> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> You also don’t do that for a company you don’t truly intend to purchase
You can defend Musk all you want, but you simply cannot make the argument that he is a traditional, by-the-books, conservative business man. He's an impulsive, irrational, self-obsessed, risk-taking billionaire who flouts convention, tradition and consensus. His reckless instincts and his willingness to bend or break 'the rules' have worked incredibly well for him in the past. This time he fucked up big-time.
> ...especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
You think Musk is the kind of person who lets lawyers lead him around by the nose, that he is someone with a well-known and well-established reverence for the legal profession and the rule of law? This is absolutely not the case.
> Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
This is hilarious because the first part of your comment is literally you presenting sharing your view Musk's motivation (eg. "He has every intention of buying Twitter because he signed a purchase agreement! People who sign purchase agreements don't not buy the companies they committed to purchasing!").
Anyway, it's definitely not too early to make an informed judgement about the Twitter conflagration. Musk did everything he could to drag this debacle into the spotlight rather than handling it more discretely. He tried to weaponize public opinion for his own aims, and he also (very publicly) made a series of misleading or patently false allegations about Twitter in order to get his way. It's too late to argue that we should approach this with a neutral perspective.
>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.
> To be fair, twitter ownership is not required to use twitter for this purpose.
I understood that remark as a reference to the way Musk's bid to buy Twitter with no intention to follow-through, in light of other shameless PR ploys like the absurd political persecution claim, looks like a shameless attempt to distract people from other problems affecting Musk, such as Tesla's tanking stock price.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
>It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.
The entire and obvious and openly stated point of Musk buying Twitter was to reinstate Trump, and re-inflict his regular unhinged sociopathic tweets and lies and misinformation and calls to violence and bullying and hate speech and racism upon everyone in the world again, just when we were all getting used to enjoying not hearing from him every single fucking day and the middle of the night.
There's no other rational explanation, and although that obvious explanation may sound completely irrational, so is Musk, and it is still the real reason, and the inextricable consequence, just as predicted by Occam's Razor, and foretold by Musk's own words.
There's nothing bewildering about it at all, so stop acting so surprised, and pretending he changed his mind after what he said so emphatically and unambiguously.
It's not like it's a secret, or contested. He openly announced it. When people show you who they are and what they'll do, believe them.
>"I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said. "I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
>Musk added that Trump's ban was "morally wrong and flat-out stupid."
> If Twitter are lying about how many bots they have and how many real humans they have, that is not some potential minor discrepancy. That is a HUGE red flag which justifies bowing out of the deal.
Well, no, if you had doubts about that going in (which Musk publicly did) but then agreed to a contract waiving due diligence (which Musk did), it would not justify backing out of the deal that you...suspected they might be lying and we're not provided sufficient information to assuage your concerns. There might be an argument that you stumbling into clear proof of deception that you didn't have before signing the agreement would justify that, but Musk has never claimed such a discovery, but there is no reasonable argument I can see that Twitter was obligated to satisfy Musk’s concerns here, when he explicitly waived the usual requirement in acquisition deals that would be the basis of such an obligation.
> Would you be happy investing in a company that lies about its sales figures and doesn't provide the statistics and real evidence to back up their claims?
No, and, more to the point, I wouldn't be happy buying a social media company where I was uncertain about the basis for it's claims of real users. But then, that's why I wouldn't agree to buy such a company—especially where I had doubts about those claims going in—and waive due diligence as part of the deal. That would be idiotic.
> Or that Musk is a genius who will make some sort of amazing Twitter 2.0
Based on texts exposed via the lawsuit about the purchase, I don't think this is the case. I don't think he, or his advisors, understand that the product at twitter (and other social media) is content moderation. You can have a vision of whatever type of content or pricing scheme you want but without solid content moderation you will lose advertisers, gain lawsuits (people were posting movies the other day) and lose users because the "feed" becomes a muddied mess. Users are only really the product when you can moderate their content to have profit via advertisers.
> Musk gets this, and it is why he is interested in Twitter.
You think this is why he's interested. He has not actually said this, correct?
Another plausible explanation is that it is his preferred social media and its (relatively) cheap because it is very poorly run and thus its growth and financials suck.
You maybe right about Twitter having outsized relevance with respect to its user base, but I'm absolutely not buying that "the public reach that Twitter can potentially provide is much bigger than that of any other social network". Meta's platforms reach BILLIONS of people.
> 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.
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.
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