Fidelity has marked down the value of Twitter/X by 65%
axios.com
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There’s more to life than trying to do whatever he’s trying to do there.
Presumably he’s trying to create value. What’s the point when he’s $30,000,000,000 down?
I'm not sure that's true. I get the impression that he acquired Twitter for political reasons. And all of Musk's associates egging him on were right-wing political activists. An extreme example of this is Larry Ellison, a well-known funder of right-wing causes. It came out in the acquisition trial that Ellison offered Musk essentially a blank check to invest in acquiring Twitter. Yet at that point, Ellison himself had only ever tweeted once, back in 2012. He doesn't give a crap about Twitter or the Twitter experience, except insofar as it advances his political cause.
(Just checking, I was surprised to discover that https://twitter.com/larryellison/with_replies tweeted twice on October 5, thereby tripling his all-time tweet count from one to three.)
Musk himself has said things like, "The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters". Whether he's serious or not, who knows, but we can't assume that $billions in losses necessarily matter to someone of Musk's extreme world-historical wealth.
Whatever he thought at the start, I bet it's not how he feels today.
That seems to be true of many things...
Have you ever signed a purchase agreement for a house without performing an inspection first, and then try to back out of the deal, claiming problems with the house? If not, then there's no real analogy.
Was it a meth factory?
Based on what is actually known about the circumstances of him spending $44B to avoid litigation, the likeliest explanation is that he thought the value of Twitter would grow, or at least lose less compared to the cost of a settlement.
Now the spin is, as Pee Wee Herman said "I meant to do that!"
I wouldn’t be _amazed_ if the “woke mind virus” stuff is just because he’s found that the people who are into that tend to be easily led and into hero worship (I’m convinced that this is why transphobia got so popular with has-been British celebs a few years back; they’re rewarded with hero worship from this crowd). I would wonder how much of this he actually believes, or indeed if he has any beliefs beyond “people should talk about me all the time.”
He doesn't care about going to Mars. He cares about being known as the guy who went to mars
He doesn't care about transitioning the world away from fossil fuels. He cares about being known as the guy who transitioned the world away from fossil fuels
It just so happens that "being known as the guy who did something" generally correlates to the "thing actually being done". But for him that's just a nice side effect.
If you told him the world could have all of his goals with the caveat being nobody would know it was him who did it. I don't think he'd ever agree to that.
Again, just my opinion, but based on his public actions and antics this is what I currently believe about him.
Thus “don’t feed the trolls” being the most sage wisdom in the history of the internet. However, we struggle to understand this core concept of the human condition and we don’t really cover it in any basic education. So as a result we have a society wherein it’s very easy for people who don’t give a shit about their image to rise in stature by being controversial instead of being correct or good.
As an aside this is something parents struggle with SO much in my work. We identify an attention maintained behavior. I educate on the above in more detail, function of behavior, extinction, etc. and then they almost always need to be corrected because they immediately scold the child, which is providing attention! Data analysis will show this has little impact on rates of behavior but planned ignoral will often have dramatic consequences if they can actually stay consistent with implementation. The problem for someone like Elon is that you will simply never get everyone to ignore him. This procedure generally only works with young children wherein you can get a good degree of stimulus control for that reason. Otherwise it’s the issue with telling a kid in middle school to ignore their bully. They might do it and they might do a perfect job but that bully will almost certainly continue to get reinforcement from other sources making the initial kids efforts essentially meaningless.
And that, as they say, baffles people.
He bought Twitter because the court forced him to adhere to his promises. He didn't want to buy it at all, which is why he fought having to go through with the purchase.
His promises to... buy Twitter.
I actually mentioned the court battle in my comment: "It came out in the acquisition trial that".
The court didn't magically force him to buy Twitter out of the blue. Musk signed a legal agreement to buy Twitter. So the question is, why did he do that in the first place?
Twitter offered him a seat initially [1].
I don't think you can use logic to justify a clearly irrational decision made by Musk. Not everything is 4d chess; sometimes people just do things.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/media/elon-musk-turns-seat-twitters-...
I agree. I'm just doing my best to give him some amount of benefit of the doubt. The alternative is to say that he's a bit crazy -- which might be true, but I'm not in a position to be able to say it with confidence.
I, too, have my legal team draft formal offers for purchases at specific prices and sign them and deliver them in a legal binding agreement for fun, while already being in trouble with the SEC and my own businesses for potential market manipulation.
"It's just a prank" is one of the most disingenuous defense I have ever heard. At least have the courage to own your actions.
Of course not. But (and it's a really big but...):
> If he did, then he wouldn't have made such a ridiculously overpriced offer.
His ego won't let him do anything BUT (see, it's a really big but) make a ridiculous offer.
Cocaine is a helluva drug.
Maybe the influence he was had controlling the narrative on Twitter is worth more than $30 billion to him.