Musk did not leave PayPal, he was kicked out.

Watching Elon crash and watching his fanboys still defend him is so hilarious

not paying basic bills like rent or servers, reneging on termination agreements, not adequately staffed, and still deeply under water...yep, Musk is truly a genius businessman.

Only a self-proclaimed genius can buy a company and shred $30 billion of its value that fast.

Elon musk's greatest contribution to society wasnt Space X, nor Tesla. It was destroying twitter for good.

I am glad he is making public knowledge what I have known since 2018: there is a reason why the only time he worked at a company he didn’t control he got fired in the first 6 months

The Paypal part of the story is a bit wrong, though. X merged with Confinity. At that time, Paypal wasn't a company, it was the software developed at Confinity. Some time after the merge, they ended up ditching the X name, because no one liked it, and they also kicked out Musk. He didn't leave, he was kicked out. Only about a year later was Confinity rebranded to Paypal, and Musk was lucky to still own a share of it.

Hearing that the X rebrand is a 25-year-old dream of Musk's makes so much sense now. There's simply no way that anyone with a sense for marketing thought it would be a good idea to rebrand Twitter. I can't imagine even his executives would have been happy to hear that decision.

Hard to think of a worse acquisition and execution in corporate history.

Not even a joke. Now that they've rebranded as X, they may as well embrace being a platform for NSFW content considering how their userbase has shifted in that direction for years anyway.

One thing that changing name does for Musk, is to keep him in the headlines. I think that’s what he craves most - the media coverage.

Twitter is over, and the change of logo and name is the formalization of that. What we have witnessed is not the evolution of a popular app but its end, and certainly as a result of a string of bad decisions. It would've been better if X was an app hub with Twitter among others that could be integrated, e.g. Twitter Chat, Twitter Pay, etc. Anyway, X is a monument to Musk's ego, a typical case of overconfidence in business, and proof that he screws up too, which in his style of doing things, he did it big time.

Given that Twitter/X has a serious lack of staff, why would you put banking through it? Where is the security? Competence and trust are basic requirements of any financial organisation.

Just a minor correction at the 15:40 mark. Musk didn't leave PayPal - he was fired for incompetence.

Musk buying twitter is like me buying a Maserati. I can afford it and it's fun but long term my money is gone.

The billionaire genius myth just disintegrated

Once or twice per generation a tech bro will get lucky on 2 or 3 massive risks, become stupidly rich, and then think they're an infallible megagenius. It's more like luck and survivorship bias. We see Zuck's luck and Musk's luck both running out around the same time, and I'm enjoying the show. 🍿

Destroyed the brand, destroyed the staff, destroyed the logo, destroyed verification, destroyed volume, destroyed advertising. I get it: destruction is a necessary prerequisite for creation. What has he created? His "vision" has no manifestation beyond him saying so (lol), which means he either can't figure out how to do what he wants to do, or alternatively, there is no "vision" & he's just making things up as he goes along. That later scenario bears a closer resemblance to what we are seeing.

Who else here doesn’t even have twitter but enjoys this videos? 😂

I think Elon watched Marvin the Martian too many times as a kid. In those Bugs Bunny cartoons, Marvin goes to Mars and there are X's everywhere.

Elon Musk is giving a very tall stack of bills a Viking funeral.

"We have a three billion dollar negative cash flow situation." -A financial genius.

It angers me so much how Elon's treating his remaining employees. He wants them to live in a makeshift hotel in the office and work through the night? He sounds like a nightmare to work for! Elon doesn't seem to understand that these are *real* *people* who do NOT exist to serve him and dedicate their entire lives to his whims 🙄

Musk did not leave PayPal. He was thrown out. In fact it was after they got rid of Musk that the company rebranded itself into PayPal and became quite a powerhouse. Musk had nothing to do with it but he was lucky as he still had company shares from his time with Confinity.

Elon broke (oops) the news that Twitter was losing $4M/day, not noting the coincidence between that number and the daily debt obligation with which he loaded the company...

No matter how brilliant one thinks they are, there is only so much emotional YOLO one can get away with. Musk has been pushing his luck really hard.

Elon playing 4D chess... Disaster, Delusional, Disappointment, Dumbazz Checkmate

Google has all that and more. Maps & traffic, Gmail, video chat, cloud services, Google Play with apps, games and music, KZfaq (still way bigger than TikTok), Google Pay, Bard, Google News, Google Adsense which is big even outside the Google ecosystem, and smart home integration. They would probably love to put everything on one app. But you know the regulators would never go for that. But they do have the next best thing with Android. Just like when Facebook tried to integrate FB and Insta into each other. That was stopped by regulators. Acting that a WeChat type of ecosystem is only something that exists in China is dishonest or ignorant on Elon's part. Also, making himself such a polarizing figure can only hurt him. Right out of that gate, the brand 'X' has a market split that does not need to exist. It's hard enough to compete with Apple, Google, etc. let alone to create arbitrary boundaries.

Bought Twitter on credit....😂😂😂

For clarity musk didn’t have to lay off 80% of the staff. He’s following “The Worst CEO” model made famous by Jack Welch. Jack would do this to every company he touched making investors NOT employees his priority. Before this business model, employers used the kind of business practices that was workplace focused sustaining employees and their families for life. Many many American families were made middle class this way. People built & bought homes had life insurance & put their children through college. Welch also lobbied to do stock buybacks which had been previously made illegal. All in the name of shareholders not customers or employees. This business model destroys companies, people lives and blurs the lines between governments & the corporations who own them.

The switch to 'X' can be explained by massive financial pressure on the business. He has to prove to investors that they are on their way to being an 'everything app'. When things are going well, you don't change the name of your brand.

The twitter purchase was like private equity buying out a retailer: load it with debt, cut costs as much as possible, then strip it for parts. But retailers have "parts": real estate for stores and warehouses, inventory, and well-known brands that another company will want to buy. Twitter doesn't have anything but an advertising platform.

Twitters MAIN asset that is has is brand recognition. Getting rid of that is insane to me.

A lot of those layoffs were software engineers. These are the ones essential to reprogramming Twitter into what Musk wants. And its going to be a bit more expensive to replace them in this job market. And second he did get rid of censorship that "he detests". But censorship is still alive and well. Its just applies to speech hat HE doesn't like, such as anyone that is critical of HIM or his ideology.

"Free speech advocacy," is an... interesting way to describe Musk's motivations.

Even if hypothetically a WeChat-style app was able to succeed in the US there's no way that he's going to make that with 20% of the staff. Twitter was already small compared to other SV companies (In the single thousands vs tens or hundreds) so to cut that by 80% (down to ~1500) and try to force that staff to basically make Paypal but in twitter is stupid. Paypal itself has 30k employees and they JUST manage Paypal. Even if you think there's bloat in the company it still needs around 15-20k just to manage the payment system alone.

👏🏼 👏🏼 👏🏼 Great job Elon. Now, every time I get a notification from Twitter, it looks like I just got a message from an escort service or worse.

This feels like the institutional equivalent of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

He's a fraud who should be banned from any corporate ownership for a decade of flagrant lies.

I'm having my own cash flow problem so I have also decided to just not pay my bills anymore. It's saving me so much money, I'm such a genius!

Lesson: Don't get addicted to Twitter when you are the world's richest man.

let’s not forget musk has changed everything. in 2014 musk promised full self driving. now there are zero humans driving cars. also now there are tunnels everywhere so you can go underground and skip traffic. also, twitter is massively successful thanks to him. he is the best self made son of an emerald miner in the history of the planet.

9 Months Later: The Sinking Company!

The kitchen sink thing is just weird. He should have done like a dog and just peed on something to mark his territory.

If I owned Twitter, I’d probably sell a limited addition set of NFT trading cards depicting myself in various superhero costumes. If that didn’t work, I’d probably resort to outright fraud. Maybe I’d start a fund to build a wall in the middle of nowhere and just pocket the rest of the money after building only a few miles of it.

instead of starting a company from scratch gaining users from 0 he bought a platform with a 450M potential customers with just 98$ per customer

I think the ultimate winner is the bank, because while Twitter might fall Mr. Musk can still pay back that loan.

After Elon took over Twitter suddenly banned me for no apparent reason. I considered the move so stupid and unfair that I didn't even appeal. I simply stopped using them since then.

he thought running it would be easy and everyone else was an idiot, in fact he underestimated everything, then got into real troubles later then he invents some more issues to distract people from the current problems then the cycle continues....

When I was doing a bit of fundamentals analysis for Twitter 6 moths before the acqusition, I came to a valuation of 8 to 16 billion at most. That was considering mostly the financials, not the brand itself. The fact that he was buying it for 44 billion was kinda astounding to me. I thought, well maybe the brand name and the influence it has can be worth that much. Maybe he has some plan how to capitalize on it. Ifluencing peoples opinions has its value. But after the change to X and all the shenanigans, it's kinda clear there was no plan to begin with. He just kinda assumed everyting would come his way. With the price he paid just to scrapt the brand, it would be better just to build his own platform. I bet he could hype it into existence even if Twitter was still around. The thing is, he's mostly a hypeman and most of his fortune doesn't come from his companies profit, but from selling people the idea of what the company is going to be and the selling them the stock. Don't get me wrong, thats a great skill to have, it made him the richest man on the planet for a while. But it's a bit of a double edged blade, if you don't realize that your castle stands mostly on other peoples faith in you. The moment he makes dumb decision like this, it not only costs him a lot of money, but the faith too, and that spirals in a nasty way. Running a social network isn't cheap, for example Facebook need's to generate about 40$/year per active user to break even. And that's probably cheapest it gets, because they have their own very cost effective servers. For Twitter on rented servers, it's probably more like 80$/year. Mostly it's through ads. He kinda burned that bridge a little bit. So he tried subscription...that's how they came up with the pricing I think, the 8$/month is pretty much just to break even :D. Assuming a majority of people subscribe :D.

Only reason Elon bought Twitter was to turn it into X

The more Elon talks, the more he says nothing at all. The Classic 'Talking Loud but saying Nothing'

its scary that twitter was just getting by and only breaking even each year. keeping those advertisers happy was a good thing, but it was also not getting them anywhere. why did the people before him act like they owned the world under those conditions.

It wasn't sink, he carried in. It was a toilet, where he then started flushing twitter down it.

Not Musty digging his original idea out the crate 😂😂😂😂

I think he might be testing the waters for a brand change to sell the Twitter brand while keeping the site and users. Maybe Dorsey wants to buy it back.

I'd turn Twitter into an app only available to cantankerous toddlers throwing hissy fits. I mean it makes sense for Elon to double down on his core strength.

Paid 44 Billion for a brand and immediately changes the name 😂

Couldn't be happening to a more deserving guy

Most costly mid-life crisis ever. At least Saudis got rid off twitter…

It boggles my mind how Musk can't see how he cut his workforce too small to save Twitter. That's just basic business.

One man can change the fortunes of thousands of dedicated workers for his own ego.

Hopefully Elon learned his lesson to shut his mouth and be humble

Musk didn't get rid of the political censorship. He's very much for censorship, censorship that's in his favor, and we've witnessed him doing it.

Calling someone who pretended to be Eli Lilly a fraudster is wrong, as they were making a political statement rather than defrauding anyone by buying futures or whatever.

All the Elon lovers are in the comments.

Should’ve kept it as twitter and just focused videos/live streaming, but the company needs quick money and he knows the fastest way to do that has been to get into financial. Unfortunately for him we’re living in a very different financial world and you can’t pump the stock like 2020. He couldn’t have bought twitter at a worse time, but he really just wanted a way to sell Tesla stock at the top, so even if twitter goes bankrupt he kinda breaks even anyways because he would’ve lost that money when since Tesla shares dropped like 50%.

So it really might be a case of X marks the spot, where twitter is buried. 😂

Disney using Adjacent Advertising to steer away from Tweets w profanity made me chuckle.

He should of walked in the headquarters with a toilet seat 🚽

He even had to pay the fees of the lawyers that twitter hired to force him to follow through. Got to be one of the biggest spankings in corporate history. A great engineer does not always mean a great businessman.

He massively overpaid for a dumpster fire of a company, that's where the problem began.

I noticed the Twitter app icon being changed to that weird porn site symbol and deleted it immediately.

The brand and logo were Twitters most valuable asset. Worldwide brand recognition, ubiquitous in every home. He threw it in the trash, at least sell the brand! Dumbest move in business history

Saying Musk “Left PayPal” is a bit of an oversight

imagine being a company who lives of advertising and them try limiting how much post users can see( and for consequence advertisement)

How to make Musk a multi millionaire? Start with billions and let him take it from there.

The fix is simple. 1.5b interest payment? Convert the debt into share and dilute the hell out of shareholders. Don't blame the employees or the company, it is you Musk.

How did he fire 80% of staff yet Twitter still have the same operating expenses ?

Apparently Musk felt the need to send all the annoying people to my Twitter feed and decided he wishes to share his own Tweets with me as well. I've left Twitter. I had my Twitter feed filled with people who's Tweets were nice and relaxing to read late at night when I can't sleep which made it worth my time to go on Twitter. The way it is now I don't bother going on the platform at all.

Elon is going to be a case study at business schools in the future - as an object lesson and warning.

I was an everyday Twitter user from 2009-2022. I have no opinion on Elon, one way or the other so there is no bias towards him. The app is simply not good anymore. It crashes, I have to open it twice to get it to launch and various other glitches that NEVER happened in the previous decade+.

Glad you didn't mention the nonsense about "bots" that Musk was using to get out of the deal as a legit reason.

That sink has sunken

I browse Twitter only one or two times a day, and try to stay on less than ten minutes. The For You stream is a complete turn off. Half the posts are by people I don't follow, and there's just too much vile content that I don't want to see. Every third or fourth tweet is another, which is also very annoying. I miss the days when Twitter offered pretty good news coverage and they censored a lot of garbage on the platform. Also, the X icon is a complete turn-off. I removed it from the homepage of my devices. Sad to see Twitter dissolving, but hopefully something better will replace it.

I say good riddance. The cesspool of Twitter/X may have granted some people opportunities, but it's main contribution always has been mental health problems and scams. I sure won't miss the site once it's finally gone.

Elon is the "Citizen Kane" of the twenty first century. There is a scene in the movie (paraphrased), where someone tells Kane the newspaper is losing $1,000,000 a year, and Kane response "that means I will go out of business in 60 years."

At this point, what left about Twitter that would have justified paying $ 44 billion to buy the company instead of starting his own social media platform from scratch

Never was a fan of twitter and now less so! How he is the richest person in the world is beyond me!

And this is the guy who's supposed to colonize Mars for us 😂😂😂😂😂

12% INTEREST!!?!!?!?! Twitter doesn't make the money to cover the interest, let alone the loan payments. wtf?

that's what the X is? 😂 that's hilarious. like facebook going to Meta. do they think "cool" names will change everything?

Musks only hope is to add two more X’s to the first X and make it an OnlyFans type platform.

Look at the body language in the BBC interview ... arms contorted, the nervous laugh at the building losses, and the lies about cash flow.

To fix monetization issues all you have to do is remember that you the company are in control of what is seen. If a person is watching something they like it . So you can think of it the same as nobody associates ads with the particular videos they’re watching.

Watching the interview with Elon when he says that if things keep going as planned they could "possibly" be profitable "this quarter"bis so cringey. He's obviously lying by his stature and, by his facial expression. How people choose to invest in him after all of his lies in his multiple failed endeavors is stupid. He's using the same tactics he was using for Tesla's self driving function "if everything goes like jownits going now then we will have full self driving cars next year" -> said like 5 years ago. Lmao. My take is that his play in this Twitter acquisition is to try to create enough hype around the product as he can for investors to keep him alive, just like with Tesla and AL of his other companies

Laying off 80% of your staff while having plans to massively expand the reach and functionality of your app = recipe for disaster.

I can't wait to tell my bank that I am in a negative cashflow situation and will make my car payment some day down the road. Companies don't want to generate a profit; profit is taxable.

The whole building a hotel for employees to work through the night isn't anything new. A lot of tech companies provide these types of services maybe just more quietly. EPIC gives everyone their own office cause often tech workers are sleeping over night in them. And then they have a food court and showers so they can eat and shower in the morning

Every crash or collapse offers an equal market opportunity if you are well prepared and knowledgeable. I've seen people accumulate up to $800,000 during crises and even pull it off with ease in a bad economy. Without a doubt, the bubble or crash has made someone extremely wealthy.