Dem
51
GOP
49
About a year and a half ago, Elon Musk plunked down $44 billion to buy Twitter, a company that hasn't turned a profit since 2019. Musk proceeded to fire over half the staff and another bunch quit when he made unreasonable demands of the folks who remained. Musk didn't use his own money to buy Twitter. He borrowed it, leaving the company with annual interest payments of about $1.25 billion/year. Last year, Fidelity, which owns a stake in the company, valued the company at $15 billion. Going from $44 billion to $15 billion in a year is not easy. It takes a world-class financial genius like Musk to do it. Though a stable genius like Donald Trump could surely pull it off, too.
But there is more. Now the number of users is down 23% since Musk took over. Another trick not anyone else could do. Many of them have moved to Facebook's Threads, a Twitter clone, or to Bluesky, another Twitter clone. Here is a chart showing changes in the number of users of five social media platforms:
As you can see, eX-Twitter is taking a real beating, TikTok has lost a little bit (possibly due to Congress preparing a law to ban it unless ByteDance sells it to a friendly company), and the others are mostly stable.
Also, many advertisers have fled eX-Twitter. Ad sales in the U.S. are off by almost 60% since Musk bought the company. With the value of the company down by two-thirds, users fleeing, and advertisers running for the hills at full speed, all we can say is that Musk must be the smartest businessman since, say, the guy at Ford who ran the Edsel project. Or maybe the guy responsible for New Coke. Or the guy who managed to bankrupt four Atlantic City casinos.
It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy, but what are the political consequences? Now that Donald Trump has successfully merged TMTG and DWAC and taken control of 58% of the stock in the merged company, what's he going to do next? Possibly his long-term game plan might have been to milk the new company for everything it is worth and then move over to eX-Twitter, which still has a much bigger audience than Truth Social. But with eX-Twitter failing so badly, this plan might not be so attractive.
So what is Trump going to do? He could stay at Truth Social, even after he sucks it dry, but it has only 2 million active users and a 12% market share in the social media space. Since he wants to reach the 74 million people who voted for him in 2020, this doesn't cut the mustard, and with eX-Twitter failing, we don't see an obvious solution for him. But we have an idea: Buy TikTok. That will get the Chinese government out of the loop and make everyone happy. (V)