[MarkMc]

I must be the only person who thinks Twitter is still worth at least $44 billion. Yes, Elon has made a few dumb mistakes. But they have been reversed pretty quickly without much long-term damage. It's the rate and scale of successful changes that count.

Advertisers will come back and Twitter will be hugely profitable.

[Zigurd]

> I must be the only person who thinks Twitter is still worth at least $44 billion.

True statement. Everyone else knows that MyPillow and scam supplements do not a business model make. That's who advertises on the kind of thing Twitter has turned into.

But there's more: Driving away advertisers was not the first and worst error. Overpaying and using $14B in leverage means equity stakes are so far under water you have to dig under the whale poop to find them. I've seen some sucky rounds, but it's hard to beat the fix Elon got himself into. This is all on top of the fact that social media turnarounds are exceedingly rare and fragile. Everything fragile got broken on a whim and for no purpose already.

Nobody wants fashy techbros anymore. Elon brought a lot of exposure of this species to the normies and the normies are icked-out. Twitter's brand image is damaged in a way that puts it alongside Truth Social, Parler, Gettr, Gab, etc. Nobody wants them. The only thing fun about being those people is getting a rise out of someone by "just asking questions."

[mhoad]

They aren’t coming back.

I’m going to assume marketing and advertising are not your background but they are mine.

I need you to understand that even before Elon, brands were already extremely on the fence about allocating budget towards Twitter.

They are in no way shape or form clamouring to get back there since leaving.

The reality is they have fatally wounded their only meaningful hope at profitability and the mechanics of the business no longer make sense.

The only thing left to debate is how long until it’s over.

[mcv]

If I understand correctly, Twitter was already under some sort of federal supervision because of earlier mistakes, and dramatic changes to Twitter require careful consideration and approval. Not doing that and even sabotaging their ability to follow those rules might open Twitter up to some pretty harsh fines. In which case it might be over as soon as the government acts on it (which admittedly might take a while).

I forgot the details, but it's been mentioned here before.

[somedude895]

> I need you to understand that even before Elon, brands were already extremely on the fence about allocating budget towards Twitter.

I work in digital advertising and this claim seems weird. Twitter is expensive compared to other channels, but it's an integral part of many media plans going for reach in b2b / tech / high-income.

[mhoad]

Right. It’s been long known that it only works for a tiny fraction of products that meet a very specific criteria.

It’s unprofitable for everyone else which is why most companies are totally ok walking away already.

It’s also typically used at a very hard time quantify stage of any sales cycle since nobody actually buys anything directly after seeing an ad on Twitter.

Brands were paying for eyeballs from a very specific kind of audience who are also rapidly moving elsewhere at the same time.