this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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One year after being bought for $44 billion, X is worth $19 billion (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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[โ€“] Twentytwodividedby7 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You've missed the mark on two counts:

  1. Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter and bring it into private ownership. I'm saying had he just left well enough alone, he could have used that money for other purposes
  2. Your point on adding more supply to the real estate market to prop up prices is the opposite of Econ 101 - more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices. Mental health is a much larger barrier to receiving help for the homeless.

I used to volunteer weekly with homeless and housing insecure people in Philadelphia and untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.

Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society. Anyway, my point was simply to illustrate what a magnificent waste of resources it was to buy Twitter.

[โ€“] UnderpantsWeevil -1 points 1 year ago

Musk raised $44B of real money to buy Twitter

He raised $20B by using his own (highly inflated) Tesla stock as collateral. So this wasn't new money, it was a swap. He covered the balance with Twitter's own equity as collateral (which is a big reason why he's been so cavalier with its devaluation). This new money was effectively just to keep a business in the red from running out of operating income.

more supply, all things equal, will reduce prices.

Not under a cartel. And real estate markets are increasingly cartelized, with large vacancies kept off the market clearing rate in order to prop up the book value of the rest of the market.

untreated mental health or substance abuse was an issue for many. There are also barriers to receiving government aid that would assist them because many programs require an address or the process is unnecessarily complicated.

Which creates a vicious cycle, sure. But the solution is to reclaim vacant real estate from speculators and use it as real housing.

Building more investment properties and vacant luxury units to increase book value of real estate does nothing to reduce homelessness.

Housing is just one step. They would also require a great deal of counseling, job training, and medical attention to reintegration into society.

All services that are best delivered to housed populations. What's more, they're services with a universal application. You don't just need to be homeless to benefit from professional counseling, education, and public health care.

But, again, sky high real estate costs make these services prohibitively expensive to expand into neighborhoods.

Delivering these services at cost requires local governments to reclaim vacant real estate kept open at above market clearance rates and turning it over to public sector service providers.