> Someone posted yesterday that the beginning of Musk's Twitter buy happened shortly after elonjet refused his $5000 offer to buy the account. The rational part of me says he surely couldn't have spent $45 billion dollars to shut the account down, but it's kinda feeling more and more true as the story continues.
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.
This is no where near the same situation. When Elon originally put is offer to buy Twitter, Twitter didn't even want to sell. Then the market crashed and all the sudden Elon's own offer was almost double of the "fair market price" for Twitter.
Elon would be insane if he made the same offer today.
> why did Musk even start this clown show of pretending to want to acquire Twitter in the first place?
To me it seems like griefer [0] behavior. The goal is to just duck with Twitter and derive joy from others pain.
Musk is a gamer and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s pretty common to see people who are bored or max level or whatever who just mess with other players like a cat does with a mouse. They expel more of their own energy to cause discomfort to their target. An example may be spending 10 gold pieces to make the target lose 1 gold piece.
It “doesn’t make sense” rationally until you take into account the value of the confusion, pain, negative experiences for the target as a sort of currency.
So it seems perfectly common for me to see Musk spend a few billion in fines or whatever to make life worse for Twitter.
One theory I’ve seen to explain why Musk wants to buy Twitter is to shut it down. If that’s the goal then it’s actually much cheaper not to pay $40B to acquire it and shut it down, but to do this sort of thing that seeds uncertainty so when he pulls out the stock price plummets and Twitter dies from an acceleration from it’s likely path.
> I may be wrong on the finances then, as I had read on how Twitter was sinking in debt and Elon didn't know how bad it was, hence the firing. I thought most of the money came as investments from companies/people.
Where on earth did you read that? Like, I mean, (a) it’s not correct (it has a lot of debt now due to debt taken out as part of the leveraged buyout, but it didn’t before) and (b) it _could not be correct_; Twitter was a public company! Musk absolutely knew its financial situation before the takeover, or at least had no excuse for not knowing it. Anyone could just look that up; it’s part and parcel of being a public company. Is there some sort of Musk fanfiction financial news website that publishes this stuff or something?
Anyway, wherever you read that, I would be _extremely_ sceptical of anything else it writes, if I were you.
> Twitter can’t give Musk the data he needs to determine fake accounts.
Twitter has already given Musk access to the "firehose of data". [1]
Musk bragged about buying Twitter because of the bots. Nobody is going to believe that he suddenly cares now that there are too many, not after he waived due diligence and set the buying price as a 420 joke.
>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."
> 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.
> 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.
> The user mandmandam seems to be implying that Musk has been paid by Saudi oligarchs to make Twitter fail due to its history in causing disruption to their plans, but that seems to hinge on Musk's investment in the company
No. It just means that the Saudis think that Musk is a useful idiot.
Saudis can be trying to destroy Twitter and Musk can be trying to save it at the same time. Alas, this is how Musk thinks he's saving it. He's heavy handed, narcissistic and ignorant in the ways of online culture.
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.
> This is 44bn of musks backing investors finally waking up to the fact that the willy-wonka they trusted to shepherd a communications platform was in fact just a billionaire heir to an emerald mine
In his investors’ defense, Elon had a singular track record prior to Twitter. And his proposal to turn Twitter into X, aka US—based WeChat, was not a terrible one. It was an expensive investment, but there was a plausible positive outcome.
His complete and total bungling of it all would have been difficult to predict in advance based only on what was known then. He is seemingly oblivious to the unintended consequences and second order effects of both his actual decisions, and their rash and heavy-handed manner. It’s odd, and not surprising they forced a professional CEO on him.
>but Musk had to pay over $40B to have Twitter and no one came around to offer him to build a Twitter for $39B.
As far as I understand, musk offered $40B for Twitter, unprompted. Is there any evidence that he put out offers to build an alternative for $39B? Because I feel like it would have been taken up given the widespread belief that he was overpaying, and even Musk believed that since he tried to back out.
> 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.
This is hn, not 4Chan
reply