Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

I believe it's pretty much the widely held belief right now that he was just trying to get out of a terrible deal due to the market downturn.

If the case everything should be viewed through that lens.

> From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?

With no judgement of morality here; this is Elon Musk. Yes absolutely he is.

If your politics don't conflict with Elon's irreconcilably, and you don't get fired, I'd think it'd probably be a better situation than before. Elon is not a bad chief executive and has run several highly successful tech companies that have performed far better than Twitter.

I always find it strange when he positions himself as pro-democratic and pro-freedom when his actions say pretty much the opposite:

He is pushing for a political system/values which:

- doubles down on money == power, to a point where only money is power

- uses pretext of "freedom" to remove protections which limit in how much companies can abuse people, mainly in forms which move money from them to the companies.

But if you systematically make it easier to wide spread systematically move money from the demos (populace) to a selected few and make sure only money is power that is pretty clear cut anti-democratic. (I mean it basically remove the demo from democraty).

And sure this is somewhat true for all democratic states, but the question is how much and if you push for it getting worse. Which AFIK Musk does. (It's also why a lot of people which had looked into such power dynamics will look at you strangely when you tell them the US is a beacon of democracy, it isn't and never was. It is a beacon for capitalism combined with wealth, western culture, military might (in some order) and only then democracy. At least in my opinion.)

So what does that have to do with Twitter?

One of the main complains Musk has with it is how it did restrict "freedom of speech", except it mainly did so when that freedom was abused for spread hatred and misinformation, often with the intend to manipulate democracy to elect people pushing for less democracy. And he wants to remove that.

Now without question Twitter did a bad job at moderation, still I would be really surprised if Musk would improve that. I would love being surprised.

Another problem is that Musk has shown to be a petty person and has shown to abuse the power he has over his companies, e.g. to cancel a Tesla pre-order because of someone saying something he took offense with. Putting such a person in charge of a platform like Twitter looks like a recopy for disaster. Especially given that it's also used a lot by some minorities Musk seems to personally have a rather strong dislike for...

Now I would love to be wrong about this assessment. I personally might not be the biggest fan of Musk but what does that matter if he does manage to create a better twitter.

And even if he fails it might have positive effects, by e.g. enabling a better alternative platform to take it's place.

I think he's actually said both of these things.

> If he can simply wait for Twitter to be worth as much as he paid for it, so that he can sell it again and cover his losses, that will be a fairly good outcome.

This is a leveraged buyout.

That means that $13 Billion was borrowed from Morgan Stanley to make this deal happen, and Twitter is the owner of that debt. Estimates are ~$1.3 Billion / year in interest payments (the most risky $3 Billion is unsecured loans, expected to be CCC-rated, and CCC-rated debt is around 16% right now). So I think 10% is a reasonable estimate for what this financing will cost.

In 2021, Twitter made... _NEGATIVE_ 200-million bucks.

So... yeah. Add $1.3 Billion of interest payments on top of that, and I think we got a problem here folks. Another note: TWTR's revenue (mostly advertisements) is $5 Billion/year. I really dunno where they're gonna find $1.3 Billion/year from.

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What Musk bought here is a white elephant. It will cost tons of money just to stay afloat, let alone "make money" or even "retain value". If Elon Musk holds onto this and "only" loses a few dozen billion over the next few years, I think he'd have done a good job. I have no expectation that TWTR will remain a $44 Billion company over the next decade. Selling the company off for $20 Billion 5 years from now (IE: a $24 Billion loss) would be a herculean effort as it is IMO.