For sure. And I think the lashing out is driven by some things that are legitimately painful. He only briefly wanted to buy Twitter; the courts were going to force him to buy it. And the main source of his wealth, TSLA, has gone from a peak of nearly $400 per share to down around $150.
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.
Oh, for sure. But given his behavior, either he didn't believe it was a firm contract or he just thought firm contracts applied to other people, not him. Either way, I'm sure it's a very stressful experience. Stress that he has richly earned, I must add. I just think it helps explain why he's flailing around with such vigor.
I think it's worthy to note that the markets declined significantly between when he signaled a desire to buy Twitter and when the court forced his hand. I don't think he wanted to back out, he only sought adjusted pricing, based on the significant decline in stock price.
Yeah, but that’s not how public company acquisitions work. Basically the reason that there’s a lag between when the contract is signed and when the acquisition closes is because there’s a lot of logistical stuff that has to happen in the meantime. SEC filings have to be made, shareholders have to approve the transaction, usually at least some regulators have to sign off, etc.
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.
Other repliers are disagreeing with you but I think you are absolutely correct. He was trying to pressure Twitter into changing their price to avoid being dragged through discovery. It looked to me like it almost worked, but my suspicion is he realized that he would also be subjected to this and decided it wasn’t worth it.
Why would short-term market price fluctuations matter if he were serious? Real corporate acquisitions are based on looking at the target, figuring out how much money could be made by the new owner, and bidding accordingly. If he were buying it for business reasons, a general market decline wouldn't change anything, because it would be years before he might try to IPO again. And if it wasn't for business reasons, market fluctuations matter even less.
I think the real problem is Musk is a very polarizing personality and everyone can only speculate his intentions using their colored lens.
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.
I can understand why folks feel no sympathy for him on the matter, but he is a business man, and any smart business man would be foolish to not attempt to get the best deal in the end. I was merely pointing out that if he truly did not want to own Twitter then he would have just paid the breakup fee.
If he can't handle the uncertainty of shifting markets getting in the way of the binding agreements he forced on other people, if the stress of managing that many billions of dollars is making him sad, I'd be happy to take a few off his hands to help lighten the load ;)
I think we're all right there with you, but I'm not holding my breath. Best he could off Jet Tracker Kid was $5k, which would arguably be pennies (less than that?) to Elon with his level of wealth. :D
They rebuffed him, poison pilled to make it really hard and required a much firmer offer, which he made and they accepted (he even threatened a shareholder lawsuit if they didn't citing boardmember fiduciary duty).
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.
To oversimplify it somewhat, he could back out and walk away owing the $1 billion only if his debt financing sources had refused to fund. It was unlikely that was going to happen because (1) his lenders had committed to finance the deal (barring the occurrence of very, very unusual circumstances) and (2) they had their own separate legal and reputational exposure if they didn’t show up at closing.
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.
I think it was just a regular pump and dump like with doge or btc. He was going to buy a stake, get his followers excited, pump the share price and then dump it.
What he didn’t realise is that in the real world, contracts can be enforced.
The courts forced him to make good on his ironclad offer to buy. He forced his lawyers to craft the most absurdly ironclad offer you could imagine. No lawyer would have ever written such an offer without being explicitly told.
Makes even more sense if you treat it as a foreign hostile takeover.
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.
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!
Oh you’re right. It just makes analysis like, dumb.
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.
To be fair, the bloke is just human. Unfortunately we don't need humans running big old corps and media outfits or even simple businesses.
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.
I don't know, I think speech on twitter was way more predictable before. Now you need a weather report to figure out what Elons current mood is and an oracle to figure out what you're therefore not allowed to post.
Possibly, an algorithm banned him just for writing the word "mastodon", then someone noticed and reversed the ban just because he's famous, to avoid public backlash.
