Kara Swisher:
Okay. Okay, I wrote something up. So, I hope you don't mind. I think the question is not is Elon killing Twitter, but is owning Twitter, killing Elon, essentially, at least the brand, which I think has seen more deterioration in last six months than anyone I can think of. In doing so he's created the perfect storm of self-inflicted harm. He's shot himself in the foot and then the other foot and he went back to the first foot. And while it'd be easy to focus solely on his demented daily tweets spewing homophobic misinformation to bear-hugging despicables to firing people with the stylings of the very worst of robber barons, I think the only thing you can do here is follow the money which I'm going to focus on. First of all, he blew up a stable $5 billion ad business in a few months. It wasn't that good, but it was still $5 billion losing huge opportunities like the World Cup and the holiday season. The site’s ad experience is now like 2 a.m. on cable with a series of grifty ads and come-ons and more porn than ever, which some people might like. Number two, he adopted misguided advice from one of his dumber minions to focus the company on an enterprise software company. It's failed to launch anything stable or unable not to troll corporate clients. You saw that when they did Twitter Blue and everybody faked companies. He's gotten himself into class action lawsuits and how he cloddishly handled the firing of Twitter employees. As former Twitter Blue head Tony Hale wrote: "New York's hottest club is a Zoom call with the lawyers for the Twitter class action suit." It will be a drag on him and all his companies, even if he throws lawyers at it, as he always tends to do. He's been involved in lots of lawsuits over the years, this is a big one. He's allowed the conversation to get uglier by allowing 60,000 of the very worst to return to Twitter to, wait for it, improve the conversation. That's akin to Voldemort letting all the prisoners out of Azkaban prison. He said he would make decisions for these different people via a council which doesn't exist, never happened, and it turns out it's just him late at night mainlining Cheetos, Ozempic, and conspiracy theories. So, a group of managers making decisions managers are paid to make has been replaced by essentially one guy. According to internal sources, usage has started to decline among active users, which make up a small part of the population and a large percentage of the tweets. Mine, for example, have gone from a couple hours a day to under one and it's declining every single day. I only use it for marketing and nothing else now, which as a platform I used rather actively, including where I met Anthony Scaramucci, where I trolled him for quite a lot of time. And he has such a good sense of humor that he allowed me to do so, and we've become I think friends in some way. It's allowed competitors to emerge, like Mastodon, which has been compared to a waiter handing you a gun, pointing at a cow and saying, "Get dinner." So, he's given lots of opportunity for a number of competitors to get in here when Twitter could have dominated here with someone like Elon at the top. Speaking of nothing burgers, the Twitter files. Nine, he's taking other businesses with him. Tesla has owned a lion's share of the electric light vehicle registrations in the U.S. according to a number of different measurement services, but that's down 79% in 2020. There's a surge of competition including lower price models. One Wedbush Securities person wrote, "Musk must take a more-hands on approach in 2023 at the company, as a Twitter distraction along with the current demand situation it's falling off, is a perfect storm for the stock." Tesla stock is down 70%. Even though it's way ahead in EV production, in batteries. It has four plants globally. All kinds of competitors are now– he's leaving it open to competitors to launch models from Lucid and others. He's certainly trying to do so, but his eye is definitely off the ball there and they're facing the more competition they've ever had in a really bad economic environment. And lastly, follow the money. Let me read from Bill Cohan [William D. Cohan]. Just he just wrote a piece yesterday about this. 'The banks, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America will be reporting what it's doing with the debt it has,' the $13 billion in debt, 'and what the banks will be revealing, if I'm right,' this is according to Bill Cohan, 'is that thanks to the demand of the Federal Reserve, Wall Street's prudential regulator, the Twitter bank debt has been marked on the books of both Morgan Stanley and Bank of America at 50 cents on the dollar.' That means the $13 billion of Twitter debt is now worth about half that amount, or 6.5 billion thanks to a combination of rising interest rates and Twitter's shrinking EBITA, as well as questions about whether Elon will be able to make roughly $600 million of interest payment due on the Twitter bank debt in April. And following the logic here, if the bank debt is only worth half its face amount, it has now been recorded as such, it means Twitter equity, which is owned mostly by Elon and a bunch of his rich friends is virtually wiped out after a mere two months under Elon's rule. To put it bluntly, this is an astounding and virtually unprecedented outcome in the world of leveraged buyouts. But he is doing something about income inequality, I guess. Anyway, that's my argument.
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