What if he just loses a big pile of money while Twitter twists in the wind because there isn't much of a plan? That seems likely enough really.
They were almost ready to fold, got a new iCEO, and completely turned around to become the world’s most valuable company two decades later.
(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)
Twitter is the product though, there's not an underserved market that they can move into.
The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.
Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.
I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.
A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.
It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.
What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.
I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!
This wasn't a negotiating strategy.
He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.
Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.
Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.
anyone who actually think he was forced to pay 43bn when he could have paid 1bn. (even 2bn) are just not thinking correctly.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.
All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.
He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.
There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk...
It is embedded on this link https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
“Pay $2B and out” was not a choice available to him.
I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.
He decided to buy because he feels its better to own it.
Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.
He did but not for this price...
I think it's more precise to say he acted as if "he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter.".
If he's unsure about that, he can hire Zuck which might be free from contract soon if we look at how Meta stock is trading.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well)
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - Aerospace engineer
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
> If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
My position is that there are multiple factors and neither is sufficient on their own.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.
The meat of the claim is "just an engineer [...] Did he invent something that I'm not aware of?"
The money isn't mentioned to disqualify him, but to point out that money isn't enough.
What did he actually do that shows genius?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Elon Musk had no more support than the son of any upper middle class (doctor/pilot/lawyer) household in America would have.
Watching language evolve in real time is fascinating sometimes.
This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.
(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...