“X has a bot problem unlike anything else seen on competing platforms

“When X's Super Bowl traffic is compared to other social media platforms during the same time period, the bot issue on Musk's platform appears even more stark. CHEQ also provided data to Mashable pertaining to Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In terms of fake traffic, no other platform came close to X's nearly 76 percent.

“Out of more than 40 million visits from TikTok, only 2.56 percent were determined to be fake. Facebook sent 8.1 million visits and 2.01 percent of the monitored visits were classified as inauthentic. And over on Instagram, only 0.73 percent of the 68,700 visits from the platform were fake.”

The man is a genius

“Wheeler tried to explain this to her new boss by bringing up a tweet he'd posted just a few hours earlier in which he'd threatened to go

"thermonuclear" on advertisers who stopped spending money on Twitter ads. "You don't want to go to war with advertisers," she warned.

"Oh, I will go to war," he replied. "And I win wars."

https://www.threads.net/@kurtwag8/post/C3GDezaxcAa/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

“Elon Musk's Al start-up seeks to raise $6bn from investors to challenge

OpenAI”

“Tesla chief targets $20bn valuation in bid to take on OpenAl”

50% of the equity value or 50% of the enterprise value? Because if it does a debt-equity swap it might be above 50% of enterprise value but below 50% of the equity value. Sorry to be pedantic but this affects the outcome

@DonutThrow It's important (and fun!) to be pedantic about resolution criteria.

“Large hedge funds and credit investors on Wall Street held conversations with the banks late last year, offering to buy the senior-most portion of the debt at roughly 65 cents on the dollar. But in recent interviews with the Financial Times, several said there was no price at which they would buy the bonds and loans, given their inability to gauge whether Linda Yaccarino, X's chief executive, could turn the business around.”

https://www.ft.com/content/bc0b6534-c1b6-4979-bc21-30c1ff4594a2

“X generated a little more than $600 million in advertising revenue in each of the first three quarters of the year, and is anticipating a similar performance in the current period, according to a person familiar with the numbers. That compares to more than $1 billion per quarter in 2022.

“The company also makes money from its subscription service, X Premium, and from data licensing agreements. External estimates peg the subscription business at less than $120 million annually. In 2021, X (then Twitter) generated $572 million in revenue from data licensing deals.

“X was not profitable when Musk took over, but the company reported more than $5 billion in revenue the year before Musk acquired the company. In early 2021, Twitter executives led by then-CEO Jack Dorsey set a public goal to reach $7.5 billion in revenue by the end of 2023.”

https://www.axios.com/2023/10/29/fidelity-twitter-x-value-elon-musk

“One year after the Twitter acquisition:

- 13% fewer users according to Apptopia

- less than 1% signed up for premium

- X’s top 5 advertisers' spend down 67%

- still a mountain of debt to repay”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-25/elon-musk-s-x-looks-little-like-the-twitter-he-bought-a-year-ago

https://www.threads.net/@sarahfrier/post/Cy1LiGTPoRi/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Would Musk purchasing debt from Twitter/X creditors at a >50% discount count as raising a round at or below 50% of the 2022 purchase valuation?

“A gambit where he buys part, or even all, of the debt at a steep discount. Then, he’d become both X’s biggest shareholder and potentially largest creditor. X would owe Musk gigantic interest payments. But his goal is reducing or eliminating that burden to help make X a profitable enterprise. Hence, in exchange for the billions paid for the debt, he’d demand a huge new slug of X shares, and secure another big discount by paying, say, half the purchase price of $54.20, diluting his co-investors but in the same motion saving X.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-13-billion-whip-171340881.html

Elon Musk’s $13 billion whip hand against Wall Street: How interest rates and the financial disaster at Twitter put the world’s richest man in the driver’s seat

Might Musk be looking to buy back X's debt at a steep discount? It would be just the kind of swashbuckling coup he so relishes.

For it to be sold, do you mean all the shares are sold? What would a funding round below the previous valuation resolve to?

@Arinbjorn Good point, will add “or raise a round below the 2022 purchase valuation”

@warpaint "Raising a round below the 2022 purchase valuation also qualifies." or "Raising a round at or below 50% ofthe 2022 purchase valuation also qualifies."

@StefanHolstein yeah the way it was just written seems like a mistake

@StefanHolstein Amended