What a wild card. Has Musk said why he purchased twitter in the first place? IRL he seems so introverted. It's just odd to me he'd have any interest in a social media company.
My pet theory is he got roped into it because the SEC was going to hit him for securities fraud (wouldn't have been the first time he'd done it[1]). Earlier this year, he had originally said he was buying a 5% share and would be a passive investor. Later on, whoops it turned out he'd bought over 9%[2] of the company without the mandatory disclosures, potentially defrauding the market of over 100 million that he would've paid in inflated share price if his moves had been known to other investors. With the SEC on his trail he said screw it, and inked a very difficult to escape contract to purchase the company. The SEC gets off his back, and he spends months trying to wriggle out of it but finally is compelled by a dead-end court case to fulfill his obligation.
He has a unique perspective as someone who's addicted to tweeting and whose account is constantly getting impersonation and crypto bots in the replies. His friends are incompetent VCs and other tech people who are convinced journalists and women with colored hair have taken over Twitter and are hoarding all the blue checks for themselves.
He's also extremely divorced, keeps having off the record children with his executives, and is having a midlife crisis.
Probably a combination of a career-first mentality where they don't have the time or inclination to seek / maintain lasting relationships, and also having the means to not raise their own children. To these people children are not burden in the same way as traditional parents because they hardly contribute to raising them; instead they are just another play-thing.
There may also be some game of thrones shit going on where if a boss and a mini-boss have a baby it solidifies rank and power.
Twitter was poorly managed. It would have been a $100B company in 2020-21 if it had shown any semblance of consistent profitability.
The opportunity here is to:
- Take the company private
- Cut costs by pruning staff and reducing bloat
- Get high-engagement accounts back, which, in turn, will bring back advertisers (perhaps sweeten the deal by promising something with your other ventures)
- Eke out a few quarters of consistent profits
- Go public again, this time with $500M/quarter of profits
- Enjoy the standard "Musk-effect" 40x PE multiple and slow keep cashing out
Hard to cut costs when you've just saddled the company with billions of dollars in new debt. Don't forget El Musk-o is getting sued by Tesla shareholders over his bloated compensation.
Get high-engagement accounts back
Advertisers didn't leave en masse because "high-engagement accounts" left, they left because the "high-engagement accounts" came back. From the looks of it "absolute" free speech doesn't include Alex Jones, so who knows what other "high engagement" accounts will be left out in the cold. Doubling down on "absolute" free speech just means you're going to have a sea of ads about pillows, dick pills, and reverse mortgages.
Can you trust anything Musk says? We know he’s full of shit; ask Thiel. As for the real reason, pick your poison:
- He purchased it because he’s in a right-wing filter bubble and bought into the idea that Twitter is controlled by a secret left-wing cabal and genuinely believes he’s doing the world a favor because he thinks right wing propaganda is actually moderate
- He has the same brain damage as Trump and requires adulation by sycophants and he thinks this is the best way to guarantee his fix and give him control over his critics
- He wanted the brand name and doesn’t care about what services are currently offered under it
- He’s from the southern hemisphere and wants to destroy the social fabric of the United States
- Some permutation of all of the above
Not sure which of these are the truth, but I’m guessing a combination of the first two.
Musk is an excellent strategist. When he says something in public it's because he wants people to react to what he said. It doesn't mean it's true. I'm not suggesting he 'lies' exactly, more than he uses his audience to manipulate the world around him to get him closer to his goals. His Twitter account is more PR than reality.
I have no doubt he had excellent reasons to buy Twitter, but what he says they are in public probably isn't the whole story.
