this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he's actually trying to recoup his "investment" he's going about it completely the wrong way
There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.
It's a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.
That works until more of the user base leaves. Whose going to pay to tweet if no one is on the platform. It's "worth" it potentially in the short term, but long term it doesn't seem viable.
At $1/year i expect very few will leave. Now if it were $10 i could see that being more likely.
A lot of decisions at Xitter were made seat-of-the-pants by Muskiboi. No modelling going on and if there is, they're really bad at it.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceelasticity.asp
The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.
Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.
Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
If he's not careful he's going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.