colin

holy shit. uwu i'm just a little multibillionaire, pwease gib money

Legit glorious stuff, it also shows just how little Elon knows Stephen King, there is absolutely no way King ever budges on this point

King raises a critical point here: The nature of Twitter is the top users are providing the product, IE, they write the content many/most "normal users" come to read. Probably they should be getting paid. This goes right over Musk's head.

I hear one of the spaghetti-at-wall ideas Musk had for how to grow Twitter again was to bring back Vine. Actually, that is the one of Musk's "Twitter Ideas" that might actually work, and it's even almost timely (just maybe a year or two late, given TikTok). However what Musk probably doesn't know (as he doesn't seem to do "deep understandings" of subjects, any subject) is that a big inflection point toward Vine's downfall was that the top content producers tried to unionize. ( See: https://www.businessinsider.com/vines-biggest-stars-tried-saving-company-2016-10 ). The high-value users wanted to get an actual contract where they would produce content at a certain rate and quality level and in exchange get defined sums of money from the company. When Vine said no, those creators went elsewhere. Musk as an individual doesn't... seem to deal well with people forming unions. Imagine MuskTwitter produces a half-assed Vine revival (though with a reduced pool of engineers, working on shorter deadlines, due to Musk-related management). Among the various competitors this will face are TikTok and YouTube Shorts, both of which have a mechanism for paying creators. So now imagine a new site, which starting out lacks the captive audience of Instagram or TikTok, except on this one if you reach the point of making professional-tier content instead of it producing a revenue stream now you pay $240/year for account verification. Hm

It gets even better... after King didn't bother to reply, Elon CAME BACK 10 minutes later with "I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls."

(This on top of the rumor that he gave the team a 1-week deadline to get it done)

LOL. LMAO.

https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1586902521037062146

this got me thinking about what $44b means in the context of twitter's employees

if we paid out for every twitter employee (~7500) to have enough money to live off interest for a yearly 3% return simply to match inflation- let's be generous and say $120k a year - then each person only needs $4m, which would be about $30b

This whole thing is one giant middle finger at Twitter's workers :]

While I don't think he's being realistic, two notes:

1. 100 million a year would be 10% of the yearly debt payments he now owes. If I could cover 10% of my debt payments with a week of crunch, I would do it. Of course he won't make 100 million a year on this.

2. He's going to try and sell everyone on this (apparently now at $8 a month), so the theoretical addressable market is way bigger. That won't work either, because he won't get the uptake he needs and a subscription fee doesn't create the incentives towards good behavior he wants.

So the concept isn't entirely insane, he's just completely failing to do market research. Which is prr for the course for him.

in addition to dropping the price to $8 he's now promising that subscribers only see half as many ads. at this point I don't think this scheme can increase revenue at all lol