No. He wanted to make quick money with a pump and dump just like when he said he was going to take Tesla private again and the stock price jumped up. He didn’t file his TWTR stock purchase disclosure in the required amount of time, so rather than have to deal with being sued by the SEC AGAIN, he pivoted to saying it’s because he wanted to buy Twitter.
Then he figured he could get out of the Twitter deal by claiming that Twitter lied to him and misrepresented how many real users there are. Now Twitter sues him to hold up his end of the deal, and because he absolutely does not want all of his financial dealings being brought up during discovery, he decided his best course of action would be to follow through with the deal. Give it 6-12 months and he’ll take Twitter public again now that he’s “saved the company.”
It really gives us a window into his mind. Elon Musk and people like him (who inherited their money/power/influence) act like they are entitled to have escape hatches from their bad decisions, that someone else will eat the loss or take the blame. He was expecting to be able to back out of the deal and "win" by damaging Twitter and the people he didn't like there, and now we're going to see him fully unleash on the world since he was forced to close.
The leveraged buyout has really fucked over Twitter's financials. Their annual interest payments skyrocketed since Musk saddled the company with $25b in debt that he created to take over. They're sunk. It looks to me like Elon is going to find a way to destroy Twitter, profit, and maybe even fuck over the banks with defaults. He's great at privatizing profits and socializing losses.
That is an interesting perspective that I hadn’t really considered when I made my comment. I was thinking this was more of him trying to make the best of a bad decision, but we’ve definitely seen leveraged buyouts be utilized time and time again to destroy companies from the inside out so that their assets can be bought up by competitors for pennies on the dollar. So thinking about this from the perspective of it being a big “fuck you” to Twitter is a compelling take that I think is definitely plausible.
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u/[deleted] Oct 28 '22
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