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Comment by lostcolony | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, Twitter is basically a running case study in what not to do when it comes to acquiring a company successfully, and can't be held up as anything other than "what happens when you do everything wrong". Certainly, it's not a useful example for others, even as a warning, because you can't easily tell what bad actions led to what bad consequences; there are so many of both.

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While I suspect you're right, isn't it a little early to conclude the acquisition wasn't successful? Who even knows what successful means in this case?

I didn't conclude it wasn't a 'successful' acquisition. Just a case study of what not to do. Even if it somehow ends up in a place it gets spun as being a success, only Elon fanboys are saying "4d chess! Brilliant!"; anyone with an ounce of sense recognizes how dumb everything about this has been.

> how dumb everything about this has been.

Including pre-musk twitter as a directionless and weird company imo.

You're being downvoted because it's too soon to judge so harshly. You may be just as biased in the opposite direction as the fanboys. There's been a lot of dumbness and silliness involved but it's pretty hard to assume that a random HN commenter is a better businessman than Musk.

So that comment is currently sitting at 1, so upvotes balancing downvotes. The original +12.

But I really don't care either way; to your point - even Musk didn't want to acquire Twitter once he sobered up to the fact he was in too deeply to pull out. It's just his brilliant business acumen meant he went into it waiving due diligence. Which, yes, this random HN commenter knows better than to do, for any company, let alone a social media company.

Success might be difficult to define. If this produces the results that are desired by Elon and the investors then it's probably a success from their perspective. I worry if that's the case, it'll be like all the buy out, chop up, and liquidate value takeovers they made movies about.

> I worry if that's the case, it'll be like all the buy out, chop up, and liquidate value takeovers they made movies about.

In general, if a company is worth more when chopped up than alive, it deserves to be chopped up.

Elon Musk took on significant debt (i.e. interest payments) when he acquired Twitter, and Twitter was already losing money when he did.

It will take significantly more than just liquidating Twitter's assets for him to succeed, he essentially needs to turn Twitter into successful company.

Twitter was doing pretty okay though, looking at revenue and profit trajectories. A fairly sharp layoff of around 20-25% might've been needed to trim back down from the pandemic hiring spree and the lack of the anticipated growth, but that should've been sufficient to restore profitability looking at their last reported numbers.

With Twitter Blue steadily and exclusively rolling out new features like edit functionality that might've begun contributing more to the bottom line in time too. It was still too new and too geographically limited to be certain.

None of this was necessary.

The debts are a choice though, he could just sell other assets if he didn't want that.

So? We're in the timeline where he made that choice, so now he owes those debts and the interest on them. Yes, in theory he could have bought Twitter without going into debt, but he didn't.

...presuming the goal is to retain any of the current employees, rather than just building a new company around the existing IP+assets.

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