The course of freedom of expression seems particularly high by the times that run. 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 (around 41.54 billion euros) to, he says, get out of his cage the little talkative bird so that he is expressed as he pleases. But it could cost him much more. This Tuesday, April 26, the Tesla action course, the company it directs, plunged more than 12 %, evaporating nearly $ 125 billion. Investors fear that the whimsical boss will be forced to sell part of the 20 % of the capital he holds in the firm to complete the more than 20 billion he will borrow from banks.
Disappointing results
This sudden loss of value is not only virtual, since part of the borrowed contracted is also backed by the value of Tesla shares. After these complex operations, he will remain the businessman to try to make his investment profitable. It starts from the principle that rating on the stock market, supposed to force long -term strategies, and the too high moderation of remarks on the network, bridles its development and therefore its prospects for profitability. It could well be the opposite.
Advertising, for the moment only Twitter resource, like Facebook, is an eminently volatile and very sensitive good, both to the conjuncture and the reputation. A little phone call to Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, the patterns of Facebook-Meta and Google-Alphabet, will confirm it. The more an advertiser targets a large audience, the more he fled the potential scandal.
The disappointing results of Google, published Tuesday, April 26, showed this fragility of the advertising market. The firm’s financial director has thus attributed to the war in Ukraine the skid of advertising on his subsidiary Youtube. And again, thanks to its targeted research and sales of advertising technology based on its internal data, the group is more immunized than its Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat colleagues, which should suffer from the new rules imposed by Apple in terms of protection Personal data from iPhone users.
As for paying a subscription to network users, the experience of Netflix or Spotify shows that this is not enough to consolidate an economical model. We will then see how ready to pay the Libertarian Musk, who loves long -term bets, but hates losing money. The price and limits of freedom of expression.