[kmlevitt]

I think I’ve figured out what he’s doing. He knows Twitter is going to flop due to its tremendous debt, dwindling audience and the failure of his paid premium subscription scheme.

But this way, when it happens he gets to blame all of that on “woke corporations“, rather than on himself.

[lamontcg]

I would hope it was blatantly obvious that was exactly what he is doing. It doesn't require any particular skill to decipher that he's engaging in blameshifting, he's flatly stating it.

[tim333]

You could be on to something there.

[shrimp_emoji]

Yep. He didn't want to buy it in the end. Once he was forced to, he fired almost everyone to lower overhead as much as possible. He also pulled some heroics in doing so, if you read about the "moving the servers" fiasco, which was an impressively intrepid bit of "getting your hands dirty" getting shit done.

I don't know to what extent he has made or could make it profitable, but I don't think he wants it to die. It dying, though, isn't the worst thing, and here he can turn it into a Braveheart moment to boot, winning hearts and minds -- like mine. I see what he's doing, but I love it; fuck advertisers. They've ruined the Internet. Or, rather, monetization in the abstract has.

It's disgusting to me how he was asked about trying to bend the knee to suits like Iger, turning the platform into some anemic, anodyne corporate candy world of devout Good Behavior, an eternal kindergarten where we're all trapped forever with the advertisers as our mental jailors, since that's how profits can flow most frictionlessly.

What he's doing is stupid -- people's 401ks are on the line. But it's wild how it doesn't seem to bother anyone how that's an argument for spinelessness. It's a New Hampshire license plate "live free or die" moment, and 90% of posters here are advocating for content slavery with tone policing and personal attacks.

[sleepybrett]

He was NEVER forced to buy twitter. At any point he could have cut a check for a billion dollars and walked away. He just couldn't swallow his goddamned drug fueled pride.

[RobAtticus]

Numerous people (Matt Levine, etc) smarter than me have written about how there was no $1B break up fee. That fee only came into play if something prevented the deal, like regulators blocking it. Him having buyer's remorse was not sufficient to trigger that clause.

[rurp]

This is true, but he could have negotiated a breakup fee with Twitter if he'd wanted to. The board likely would have been more than happy to take $10B from him to kill the deal, which would have saved him a bunch of cash and headache in the long run. But obviously cutting losses isn't how Elon likes to roll; he'd rather burn the company down out of spite.