[mschuster91]

> it assumes Saudi investors would value silencing dissenters at $44BN.

Why not? For the Saudis it's pocket money.

> It also requires believing that these machiavellian Saudi investors are so dumb they can't tell how much power they would have by keeping Twitter growing so they can more effectively silence dissenters before it becomes news.

The thing is, reach-wise there is no replacement for Twitter:

- Meta's platforms forbid sharing of non family friendly content and enforce that ban through rigorous moderation, which means reports from violent protests have a very hard time there; on top of that the user base of Facebook has declined to mostly Boomers and people using it for the messenger only.

- Telegram has no problem with violence or unrest, see the coverage of the Russian invasion, but people need to already be in the groups that share such information - it's a good tool for organizing protests, but less so for spreading the word to the general public.

- Reddit has a similar problem, unless you make the post rise in one of the default subs, no one will care, and Reddit's format doesn't lend itself to real-time updates.

- Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse suffer from a lack of cross-instance content discoverability. The "trends" on most of the Mastodon servers are completely broken, disabled or useless and the platform doesn't have a concept of geotagging to make it easier to discover regional content - the best it can do is language, but Arabic or English is spoken worldwide. And search isn't fediverse-wide, just the toots that the server the user is active on has gotten into their global feed view.

The USP of Twitter was that everyone could connect with everyone, worldwide, and get their issue trending in a matter of minutes if need be.

[ffhhttt]

> it's pocket money

It’s not.

[mschuster91]

The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1], the personal wealth of the dictator clan is estimated at 1.4 trillion dollars [2] and the real value is likely significantly higher than that, especially if you include assets owned nominally by the government or national companies, but factually under clan control.

So yes, this is absolutely pocket money, particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the money spigot or that their neighborhood gets destabilized in a second Arabian Spring again. Smaller Qatar spent four times than that on the World Cup infrastructure that was nothing more than a couple weeks worth of sports whitewashing.

We can't apply Western values of "worth it" to people who can sink billions of dollars on a whim in European soccer clubs just because they can.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-26/saudi-ara...

[2] https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/saudi-royal-familys-dol...

[3] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/10/influence-game-...

[ffhhttt]

> The Saudis are making a billion dollars a day from oil [1]

That was revenue (?) when oil prices were much higher.

> particularly if it makes sure that they can't be toppled from the

But yeah, I guess arguing about monetary amounts is a but pointless since I think the whole premise is just absurd..

Organizing the WC or buying European fotball clubs is a much better investment (if there only reason they invested in Twitter is what you’re suggesting, which of course makes no sense).

[yreg]

The cost would be much more than $44B, but even if it wasn't 3% of total house assets is certainly not pocket money.

This commenter's analysis seems more credible to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36858613

[mschuster91]

Raises some good points indeed, however it assumes that the Saudis ordered Musk to buy and crash Twitter directly, and it assumes that the Tesla shares he used as collateral would go to zero.

It's also possible that they got approached by Musk and saw a good timing to exploit a rich Western idiot to further their interests. I mean, Musk being deranged enough to call a rescue diver a pedo, smoking weed in Joe Rogan's podcast or give names to his children that are completely bonkers even for celebrities?

The signs that he's not completely well mentally were there for years. Loaning him 20 billion or whatever dollars was an extremely high risk move alone for that factor, so either the Saudis have gone off the rails as well or they see some hidden aspect that makes the deal worth their while even if the risk event materializes.