[nitwit005]

The general behavior of doing things that don't particularly make sense from a business perspective, to make numbers look better, is unfortunately common. People exploit it by doing things like trying to get a discount near end of quarter.

[bmitc]

I'm fairly certain that a lot of Musk's recent moves of creating that umbrella AI company, doing things like this, etc. are all to pass around the dept he took on when he purchased Twitter. He's effectively money laundering his debt through a ton of shenanigans.

[bonesss]

The unfortunate corollary to that reasoning: Elons shenanigans and election interference were well aimed efforts to create favourable regulations and a regulatory that would directly enrich him and enable more shenanigans.

Seen as a corrupt investment, with DOGE data access in the middle, buying an election through Twitter has been directly profitable for Elon with obvious and visible downstream upsides for his financiers partners and collaborators in such shenanigans.

[LiquidSky]

You need to be careful here, you're falling into the inverse "Elon is a visionary genius" trap: "Elon is an evil genius". For example:

>buying an election through Twitter

It's weirdly forgotten now, but Musk didn't want to end up owning Twitter. After making the impulsive buy offer, he spent that summer and fall desperately trying to get out of the deal. He finally gave in when it became clear he was going to lose in court. It was a major failure for him, and it's odd seeing this aspect of the Twitter purchase memory-holed and reframed as some 19D chess move.