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(!!!).

> 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).

That may have worked, but Musk limited the reach of tweets by only allowing logged-in users to see the entire thread and comments.

Not to mention insulting advertisers.

Does it? Twitter the product has been fine (barring clumsy design changes driven by Musk) after the massive downsizing, and they still make billions. I was under the impression a lot of the lost revenue was because of Musk's caustic image that made brands pull their campaigns from the platform.

People want to see bad behavior have bad consequences. Anything else would be amazing. And while this is by no means the lowest Musk has gone, it's definitely one of the times he has had most influence over a lot of people.

Musk has in just recent time been peddling some conspiracy theories, made some astonishing remarks re: the status of Crimea in Ukraine and so on. It's more than enough already to make me never want to see him succeed in controlling anything related to media (social or not).

> Auto companies cutting spending is just spite from competition which is understandable.

That could be part of it. But unless there is a clear sign that auto companies do this to a larger extent than other megacorps I'd put it down to just being defensive. Twitter under Musk has controversy and turmoil written all over it, And if I were a large company I'd want no part in it. It's so easy to shift ad money to other places.

I'm guessing advertisers will return once the storm settles. At that point, I also fully expect Musk to have gone full circle, realizing the only way to run Twitter was the old way. Whether it will survive that round trip is the question.

+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.

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.

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.

Prior to the Twitter situation, lots of people thought of Musk along the lines of being a new Henry Ford (American industrialist) or being a real life Tony Stark (Marvel's Iron Man tech genius character). With the successes of SpaceX and Tesla, many thought he could do no wrong.

Musk has certainly done massive damage to his image, and many well known business experts are calling him out for massively overpaying for Twitter, his management style, and even for trapping himself into the situation in the first place.

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.

Musk explicitly doesn't want that though, because he needs Twitter to earn a lot more money than it currently does.

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.

Is it though?

Musk also thought twitter had a bot problem, right up until it became apparent that saying so wouldn't get him out of the Twitter acquisition.

I think the only thing that's clear is that Musk has a Twitter attention addiction, and buying Twitter was the world's wealthiest man buying his favorite toy to play with.

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.

>Have they not changed? This is a genuine question.

If Musk pays back the bank loans, there shouldn't be anybody who could force him to continue the ad business and he could offer Twitter for free.

A billion users, with 10 tweets per day, that's 4T tweets per year. At 250 bytes per tweet, that's 1P data. At $20 per terabyte, that's $20,000 per year. With the same amount for transfer and servers, Musk should be able to run Twitter for $100,000 plus employees.

With those costs, Twitter could be financed by offering image and video tweets as a paid feature for $1 per year.

> but I personally think he has done more good through his companies than most others with similar resources.

It's always odd to me how people say Musk is doing good though his companies without backing it up while criticizing how people are critical of Musk as if it's unhinged.

https://companiesmarketcap.com/twitter/marketcap/

> while at the same time tanking the goodwill people had for Tesla

https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/marketcap/

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 clearly took full advantage of his irrational hard on to get a signed deal. Not “being scammed” in that Twitter very nuch did not seek out the deal, but they certainly fully leveraged his willingness to toss out preconditions any sane purchaser would demand.

> Having a celebrity owner increases the value.

As a mascot, maybe, unless they are polarizing and their area of negative appeal overlaps with the product’s market and their positve appeal doesn’t; but owners are also decision makers, and celebrity’s are going to be all over the map in that role.

Dude. I am agreeing with this. They do not want to be seen with content from a different pillar.