To the surprise of not very many, it appears that bigotry and outrage fabrication isn't a recipe for commercial success for a social media company. This is of course about Twitter, now renamed to X, and owned by controversial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.
The latest news is that the banks who lent Musk the money to take over Twitter are left carrying the can for the loans. At least that's what The Wall Street Journal reported, that there are US$13 billion in "hung loans" on the balance sheet of Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Barclays et al, for nearly two years.
They represent "the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis" WSJ suggested. The banks are being paid interest on the loans but they're not able to offload them to other investors, who are wary of Musk's adversarial management of "TwitterX" which is annoying users and advertisers alike.
Accumulated losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars for each bank.
Musk paid US$44 billion for Twitter, in a leveraged deal two years ago. The social network is now only worth US$19 billion, and Musk is angrier than ever after telling advertisers to go and f**k themselves, which they did, so he's suing them.
As someone who was dragged kicking and screaming into Twitter, but who grew to appreciate its amazing ability to connect people everywhere and be a source of real-time news, the slow-moving train wreck under Musk's management is sad to behold.
For convenience, I set up a throwaway Twitter account to view tweets linked to newsletters and other messages arriving via the work email account. The account has not been used for anything else, but I accidentally tried to share a story on it. Oh dear. Sad trombone:
Thou shalt not engage on a social network without paying first! It really illustrates how not to run a company that trades on... engagement between users.
Sure, it may seem like a good idea at first, because TwitterX has a colossal spam problem nowadays. Particularly after the account verification was subverted into a subscription, allowing botherders to amplify their dross cheaply.
If the experience with the throwaway account is anything to go by, the annual charge doesn't do anything to keep away the spam and bots.
The above is a selection of sleazebots following the throwaway account automatically. In fact, I don't think there's a single real account follower, not that there should be one because, you know, no engagement.
Meanwhile, it's grimly amusing to see convicted felon and United States presidential candidate Donald Trump's own social network tanking in value after he started posting on TwitterX again, having had his account restored by Musk.
That's part of a "free speech" agenda, which has seen Musk get into trouble for fanning the flames of the UK riots. It's also the thinking behind the Grok AI on TwitterX which is apparently uncensored.
Anything goes on TwitterX, as long as it doesn't annoy Musk who will block users who... criticise him wanting to remove the ability to block users.
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