Elon Musk has said and done a lot of weird and outrageous things during his tenure as the owner of Twitter (now X), but we may have just seen the weirdest and most outrageous.
Elon Musk has said and done a lot of weird and outrageous things during his tenure as the owner of Twitter (now X), but we may have just seen the weirdest and most outrageous.
He didn't want to buy twitter. It was a stunt to raise Tesla's price but his bluff got called out and he was forced to buy it. Now he wants to get rid of it, so he's tanking the valuation low enough for vultures to buy it.
We all know he ran it into the ground. However the twitter trademark is still worth something. It’s probably the only part of company worth buying. Which is ironic given that he changed the name. Regardless, someone might be willing to pay ~1 billion for it.
Which is what a smart ceo would do. Musk is not smart. He’s a spoiled little brat. Musk’s ego can’t handle the fact that anyone who buys twitter could make the company profitable (something he failed at spectacularly) by doing the exact opposite of whatever the fuck he’s doing. I.e. by proving that all his ideas are stupid.
Everyone glosses over the fact that Elon didn't buy Twitter with just his own money. While he used a lot of his own money, he had a bunch of other investors included in the deal, and not one of them seemed to have an interest in Twitter's success as a business.
The largest investor, at $2 billion, was Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, and the Saudis were openly hostile to Twitter and would certainly like to see its destruction. This may sound conspiratorial, but I'd wager his plan was to ruin it from the beginning. I would be surprised (but not too surprised) if he's destroying it on accident
It's not a good thing, though. Twitter has always had issues, but the world's richest man getting his shit in a twist because of it, then shooting his mouth off and buying the damn thing, then running it into the ground... that's not awesome.
The only good thing about it is that after running his big, dumb yap, he got forced to carry through with the purchase. Anything else is just Money Wins as usual.
“I don’t want them to advertise,” Musk said. “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money go f*** yourself. Go. F***. Yourself,” he said. “Is that clear? Hey Bob [Iger, CEO of Disney], if you’re in the audience, that’s how I feel.”
In a normal situation, you might see the value of a company drop and Musk sell it off to someone else for a loss on what he paid for it. But this is not a normal situation, as Musk’s comments and overall behavior lately seem to indicate. It would be unwise to think he might not just take the whole thing down out of spite, and attempt to tell the world that it was the giant megacorps that did this. The only ones who will believe him are his beloved Blue Checks, but they will not even exist anymore.