I'm not sure how you can have a "charismatic" individual run something like Twitter. Your charisma might be my anathema but a PR department waffling platitudes will probably work.
A dictator will always want to dabble. We are looking at some fundamentals here. Twitter run by whim and not rule. The world's media has basically gone all in on Twitter but it needs to get a grip.
I suspect the best thing for Twitter is to exclude the owner from participating. We all have far bigger fish to fry.
How many orders of magnitude is his NW from yours ? He’ll be ok no need to feel sorry for Elon
Making piles of money, inspiring a lot of people, while holding a questionable vision just isn’t something reactionary people do, usually. It’s something con-men do, but they usually try to save their image. Not go all Kurt Cobain on their kingdom…
Indeed. This one is funky. I’m open to outliers. Good call.
Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, where his has competent domain experts running things he knows less about, he has already fired everybody at Twitter with a backbone. Because he uses Twitter, he clearly (and wrongly) believes he understands it just fine. Twitter's also all software and mostly consumer-facing, so changes are both immediate and obvious. So I think with Twitter there's very little between his impulses and immediate impact on hundreds of millions of people.
It can be very disruptive to a company’s operations and stakeholders (employees, vendors, customers, etc.) for it to agree to sell itself. So it wants to have its deal, including price, locked down to the maximum extent possible. So if markets turn down in that interim period, 99.9999% of the time, it’s the buyer’s problem. And in any event, Twitter would have had to go back to the shareholders for another vote even if they had wanted to take a lower price.*
But there was no particular reason for them to, because they had a tight contract and there weren’t any compelling arguments that the buyer wasn’t required to close per its terms.
* An obvious question is, what if markets had gone up instead of down in that period? There was still a binding deal to acquire Twitter, but in this instance, it is at least theoretically possible that another buyer could have made an unsolicited offer for the company and the board would have had a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept that off. In that case, they can terminate the merger agreement, but then the buyer gets a termination fee and usually reimbursement of transaction expenses. But the reason for the asymmetry is that, barring a deeply distressed situation, a company doesn’t put itself up for sale without a high degree of certainty that a sale on the original or better terms will go through at the end of the day.
I stand by my opinion that he intended to close the deal one way or another, but wanted more favorable pricing. Your IPO profit is eaten away if you paid more than you could have when taking the company private.
I don't think Twitter truly was worth what the markets claimed it was worth, much the same as Tesla stock is still detached from the underlying asset. Mania in the markets will set the price at whatever people are willing to pay.
I firmly believe Musk saw a threat to the ability for healthy public discourse to be carried out and was willing to jump on the grenade that was an overvalued Twitter, until a point at which it became vastly overvalued.
That said: I do agree he has made a series of missteps at the helm of Twitter. He came in seeking to change far too much, far too quickly, and Twitter has a rough road ahead of it to get to even self sustaining, especially on the eve of an economic calamity.
It will show up in contract law books under what not to ever let your client do.
I suspect he wanted to cause problems and pain for Twitter, and that this was the bait used to hook him into ownership at an inflated price. He has flouted so many other laws, regulations, etc, he probably thought he had a good chance at getting away with this type of behaviour in a Delaware court.
What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.
Courts didn't force this on him out of nowhere, he bought it then he wanted out when the tech market tanked, and courts just said no, you bought it.
He had a lot of time to back out with a penalty payment too and didn't do so.
He forced himself.
This is the problem of having core global communications infrastructure be centralized
Did he fall out with Larry Ellison as well? I've lost track at this point.
A quick look at some of the funding sources for the $44b, and the distinct direction Twitter took post-acquisition suggest (to me at least - personal opinion) that Musk is promoting certain (alt-right) agendas. It could also be that the goal is to burn Twitter to the ground, as it has been touted by the US government as a “freedom tool”.
I can easily imagine Mohammed Bone Saw solving potential outcries of future heinous acts, by making sure there’s no outlet to discuss them.
Again, just my private opinion.
It doesn't quite add up all the way to me, but almost; it looks like an act of sabotage.
The thought experiment is: if you wanted to destroy Twitter, what would you differently?
I mean you could do even worse, but... not if you didn't want to make it obvious. The "entitled born-rich manboy can't deal" is obviously a solid cover, because almost all of us already believe it!
There's no secret plan, he's just trying to "fix" whatever personally bothers him.