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Comment by osrec | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. The fact that someone is willing to buy a stake in a company suggests the company has some potential. The fact that someone having bought a company is willing to dump their entire ownership so quickly suggests the company may be rotten from the inside. The latter would exert a much stronger downward pressure on the stock, in my opinion.

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That makes sense if you assume Musk has learned something shocking about Twitter from the inside in the past couple of weeks. How likely is that?

It seems spectacularly unlikely to me that a demonstrably impatient person with a pre-existing thesis about Twitter would take the time to investigate and learn new things about its product/financials/culture/governance.

It also seems unlikely that a person with a known strong stomach for legal and ethical "flexibility" would be especially bothered by anything they did learn, assuming they took the trouble. But YMMV.

His point is that it will look like Elon didn't like what he saw and changed his mind, it doesn't matter what he truly saw.

"Musk, what do your Elon eyes see?"

"They're taking Twitter to Isengard!"

I do think something like twitter longterm could a big play at something like authenticity verification in the world of deep fakes, similar to what keybase was trying to do but they already have traction with public figures

As a hypothetical investor on Twitter, would you be willing to take that chance?

> suggests the company may be rotten from the inside.

Even if there are 0 actual facts open to the public that prove this, the optics suggest that this narrative can be made. He moved the stock 30%+ in a few days by publically buying in. If he sells it, why wouldn't it give up all of the gains he brought (and maybe more)?

I don't know what he thinks he stands to gain by buying Twitter. Can a rocket scientist/electric car guru really get into tweets + advertising?

To strongman the case for him running twitter, he clearly has significant experience and success with running large engineering oriented companies - which is the primary job of twitter executives. Both Tesla and SpaceX have significant software organizations, and he also has experience in running a pure software company back when he was involved with paypall. As a heavy user of twitter, and the de-facto PR person for Tesla and SpaceX he also has a good understanding of the product, both from a normal users perspective and a marketers perspective.

That said, I don't think this is primarily about buying twitter being profitable, but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny. I also don't think he's likely to get that into the day to day of running twitter, just because he's already busy with Tesla and SpaceX.

> running large engineering oriented companies

I don't disagree. It's just that... what are his plans for Twitter? Add an edit button? Tweak the algorithm that delivers timelines? None of that is really complicated. Those could be 6 month roadmap projects.

> but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny

1/3rd of his net worth on a company seems odd.

First, it’s more like 1/6 his net worth. But I don’t believe the proportion means anything at that level of personal wealth. He’d still have the other $210B, plus ownership of Twitter. Each of those other billions is worth a billion dollars. Almost everybody could make do with just one of them, and he’d have over 200 of them. Even luxury goods don’t scale up to that scale. All he can really do with that is buy companies anyway. And Twitter is what holds his interest right now.

It seems like Twitter's barely done anything new since going public over 8 years ago. Making a UI that was actually usable for following conversations would be a good place to start. What are all these product people doing? (I'm a small TWTR shareholder. It's one of my worst tech investments.)

Why do rich people buy newspapers and media conglomerates? Why did Jeff Bezos "get into journalism" via Washington Post? There is your answer.

Washington Post can control what is posted through journalists, etc. (digital or not)

Twitter is like... an aggregator of a bunch of people tweeting. The people tweeting aren't being paid by Twitter to tweet (like journalists are for Washington Post, even if it's like $75 for an opinion piece/basically blogspam)

I feel like that's a pretty big difference?

Twitter can control what who can post and who cannot (remember Donald J Trump being banned?).

Twitter can control what is being read by deciding what is promoted by their algorithms and what gets buried down.

These are just few examples. We can't pretend that Twitter is a fully decentralised service and that there's no one pulling the strings.

Kara Swisher said this 4 days ago: https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1513370798815330307

Twitter likely decided to not allow him onboard just because of his constant shitposting about the company, his volatility, and really just wanting Twitter to be his sounding board for whatever offensive things he has to say, so they're trying to ensure he can't try and takeover as we speak.

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