Twitter is Still Very Deep in Debt, the Interest Payments on the Debt Are Massive ($300,000,000), and It's Still Losing Money After Discarding Most Staff
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2023-06-18 00:31:55 UTC
- Modified: 2023-06-18 00:31:55 UTC
Summary: It is perfectly plausible that Twitter will declare bankruptcy not too long from now; the company is not viable and things become very messy very fast
OUR position on Twitter has been all along very consistent. We've urged people to quit the platform and not take anything found on that platform seriously (it was a leading source of misinformation).
There's some
real news about Twitter these days. Below is a sample from the past week.
Twitter is not a
social network, nor is it a community. It's an ego/vanity project of Elon Musk, according to its CEO [1].
"Twitter’s Lawyers Admit They’re Overwhelmed As Nearly 2000 Laid Off Employees File Arbitration Claims [2] says a new article and now they need to worry about a lawsuit over "copyright infringement to the tune of $250 million" [3]. The Twitter platform of the
present has a severe problem with fakes (changing what "verified" means did not help) [4], which may lead to defamation lawsuits and accountability lawsuits some down the line, and the founder of Twitter is trying to take advantage of the chaos [5]. Musk seems to be thinking Twitter will become another TikTok [6], but he's late to the game and what's left of Twitter is being evicted for failing to pay bills [7-8]. Maybe soon the Web site and "app" will go offline for failing to pay server bills [9]. No kidding here, this can
actually happen soon.
So what has Musk got in mind? Bringing in racists [10] and truly pissing off LGBTQ users [11-12]? You just know this won't end up very well. Openly endorsing homophobic politicians in Twitter livestreams probably pisses off the lion's share of what's left of the users in it, not to mention most US politicians.
"Jack Dorsey Says Indian Officials Raided Twitter Employees' Homes," said a recent article [13] and maybe some time soon it'll be US officials doing the same.
We're not too sure what Twitter will look like by Christmas. Given all those lawsuits and unpaid bills, the platform might as well be offline.
As noted in the title, the company still costs a huge amount of money to run. The only way to put an end to these losses is to declare bankruptcy.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
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Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and much more time intensive court process. However, lots of big businesses became obsessed with the concept as well, and, as we’ve covered over the years, that’s resulted in them spending much of the early 2000s turning the system to their advantage.
A group of music publishers is suing Elon Musk’s Twitter for copyright infringement to the tune of $250 million. But the group faces a recalcitrant Musk who isn’t paying rent—why would he pay royalties?
China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. A growing number of Twitter accounts have been impersonating outspoken Chinese intellectuals or celebrities. Their posts, which frequently criticize the Chinese government, often draw hundreds of thousands of followers before the deception is publicly exposed.…
