• Kanna [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I can't even imagine what the end goal is here lol. What a massive waste

      • discountsocialism [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        He's probably trying to quickly divest from Tesla because the stock is the 6th most valuable company in the world and they make only 0.6% of the total car inventory per year. He had to quickly spend $40 bil in a way that wouldn't be held up in anti-trust.

        • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          This. Also his ongoing policy of stock manipulation and Tesla bot & influencer strategy instead of traditional marketing.

      • Phish [he/him, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I'm sure he'll squeeze in some anti-labor propaganda here and there.

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      13 days ago

      deleted by creator

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        The worst thing imaginable would be if Musk was actually shrewd and diligent and his public dipshittery is entirely a media production. that would break me.

    • Civility [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Elon Musk has became the world’s richest man by using his personal brand to manipulate the stock market through social media and secure absurdly lucrative government contracts.

      Buying Twitter is an extremely natural move for Elon. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.

      Firstly, as the valuation of his companies is so dependent on him personally hyping them on social media daily, being deplatformed for whatever reason (which twitter has been increasingly willing to do, first with Trump, then the crackdown on the left, and now the censorship of dissenting voices on the Ukraine war) would be ruinous. Buying out his main social media platform is a way of addressing that risk.

      Secondly, Elon has a lot of raw capital, and an impressively large (if messy) personal brand but very little actual institutional, political or cultural power. Buying Twitter is a way to use raw capital from his overvalued companies to buy the other three, giving him more power to effect actual change in a similar way to Bezos buying WaPo or Murdoch’s media machine giving him outsized influence to his nominal wealth. Musk probably personally cares about this, but it’s also a smart move for his businesses as

      The second pillar Elon’s wealth is built on is lucrative government contracts. Musk owning outright the main forum for public political discourse will give SpaceX and Tesla an enourmous advantage in securing government contracts. Where previously Musk has been able to consistently keep SpaceX and Tesla publically visible with overall good PR (both things politicians care a lot about) and offer the usual large sums of money, so did several other actors. Owning Twitter puts Musk in a Murdochlike position of having something politicians cannot do without or afford to offend.

      Twitter is a far more essential part of our social, economic and political world than SpaceX or Tesla are and likely ever will be. It’s absurd that Twitter is “valued” at only 1/9th of Musk’s net worth and trading one for the other greatly stabilises his (previously tenuous) position and increases his effective power.

      • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        This is a very good explanation. It also gives him a handy way to exit a large chunk of his stake in Tesla.