Does telling your advertisers to go fuck themselves have a negative effect on your business? This is a question that nobody had seriously thought to explore for decades, probably because the obvious answer is “Yes, you moron.”
Apparently Elon Musk thought about this question, though, without the obvious answer popping into his ketamine-addled mind. Elon Musk appears to not think about a lot of questions that would be a layup for anyone with a functioning brain stem.
So let us imagine we are Elon Musk. Then let us imagine we are ignoring all 127 or whatever of our children not only because we are always ignoring all 127 or whatever of our children, but also because we are busy asking ourselves, “What happens if I take the world’s most insanely popular social media platform, one that has become an essential tool of communication for businesses and government entities and activists, and turn it into a Nazi pool hall full of bigots and misogynists and fascists and weirdos who go apeshit whining about reverse racism if someone makes a dad joke about white people not liking really spicy food, in addition to telling all the advertisers who are already unhappy about my business turning into the online equivalent of the Luitpoldarena in 1936 to go fuck themselves? Might that cause any revenue problems for my company or companies, of which I own several that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars?”
Luckily for Musk Forbes looked into it so he can now put some numbers on his idiocy:
According to this report, X booked $114 million worth of revenue in the U.S., its largest market by far. This represented a 25% drop over the preceding three months and a 53% drop over the year-ago period.
That already sounds bad. But it gets worse. The last publicly available figures prior to Musk’s acquisition, from Q2 of 2022, had revenue at $661 million. After you account for inflation, revenue has actually collapsed by 84%, in today’s dollars.
No wonder Musk came up with the genius idea to sue advertisers for refusing to advertise on his site. That might be his only hope.
If the company formerly known as Twitter but now known as X was a publicly traded one, the stock would be cratering and shareholders would be demanding Musk himself fuck off into the sun. But that task is being left to the shareholders of Tesla, which is a publicly traded company with investors who were already nervous because Musk kept dumping his own shares to finance his purchase of Twitter, which tanked the stock once already.
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On top of that, Musk being an insufferable schmuck was already hurting sales of Teslas. So one imagines that his selling more of his 12 percent stake in the company will not help.
It is hard to imagine that Musk’s leadership of ExTwitter could drag it to this sorry pass, unless one remembers literally every single decision Musk has made since he bought the company two years ago. Firing most of the employees, including many who had deep knowledge of the rickety programming scaffolding that keeps the app running, then having to scramble to bring some of those people back when the inevitable breakdowns started. Ending the verification system that helped distinguish real celebrity and company accounts from phony ones, which was about all that made the site usable for those entities. Charging people $8 a month to use a previously free service. Turning himself into a Tucker Carlson-wanking edgelord who seems to spend more time shit-posting on his own site than doing anything else. Suing everyone in sight for pointing out his wrongness. Throwing his money and support behind Donald Trump, the rapidly decaying Republican presidential candidate who is about as popular at the moment as a dead raccoon rotting in a crawlspace under the house.
The sad part is that Musk will still be worth a couple hundred billion dollars even if he has to sell some Tesla shares, because God has the dumbest sense of humor.
[Forbes]
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