>> It's less clear to me why he almost immediately started trying to back out.

That's what you do when you sober up and realize what a mess you've made.

Perhaps underneath the 420 jokes lies the reality that he's high fairly often.

I am sure the offer price of $54.20 was a joke. With Musk, the appearance of those digits is never an accident.

Wine and Ambien is his goto..

Is it?

Well, if the purpose of buying twitter was to improve the user experience of internet users and advance the doctrine of free speech, then why not just spend that same amount of money building your own twitter (mastodon instance or something) and use your publicity to attract users?

An established social media platform's most valuable asset is the size of its userbase. Even with the reach of Musk, I think it would be hard to attract a large enough userbase to make the product more compelling than Twitter.

An established platform's most valuable asset is the data of the userbase.

Twitter can leverage a huge amount of data about personal preferences, interests, relationship status, political leanings, income, usage profiles, message habits and content, social graph, and location.

If you specifically wanted to clamp down on certain demographics, it would be an excellent way to locate them.

Can't have a large data trove on your users without users. A huge part of a successful social network is sufficient adoption. If the people your users want to follow aren't on the platform they don't have a real reason to be there. It's a major hurdle for any new social platform and a lot fail at that step.

If spending a ton of money was a reliable way to build a new social network we would all be having this conversation on Google+.

"Musk Social"?

The difference would be that musk's following is more moderate, and they might respect peering agreements unlike Gab or Truth Social.

because that doesn't work.

Well maybe he realised that in the best case he would govern over Twitter 2.0 with extra toxicity and in the worst case be the proud owner of another cesspool of assholes, pedophiles and people with violent ideas.

I don't believe for a second that Elon Musk really cares about free speech for anyone but himself and he is right now probably not limited by twitter's policy but by other externalities

Pedophiles? I'm pretty sure they would be forced to take down child porn. I mean, it's a public forum. If you are publicly announcing that you are pedophile or terrorist, that sounds like bad news for you.

In any case, does twitter not already have a lot of "assholes" and people with "violent ideas"?

Yes he would (sorry if I went a bit over the top there).

My point being that I don't trust Elon Musk to make better moderation decisions than whoever is in charge right now.

Past attempts of social media with low barriers of what is allowed have absolutely turned out worse than Twitter if you ask me(e.g. 4chan, 8chan, gab etc) That's why I think the best case is "Twitter but more aligned with whatever Elon Musk thinks at the moment"

This seems to happen with some regularity in Musk's timeline.

It also hit at a point when Tesla's stock price started a rapid decent. The Twitter deal is becoming a larger and larger percentage of his net worth.

Stocks went down almost immediately after the deal across the tech sector. Financing got harder, he would have sell off a lot of TSLA at a discount to complete the deal.

The market went to shit almost right after the point where he made his offer. Tesla took a dive at the same time. A lot of the loan he took out is against his tesla stock.

Did everyone forget about the massive hit the stock market took right after the deal was announced? Maybe that has something to do with it.

It makes more sense if you assume that Elon Musk is both a sometimes successful businessman and also suffering from unmanaged bipolar disorder.

Can we not jump to blaming a person's bad choices on the first medical condition that fits? I know Musk has said he has bipolar disorder, and I'm not trying to discount that.

I'm just saying what if... gasp... he simply did something foolish? The blame-it-on-the-bipolar out reinforces the narrative of an infallible person who only make mistakes because of a medical condition. Take that line of thinking one step further and you are now fully onboard the bipolar stigma train.

A mistake or doing something foolish is going out in shorts in the winter and then getting a cold.

He spent days/weeks/months on setting up this deal, he became obsessed with it at some point.

(Hopefully) no one is "blaming" it on the bipolar. It's simply something consistent with bipolar. (But it's also consistent with rich people getting obsessed with something and then spending way too much resources on it.)

> reinforces the narrative

That narrative is simply bad and pushed by people who have no idea what they are talking about. Musk's previous instances of risk taking (that "all" turned out to be fine) is also perfectly consistent with bipolar. (Of course if you look at it then it turns out that he took many risks that made very little sense, like when he talked about taking Tesla private, the infamous funding secured tweet.)

And of course just a label like bipolar means (almost) nothing, these spectrum disorders are complex (and there are usually other comorbidities at the same time, just with different severity), we don't know how he is treating/medicating/managing it, or is it even the right diagnosis or not. Or he could have simply lied.

> It's simply something consistent with bipolar.

It's also consistent with making a mistake.

... you can call it a mistake, but that emphasizes an irrelevant fact. everyone makes mistakes. rich people do small and big mistakes. we hear about the very stupid (regular florida man) and very expensive mistakes (trader accidentally entry more zeros, etc).

and of course we all hear about the top of the Forbes billionaire list mistakes, the wework scandal and the other questionable decisions of Masayoshi Son, how "the crazier someone it's more likely they get money from Thiel", etc.

but even on top of all these this one easily takes the cake.

yes, in isolation it's a "mistake", but luckily we have plenty of context for it.

> everyone makes mistakes. rich people do small and big mistakes.

So then you agree that it being a mistake is entirely plausible and that it having anything to do with being bipolar is pure speculation?

I'm trying to communicate that mental/personality disorders don't work like that.

It's a very costly and stubborn mistake either way and he has (or hasn't) bipolar either way.

Even in the most severe substance dependence cases some people can override their short term wants (eg. they don't go and mug people to get money for their next fix), while there's a clear pattern of this behavior in others. (But it's what we expect, since we define one by the other.) So in both of those instances, it was their mental state, but was it the altered part or the underlying base state that let the dependence to form in the first part? It's really not separable.

One explains the other, but there's no direction, no proximate causal relationship. At best there is some predictive power, ie. if someone goes off their meds, or stressors increase they will show behavior consistent with this or that. (But in general everyone will make more mistakes when they have more stress in their life. Who would have guessed, I know.)

Yet these categories (diagnoses) are not useless. They communicate behavior patterns, things to look for, things to be mindful of and try to manage.

Do you have any experience with bipolar?

Agree 100%. I’ve never met Elon but his online behavior in the run up to and immediately after the Twitter deal sure seemed hypomanic to me.

Or it is far more likely that he isn't so much smarter than everyone else like he pretends and regularly makes mistakes like anybody else.