made a sexist joke about women being “dangerous and violent.” This week, he responded to — and thereby amplified — a tweet that promoted an anti-trans narrative around the school shooting in Nashville, Tennessee.

        Advertisers have expressed concern about Musk’s erratic decision making and how his personal brand blurs with Twitter’s corporate image. For instance, the same weekend as the Super Bowl — traditionally a major advertising event for Twitter — Musk was asking engineers to adjust the algorithm to boost his own tweets into users’ feeds. “It’s this intangible wild card,” the media buyer said about Musk, asking for anonymity to preserve relationships at Twitter. “We need to work with clients to understand from a values perspective: Is this a partner you want to be in business with?” The short answer for many advertisers right now is no.

        Read the Big Take: Musk’s Empire Becomes a Burning Problem for Washington Last month, the company expanded its adjacency controls so that brands can block their ads from showing up next to specific user accounts, too. Author Exclusions, as Twitter calls them, let advertisers choose as many as 1,000 handles that they want their ads kept away from, in addition to keywords and topics. “Brands need to consider the source and what a person stands for,” said Jason Lee, brand safety officer at Horizon Media, a leading US media agency. “The irony, of course,” said another media buyer from a large agency, is “the No. 1 or No. 2 account that we’re going to look to avoid is the owner of the company.” Twitter, which has historically gotten more than 85% of its annual revenue from advertising, has long specialized in brand advertising, offering marketers a place to put their message so that it would appear in the same conversation around major events like the World Cup or the Super Bowl. But many major events aren’t feel-good moments, and brands have also worried about spikes in hate speech and other unsavory content.
        The company is working with outside agencies like DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science to audit its advertising adjacency tools to assure marketers that their ads aren’t running next to inappropriate posts. The company has also hired Sprinklr, a social media strategy and analytics firm, to audit the prevalence of hate speech on the service. But marketers say the results from the various audits either haven’t been clear enough to continue spending, or they are still waiting to see the results. There are other issues. Advertisers are reducing their digital spending more generally, due to economic pressures and a reduction in ad effectiveness after Apple Inc. implemented new privacy rules on iPhones — a change that’s affecting Twitter’s competitors, too. Musk hasn’t scared away all of his advertisers — during an interview on Bloomberg Television in late February, WPP Plc’s Mark Read, who runs the largest media agency in the world, said he thought Twitter “seems to be a lot more stable” than it had been a few months earlier. “I think clients want to start to look about how they can come back onto Twitter,” he added. During his Morgan Stanley interview, Musk thanked Read for his support, and called out Apple and Walt Disney Co. as advertisers that “stuck with us.” Until more big names come back, some smaller advertisers are filling the spots reaching Twitter’s still-sizable audience, which Musk says is 250 million people daily. FinanceBuzz, a personal finance website, has spent more on Twitter ads each quarter since Musk’s takeover, and didn’t even think about leaving the platform, said Franck Delbecque, a senior media buyer who leads FinanceBuzz’s social media strategy. “We have not reconsidered as long as it’s meeting our platform goals,” said Delbecque, whose site spent has less than $1 million on ads in the first quarter.

        Since Musk took over, FinanceBuzz has actually seen ad performance improve. The company primarily measures performance in terms of conversions, or how many users visit its website after viewing an ad. Delbecque thinks changes to Twitter’s algorithm, which controls where, when and why ads are shown, have led to better conversion rates. Twitter is “definitely on par with other platforms,” he said.

        Read more: Elon Musk’s Legal Liabilities at Twitter Are Multiplying Fast Musk seems to have taken more interest in Twitter’s sales organization in recent weeks, and changed the reporting structure so that around half a dozen sales leaders now report directly to the CEO, according to a person familiar with the move. In a step that may be aimed at keeping more workers from exiting, Musk has offered employees new equity grants that will start to vest after six months and will offer them the chance to cash out some of their equity in about a year, the Wall Street Journal reported.

        Still, advertisers have worried about the churn on Twitter’s sales team, thinned through multiple rounds of layoffs since October. Some marketers said they have had several new account managers or sales reps during that time, which has hurt relationships and confidence that Twitter will deliver as promised. Those concerns were renewed in early March after yet another round of personnel cuts. It was reported publicly that Chris Reidy, Twitter’s head of sales, was laid off with colleagues, but employees and partners later realized Reidy is still at Twitter — adding to the confusion among marketers.

        “There needs to be a clear understanding of their organization,” said one media agency executive. “Regardless of Elon, like who is running the shop here?”

        • trainsaresexy@lemmy.world
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          I don’t care enough about twitter/elon to read all of that so here’s a LLM summary:

          After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, hundreds of advertisers paused their spending due to concerns about potential changes. Many of these advertisers have not returned, leading to an 89% decline in spending from the top 10 advertisers on the platform. Major brands like Coca-Cola, Hilton, and AT&T have not resumed ad spending as of February. Major media agencies advised clients to pause their Twitter campaigns after Musk’s takeover and are still cautious due to Musk’s behavior on the platform.

          Musk has made efforts to win back advertisers, offering discounts and safety tools, but concerns remain. Twitter’s revenue has fallen by 50% (minimum) since October due to the decline in advertising. The company is working on brand safety measures but faces challenges in convincing advertisers to return.

          Despite the decrease in big-name advertisers, some smaller advertisers continue to spend on Twitter. Musk has shown more interest in Twitter’s sales organization recently and made changes to the reporting structure. Advertisers remain concerned about churn on Twitter’s sales team and uncertainty about the company’s direction.

    • Fisting for Freedom@sh.itjust.works
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      And that article is from late March. The almost 4 months since then haven’t exactly been reassuring for potential advertisers - remember the time Musk decided to require logins to view tweets and severely restricted the number of tweets users could view, completely without warning? If they’d made any headway in convincing advertisers to return to Twitter, that single weekend burned all that work to the ground and then some.

      The new CEO must have a humiliation fetish to have taken that job.

    • designatedhacker@lemm.ee
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      He’s negative after not paying rent, his server bills, and firing everyone then not paying severance. That leaves $1.2B in interest per year plus whatever salaries he’s actually paying. They made $5.08B in 2021. It’s probably down a shitload more than 50%.

  • Cyyy@lemmy.world
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    good. he killed off thirdparty apps and destroys twitter each day more. i hope it burns to the ground so we can finally start using a better plattform without him controling everything.

  • Adam@geddit.social
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    “Basically, our revenue is cut in half because we didn’t toe the line,” he said, gun in hand, feet shot to bloody stumps.

  • Aer@lemmy.world
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    It’s the best and worst thing to happen to the internet.

    Best because - Twitter is a toxic site, with toxic people and a system that encourages ragebaiting means it breeds it.

    Worst because - These negative people need somewhere to go… And it will only force them onto alternatives and fester in new places. Potentially here.

  • Lanusensei@kbin.social
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    I wonder what hurts the guy more, that he was forced to overpay for this dumpster fire, or that everyone can point at him as the reason for the site’s failure.

    • Frugalexcess@sh.itjust.works
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      With narcissists like this I think it’s safe to assume they don’t really factor in what people think of them. At the end of the day he won’t own up to being a failure.

      Losing the cash likely hurts more. As much as it can when you’re that ungodly rich.

        • saltesc@lemmy.world
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          That’s insecurity. Narcissism is many things, but a big part is oneself focusing on oneself. If others think poorly of the narcissist, those people are simply ignored for being wrong/stupid. Narcissists are brazenly selfish, vain, self-centred, etc. and don’t care what others think unless it’s praising, in their interests at the time, or negativity toward them is very popular.

        • Frugalexcess@sh.itjust.works
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          Ah, looks like you’re right.

          “A personality disorder characterized by self-preoccupation, need for admiration, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem”

          Is it sociopathy? Whatever disorder that allows someone to become a billionaire.

          • whatsarefoogee@lemmy.world
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            Why does it need to be a disorder? Being a selfish greedy asshole is not a disorder. It can be a result of some disorders, but it doesn’t have to be.

        • sachasage@lemmy.world
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          You’re right. Narcissists are generally very concerned with what other people think - specifically about them.

    • fakepostman@feddit.uk
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      “forced to overpay” is a weird, kinda Muskist-flavoured way of putting it. He just overpaid. He decided on a price, made a bid, reached agreement and concluded the deal, all entirely freely and of his own accord.

      That he then wasn’t able to bullshit his way out of the contract shouldn’t be more than a footnote, it’s just normal process with court involvement only because he thinks he’s special.

      • anlumo@feddit.de
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        I still don’t understand how they got him to sign that comically one-sided contract. He really should have involved a lawyer on his side. Maybe his ego was too large for that.

        • Sarcastik@lemmy.world
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          Ego, narcism, over confidence, his entourage of Dick riding sycophants… The list goes on. Basically they called his bluff Elon walked right into it.

          It’ll be years, if not decades before Elon truly appreciates that he fucked this up.

  • Chatotorix@lemmy.world
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    One thing that’s very fascinating is to go to his tweet and see all the blue checkmarks pitching him suggestions about what to do now, but praising him at the same time for the magnificent work he has done so far, like, “excellent job on steps 1, 2 and 3, now he’s what steps 4 and 5 are about-”. They can’t really believe that, but I guess they do it to try to get a “Agreed” from him? I don’t know. Its mystifying.