With advertisers fleeing Twitter due to various concerns about Elon Musk which could result in Twitter to having to declare bankruptcy, Elon Musk has come up with a plan to boost advertisers’ confidence. This plan involves SpaceX advertising their Starllink satellite Internet service to Twitter users in Spain and Austria. Nope, this in not a joke. So far SpaceX has purchased a ‘large’ advertising package on Twitter for a mere $160K (though this number could top $250K). Part of Twitter’s financial distress is the fact Twitter has not been profitable since 2019 is the fact when Musk purchased Twitter last month he took on $13 billion in debt. With that debt comes around $1.2 Billion in interest payments annually. Regardless if it is $160K or $250K that small amount of money is not going to help Twitter’s financial woes. This would be like paying 50¢ to your bank in hopes you won’t default on the mortgage which you owe over $500K. I have no clue how Chief Twit thinks that his own company (SpaceX) purchasing advertising on Twitter is going to get the other advertisers to come back.
Musk said that the approximately $160,000 that SpaceX spent is “tiny” in his books, but in terms of how Twitter describes its own advertising packages, the timeline takeover does seem to be among the biggest ad packages that SpaceX could have bought. On one of Twitter’s business pages, Twitter describes the takeover as granting advertisers access to “the most premium, mass-reach placements.”
As CNBC noted, regardless of whether the SpaceX advertising investment is considered small or large, it’s not big enough to make up for all the advertisers withdrawing from Twitter. For someone like Musk who’s forced to look at the big picture, it probably does seem quite small.
So may be this move is not about trying to lure advertisers back (especially he already said ‘Twitter can not rely entirely on advertisers‘ when he first announced the new Twitter Blue). Musk has also done a similar advertising campaign with Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and on Google Inc. 159,92 +1,97 +1,25% itself. While Musk’s Twitter is new advertising territory for SpaceX, it might not be of much help to either SpaceX or Twitter.
via Ars Technica
