> Musk is the largest beneficiary of all the fake accounts pumping his follower count.
Fake accounts don't pump TSLA stock. They have no purchasing power. And he has a large enough following that it really doesn't matter what the number next to his name is, whether it's 30 million or 90 million.
But I agree with you that it sounds like he's got buyer's remorse. Seems like free speech (or whatever the public reason he stated for buying Twitter) isn't worth that much to him.
He's said any number of things that are either not true or at least misleading over the years. Taking tweets at complete face value with Musk is... unwise.
I'm not sure that's true. I get the impression that he acquired Twitter for political reasons. And all of Musk's associates egging him on were right-wing political activists. An extreme example of this is Larry Ellison, a well-known funder of right-wing causes. It came out in the acquisition trial that Ellison offered Musk essentially a blank check to invest in acquiring Twitter. Yet at that point, Ellison himself had only ever tweeted once, back in 2012. He doesn't give a crap about Twitter or the Twitter experience, except insofar as it advances his political cause.
(Just checking, I was surprised to discover that https://twitter.com/larryellison/with_replies tweeted twice on October 5, thereby tripling his all-time tweet count from one to three.)
Musk himself has said things like, "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters". Whether he's serious or not, who knows, but we can't assume that $billions in losses necessarily matter to someone of Musk's extreme world-historical wealth.
I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here.
I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation.
On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain.
He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain.
His 14 April announcement[2] of his offer to purchase Twitter was likely intended to boost the price further before the expected poison pill would justify him divesting everything as he stated he would do in the SEC filing[3], thus netting an even bigger gain.
It didn’t boost as he expected, but the value has remained higher than it started at. He will still make half a billion and his actions, this time, are hard to sue, since he did not lie on anything but intent, which is impossible to prove.
> but strictly from a business point of view, buying Twitter for the purpose of profiteering was a bad one, but at his level, money has become irrelevant, its more about control here.
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.
> Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense...
He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
> Bought Twitter, made himself look foolish doing it, and continues to make himself look foolish in the running of it.
to who? you? corporate media? this is nothing personal but do you honestly believe musk cares about how you or the corporate media portrays him? that it clouds his mind in the morning “oh no, I look like a fool?”
Are we talking about musk, whose resume includes spacex, tesla, boring company, paypal? Are you sure we’re not talking about kim kardashian?
The guy has money and influence at the .1% but it’s the fear of “looking” like a fool?
After he accused a random guy of being a pedophile because he saved a dozen kids, after he lied about making Tesla a private company, after he lied about Tesla accepting bitcoins as payment (just to speculate on BTC), it should be evident to everybody that Musk is not to be trusted. It wouldn’t surprise me if he pretended to buy Twitter to speculate on price changes with some weird derivatives.
> A lot of people are saying that Musk is buying Twitter to get ahead of this story and control the narrative around it. That's a reasonable (albeit very unproven) hypothesis.
I’m sorry but there is no world in which Musk spends $40b to control the narrative in a single sexual harassment story. Clearly it was only worth $250k to get an NDA from her in 2018. Musk buying Twitter has nothing to do with this.
Musk’s tweets about incoming political attacks on the other hand likely do have something to do with it.
Well, the previous owners of Twitter are laughing with him, all the way to the bank.
>to own his political opponents
I don't see how throwing away a brand does that.
>maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into
Again, I don't see how that's possible. What he locked himself into was buying Twitter at a stupid price. After he did that he could have simply kept Twitter as it was, which was what he paid for. If he was just going to remake Twitter into something completely different there was no need to buy it at all. He could have just built X from the start. You could argue that what he bought was Twitter's userbase, but that userbase exists because Twitter is the way it is, and there's no guarantee that it'll stick around once Musk finishes turning Twitter into X.
Before you reply about the obviously lower valuation over the last few years, take a look at some comparable companies: https://companiesmarketcap.com/
The economic realities of Musk's ventures does not align with what seems to be the zeitgeist opinion of him as a person.
>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)
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(!!!).
> At Twitter, every move he makes is contrary to his own interests.
While he may drive a Tesla and use Starlink, he didn't create SpaceX or swoop in and take control of Tesla as an obsessive customer with an agenda as a customer.
I don’t think that that entirely explains why Musk Twitter isn’t like Tesla or SpaceX, but I can’t imagine its not a significant factor.
(I also think that, distinct from his customer-agenda, him seeing it as an opportunity to relitigate his finance app history getting booted as CEO of X.com twice before it became PayPal is an issue that impacts more than the names he has used for the companies used in the Twitter acquisition.)
> Choosing to believe a company that has admitted to lying to investors is your prerogative, it doesn't make them trustworthy or correct
More to the point, it's Musk's perogative, which he excercised when he signed a contract to buy the company based on their represenations while choosing not to do any due diligence to verify those representations.
I think Twitter is probably more believable here than you give them credit for, but Musk trusted them 100% for some reason.
> Musk claims often that Twitter engagement numbers are at record highs. I don't believe these are lies.
You're talking about a man who has more than once been fined by the SEC for making false statements about public securities. What makes you think that he'd be a more reliable narrator for a private company for which he has no external accountability and a large personal financial interest?
> Imo, the only hypothetical reason for Musk not to buy it would be because the real numbers on the bot issue showed the company has seriously defrauded investors, and the stock goes to almost zero.
My understanding, at least from reading Twitter's lawsuit and other's commentary on it, is that Twitter lying about bot numbers is irrelevant because Musk agreed to, in contract, buy it regardless of those facts.
> So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
> 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).
> I think he's just looking at this rationally, as he should as a major share holder. His job is not to be nice but to deliver share holder value
I was an avid Twitter user, but stopped using it because I find Musk super annoying and unethical. This is part of that. Complete and total brand destruction. That's not "delivering shareholder value". There's been massive markdowns to Twitter's valuation since Musk took over.
>Interesting how everyone was calling musk a madman for paid twitter accounts and suddenly its a trend.
I think you are taking a very interesting spin on the situation and leaving out many factors; notable blowing up advertising revenue to the tune of several hundred million dollars per year in exchange for a program that is now pulling ~30M/year.
> Of course he did. He put his own money and reputation on the line for both businesses.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
Fake accounts don't pump TSLA stock. They have no purchasing power. And he has a large enough following that it really doesn't matter what the number next to his name is, whether it's 30 million or 90 million.
But I agree with you that it sounds like he's got buyer's remorse. Seems like free speech (or whatever the public reason he stated for buying Twitter) isn't worth that much to him.
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