YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Levine

lines on the record: 54
first: 2022-10-31
most recent: 2022-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The next big story. I don't know. I'm interested in I come from banking and a bunch of the big banks are sort of doing big moves. Credit suis is breaking itself apart, like Goldman Sachs is kind of rethinking its retail move. So there's a lot of stuff that's happening in banks, but mostly I've had no thoughts beyond Elon and Twitter and I'm going to, you know.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, no, but I think the density of hucksters is lower because a lot of them, some of them were like literally on the lamb. And then others are pretty chastened by being in bankruptcy. Right. And I think just in general, like. You're less likely to fool people now into like doing the dumbest possible thing because when everything was going up, you might as well do the thing that's going up the most. And now people are, you know, it's like it's not obviously easy money anymore.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's one of the points Yeah, even just making the same mistakes the traditional finance makes is instructive because you get to see it in a lab setting. You get to see, like, I said that the crypto winter, among other things, just recreated the 2008 financial crisis. Some of the dumb stuff that happened in 2008 where everyone's like, wow, we can never let that happen again. Crypto found a way to do it again, which is, you know, instructive.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Current usefulness or for like a future where we're all constantly exchanging coins for everything we do. But I also think that like crypto has built a pretty cool financial system and has had a lot of interesting technical ideas. And so like I'm sort of enthusiastic for like seeing what crypto is doing. I also think that it's just an interesting thing to think about because it's a real lens on what happens in What social status means, all these questions that are sort of like big questions of life are like crypto makes them really clear and weird, you know, it's fun to talk about crypto”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, like, we're in a crypto winter in the sense that crypto lost a ton of $2 trillion of market value in the last during this year. But it's also like there's a trillion left, right? Like it's still a big asset class is maybe too nice a word, but it's still a big thing, right? It still attracts a lot of investment. And people are still doing a lot of stuff and like building a lot of products in crypto. I mean, as you say, I'm kind of in the middle. I'm skeptical of a lot of the claims that have been made for cryptos.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. I mean, it's weird because the US is very weird in this and there being a very strong coordinated backlash to ESG. But the rest of the world, like, no, not at all. And so these really big global asset managers have a difficult time where it's very important for them to prove their ESG bona fides to certainly European investors and also to a lot of American pension funds or whatever. But also they have to be able to go to like the Texas pension fund and be like, no, no, no, we don't do ASG at all.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is a theory of Republican politics, but like the way you implement it is you take money away from BlackRock. You're like, our state pension will never invest in BlackRock. We'll take it away. And then... There springs up a business to support that. It's not primarily a thought out financial, and I'm being unfair, and there are people who take it more seriously and are like, we think ESG is wrong. The financial analysis is incorrect. And we will do a different financial analysis. But there are also a lot of people who are like, these Republicans state treasurers are handing out all this money they took from BlackRock. I want to get some of that money. So I think there is a sort of obvious like opportunistic form of anti-ESJ investing where you say, I'm not woke, give me the money.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Response to climate change. And if you are a Republican, you know, candidate, you can make hay out of that because you're saying like traditional Republican things about distrusting climate change, but you're also attacking big business, which has a sort of natural populist appeal.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that this comes out of Republican electoral politics where Republicans say a way that we can appeal to voters is by saying that big evil financial firms like BlackRock are stealing your retirement savings to promote their big city woke values, right? There's some kernel of truth to that where like, you know, these big investors are run out of big coastal cities and like many of their managers tend to be more socially liberal than like the average Republican voter. And so they have views on climate change that are not necessarily like the political majority in America. And so these ESG funds take that, like implement that view and try to buy stocks that will do well in”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that the odds of Siphas blocking Elon Musk, who is a U.S. citizen from owning Twitter are like zero. Zero. I think there's some chance that some of his foreign investors, which include like Binance and Awalid and some others. Would be kicked out of the deal because Cyphius technically has the ability to kick out minority foreign investors. But like, why? What's the risk to foreign policy of these minority investors owning Twitter? So I don't think it's much.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and like more, he's been more like he's like occasionally tossed off Chinese propaganda, but like he's been pretty committed to Russian propaganda. And only for the last two weeks. It's not like a longstanding fondness for aggressive Russian foreign policy. It's like two weeks ago. He's like, ah, Russia should really keep Crimea.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's been some reporting that people in the Biden administration don't like that Elon Musk has sort of enacting like a Russian agent on Twitter.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's interesting that there was in Elon's filings, he talked about he was continuing to have conversations with Jack about investing. And we don't really actually know who the co-investors are, but it didn't seem like Jack was actually rolling his stock over. I don't know. I mean, like, clearly they have a friendly relationship and they text, but like. My impression is that Jack is kind of checked out from Twitter and does not have... A lot to tell Elon about how to run it.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the other thing is we haven't talked about it really, but there's the super app idea where like Twitter becomes like the payments channel for America the way WeChat kind of is in China. I don't put a high probability on that.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're in. And like other good exchanges, they're like, we're going to put Twitter on the blockchain, right? So finance has definitely made some noises about how they will help Twitter go out, like integrate with the blockchain. I have no idea what that means. I don't think it means much.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, again, I think as equity investors, they have just no power whatsoever. I think this is Elon's company. I think as like fellow rich VCs, they can get them on the phone. They can text him.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think none of his equity investors have any influence at all. I think some of a couple of them are like Elon's friends and like VCs and like they might have some influence. But I mean, I just think contractually they have no say over the company. And I think they are not in this because they want to run Twitter. They want to hang. Because they trust Elon. Like in August, the interesting thing there is that he was critical of the deal because he thought Elon was underpaying for the shares. Now, right. I don't know if he still thinks that, but his rolling over his stock is a way to implement that view. If you think Twitter is worth a hundred billion dollars, you don't want to sell it a $40 billion valuation. So you keep your stock. That's his bet here.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's like what's been said so far, but that doesn't mean they won't. It means that like. This is not a good time to sell the debt. So, like, if the market changes, their minds might change. I don't know. I thought about that because a lot of people have talked about like, oh, this debt will end up in the hands of Apollo and these really aggressive distressed debt investors who will like put the screws to Elon. I can't imagine wanting that, right? So I don't know. I think the debt will be pretty quiet. I also think that like. I don't think Twitter is going to default on the debt in six months. I think they have a lot of cash, and I think they'll find a way to kind of make the payments.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that they have his ear, right? His banker at Morgan Stanley, Michael Grimes, is a sort of well-known banker and has clearly been like his kind of trusted advisor on this. And I think that we'll be giving Elon some financial advice about what the market wants. And that matters. You know, in terms of being the creditor, I think that Twitter is just going to pay the interest for a while. Even if things go poorly. And I think that Morgan Stanley, in their role as creditor, just want no part of like the day-to-day running of Morgan.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I mean, the worst cases is everyone quits and the service becomes unusable and Twitter dies in like three months. I don't think the odds of that are super high, but the worst case here is zero. And like when I say zero, it gets worse because it's like this debt that you have to pay and then does a bank foreclose on it. Does like Morgan Stanley end up owning Twitter and like they don't want that? So there's all sorts of worst cases. What's the best case? He does product innovation that makes it fun to use and that people want. And he does enough economic innovation that, you know, he's like selling more ads and or charging people for using Twitter in a way that is relatively frictionless, that like power users are paying as much as they're willing to pay and ordinary users are getting it for free and are like, oh, this is fun. And then the next step of that is he does that in like three years. And then he goes back to public markets and he's like, buy my Twitter and it's worth a trillion dollars because it's the combination of like.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Like he's expressed views that are quite positive about China. And everything else aside, like if you're the CEO of a company that has a lot of business in China, you want to avoid offending China in your personal statements. And that's understandable. But now he is responsible for the statements of hundreds of millions of people on Twitter. And could China lean on him? I don't know. And here again, it will be useful for him to say, no, it's a company. We've outsourced it to the trust and safety team. We're committed to free speech. And, uh, I don't think he's going to ban discussion of Tibet tomorrow or whatever. I think he has a genuine desire not to do that, right? I just, I don't know what the pressures will be down the line.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that my sense is that the content moderation stuff gets a lot of attention What we'll probably take up more of his time is product e stuff. Stuff like, you know, figuring out how to do ads better, figuring out other ways to monetize, figuring out block list, like just making the experience better. In terms of moderation decisions, I mean, I think the place where he's going to get where a lot of his focus is going to be is stuff where the pressures on him come directly from powerful government officials, right? Like I think he will get calls from powerful Republicans saying we need to unban these Republicans who did bad stuff. I also think the concern that a lot of people have has nothing to do with American politics, concern that a lot of people have is that he's going to get calls from Chinese Communist Party officials saying you as the CEO of Tesla have tons of important economic ties to China and we don't want Twitter to carry any pro-Tibet content or like anything about like Uyghur genocide.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He probably would because he is like this insane micromanager. He might get into that for a week or two. But I think eventually he wants some sort of process that he can punt to.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His mind, he was like the guy making the content decisions, right? But as of now, he's like, wait a minute, like, I can't spend my whole time deciding if some account with 200 followers should get back on Twitter after they tweet something racist. And I think he's realizing that and like he wants to have any other company would have some sort of process for doing this so that he can say it's the process. It's not me. I don't have to make every decision personally because that would be a nightmare.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wants somewhat more Republican content on Twitter, but I don't think that he wants all possible content on Twitter. I think there's going to be a lot of content moderation, and I think he's going to, you know, it's like pretty easy for him to declare victory and be like, Trump is back on Twitter. Free speech is free. I think that as of last week.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never go Ideas that I might have children. I'm not sure I have either. But no, like Twitter is not about your life, right? It's about screaming about politics or making weird jokes. Yes.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, Twitter historically is just worse at that, but they also like, you use Twitter differently, right? You're not there to follow your friends and share your baby pictures so they can serve you ads for Disney+.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I've never fully understood Twitter advertising. The ads I'd get are not great, you know. And right, like even given as of last week, Twitter's trust and safety procedures, if you're serving ads on Twitter, you're kind of still next to some sketchy content. Yes, you really are.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, by the way, he interacts with people. People reply to him and he replies to them. He does use it as a two way communication tool, which is maybe somewhat unusual for a celebrity with millions of followers.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is published in a newspaper, you know, is published in the Wall Street Journal and on Bloomberg, right? So for him, it's a broadcast platform, which is not the same as the Town Square, but not a lot of people have a filter that avoids him. Yeah, no, he's”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit, but like honestly, Twitter is never like it's a you know you choose your own feed, right? Twitter's product people have like been fighting against that for years where they are constantly trying to show you tweets that from people you don't follow because they want to increase virality and right they're trying to be more like Facebook but the idea that everyone on Twitter should see the same thing has not really ever been a goal of the product and when Musk says it's the town square like he doesn't exactly mean that right you know every tweet that he writes”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right. So you can build more filters and more ways to customize your Twitter experience. And then you can pay a little bit for more pleasant Twitter experience. And Twitter is very valuable because there are a lot of casual users who can see the memes that you tweet and in some low touch way be fans of yours. And those people shouldn't pay for Twitter because they're very casual users. But there are a lot of very deeply addicted. If you charged Elon, you know, leaving aside that he bought the company. If like Twitter had charged Elon Musk a thousand dollars a month last year to use Twitter, he would have paid it, right? Like he's rich and he loves Twitter. Something is there.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, if you have 100 Twitter followers, Twitter is a... To consume some information that you probably wouldn't pay a dollar a month for. But if you have a million Twitter followers, Twitter is part of your business, right? Like you're in some sort of business of promoting yourself and you need Twitter. And if you charge those people 10 bucks a month, that would be an easily written off expense. That's the thing that people have suggested over the years. One thing he wants to do is just build more product, like just make more stuff that you can do to make a Twitter experience better and presumably you could charge for some of that. Like, you know, you could charge people to have the low racism Twitter, or you could charge them to have the high race on Twitter. I don't know, I don't know which one is more valuable to more people, but probably the high.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's been very little product innovation at Twitter. And like when you talk about TikTok, the thing they're doing is more appealing to more people and particularly to younger people. And so does Twitter risk becoming like the place where old journalists go to chat with each other and how valuable is that?”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe that'll work, but like it might be kind of hard to implement. But the other problem is just if you're firing everyone or if you're like sort of like demoralizing everyone, then you lose not only the people blocking Donald Trump, but also the people blocking spam bots and crypto scammers. And then, you know, like part of why he wanted to buy Twitter is that his Twitter experience was like being constantly barraged by spam bots. He wants to fix that, but he's also wants to fire everyone. So it's like, you know, he may end up making that problem worse. And then just more generally, you know, like people like.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the sort of immediate worries with Elon Musk take over are, you know, if you sort of buy Twitter with the goal of free speech, and then you just sort of like fire the entire content moderation team, and then it's all just, you know, abuse and racism and misinformation, then probably a lot of people are like, I don't want this anymore. I'm going to go do something more pleasant with my life and you lose people. And I think Musk's ideas for that are kind of like. You'll be able to choose your filter so that you can have the high racism Twitter or the low racism Twitter somewhere in between.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agree with that, but it's sometimes hard for me to see because I'm a journalist and the center of gravity in the journalistic world is Twitter. And it's clearly, you know, like. It is not where the teens are making the memes, you know, but like it's where Elon Musk hangs out, right? It's where Donald Trump wishes he could hang out, right? So I think that there is. There continues to be this idea that it's culturally central, and the question is can he revive that and monetize that? The stuff that he's said about that is like, well, charge people for subscriptions. Okay. Like, does that sort of destroy its cultural value? Because the value of Twitter is everyone can go there and make memes and sort of exchange ideas. I don't know”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. He fired senior executives who he clearly didn't like, you know, and who's been fighting with for months. That's not surprising. But I think he said that he wants to. Slim down the employee ranks pretty drastically. And I don't think he's alone in thinking that Twitter's overstaffed and has not done a lot of product innovation with all that staff. It is not at all impossible that he can slim down the staff and continue to have a functioning Twitter and possibly even add some stuff that he wants to add.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can do it again. Yeah, but also that he is a meme lord and he has fans who might buy, you know, like he became a meme lord for Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency. And like, that doesn't do anything. And nobody's expecting him to make Dogecoin, you know, have cash flows. But like people bought Dogecoin because Elon Musk like Dogecoin. By the way,”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like I think it's going to be three, four, five years, like a sort of more normal time frame where he can actually do stuff. And when he goes back to the public market, he can say, look at all that I've done to change Twitter and make it better. But to some extent, having it go from a company that is a regular public social media company to being an Elon Musk company, that possibly adds value there. And that's like people who are Elon Musk fans would want to buy this stock.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could imagine like Elon Musk buying Twitter today or yesterday and waiting like two weeks taking it public again and you're basically just taking it away from Twitter shoulders and now you sell it back to like Elon Musk fans and maybe you can sell it at a higher price. Obviously he's not going to do that two weeks. No, that's an exaggerated joke.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, and Twitter is a challenged product that he thinks is important and can put his mind to and perhaps make it better. I don't know how. And when you look at the stuff he said publicly about how he wants to do it, I don't know, that doesn't sound like it's going to triple the value of the company. But he's created a lot of shareholder value before. So might he do it again, maybe.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he's obviously very smart and talented and has gotten a lot of things right. And he runs all these very disparate, very aggressively complicated companies tackling difficult problems and making impressive progress on them. You can't look at SpaceX and be like, this guy's a dope, you know? He's clearly good at doing stuff.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buy the stock and push up the price of the stock. And if you believe some form of that, then like, you know, can he add value to Twitter? Maybe. Now, separately, can he add cash flows to Twitter? And the reason people buy Tesla is not just that they like his jokes online. They also think he is some sort of business genius. And so if he can do some business genius to Twitter, then perhaps that leads to a, you know. 80 or 100 billion dollar valuation instead of the $40 billion he bought it at or the $10 billion it might be worth otherwise.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I mean, if you look at the history of Tesla, I think most people kind of think of Tesla as a pretty good business now in terms of it makes cars and sells them for a lot of money and does volume and builds factories and stuff. But for a long time, like the stock price was way ahead of the business, right? And it would not make money year after year. And the typical reason that people give for that is that there's an army of Elon Musk fans who will”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would be difficult in better times for it to cover that interest expense. So, you know, if it continues to perform poorly financially, there's some chance of Musk's banks foreclosing on Twitter, which I wouldn't want to do if I were them. But it's a theoretical possibility. And Musk has co-investors, and he will eventually probably want to take this company public again. I mean, that's normally what happens with LBS. So you'd expect him to want to sell it again and to want to spruce up the economics in order to do that.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know it doesn't matter to shareholders, right? And the shareholders have been cashed out. It matters. A little bit in the sense that Twitter has a really big debt burden now, like it's borrowing about 12 or $13 billion to pay for this purchase. And so it's going to have something like $1 to $1.5 billion a year of interest expense, which is”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you looked at sort of where Twitter was trading and the market, but that was before a big downturn on the market generally, it's not a great time in the market for social media stocks. And Elon Musk kind of bought this social media stock at the peak.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's important as a product and as like a sort of, as Elon would say, like Town Square for Democracy is so much greater than its economic importance. Every politician wants to be on Twitter all the time. Why isn't it making more money? And the latest iteration of that is Elon Musk is going to try to make it make more money. Maybe.”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. I mean, first of all, it's not a pleasant fight to get Elon to actually close the deal, right? I mean, I've been critical of Twitter's board and management for sort of finding themselves in this position. Elon has a vision for Twitter. It's not totally clear what it is, but he thinks it's valuable and he thinks it's important. And he just, he's just like a Twitter user. He really likes Twitter. And you never get that sense from Twitter's board or management. No, you never get the sense that they're deeply committed to the product, that they really believe in its social importance in the way that Elon says he does. Arguably, this share price was languishing because the company was a little bit out of ideas. And that's why Elon Musk ended up buying it, right?”
2022-10-31 · On with Kara Swisher · Matt Levine on Elon Musk: Chief Twit & “Meme Lord” · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT