- Elon Musk purchased shares of Twitter after unsuccessfully petitioning the CEO to remove a Twitter account tracking his private jet.
- Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
- Musk banned the account after promising not to, highlighting his prioritization of getting his way over free speech.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ttBv9
Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn’t disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn’t back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn’t that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I’m pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.
This
Likely story. Rich people don’t go to prison, you think I was born yesterday?
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.
Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.
(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
Really wish he’d kept fighting do we’d see that.
Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
Yes AND he’s desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.
The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.
It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn’t) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, “you’re the coolest, bro” and him replying, “watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I’m probably the fastest dinner ever actually” [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn’t afford the penalties because he didn’t have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.
Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
Incidentally… https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
Threads isn’t federated yet. It’ll be a while before fediverse accounts can be seen on threads
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
Even when he wins he does it like such a loser. Fuck this guy.
Jesus Christ this is low point even for him.
Considering that…
- The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
- He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
- He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
- He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren’t blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
- He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries
…I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.
Didn’t they hang dissenters in public squares back in the old days?
He just didn’t clarify when!
What a snowflake
A visionary snowflake.
How is he visionary, exactly?
I mean, I didn’t think it needed an /s because does anyone take the term “visionary” seriously anymore?
My bad
Called it! 100% called it!
Yep. I called that too. Talk about burning money…
So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though “Fuck it, maybe I can’t beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!”…If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements… Like “For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!” -
We would be living in a totally different timelineMuskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There’s no “grand design,” just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.
Made a legally binding decision to massively overpay what the company was worth, or probably ever would be. Of course the current owners are going to take it
I think the deal was so good for Twitter that it may have been illegal for them not to sell to Musk because their job is to maximize profits or value for the shareholders or whatever. As a publicly traded company, not doing the deal would be choosing to not maximize profits.
Now in hindsight the idiot is killing current stock value, but that still has nothing to do with the shareholders who had stock when Twitter was sold. Those shareholders were thrilled to sell all their stock well above market price. Corporate ethics.
Or really, he wanted to talk shit and pump and dump, and he got caught by some savvy lawyers at twitter.
Then he tried to turn it into a political tool sprinkled with his narcissism, hoping foreign governments would pay him to manipulate narratives. But now nobody gives a shit, he has lawsuits left and right and is likely going to go broke, and he’s scared away all the advertisers who were his life blood.
He tried to pull a trump but nobody actually backed him up, and they’re likely going to let him fall.
All that money could have gone to something useful that would have benefited everybody and instead it went into investors pockets
Like the $6 billion Musk promised to end world hunger.
Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.
That’s the definition of “fuck you” money.
Yeah $50k isn’t even that much to Musk, what an idiot.
He’s still worth $200B.
Spending $44B? $88B? $100B. Doesn’t matter. The dude never, ever has to think about money again. If he lives to 85 and doesn’t earn another cent between now and then, he can splash 6 billion dollars a year every year until he dies.
To give you some understanding of that kind of money, he could roughly buy two Lamborghini Diablos every single day for the rest of his life.
Mind you that’s mostly non-liquid accounting of his stock and assets. Not that he’ll have to worry about what he spends, but it’s not cash in the bank billions.
That’s the point.
He could burn 40 billion buying Twitter just to spite a kid over 50 grand because money is meaningless for Musk. He essentially has infinite wealth.
He could spend the 50 grand the kid asked for every minute for 7 and a half years and still have 3 billion dollars.
Stop talking about this guy.
Citizens say go
Yes this makes far more sense then the brain dead “bought it to kill it” theory that’s just cope for phony stark
Here we are talking of very debatable definitions of “making sense” tbh
Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he’s ever taken and that’s a long list to fight to the top of.
And totally on par for him.
I love that for him 🥰
And you know the worst part about it? Burning that amount of money makes basically zero difference in his life.
But you forget the best part. The tracker still exists and everyone still knows where his fucking jet is flying to because that shit is public information by air navigation regulation. There’s still bots that regularly posts the MuskJet location both in Twitter and Mastodon. So he spent all that money and still failed.
So… it was a really good call from the CEO to not remove the account?
