This is just a periodic reminder that Elon Musk spent months desperately trying not to buy Twitter, and only did so because eventually it became obvious that a judge would force him to make good on the cockamamie contract he signed with the Twitter board in a short-lived fit of hubris.¹ So when you hear Musk talking about all his noble reasons for buying Twitter, it's just garden variety BS. He bought it because he lost a court battle to worm his way out of his agreement. That's it.
¹Or something.
As I recall, he dropped his lawsuit when private conversations and documents of his (and of others among the global elite) were going to be disclosed. The material was not just embarrassing but likely evidence of illegal activity.
It seems that he got a very good deal: $44.5 billion for a Presidency. That's a bargain for an arrogant Boer who is also a Boor and a Bore.
Exactly. How much did his net worth go up after the election? I don't have the exact figures but it was multiples of the $44 billion he spent on Shitter.
I really want to thank all of the liberals who just couldn't make the massive sacrifice of leaving Twitter and who now can't leave Facebook because that was just too much of a burden. Keep making these awful platforms valuable!
November 5th, TSLA closed at $251.44. I has peaked at $479.86 on December 17, and today, January 13th it closed at $403.31. So, it was as much as up 90%, but presently up 60%, having fallen not quite 16% from the post-election peak.
It’s amazing how many things liberals are personally and solely responsible for inflicting on America. It’s as if they’re the only people who have any agency to stop anything bad from happening, and their repeated failure to do so without anybody else’s help is a prime reason why we would be better off getting rid of all of them.
Yep
So that's why he named it the Boring Company...
Elon Musk and Far-Right German Leader Agree ‘Hitler Was a Communist’,
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-far-right-german-leader-weidel-hitler-communist/
It’s stuff like that that makes me root for Steve Bannon in the Musk/Bannon feud. Which I guess is kind of like rooting for Mussolini in a Hitler/Mussolini feud.
When evaluating the Hitler/Mussolini match, remember that Muskrat "runs the spaceships on time!"
It's really far more like a Himmler vs. Goebbels vs. Goering fight over the pecking/succession order under their man-god. Us non-MAGAts should resist the temptation to take sides, we have no dog in this fight. As far as I'm concerned, a Night of the Long Knives limited just to MAGAts is an unalloyed good thing. (See Al Stewart's Last Day of June, 1934.)
That's pretty much my takeaway from what Character Limit says about the offer and the court case. He tweeted himself into a corner, basically, though as Anandakos says, he's gotten the money back a few times over by now.
What really strikes me about the noble stuff he says now about what he's doing with Xitter is that it's not only BS, it's also the same tenor of BS he was spouting earlier about how his electric vehicles were going to save humankind, and colonizing Mars would save humankind, and vacuum-tube travel would save parts of humankind, etc. And "self-driving mode" is self-driving except it isn't, and how many times was "full self-driving" going to be operational within two years, etc.
Not trying to pick a fight with the Elon fans here, just a personal opinion about him and not about the cars at all. As far as I can see he's always been a kind of Harold Hill type who's been mostly selling the story of himself as a visionary. There's a place for that in corporate America-- a big place, actually-- and through deft handling by people around him it's worked for Tesla and Space-X. But I don't see how anyone who's read Character Limit's sections on his direct management at Twitter can have the slightest regard for him as a hands-on corporate manager. To put it mildly.
An interesting angle is what somebody like Vivek can make of Musk now that he's been in on the same operation with him at DOGE (which I always say to myself as "doggie," stolen from a reskeet somewhere)? Vivek strikes me as a disciplined guy who built his fortune arbitraging drug patents by selling out at the right time, which to me says he at least understands financial detail and has an eye for marketability and an ear for the patter that buyers want to hear. I'd bet he's ignoring Musk and soaking up all he can about the government's inner workings and looking ahead 10 years or so.
Swami Vivek! Guru to the Rich and Famous, MAGA's Yogananda forsooth.
WHAT is he going to do when the Christian Taliban have an exorcism at one of his political rallies? Enquiring minds want to know.....
Apropos of nothing, I, too have always pronounced it "doggie."
It's so much less high-and-mighty that way . . .
Wouldn't surprise me at all if Alpha MAGAs like it doggie-style.
On the other hand, Boer + Boor + Bore + Billionaire = 4B.
Elon really should go back to the shithole country he came from.
What Kevin states is true, but given that Musk is now worth a half trillion, I bet he's glad the judge forced him into the purchase. The Twitter deal hasn't hurt his personal bottom line, and it has helped him become one of the world's most powerful people. Unfortunately.
The rich always fail upwards. And the ultrarich are too big to fail.
Let's think about what's actually at the center of why he did what he did.
He bought it because he's an asshole who wanted to prove that he could be an asshole and get away with being an asshole. And if we've learned anything from this all, it's that there are people who enable him -- addicted birdsite users and advertisers -- and then there are the dedicated Muskhole worshippers who praise and kiss the Muskhole.
Which goes to prove that, in fact, they really do let you get away with it when you have money.
As far as I can tell, X is still a big huge money pit and the only reason he can keep it afloat is because the rising value of Tesla stock allows him to light a few billion dollars on fire every year to pay the interest on his loans.
Indeed. It's called "fuck you money".
Of course, Musk is testing the boundaries of FAFO. Maybe he gets burned so badly he becomes an eccentric recluse.
Maybe it's just my ear, but the real reason he bought Twitter can't only refer to the reason he didn't back out of a bad deal. After all, he had to propose it in the first place. And that was just a doubly awful mix of the conservative trying to control the political message people see (and often succeeding) and a Trump-like flare for creating businesses as a brand that loses money massively. A good sign for the economy itself with Trump and the right in charge?
Oh, and that branding of losers should put in perspective, too, two other items in the news. One is whether criticism of big biz by libtards has driven Silicon Valley to the right. Surely much of the criticism has been from the likes of Trump sorry that he can't control the online message better, what led him to start his own floundering social media. So naturally, as with election endorsements, Silicon Valley gets defensive.
The other is the endless speculation of why Trump wants Greenland. Think of it as no more than the next Trump Steak. Maybe it'd be the Trump Ice on which to store his steaks.
Just from memory because I'm too lazy to go back to the source now, the background goes something like, he'd been complaining about how the old site was handling some things, Dorsey had been unhappy for a while with how the company and the service were going and was pulling himself back from it, the two of them were commiserating in private channels, and Dorsey talked up Elmo both to the board and to Elmo directly as the man to save the company and the service and got him involved with the board after he bought a big chunk of stock. Then he decided he had to have the whole thing, got into a bidding war with himself, won it, and got set up in that iron-clad contract without knowing much at all about the internals (and before he'd arranged the financing, too). If the book is to be believed, the board expected a lot of due diligence and offered all kinds of info but Elmo's side refused to look at almost anything of it.
Apparently the board's attitude was that the company, as opposed to the service, was either going down the tubes or going to be bought out no matter what and the per-share offer was so high they couldn't pass it up without exposing themselves to lawsuits for breach of fiduciary duty. So they negotiated a contract that Musk basically couldn't get out of except by dying. His lawyers and deal specialists-- and he could afford to pay for the best-- accepted all that so it wasn't a one-sided hornswoggling.
What I still don't quite get is whether he owns it as a privately-held joint-stock company with others, or as a personal proprietorship or partnership or something like that. He runs it and acts like it's strictly personal property, no by-laws, charter, oversight, nothing of the corporate structure. Could all that have evaporated, really?
For the be careful what you wish for files… https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/13/china-considers-selling-tiktok-us-operations-to-musk-bloomberg-.html
And also in the be-careful-what-you-wish-for department:
TikTok users flock to Chinese app RedNote
https://www.google.com/search?q=rednote
And about that purchase, he was, secretly, acquiring shares and not disclosing before all the legal wrangling began: https://sfist.com/2025/01/16/sec-gets-in-parting-shot-at-elon-musk-sues-him-for-swindling-investors-by-hiding-his-twitter-shares-purchase/