BREAKING - Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk and will go private after agreeing to a deal worth $44 billion. pic.twitter.com/vEkGwXTDmt— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) April 25, 2022
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.
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.
This is a very good explanation. It also gives him a handy way to exit a large chunk of his stake in Tesla.