Seems to me that he did / does want to buy Twitter (not because of free speech or whatever, but as a rich guy vanity project), but then the stock market crashed and now the price he agreed to is way too high so he's trying to weasel out of it or weasel the price down. Either way he's just being a weasel.
Or he could have just renamed the company to "X" and left the current Twitter product as "Twitter." All his hypothetical fancy new stuff could get its own branding (or not) but he still gets the X. The "Twitter" branding could be subservient to the company branding.
Like Alphabet, or Meta, or Microsoft, or countless others...
It really seems he just wants to start fresh and kill the Twitter brand immediately regardless of the short term cost. It's a strange play indeed, and it's hard to guess why he wants to disassociate with the brand so strongly.
Because if that's his real motivation, it's more efficient to build a competitor. It would probably be even more efficient to put polish on existing competitors like Mastodon. Buying Twitter is one of the silliest possible approaches. Thus, skepticism.
I don't know who said it, but the real point of buying Twitter was to prove he could buy Twitter. He doesn't really have to care if it burns down, he's not going to be out on the streets from it like the rest of us. It's futile explain what he's doing using any other logic.
Yep, he was forced out of PayPal for trying to make them rename themselves X.com after the acquisition almost 25 years ago.
So here he is again, pushing the name X. My understanding is he’s done it before. And he wants Twitter to be a huge financial payments player. Claims half the global market will want to use it.
Seems to me he can’t stop fighting past battles to try to prove he was right, when he clearly wasn’t, to assuage his ego. I’m hardly the first person to point this out. I learned it from someone else years ago, it just happens to fit perfectly again.
I don't think there's any 4D chess going on here with Twitter.
He signed the deal when the market was way up. He was probably riding high and overconfident on his wealth. The market corrected, his wealth dropped and he tried damn hard to get out of the deal. Turns out the deal was hard to get out of so he's trying to make the best of it.
I think he's earnestly trying to make Twitter successful and profitable. This is just his best effort.
He was kinda forced to buy twitter in the end. He made a bid, but then the marketed turned red, and then didn’t want to buy it anymore. Now he is stuck with a company which generates less earnings than the interest costs from the buyout credits.
That’s also why he is even firing the kitchen staff and selling their kitchen appliances. He is so desperate for money to keep this company from bankrup.
Which is also probably the reason why he plays with QAnon stuff. I think he is speculating on someone to take twitter away from him. Maybe.
I said he doesn't intend to sell it. Being forced to due to bankruptcy is an entirely different thing that I didn't comment on.
People in this thread are all saying this is part of his master plan to get Twitter/X to be worth hundreds of billions and then to sell it and walk away. I don't see any reason why he would sell and walk away if he manages to pull it off.
Is he trying to save face by avoiding to be compelled by court to proceed with buying Twitter as part of his original offer? Or is he seeking attention again?
This doesn’t make any sense at all. If buying twitter was just a complication, why is he being so active in it? If I found myself accidentally buying a company outside my wheelhouse, I would find some suitable management and not touch it an all. Or make small changes, Berkshire Hathaway style. Not take the helm and for everyone.
I always thought this was a weird purchase. All his other businesses have been industry disrupters where he can make all sorts of bombastic claims and promises of new products, but Twitter was an established company in a stable(ish) industry.
It was really hard to see how he would apply his usual tricks, and I always figured he was going to wiggle out.
He is happy to goof with his things (hat sales), but he's not about to let x.com go away for peanuts, is my point.
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