this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2024
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I need someone to tell me why Musk won't be a huge buyer of DWAC when it opens. How much of Truth Social would he need to get it merged with Twitter, which would get Trump back on the platform. Musk gets to help out the psycho conservative right and he gets to help himself.
It would get attention, but can that attention be translated into ad revenue? So it doesn't really help Musk out, and would be a bad move. So it seems like a stupid thing to do. So he'll probably do it.
Trump is a meta-generator; there are articles critical of the articles critical of his coverage. Anyone could sell ads under a Trump tweet. How many real people joined Truth Social just to follow Trump, and more just to be able to see what the orange bastard spewed? There's a reason pre-Musk Twitter bent over backwards to keep the shit-flinging orangutan on their platform.
If Musk does nothing, Twitter dies in a slow spiral. He has to do something. What better way than to get a guy who people can't stop paying attention to, a frontrunner in an election season? The man gets clicks. If he's already dropped $44B on Twitter, what's another billion or two to save its life while simultaneously propping up his political choice, triggering the libs, and writing the loss off of his taxes?
Imagine Trump posts something about "killing immigrant vermin" and there's a Nike swish with the slogan "Just Do It" beside it.
How much money do you think advertisers will pay when this is a possibility?
You're thinking solely in terms of getting attention. And yeah no doubt Trump being on Twitter would get attention. The question is how do you turn that attention into revenue?
You've jumped to the conclusion that this will save Twitter. The problem is that this will get attention (which actually costs money in bandwidth) without a clear way to make money off of it. So he'd be spending billions on something that would not get him back into the good graces of advertisers and probably cement the inevitable destruction of twitter, not save it.
Like I say, it's Elon Musk so the fact that it's a bad move means he might actually do it.