He’s a wanker.
Because it’s full of people criticizing him, and once he realized that he couldn’t get out of buying the thing, he figured why not get something out of it for him.
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I’d love to see the faces of the board and big institutional investors over at Tesla. On a daily - actually make that an hourly - basis, Musk is disproving the myth that he’s a genius. And that illusion is the sole reason the company is worth so much.
This goes on much longer, surely the board has to remove Musk?
And there won’t be enough popcorn in the world for the tantrum when that happens.
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I know NOTHING about gambling. Is there a way to see if Las Vegas is taking bets on how long before Twitter goes under/gets taken over?
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Pretty much this.
I don’t think Muskrat really wanted control of Twitter. He wanted to pressure Twitter into lifting Cheetolini’s ban, and the ban on some of the other right wing provocateurs that make him feel like an edgelord.
First he bought shares in Twitter, hoping his ownership stake would be enough pressure to make this happen. Then he threatens to join the board. Then, when he found out being on the board comes with legal responsibilities antithetical to his goals, he threatened to buy Twitter outright. But instead of caving, Twitter’s board called his bluff. And why wouldn’t they? Muskrat pulled a Balmer, paying top dollar for a company in a death spiral. Muskrat realizes his plan backfired and tries to weasel out of it, but Twitter’s board sticks to its guns, Muskrat finds the Delaware chancery court will probably rule in Twitter’s favor, and worse yet, he looks like an idiot to the masses — which is a blow to his ego, but also to the myth of him being a Genius Visionary™️, the very thing his entire fortune is predicated upon.
So he buys Twitter, learns it is in much worse shape than he could have imagined (because the idiot waived due diligence; that costs a lot of money and he wasn’t really planning to buy the company anyway), his other companies start losing value because the markets are losing confidence in him, which means his collateral — Tesla and SpaceX stock — is worth much, much less and he is in real risk of losing control of them.
So he panics. He has to turn the company around quick, but he has no idea how to do this, and no understanding of the company he’s bought or the industry it’s in. He nukes the staff (without checking with legal about how to do it without incurring a mountain of liabilities, or who is “essential” to the company ). He tries to assure advertisers Twitter is still a safe location for them while doing the exact things they tell him will scare them off. He institutes $8chan. He decides porn, gambling, and crypto scams are going to be revenue generators for the platform. Fuck, tomorrow he’ll probably beg his edgelord ego strokers to send him a tenner or two to save the company and own the libs.
Most people learn that they aren’t special and reality doesn’t care about them by high school. Muskrat has chronic affluenza, so he’s only learning this lesson in his fifties, when the consequences are so much greater than a dented fender, a fine and community service for shoplifting, or a beatdown in the halls for picking on the quiet kid who’s actually a black belt.
I feel sorry for marginalized communities who’ll lose all the hard work they invested building safe spaces for themselves, and for the workers losing their jobs. But Muskrat? Unfuck that guy. This was an entirely avoidable self inflicted wound. I hope this debacle will cause him to slink away never to be heard from again, and will be a death blow to the myth of meritocracy.
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My guess is that he confuses what he thinks the law should be with what the law is.
Texas is an at will employment state. That means all jurisdictions should be at will employment states because he says so. 
Like you said, he’s probably done this before and the lawyers cleaned things up. But this will cost so much more than pocket change and a horse.
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I still have the suspicion that the Elongated Muskrat just bought Twitter to ruin it, because he was mad that people there were mean to him.
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Meh, there aren’t that many Tesla’s on the road. He deliberately priced them out of anything but a niche market.
Larger auto companies are already horning in on the EV market with better manufacturing, marketing and customer service infrastructure.
This is a guy who killed a mass transit system in CA by falsely claiming he will build one of his own.
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I think it started as a pump and dump scheme that went awry. He never intended to buy the company but got stuck with it after the music stopped.
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That’s amazing. Do you have links?
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As you should. It’s nonsense. Especially for the ultra-rich. In my opinion it is more likely they have so much money because they are greedy sociopaths who are willing to do almost anything for more and more wealth. They are conniving, relentless and unconcerned with the adverse consequences of their actions on others.
As for his ‘plans’ to destroy Twitter, I found this piece pretty interesting as it casts the acquisition as a political action vs a business decision.
And I hope Musk goes down in painfully embarrassing fashion
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This is a flawless summary of the entire situation. I have no notes.
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On a personal level I am amazed at the evolution of my opinion of Elon Musk. 15 years ago when Tesla was a tiny company and he had put all his money into it in an attempt to disrupt the oil/automobile cartel I thought ‘That’s pretty cool’. SpaceX upending the space launch ‘industry’, also very cool. Tesla batteries, SolarCity, all those things appealed.
And then much of the last 10 years happened, drip by drip. Somewhere along the way he got high on his own supply, and now he should probably just go away somewhere. It’s likely about time for boring, competent types to start running Tesla and SpaceX etc. at this point.
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Indeed; when a bottom tier Hundai, or Honda has better, more consistant build quality and QC / QA that actually catches blunders (like forgetting to put brake pads on a wheel) before the customer gets the vehicle, that should tell you something.
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In the end I think Tesla will end up getting owned by a traditional car company and becoming a luxury EV brand. I can’t think of who needs their power electronics tech at this point, and anyway supergenius opened up a lot of their patents for free to competitors a while ago. VW and Ford are arriving on the scene now with GM, Honda, BMW, etc… so aside from the branding they don’t have much.
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They (Tesla) has a network of charging stations that will eventually need to be retrofitted to use the actual national charging standard connector, and the back of house IT infrastructure to manage those stations and the cars.
If I were one of the big multinationals (GM, VW, Honda, Toyota, etc.) I’d take some money out of petty cash and buy tesla for that sole purpose, and then send in my experts to fix the various problems with the factories. (and slowly begin to merge those parts into the rest of the business, keeping the good parts and phasing out the bad parts; in other words, pull a Cisco.)
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Yeah, Musk was telling employees that if they were “hardcore” (i.e. willing to work 80-hour weeks) Twitter would be a “good place” for them (and if they weren’t, they should leave). But… how? By his own admission they’re teetering on bankruptcy and his business plans are nonsense, so the odds of even extended employment, much less advancement are nil; he’s not talking about any sort of reward structure or anything. The “reward” I guess is just continued day-to-day employment under increasingly high stress conditions at a company with no future. Great talk, Elon!
It came from a discussion on the company Slack, discussed here, among other places:
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I’m grateful for him now, since I reached that conclusion long ago and now he’s helping others to see it.
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He sucked back then, too. This is not a case of a good, admirable man going bad. Don’t respect the very wealthy, please. They have zero concept of risk, literally nothing they could do carries as much consequence for them as a simple conversation with your boss carries for you.
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That article is a good read. It really highlights how hostile the entire company is to their own CEO. Nobody wanted him, and nobody has any intention of listening to him.
His own in-house legal team told employees they don’t have to come into the office (it’s in their contracts) and they should continue to take as much time off as they want (Musk tried to remove all non-stat holidays and vacations days).
What a shitshow. He is an incomparably toxic human being.
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