If Elon was not rich and he did the same things you'd call him dumb. Why are we pretending someone who impulsively decided they'd buy twitter without due diligence "not stupid"?
Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).
This all sounds like very silly Elon bashing to me.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...
This was unusual to the point of getting criticism from a judge when Twitter sued to force him to follow through on the deal (which bought them at a significant premium over market):
https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-calls-elon-musk-legal-...
> Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).
This is vaguely true but in this case the big question is how he'll make it massively more profitable than it's ever been. Twitter was marginally profitable for the last few years but the massive debt load Musk saddled the company with means they need to increase profits by whole number multiples simply to catch up to where they were in 2019-2021. It's not enough to get advertisers back, they have to significantly increase their spending.
It absolutely makes sense to re-established a valuation if there are 'material events' and there have been - notably, major layoffs, operational problems, customers have left in drives. Most poignantly, the CEO has indicated 'there is a very material chance' that Twitter could go bankrupt.
What do you think 'we could go bankrupt' means? I means that, and, it was not the case prior to his arrival.
Finally, there has been a major market correction which has affected the price of all tech companies. Were Twitter to be a public company probably it'd be worth 1/2 as much - essentially P/E ratios have changed, even if the business did not.
Twitter is worth 1/4 what it was before - Musk bought at the peak and even if he did nothing it'd be worth a lot less, but his actions have caused the business harm with no predictable positive outcome (the changes mostly don't seem to align with some kind of plan to profitability).
That seems to be even more true of the customers that pay the bills, that is, advertisers.
? Yes, and ?
You can say and do (and should) a ton of things when you are rich, that you should not / cannot when you are not rich.