> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.

It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.

I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).

Agreed. Bezos, Gates, Musk, etc don't buy media companies for money. They buy it for influence, propaganda, etc.

> Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.

I like Musk and generally support things he is trying to do. But I'm not holding my breath. No way he allows twitter to be a free speech platform. Nobody spends $44 billion to allow others to have their say. Nobody spends $44 billion for other people's benefit. Maybe he'll make some symbolic gesture like letting trump back on the platform, but I'm guessing twitter will be his personal megaphone to push his products mostly.

Or maybe this is a watershed moment and elon's purchase of twitter is the start of a shift back to what the internet/social media used to be.

He means tremendous financial potential for him.

Because it strokes his ego.

> If I found myself accidentally buying a company outside my wheelhouse, I would find some suitable management and not touch it an all.

That would make good sense.

> Or make small changes, Berkshire Hathaway style. Not take the helm and for everyone.

Clearly, you are not Elon Musk, but I agree that your approach would make a lot more sense.

Only if Musk operates Twitter as a public service, at a personal expense of at least $700MM/yr.

...

Elon's debt service for the purchase exceeds $1BB/yr, for an unprofitable business with $600MM of revenue.

If he cuts operating costs by 50% while maintaining revenue (not likely but possible, surely Twitter has too many people today. or last week anyway)... then he personally loses ~$700MM/yr for the privilege of owning Twitter.

That... makes absolutely no sense. The interest of the current average shareholder ends when they sell their stock. There is no point in time at which both (1) the current average shareholder owns more than zero shares, and (2) Musk has a controlling interest. So it's impossible for those two things to conflict.

If you were a member of Twitters board, would it be in the interest of the current average shareholder to sell their shares at well above the market price?

That's cute but the past is gone. Twitter is clearly going downhill, both with their product and with their management (good thing they got rid of Dorsey, but perhaps that was too little too late), the stock just follows on that. If anything, people like Musk are the ones who still attract interest to the platform.

>Twitter can bring more value to shareholders with or without Elon

Twitter is on a very dangerous spot right now, their MAUs peaked long ago as young people go to other platforms, and overall, everyone is a bit of tired of the kind of discourse that predominates there, for instance, Trump was banned and I STILL find out everything about him because the people there (left and right-wing) are absolutely obsessed with him.

Honestly, Twitter is the one social media platform that I wouldn't really mind if it just disappeared. At least Facebook has some family members in there and some pictures from my earlier years. Twitter brings nothing of value to my life and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like that.

If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?

Surely he has the means to attract tech talent to do it, the means/message to attract users to a new platform, and presumably if he knows what's bad about Twitter and how to subtract it and make it good, he could do this greenfield.

This would result in increased platform diversity, too. And I'll bet you it's cheaper.

Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.

(1) No one, or very close to that, ks saying it's a slam dunk that Twitter will get specific performance, but many people are saying that there is an extremely high risk that Musk will not get to walk away from the deal with no cost (and several people are saying the opposite), and

(2) even if the consensus of legal experts was as you describe, “People competent with analyzing legal analysis” and “people with money and inclination to invest in Twitter” aren't the same group.

> So, what's up?

You are misreading what mos people are saying, and making the common mistake of assuming that any knowledge that anyone in society has must immediately be reflected in the market price.

That's not really a very useful metric, because Musk paid way too much for it in the first place, and even without that it was probably overvalued to start with (IMHO). Besides, in the end a valuation, especially for a private company like Twitter/X, is not really all that useful and just a bunch of people going "well, I'd pay this much for it, I guess..."

I don't know if Twitter is doing okay or not, but I do know this is not a good metric.

Yeah, but he overpaid, and that is only about the value pre-deal, and not:

(1) the adverse effect the news of the deal had on Twitter even before it was consummated, and

(2) The adverse effect his tenure has had on Twitter’s value since.

Is it now worth more than $1 billion? My guess is yes.

Is it worth more thsn $10 billion? Probably not.

There were doubts about the bid. Musk had no financing. Now he has financing. The market has moved.

If he’d come back last week with a “tee hee jk” tweet about buying Twitter, everyone would have taken it in stride and then mocked those who bought the rumour to get run over by the news.

Yeah, but that did a hasty negotiation that resulted in a no-due-diligence contract at that figure, tried very hard to escape the deal, including openly repudiating it and being sued to be forced to consummate it, and only relented and agreed to close on it in the face of court action to force him to which might have imposed additional costs as well.

So, while it is probably worth something, we can say that it is pretty clearly not worth $44B in the clear light of day, even to Musk.

I don't think it's a question of competence. Musk bought a company that was already losing billions, and saddled it with debt and billions of interest payments per year. His recent actions also cost near-term ad-revenue loss, thereby further amplifying losses.

As bad as those things are, in-and-of themselves, they don't represent an existential crisis.

The problem is that he actually cannot afford to float Twitter until such time that the company becomes profitable (if ever). Hence the drastic cost-cutting measures.

Down from super high is still high. Still profitable company with an incredibly high market cap.

> Twitter is not profitable, heavily indebted, and likely loosing a lot of traffic.

Twitter's market cap hasn't change much. The perception of it losing value and being in trouble has a lot more to do with people's personal feeling (ironically expressed on X), rather than economics. It wasn't profitable when he bought it and it's not profitable now. It's still worth roughly what he bought it for.

> SpaceX is one of the most promising opportunities for him, and even that has huge structural risks due to clients being governments and is barely (rarely) profitable.

By your own admission, profitable and future projects are set to make it more even more profitable. Governments are the least risky clients there are.

> The boring company, neurolink, etc are barely real companies, they're just vanity projects for him.

That he spends relatively little money on, hardly worth mentioning, either positive or negative.

But all that is irrelevant because he wants to take the company private- no shareholders. The impact to shareholders is the massive bailout he would give them on their shares.

If they cared about shareholders best interests they would bring it to vote.

+1. It's hard to see how the ROI works out here. The price was 50% overvalued if not more, and Twitter has had severe problems with monetization.

On the other hand, Musk actually uses Twitter at scale unlike the previous management of the company. That might give him more insight into the possibilities than his predecessors.

I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.

Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.

This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.

They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).

Up to you to take him at his word however he has stated otherwise.

"It's important to the function of democracy, it's important to the function of the united states as a free country and on many other countries and actually to help freedom in the world more broadly than the US.

You know I think this there's the risk, civilizational risk, uh is decreased if twitter, the more we can increase the trust of twitter as a public platform and so I do think this will be somewhat painful and I'm not sure that I will actually be able to to acquire it.

I mean I could technically afford it um what I'm saying is this is not a way to sort of make money you know..

It's just that I think, my strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization"

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDfqwTBHah8