Strategic Foresight - Insights in Business and Technology

  Effect on Share Price, Twitter Business, Employees, CEO and Exec Team Elon Musk who leads Tesla and Space X announced buying Twitter for $44 Bn supported by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, the crypto exchange  Binance, and Oracles CEO Larry Ellison. This helped the falling share price to rise again.  On July 10 he announces to pull out because of a lack of clarity on users (primarily bots) and financials and since then the price has fallen back to the same price of $33 when the deal was announced to acquire. Prior to this deal, the share price was in decline from early 2021. It is likely that it now goes into litigation and worst for Musk will be to pay $1Bn in the penalty, but it has a detrimental effect on Twitter's business, employees (morale), and more importantly, its brand equity will take a severe hit, resulting in further decline. Twitter CEO and his executive team will not survive this fiasco.

Rumours are hot again about Google/Microsoft planning to buy Digg. When I wrote about Top5 probable Digg buyers in 2006 it was a rumor, but this time reports coming out suggest that this time Kevin Rose might sell it, esp when the stock market is going down and the US is technically in recession. The only difference between now and then is, that one of the suggested 5 players, Yahoo itself is in trouble. So only 4 players remain in the race and these are : 1. News Corp 2. Time Warner 3. Microsoft 4. Google I'm quoting from my previous post here with some modifications on why these 4 players are after Digg: News Corporation - Newscorp would love to have this esp; after their acquisition myspace has lost traffic/users and momentum to Facebook. And as a media company it makes sense to have the most popular portal for news/technology/current affairs to be in their armour. Microsoft - Microsoft will be the obvious choice because Microsoft is lagging in this Web 2.0 phenomenon. Ther...

Rumours are hot about News Corp planning to buy Digg . It’s a rumour right now, how much truth is there, is anybody's guess. This can be real news and might have been leaked to the press as a part of the strategy as suggested by Internet Analyst, Henry Blodget, Settle on basic deal terms and a provisional price, leak details so the market has a couple of days to chew on the idea, see how the stock reacts, and neutralize the market’s biggest concern (lawsuits) by announcing a distribution pact with the main guy who might sue you, fix the price, rubber-stamp the press release, and go. The coming days will tell us how much truth is there. If News Corp cannot buy this then these might be probable buyers for Digg. Microsoft - Microsoft will be the obvious choice because Microsoft is lagging in this Web 2.0 phenomenon. There hasn't been any decent/buzzing service offered by Microsoft in this space. If this comes on board, it will provide them with a kick-start, which they are hopin...