D&D General Elon Musk Wants To Know 'How Much Is Hasbro?'

Following the richest man in the world's attack on Wizards of the Coast for two paragraphs in the 500-page celebration of D&D, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977, Elon Musk--who bought Twitter not that long ago--wants to know how much D&D's owner Hasbro would cost.

After the public sharing on Twitter of Jason Tondro's (who wrote the book’s foreword) private Facebook posts, Musk replied "How much is Hasbro?"

Hasbro's estimated capitalization is currently $8.71 billion, with $3.95 billion of debt.

It was on 21st December 2017 when Musk similarly enquired "How much is it?" before proceeding to make a bid for Twitter. He later tried to back out of the deal, but was forced to buy the platform for $44 billion in June 2022. Current estimates by investment firm Fidelity put the platform at a value 80% less than when he bought it, with a worth of only about $9.4 billion.

 

[Corinnguard]

I think Musk is the Dragon, all Billionaires are, it's the perfect metaphor.

In the Shadowrun setting, several corporations were bought and owned by dragons. One of them, for a brief time, became President of the United States.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

In the Shadowrun setting, several corporations were bought and owned by dragons. One of them, for a brief time, became President of the United States.

Life imitates art.

 

[Corinnguard]

Dunkelzahn

Dunkelzahn (circa 13,000 BC - August 9, 2057) was a Western Great Dragon. He was the 7th President of the UCAS, elected during the UCAS Special Election of 2057, but was assassinated on the night of his inauguration, later believed to be a self-sacrifice ritual to prevent the Horrors from...

shadowrun.fandom.com

If Dunkelzahn was a D&D Dragon, he would be a metallic dragon, probably a Silver.

 

[geek0id]

I don't see this as anything in danger of actually happening. Entertaining the actual thought for a moment ...

This is basically no better than his "I'm making an AI video game company" thing. It basically means nothing.

He's not a gamedev and wouldn't spend any time on the company so he's mostly meaningless in this context. He would hire someone to run the company in alignment with some kind of philosophy and that person would have some kind of impact. Without knowing who that is, we couldn't even venture a guess if it were good or bad.

We can look at Elon's history and know exactly what would happen. It's not good.

 

[Morrus]

I can believe that the actual cancellations were pretty light, but it'd be hard to believe that the increasing anger and increasing public embarrassment for D&D (as more and more sources reported on this) as a brand didn't add a ton of weight to the anti-OGL camp, especially given we know there were at least three attempts to make the OGL 2.0 happen, before the sudden 180 to not only no OGL 2.0, but CCBY.

Oh for sure. There was definitely PR pressure. It just appears that there wasn’t significant financial pressure.

 

[Future_Monkey]

One hopes $8 billion would be a step too far given his current underwater financial status...

Frankly I think this is way too low of a 'value' for the company since it literally owns the rights to huge media franchises like the naughty word Transformers and G.I.Joe, among other IP's, which are basically a license to print money every few years.

 

[trappedslider]

3) Magic: The Gathering suddenly gets a boatload of cross-promotions. We're talking Mishra in Fortnite, 80s Cartoon D&D deck promos, movie tie-in cards, etc. AI Art? Every card. Hell, half the game will be AI generated abilities, too. "Grok, read all the rules for Magic: The Gathering and provide me with 10 new card abilities that are not currently in the rules."

Umm you mean more than it's already? There's a whole line called Universes beyond which is for crossovers, we're due to get either a marvel set or a spider man set next year (I forget which) including

The entire system is completely broken, it's what happens when you let wall street/bay street unfettered control of almost everything in the economy.

And since we can't get enough people to agree on the problem let alone a solution all we can do is rage on the internet.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Life imitates art.

While a magic returns apocalypse is probably one of the least bad apocalypses, it is still an apocalypse and while it appears that Ireland is about one third elf (so I would have a reasonable shot at it) I am not sure I would fancy the government returning to a form of pre–Tudor Anglo-Gaelic chieftaincies.
It did not work well for the country the last time around.

 

[KYRON45]

Consider if you will.
1. Calls are made and strings are pulled.
2. Hasbro spins off Wotc.
3. Musk picks up Wotc for a song.
4. The zombie apocalypse begins.
5. The AI uprising begins.
6. All hail the AI Zombie overlords!!!

 

[geek0id]

Gygax's daughter did point out a lot of stuff was taken out of context.

And there is a lot in context. Literally in the rules.This was a man who in the 80s once said women would be great in the game because they would bring food. It does seem his sexist views lessoned over time. Which people changing over time seems to be a thing many people can't grok.