[majormajor]

Of course, if Elon's right, and Twitter has been showing ads to way more bots than anyone else has realized[0], than that's gonna seriously tank Twitter's value.

So my question is: what did he learn between the point when he decided to buy all those shares at a high price and the point where he started making a stink about bots? He hasn't made any claims based on new information. Did he just spend a massive amount of money on Twitter stock with zero idea of how much it should actually be worth, and only have second thoughts after signing a deal to buy the company? There's no scenario where his actions look economically sound, so the implausible-on-the-face-of-it "do it for the lulz" argument seems like one of the last best guesses available.

[0] the internet ad space is filled with players, and generally a low-trust industry for obvious reasons, so this claim strikes me as extremely dubious, but here we are

[tptacek]

You may not have thought this out. Why would an upwardly-revised bot count number, even a drastically revised number, tank Twitter's value? Click fraud has been an open secret for decades and did essentially nothing to harm Google's financials. People who buy large blocks of Twitter advertising do so for outcomes they themselves measure financially, not based on synthetic metrics.

If you don't have an especially clear answer to how that revision would harm Twitter's bottom-line numbers, my understanding is that you'd have essentially no hope of convincing the Delaware Chancery Court that a "material adverse event" had occurred. And that's, of course, before you get to the fact that the numbers we're talking about are hedged in the SEC filings.

[ben_jones]

> "do it for the lulz" argument seems like one of the last best guesses available

Or Musk is, was, and always will be, a financier, and is doing all this because at some point it made sense to his broader financial plans - dumping Tesla stock near its peak and minimizing the fallback.

Then there was you know, an economic collapse, shortly after this started going into motion. Maybe, I don't know, the financial collapse had some impact on the cost/benefit and changed the course?

Why do people always throw out the simplest most obvious solution in favor of conspiracy and cult-of-personality worship ("do it for the lulz")?

1) Musk wanted to offload Tesla (which he himself said was overvalued). Twitter was as good a reason as any to do so.

2) Economic collapse made the deal unfeasible.

3) When you owe the bank a billion dollars its the banks problem, Musk knows the deal is worthless and is more then happy to let the courts settle it to optimize his personal costs.

[lostdog]

No way buying Twitter to justify selling Tesla stock is the simplest solution.

If he wanted to sell some Tesla, here's a simple way:

1) Tweet something: "Batteries are overpriced! I will start or buy a battery company, but I need a warchest to do it!"

2) Sell some Tesla stock

3) Don't do the battery thing. If you really need to justify yourself, just pretend some private discussions convinced you not to do it in the end.

This has the nice benefit of not being on the hook for tens of billions of dollars while accomplishing the same goal.

[majormajor]

This theory certainly has logic to it but, at this point, is "acting before he thinks" really not an option for "simplest most obvious solution" for Elon Musk's non-SpaceX/Telsa-core-business-decision actions? How many more 4/20 references does he need to sneak in?

He disclosed his share in early April and then signed the deal in late April. TWTR today is about where it was from January-April pre-news-of-his-investment, so the value of his initial Twitter investment actually looks pretty stable even post-"economic collapse" (the Dow, for instance, is down 10% over this period, hence the square quotes - obviously no picnic, but did people think the crazy 2020 runup wouldn't lead to a correction?). TWTR has already largely corrected from it's 2020/2021 peak, other than that it fairly steadily went up to be almost double what it was worth 5 years ago, still seems like a solid buy if you're trying to diversify your Tesla holdings that grew way more quickly than that.

TSLA is down 37% meanwhile from April 4 peak before the Twitter drama started. If that's because of the deal, and if that's weighing on his plans now, clearly even in the most rational case he wildly mis-judged that one.

And in getting out of some TSLA he also got INTO a bunch of TWTR (unless possibly he already sold that at the peak?). Which he now seems determined to tank the value of.

But heck, since Twitter is still valued about where it was before, but Tesla has fallen, "getting out of some Tesla stock for something more stable" seems to still make a lot of sense. He thought it was worth buying at this share price before, he even made an offer to pay a big premium (against a higher price driven by the news of his move, of course), so... what of that was unforseeable or seems dramatically different.