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Elon Musk's Twitter takeover math has changed (www.axios.com)

submitted 1 week ago by FlyingSquid to c/news

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I really hate Axios' format, but they're not wrong.

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter when he bought it for $44 billion in late 2022, after unsuccessfully trying to renegotiate or renege.

Now a new conventional wisdom is emerging: Twitter is a loss leader for the rest of Elon Inc.

The argument is that Musk bought Twitter for power, not profit. And that the gamble paid off.

Musk used the platform to help shape public opinion during the election, artificially amplifying his political messages and giving him- influence with Donald Trump that money alone wouldn't have bought.

Trump's victory means that Musk has become the most powerful unelected American ever — and that could be a boon for SpaceX and Tesla, whose fortunes are heavily dependent on federal government contracts and policies.-

Those two companies also are much larger than Twitter/X, even at $44 billion, and more core to Musk's lifelong goals.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 week ago

the most powerful unelected American ever

Other than the "unelected American" part, it reminds me a bit of William Randolph Hearst (who is widely considered as the inspiration for Fox's Murdoch - not to mention Citizen Kane).

William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism in violation of ethics and standards influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest stories.

Hearst acquired the New York Journal and fought a bitter circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. Hearst sold papers by printing giant headlines over lurid stories featuring crime, corruption, sex, and innuendos. Hearst acquired more newspapers and created a chain that numbered nearly 30 papers in major American cities at its peak. He later expanded to magazines, creating the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and coverage of political news in all his papers and magazines, and thereby often published his personal views. He sensationalized Spanish atrocities in Cuba while calling for war in 1898 against Spain.

During his political career, he espoused views generally associated with the left wing of the Progressive Movement, claiming to speak on behalf of the working class.

Hearst gradually began adopting more conservative views and started promoting an isolationist foreign policy to avoid any more entanglement in what he regarded as corrupt European affairs. He was at once a militant nationalist, a staunch anti-communist after the Russian Revolution, and deeply suspicious of the League of Nations and of the British, French, Japanese, and Russians. Following Hitler's rise to power, Hearst became a supporter of the Nazi Party, ordering his journalists to publish favorable coverage of Nazi Germany, and allowing leading Nazis to publish articles in his newspapers. He was a leading supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932–1934, but then broke with FDR and became his most prominent enemy on the right. Hearst's publication reached a peak circulation of 20 million readers a day in the mid-1930s.

His life story was the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane, the lead character in Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane (1941)