> 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.
> If I was a member of Twitter's board, Musk's history of erratic public behavior, SEC settlement, and openly hostile attitude towards the company's employees would be more than sufficient to justify my belief that his controlling ownership would not be in the interest of the current average shareholder.
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.
> If I was a member of Twitter's board, Musk's history of erratic public behavior, SEC settlement, and openly hostile attitude towards the company's employees would be more than sufficient to justify my belief that his controlling ownership would not be in the interest of the current average shareholder.
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?
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.
> 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).
>Twitter stock price was higher than Musk’s offer for most of 2021.
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.
>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(!!!).
>> This looks more like a hobby to me than a business decision. Hobbies are fine as long as they don’t distract from the job
If he’s taking the company private the future of the company should be irrelevant to you right? The only thing that matters is whether or not you think the price is fair.
>> Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium.
He believes the potential is predicated on taking it private and clearing house. The IPO price also seems irrelevant. Whether or not you think Twitter can exceed that price again is relevant.
Given it was at ~$70 last year he seems to be coming in too low for me as I think Twitter can get back to that point relatively quickly.
> Musk is being openly antagonistic towards twitter leadership and denigrating the people that work there.
Seeing how badly twitter has been managed, (for a laugh, check out their "R&D" expenditure), how mush of a loss making enterprise it has been, and how it always at risk of a take over, is it that surprising?
If it has been Elliot Management (the previous rumored takeover threat for twitter) a group far less prone to public display than Musk... would things have been any less different? The only difference is that Musk is being open about what he has been doing, which I see a public good, frankly.
Elliot's track record shows it is far more vicious in layoffs of cuts.
> 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.
> This is after we had CORPORATE control of twitter (which they apparently applaud)
... they aren't aplauding it. They are offering suggestions now that twitter is under new ownership, since the previous owners were inept. It's likely that musk is equally inept (or worse.)
> 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.)
> 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.
> It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation.
The Twitter shareholders forced Elon Musk to create a $13 Billion loan to buy Twitter?
That's a pretty nuts take, ya know? The deal was designed by Elon Musk. If market conditions change between March and October, that's not Twitter shareholder's fault, that's Elon Musk's fault for failing to see how the economy would shift.
Once Musk signed the paper in April, it was over. The company was his, no matter how much he tried to squirm or get out of it. To think otherwise is to treat him as some kind of idiot who is incapable of accepting deals or making decisions for himself.
>Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim?
The entire twitterverse has been complaining loudly about how terrible twitter is for years before Musk considered buying it. The problems are inherent to the product-space, not the owner.
Musk simply came in and screwed with the brand. His ownership didn't really affect the toxicity of the platform as far as I can tell (although he has definitely contributed to it with his personal usage, e.g. dogecoin shilling). If anything, he actually took heat off the overall toxicity by shifting attention to his own actions.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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