Lhe rate of freedom of expression seems particularly high these days. It is in the name of this very malleable concept that the billionaire Elon Musk intends to afford Twitter. He will therefore pay 44 billion dollars (about 41.54 billion euros) to, he says, get the little talkative bird out of his cage so that he can express himself as he pleases. But it could cost him a lot more. This Tuesday, April 26, the stock price of Tesla, the company he heads, plunged more than 12%, evaporating nearly $125 billion in the process. Investors fear that the whimsical boss will be forced to sell some of the 20% or so of the capital he holds in the firm to complete the more than 20 billion that he will borrow from the banks.
Disappointing results
This sudden loss of value is not only virtual, since part of the loan contracted is also backed by the value of Tesla shares. After these complex operations, it will be up to the businessman to try to make his investment profitable. It assumes that stock market listing, which is supposed to constrain long-term strategies, and the excessive moderation of comments on the network, curbs its development and therefore its profitability prospects. It could well be the reverse.
Advertising, currently the only resource for Twitter, like Facebook, is an eminently volatile and very sensitive asset, both to the economic situation and to reputation. A quick phone call to Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, the bosses of Facebook-Meta and Google-Alphabet, will confirm it. The more an advertiser targets a large audience, the more he avoids potential scandal.
The disappointing results of Google, published on Tuesday April 26, showed this fragility of the advertising market. The financial director of the firm thus attributed to the war in Ukraine the slippage of advertising on its YouTube subsidiary. And again, thanks to its technology for researching and selling targeted advertising based on its internal data, the group is more immune than its colleagues Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat, which should suffer from the new rules imposed by Apple in terms of protection. personal data of iPhone users.
As for making network users pay for a subscription, the experience of Netflix or Spotify shows that this is not enough to consolidate an economic model. We will then see how much is ready to pay the libertarian Musk, who likes long-term bets, but hates losing money. The price and limits of freedom of expression.