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On Friday morning, I received two seemingly contradictory messages.
On the one hand, we’ve received news that Twitter, now owned by the visibly struggling Elon Musk, is threatening a round of layoffs that could cut up to 50% of the social platform’s staff.
Meanwhile, we’ve received job postings that dramatically exceed Wall Street’s expectations. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal expect an average of 205,000 jobs to be added this quarter.
Instead, it added his 261,000 new jobs, higher than expected, even though the unemployment rate rose slightly to his 3.7%. This article is an excerpt from The Node, CoinDesk’s daily roundup of the top stories in blockchain and cryptocurrency news. You can subscribe to the full newsletter here.
In April, he made an unsolicited offer of $44.20 per share for the company. Twitter, like all other “tech” or “home from home” stocks, saw a ridiculous and decidedly unsustainable rally in its stock price during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it seemed like a vague good deal at the time. ) Equity investors are a complete bunch of lemmings.
These two articles of his are a reminder of the deep disconnect between the technology sector and the rest of the economy. The Musk/Twitter situation is very unique and hilarious. But it’s also the quintessential Musky exaggeration of the broader forces pushing technology in the opposite direction to the rest of the US economy, at least for now. Elon Musk has fired half of Twitter’s employees.
Musk is clearly no smarter than these lemmings, or at least no better at controlling emotions.This $44 billion is 20% to 25% more than Twitter’s market cap pre-pandemic, and Musk is now It needs to fund $13 billion in debt that far exceeds Twitter’s own whimsical and mediocre revenue stream. This equates to a $44 billion purchase of Peloton in Q4 2020, with a bit of exaggeration.
Because of this, Musk is laying off his Twitter crew at a pace that could destabilize operations. It also ditches revenue-driven ideas such as charging for verification, which seem to reflect a serious misunderstanding of how the platform works. Personally, things are already so out of hand that Twitter crashes and burns under Mask, forcing a fire sale or initial public offering that would drive Musk personally into a billion-dollar hole. I happily predict.
But as much as this is Elon Musk’s silly nonsense, it’s also, in a microcosm, the story of the larger technology sector. convincing companies) have essentially relied on debt. The economic debt, yes, was eased by the zero interest rate era coming to a violent end.