suggests he’s realized he’s out of his depth
As has everything else he’s said about this. Recently he was going on about how he’d handle bans and such, and he was basically trying to reason out the last 16 years of Twitter policy starting from scratch, in public, like he’d never actually thought about it before. Musk is the perfect, textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.
Also it’s kind of funny that the number of spam accounts jumped on news that Musk was buying Twitter…
Worth noting, Elon’s made it clear that he wants to verify every twitter account belongs to one user, and each user only has one twitter account. And that businesses and other “official” twitter accounts be part of a paid and verified system.
So my bet is he considers my “this is the account I let my family see” , my “this is the account for all the other furries I follow and who follow me”, and “this is my afterdark account for a limited selection of people”, as two bot accounts/spam accounts/not legitimate accounts and one regular account.
To repeat:
After Musk’s initial failed attempt to buy Twitter a couple months ago, he profited hundreds of millions of dollars just on the movement in shares and didn’t actually do anything other than open his big mouth. Surely even if this takeover attempt fails, he’ll come out of the other end richer than ever - or at worst, marginally less so.
Honestly, between this and the simultaneous crypto meltdown it’s like all my Christmases have come at once.
The likes of Musk, Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Thiel are doing the impossible - they make Steve Jobs look like a regular guy you’d want to hang out with,
It would be great if both sides agreed it would go to addressing some social need, like homelessness.
Sure, and a smart investor would have looked into that before making an offer. That he’s doing it now suggests that he’s either belatedly doing his due diligence or he’s looking for an excuse to back out.
Elon, if you could put it on hold until January 21, 2025, that’d be super.
Fixed it for you
Whoa!
This. For all his talk about free speech and the importance of twitter as a platform, pretty much everything concrete he has to talk about it increased monetization. He wants to get more money from users and advertisers. And this is what a number of investors have been saying for years. Twitter’s revenue per user, per visit, per employee, and overall is way behind the other social media giants, and to a certain type of investor that is like catnip. They are convinced that if they were in charge they could just “get all the gold” whether rational or not. It’s a textbook way to destroy a company. I’m not going to try to get inside his head to decide what his personal motivations were, but the finance partners that he got to agree to contribute to the bid were certainly interested in the prospects for making more money. With the stock price sliding way below the offer, and growing skepticism about the proposals to raise revenue, it’s not surprising that they would be getting cold feet and look for either a way out or a chance to renegotiate the price lower.
Funding secured
Funding detoured
Funding abjured
I think we’re at stage 2
I’m sure he and rootin’ tootin’ vladimir putin share some other similarities.
Paying for fake fans is what got him where he is today. Corey Lewandowski Says Trump Campaign Paid Actors for His 2016 Campaign Announcement
Exactly what I was thinking. It’s infuriating seeing these amounts of money tossed around so callously by people who will never, ever use it for any social need no matter what, despite being so rich that they would barely even notice the loss. I will never understand the need for people who have more money than they could ever spend within multiple lifetimes to hoard even more. They could improve the world for everyone, including themselves, and instead they choose to go for some non-existent high score that benefits nothing but their ego.
But muh freeze peach!!! I’m imagining lots of “free speech absolutists” furiously wringing their hands over this, LOL.
Hopefully if the deal doesn’t happen he’ll also rage-quit Twitter.
