Comment by DHPersonal

2 years ago

Wouldn't Elon Musk have to be getting something in return for the price of his reputation among the industry and investors by choosing to waste money on Twitter?

8 comments

DHPersonal

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dragontamer  2 years ago

You're assuming that Musk actually wanted to buy Twitter, and not the fact that he just bullied people into thinking he'd buy Twitter then mistakenly signed an ironclad contract to buy Twitter as part of that bullying, then tries to escape the contract for 6 months before the courts told him he had to uphold his end of the contract.

  • DHPersonal  2 years ago

    dragontamer, I'm not sure if you are replying to mandmandam or to me, but I will provide a response from the standpoint that the reply was intended for my message.

    Musk may have not intended to purchase Twitter, but now he has it and it's costing him a massive amount of money. Losing more money by making it fail seems counterintuitive to the process of getting a return on an investment. The user mandmandam seems to be implying that Musk has been paid by Saudi oligarchs to make Twitter fail due to its history in causing disruption to their plans, but that seems to hinge on Musk's investment in the company, his personal reputation being deeply damaged, his stakes in existing companies becoming risky, and his future investments being tarnished, all being outweighed by whatever nefarious individuals are paying him. I think that because of how much he has personally lost in this Twitter fiasco that he would have to be receiving a huge payout for destroying Twitter. Therefore, I assume that no matter his intentions surrounding the purchase of Twitter, he is not malicious in his destruction of it but rather inept at running the company anywhere near the level of success it was experiencing before his purchase.

    • dragontamer  2 years ago

      > The user mandmandam seems to be implying that Musk has been paid by Saudi oligarchs to make Twitter fail due to its history in causing disruption to their plans, but that seems to hinge on Musk's investment in the company

      No. It just means that the Saudis think that Musk is a useful idiot.

      Saudis can be trying to destroy Twitter and Musk can be trying to save it at the same time. Alas, this is how Musk thinks he's saving it. He's heavy handed, narcissistic and ignorant in the ways of online culture.

      2 replies →

mandmandam  2 years ago

We don't know for sure what he did or didn't get. It could be something tangible, or intangible, or both - how would we know?

Who knows how much tax Musk saved the .01% over the next ten years by crushing Twitter? It could literally be trillions. Handy crowd to owe you a favour.

Billionaires have class consciousness, while most commenters here and elsewhere really don't. We all have more in common with the average homeless person than with Musk. The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is about a billion dollars. And Musk is a billionaire hundreds of times over.

So, assuming that he cares too much about his reputation or a small fraction of his money (again, he didn't even buy it with only his own money) to ever intentionally harm Twitter would be a mistake.

Like I said, even if it helps prevent discussion of a wealth tax it could be worth the spend over the long run - though I'd bet there's more to it. It's a little too clumsy and obvious how he keeps trying to destroy the site while pretending to care about free speech.