Ask HN: What if Musk's strategy is to destroy Twitter?
Elon Musk is clearly taking the hammer to Twitter. What does HN think of the idea that he is doing so intentionally? Is there a possibility that Elon is trying to bankrupt Twitter so that the creditors call their loans, only to sweep in with a bit of his own cash and buy them out for pennies on the dollar? Such a strategy would carry a great deal of risk. Creditors could sue him if there's evidence that he intentionally trashed the asset. But Elon Musk is known to take extreme risks. He may view the possibility of owning Twitter for a far smaller price to be worth the risk of losing it all.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 49.6 ms ] threadRelevant thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33057042
Basically Elon is a soft Republican/Trump supporter who is like "Trump didn't do anything wrong" and intends to make the platform a free for all.
It makes sense with a lot of his statements as well. Why obsess over the blue ticks? Cause the right wing was upset about it. Why obsess over freedom of speech? Because the right wing said they were being removed en masse from platforms. etc. etc.
There was a great twitter thread explaining all this that I read today, but for the life of me cant find it.
Ah found it here - https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1593474503996280833
all the why Elon Musk bought Twitter theories are overthinking it.
it’s simple.
Musk is in a right wing filter bubble. he bought Twitter believing their problems were real & that others felt the same
Not that losing the $$$ of his own that he spent buying it would be painless.
He probably regretted it, hence the attempts to get out, or maybe that was all just because he likes attention. Regardless, he now has a Twitter, essentially at no cost to himself because if he hadn't bought Twitter with that money he would have lost it anyway as the Tesla stock slid. That doesn't mean he wants to pay anything to keep it going. So, a much smaller Twitter that is break-even is better for him than a larger one that (at least in the short term) requires him to put money in.
Just an hypothesis; not sure if I even believe it myself, just putting it out there for consideration.
It's pretty obvious that he knew Tesla value was high as evidenced by issuing additional tesla stock to lock up some of that value over the past years.
People now act like it was obvious that the stock market was going to tank, but curiously those same people didn't place options in the market and aren't millionaires now.
(which is my way of trying to goad him into buying those companies and twittering it.)
1. Elon did not want to buy Twitter. But he wanted litigation and depositions even less. Is there a less good reason to close on a $44B deal where the value of the equity investment can be marked down to zero on day 1, and where the creditors are hostages to their now inadvisable contracts?
2. His decision was impulsive and cynical: He thought he could "flip" Twitter and lose less than a settlement would cost. That notion was dead on arrival, and now you see a narcissist flailing around trying to distract people from the fact he made one of the worst business decision in human history.
3. The scale of this mistake is boggling: $44B is the market cap of Foxconn. He could have bought Santander and launched his X app. He could have bought AIG. Or National Grid. Or LG Chem. Or Ferrari. Or Block. Or Maersk.
To destroy that much value on a struggling social media company in order to destroy the company is the kind of myth making that narcissists, and their fanbois, do.