I guess it would have been a hit to his ego if he had failed to get financing... it'll probably be a bigger one to drive twitter into the ground and throw away his and others billions.
The whole thing is very bizarre from the start to now.
To save money at the time he drove a van for a carpool service (he could use it for free as a result). A lot of the guys on his van were in tech.
When the first rounds of layoffs hit, guys would get on at the end of the day and they would talk about their severance. The first question in response to “I got laid off” was “What’s your severance?”
At one point deep into 2002, he remembered a change. Now guys were getting on the van with all their stuff in a box. He played the game, even though he wasn’t in tech, and asked one of the guys with a box, “What’s your severance?”
He just got a flat look in response.
That would have stung.
> Either Twitter or Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement if, among certain other circumstances, (1) the Merger has not been consummated on or before October 24, 2022, which date will be extended for six months if the closing conditions related to applicable antitrust and foreign investment clearances and the absence of any applicable law or order making illegal or prohibiting the Merger have not been satisfied as of such date; or (2) Twitter’s stockholders fail to adopt the Merger Agreement. Twitter may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including to allow Twitter to enter into a definitive agreement for a competing acquisition proposal that constitutes a Superior Proposal (as defined in the Merger Agreement). Parent may terminate the Merger Agreement in certain additional limited circumstances, including prior to the adoption of the Merger Agreement by Twitter’s stockholders if the Board recommends that Twitter’s stockholders vote against the adoption of the Merger Agreement or in favor of any competing acquisition proposal.
> ...
> Upon termination of the Merger Agreement under other specified limited circumstances, Parent will be required to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1.0 billion. Specifically, this termination fee is payable by Parent to Twitter if the Merger Agreement is terminated by Twitter because (1) the conditions to Parent’s and Acquisition Sub’s obligations to consummate the Merger are satisfied and the Parent fails to consummate the Merger as required pursuant to, and in the circumstances specified in, the Merger Agreement; or (2) Parent or Acquisition Sub’s breaches of its representations, warranties or covenants in a manner that would cause the related closing conditions to not be satisfied. Mr. Musk has provided Twitter with a limited guarantee in favor of Twitter (the “Limited Guarantee”). The Limited Guarantee guarantees, among other things, the payment of the termination fee payable by Parent to Twitter, subject to the conditions set forth in the Limited Guarantee. [1]
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
Jack hyping Elon as twitter’s great hope and such I almost expected this was some subtle game to get that $1 billion to Twitter
Now I can’t help but wonder if Jack was tweeting such praise to goad Elons ego into it. But in hindsight I’m probably giving these guys too much credit
The gist was it that Jack believes Twitter should be not be a company and he believed Musk will take it there. Not sure I agree.
The way things are going now there’s an increasingly real possibility that Twitter may not exist in a few months, putting the jobs of the other 3000 or so employees at risk too. Not to mention all the people who used Twitter to make a living.
The destruction of lives and so much value for one man’s ego is astounding.
If you honestly think that's a real possibility, how do you see that actually happening?
https://www.axios.com/2022/11/10/musk-twitter-email-arduous-...
Strangely, it's the same story as linked in OP, but Bloomberg doesn't include that detail
A few weeks ago I didn't think this sort of outcome was possible, I thought Musk might muddle a bit and cause a long term decline, but nothing so sudden. Now, with the FTC consent decree potentially breached, advertisers running for the hills, Musk himself saying the company is close to bankruptcy, the resignation of virtually all key top staff including their head of Trust & Safety, and the departure of so many SREs that it will cause stability issues, there's a perfect storm developing that'll have mutually reinforcing effects. Social networks don't always die slowly, sometimes they collapse as Hemingway described: Slowly, then all at once.
The death knell would be if Twitter is kicked off one or both of the App Stores, but I think long before that the company will become completely unsustainable financially. I expect Musk to successively lay off more and more staff to try to stay ahead of that, making things worse.
Elon Musk's big plan is simply to build a huge personality cult around him and Twitter is perfect for that.
It's not enough for him to be exceptionally rich, he wants to be adulated.
He wants to hear he is the new Steve Jobs, that he is better than Leonardo Da Vinci. That he got this right, we are living in a computer simulation.
Why do everyone keeps assuming he is playing 10 dimensional chess?
Have you seen his dumb tunnel under Las Vegas? Why would a brilliant engineer build that? What's the big plan here?
That being said I absolutely don't think he's playing 10D chess, he's got a few big Ws and it's gone to his head in a disastrous way. He can be a brilliant engineer/engineering manager and a total fucking idiot at the same time.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAtLTLiqNwg [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
The dumb tunnel makes me think Elon Musk is fully insulated from reality. Nobody around him dared to tell him the tunnel was dumb. And or he didn't listened.
Fast forward today where he decides on a whim that every engineer must stop working remotely and must instead work like crazy to satisfy his ego. And here again the feedback from reality seems minimal on him.
I think and I hope that the good engineers at Twitter are making plans to leave this terrible boss ASAP.
Best I got was, experience with tunnel boring machines would be really useful for Marian and Lunar colonies.
Now though? Well, now I think it was always merely the billionaire equivalent of me picking up Blender, modelling half a spaceship before I get bored, quit, and forget I even have Blender installed for another six months.
Notice how He re-discovers everything that people were saying about running a social media? I think His hands on micromanager approach is good for finding a solution through iteration. Of course, if a solution exists.
It is like going back to the basics and look at the situation with a fresh eye and understand why something doesn't work, create a solution and try again if the solution doesn't work.
This works well in a startup whose business position is a kind of blank slate and you have lots of VC money compared to you run rate, but when your existing business relies on established trust in the market, uninformed blind rapid iteration that harms brand position and existing relationships adds additional problem while you are exploring the solution space for the preexisting problem.
So if I worked at Twitter and was not on the list of people he thought he needed to fire after reviewing swiftly millions of lines of code, I would make plans to leave ASAP
What reality indicates - to me - is he wants to integrate financial services on Twitter.
Musk has already said that he more or less intends to turn Twitter into a global WeChat, an all-in-one app that does payment, micro-apps, social media, video, etc. The steps he's taken already, even in the short period he's owned Twitter, point to that. He's already integrating payments by getting people to pay $8 for a blue check, which means payment validation of identity; there's a way to turn your Twitter avatar into an NFT, but only if you attach your crypto wallet—logical next steps are to turn Twitter into a payment platform, get people to order food over it, verify identity and attach online identities to financial records, develop a financial/speech surveillance system, and pretty soon you have WeChat 2.0 but with the NSA lurking in the shadows instead of China's equivalent. He can't get to that point without existing users.
Users are what gives it value, but users are here for the app, not for the brand. That's what Metasbook seems to have forgotten when making Instagram look like TikTok. If people want TikTok, they will go to TikTok, not to Instagram.
But in the end, money will always end up in his hands no matter what he does. When you are this rich, you’ll always end up making money.
It'd be even cheaper if he had the sense to not play chicken with Twitter's board only to get called on his bluff. Nothing about how he's handled Twitter thus far suggests that he ever took his offer to buy them seriously. He was showboating from the beginning and screwed up, and thousands of people are paying the price.
We'll probably never know, but I'd love to hear the story of how exactly he thought it would be a good idea to blindly sign the binding paperwork for the purchase without doing any serious due diligence. Either his lawyers were begging him not to or they're as dumb as he is.