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Comment by ChumpGPT | Hacker News Reader

I believe there were complaints that Musk made decisions that were incredibly unpopular and reckless. Laying off important staff, creating a sweatshop environment, policy changes, etc. All these decisions were intentional, I'm sure he was warned of the possible consequences but didn't care.

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Yes, but the fact that individual decision were intentional doesn't add up to that the overall goal was to wreck it.

So you'd need some sort of legal document declaring intent to conclude that it was intentional?

Twitter was the center of the Arab Spring. There's plenty of powerful people in the world who would be happy if it went away. And the users migrating to Facebook, a platform far more friendly to censorship favoring existing power structures, is probably also desirable.

In my opinion, the simplest explanation is that Musk isn’t very good at business. He thought he was, but he mistook the successes of the people around him as his own.

Nobody, not even Elon Musk burns that much money on a whim, besides, he tried everything he could to get out of the deal.

All these weird 'genius play' defenses really are hard to follow, people make mistakes, even Elon Musk and if he had been able to walk away from it he would have.

Yes, Musk understood (perhaps too late) that he has Teslas to make and sell, and China is the second largest market for them, and CCP would be aware if he owns Twitter. Now he is between rock and hard place because his financial interests don't play well with his public image as "pro free speech". So maybe killing Twitter is even not too bad a deal.

Plus his idea of X as "everything app" means Twitter will not exist as such anyway, ie. at best it'll be killed by quickly transforming into something else. The rumors that it will require ID verification seems to support it. Instead of a single common space it will be balkanized between nations so that he can satisfy everyone by showing different content (ie. if you verify as Chinese you will see only pro-CCP propaganda, same with Arab countries etc).

He could have payed 2 billion and walked instead of losing 25 billion plus :))

Pride can be deadly....

I don’t believe that’s accurate. There was a 1 billion dollar penalty clause, but that wouldn’t cover him simply changing his mind. Twitter could have sued him for breach of contract and potentially taken many billions of dollars (all fuzzy memories at this point, I could be wrong).

Perhaps the Saudi ownership component is larger than we've been led to believe?

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