The real question, why did Google Web Services and other cloud providers let Elon not pay them and let the app run for so long? It's clear he isn't going to pay up
If you want to pick a fight with the ADL, you have to have a significantly more nuanced social media approach, regardless of whether you are "right".
Hopefully this will resolve sooner or later with the current incarnation of Twitter going away completely.
Edit: Reminder to follow HN guidelines[0] and only comment if you have something substantive to say. I'm curious to see discussion on this but HN downweights submissions with high comment to vote ratios (flame wars).
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/21/x-blue-users-will-n...
In theory, markets for direct response ads should be somewhat efficient - you are paying for clicks, views, traffic, etc. So even if the ADL was behind some kind of conspiracy with major brands, you would see someone scooping up the ads at a slight discount.
The truth is that most ads were probably ineffective to begin with. Big brands were overpaying on ads as part of "awareness" programs, and probably because the ad departments at these companies were personally using Twitter a lot and wanted their brands to be on Twitter for personal reasons (if you don't think marketing departments are so vain, you should hear how many billboards are bought just because they sit on travel routes of company executives).
Musk is now himself hammering in this idea. He's not making a case that Twitter has a valuable set of engagement metrics that are currently going untapped - and current ad buyers are getting a crazy good deal. He's admitting that Twitter's valuation was based on Twitter being a cool place for vain brands to dump money and now it's not.
Every self-professed technologist or SV cheerleader valued this guy and his companies as some sort of last bastion of hope for a better future and the reason why we must tolerate his shananigans and straight up frauds.
Cooler heads have always identified Musk companies as dominant in the financial press publications and the tech press narrative publications and now the political press publications but of very little structural importance.
When JPMorgan, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Bank of America, Exxon, Aramco fold...or lose 90% of their value, that would be the moment to stock up on food and ammo.
Or the equivalent with buying back / diluting stock or whatever the mechanations are.
Starlink's global "last mile" coupled with "you have to have an X account to use it" or even "free X/starlink/internet service" ... he can still win on this deal, i think.
Eh? No. No-one sensible would ever give out a loan on that basis.