The board had a fiduciary duty to get that $54.20 price. They would’ve been sued by some stockholders if they hadn’t.
That was really nice to read, thank you!
“I’m going to motivate you to stay here and keep working by suggesting the direst possible outcome.”
I missed that one in my Organizational Behavior classes.
Remember Marissa Mayer, the former Google exec who was hired by Yahoo to turn the company around? Ending work from home was one of her early decisions, too. And the result? Yahoo was NOT turned around, she became wildly unpopular for a whole string of other bad decisions, and ultimately was forced to resign.
The only difference here is that no one is going to fire Musk because he owns the place, so if things continue on the current trajectory he’s just going to end up being the owner of a failure.
Why would Elon spend billions to buy a company in sure dire financial straits? And all his actions since have seemed to purposefully harm the company. On purpose, or is he not the business genius we’ve all been led to believe? Did he attend Trump U?
Can’t it be both? Control and numbskulls?
My brother worked for HP when Meg Whitman took over as CEO. He was totally remote at the time, and one of Whitman’s first decrees demanded that all employees report to their local office.
His nearest office was 90 miles away, but he got up early the next day, drove to said office, and presented himself to the bewildered branch manager. They didn’t have desks, chairs, cubicles, or internet connections for any extra employees, so they sent him home and told him to keep working remote “until they got it figured out.”
Sorry to be Thelma-Come-Lately to this thread. And I haven’t read any of the preceding posts. But I didn’t want to start a new thread… so my question is: did Musk buy Twitter just to destroy it?
That’s what I pondered two post up: On purpose or just a business dipshit? Could be both I guess…
The heads of Twitter’s legal have all resigned and are telling engineers to “self-certify” that their work complies with the FTC consent decree the company is under.
That would require advance planning. Elon decided to buy the company on a whim, just like all his decisions the past two weeks have been. There’s no bigger agenda here than “haha bird app go brrr”.
Based on the evidence at hand, and the ever-popular Occam’s Razor principle, Musk bought Twitter because he’s a Genius™ (in his own mind, at least) and is capable of running any company and making it enormously successful. And this particular company gives him – if it continues to be dominant – a tremendous ego-gratifying bully pulpit.
I think Musk had just enough sense towards the end of the proceedings to realize that he knew nothing about running a social media company, and really did try to squirm out of the deal. When that proved impossible, and he had to go ahead with the acquisition, his obsessive inclination to micromanage took over, and a whole series of really, really bad decisions continue to roll out.
I’ve become fairly certain Musk never actually intended to buy Twitter for real. He wanted to damage it, but from the outside, by making an offer that would let him do discovery and air their dirty laundry and fuck with their stock and then walk away. Consider the almost whim-like attitude with which he launched the bid, and compare how much effort he devoted to trying to get out of it, and his priorities seem clear. Unfortunately, because he’s a doofus who operates on impulse and instinct, he didn’t quite realize how binding the offer was and how difficult it would be to walk away from, so he wound up holding the bag.
People who make a genuinely serious takeover attempt form a detailed plan of action in the weeks and months before it’s consummated, so they can hit the ground running. Musk has not hit the ground running. He has hit the wall flailing. He’s making it up as he goes.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t think he is intentionally destroying Twitter, now that he’s in charge. I think he is genuinely trying to remake the company into something that makes sense for him. But because he simply doesn’t understand social businesses or, hell, human relationships, he’s radically off-base in terms of his priorities. His simple-minded perspective is that Twitter is a direct service to its users, and services should be paid for, so he’s trashing the ad model and going for direct billing. He’s starting projects in the background, also, that will expand this paid-service framework, from creator-chargeable video (i.e. he’s turning Twitter into OnlyFans) to peer-to-peer payment processing services (i.e. dredging up what he remembers from his time at PayPal).
He’s a techbro. He has no comprehension of people, which means he didn’t understand how Twitter worked. So he’s throwing away everything that mystifies him, and building something familiar, which is tech-forward exploitation.
That, to me, is the truly hilarious part (separated from the tragedy of thousands of lives thrown into chaos). What we’re seeing is Musk legitimately doing his best. He’s really trying. And this is the result.
I have no idea if something called Twitter will still exist a year from now. If it does, it will be radically unlike its current form, and it will be much, much smaller.
Thanks, @smapti, @wolfpup and @cervaise for those informative answers to someone who wandered in from the break room.
He literally waived due diligence on the deal.
I didn’t say he was doing it well. 
I think the best way to summarize Musk is that he’s a very bright, hard-working guy with a record of commendable accomplishments, but also someone who is by no means entirely sane, a problem that is greatly exacerbated by an enormous ego. The word “eccentric” doesn’t even come close to describing him.
He’s a perfect example of how smart people are just as subject to the Dunning–Kruger effect as anyone else.
The track record of star CEOs parachuted into companies to turn them around suggests that they are of no value at all.
This right here.
In social media, the user is not the customer. The user is the PRODUCT. Musk doesn’t grasp that at all.
More true than not. The best counter example is Michael Eisner being asked to rescue an almost-dead Disney back in 1983 - the man did a fantastic job.