GM suspends Twitter advertising

Lol...

 

Maybe GM just wasn't keen on their ads appearing with hate speech, or waiting to see if Trump comes back.

Anyway, was going to post this separately.
Welcome to hell, Elon - The Verge
"You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems..."

 

What's mind boggling more than whatever twitter actually is as a form of global governance/cyber lynch mob, it's historic that a primary social media IPO can get bought out via a share price so outrageously high. All because his Tesla profit sharing stock options had an expiration date and he had to cash them out or lose them. And he intentionally paid the highest tax bracket and wrote a US income tax check for $11 Billion to mock his fellow billionaire's and spent most of the rest on Twitter:

"Our story begins with stock options that Musk received back in 2012 as compensation for his services as Tesla’s CEO. These options gave Musk the right to buy the shares at their 2012 price at any point he chose over the next ten years. In 2021, with the options trading at phenomenally higher than their 2012 price, he made that choice. He exercised his options to buy Tesla shares at the 2012 price, a move that caused the equity in those options to be taxable to him as wages. That became the source of the overwhelming bulk of Musk’s 2021 tax liability." https://inequality.org/great-divide/a-perfect-storm-has-elon-musk-paying-11-billion-in-tax/

"In 2012, he was awarded 22.8 million options at a strike price (a purchase price for the options) of $6.28." https://www.investopedia.com/tesla-falls-as-musk-says-he-may-sell-portion-of-holdings-5208794

As always, the problem with capitalism is it fails to set reasonable limits for not just human egos, but for the very health of the planet itself. So until all 8 billion of us learn otherwise, we're all wanting to aspire in a capitalist direction that is not sustainable, yet also not escapable.

 

The Reddit thread this post links to has over 3.5K comments. I thought this one summed up my concerns well:

"Elon goes on and on about being in the center of things, while the alt right crew are taking that as freedom to say homephobic/transphobic/racist shit freely. If he doesn't live up to what he is saying, it's gonna be more and more obvious to advertisers and more will pull out and killing the app."

 

Quite the entertaining event:

 

Meanwhile... I didn't believe my eyes last night, but I just double checked and there's no ads on Twitter anymore. Guess that's what happens when first thing you do is fire everybody after you buy out all stock and take the company private? Dude literally shut down their primary revenue stream by getting rid of all ads and GM is like, "we're suspending our ads on twitter." Lol... Too funny!

 

i would be skeptical, but i've been skeptical of some of musks previous adventures, so i'll let it play out before commenting one way or the other.

 

He teamed up with the usual evil doers of finance at Goldman Sachs to leverage/minimize amount he pays out of pocket, so my latest theory is he gave the ad sales revenue to those investors and the act of shutting down all ads temporarily allows the whole price structure to go as high as they feel like pricing it. As in Twitter sold cheap ads to profit off shear volume rather than high price corporate contracts.

 

Ha ha.
GM is a scared/ chicken.

Although, Elon Musk is GM's main competitor to the EV.
So perhaps, Marry Barra has no desire to spend money on a Musk company

 

GM isn't the only one to have paused advertising in the past.

"Some major advertisers including Dyson, Mazda, Forbes and PBS Kids have suspended their marketing campaigns or removed their ads from parts of Twitter because their promotions appeared alongside tweets soliciting child pornography, the companies told Reuters.

DIRECTV and Thoughtworks also told Reuters late on Wednesday they have paused their advertising on Twitter."
Exclusive: Brands blast Twitter for ads next to child pornography accounts | Reuters

Musk taking over has restoked these type of concerns.
"Elon Musk sought to reassure jittery advertisers that he has no plans to make Twitter a “free-for-all hellscape,” as Madison Avenue is reportedly uneasy about his plans to loosen content moderation rules once he takes control of the social network."
https://nypost.com/2022/10/27/elon-musk-issues-bold-pledge-to-advertisers-about-twitter/

There is already a group of them that wil boycott Twitter if Musk reinstates Trump's account.
Trump won't return to Twitter right away: Musk enlists panel to review suspended accounts | CNN Business