Elon Musk makes $43 Billion offer for private buyout of Twitter

sonicboom said
Not sure why Elon Musk didn't just create a copy-cat twitter company?!?! Probably would of been less, than a quarter of the cost of buying Twitter, plus, he renamed it X anyways.

I understand why he bought it, but I don't understand why not just create a better version of it. Facebook overcame My Space.

He wanted to make a worse version. It’s far easier to take something existing and make it crappier than it is to build something crappy from the ground up.

But seriously, it’s easy to forget the history as we move away from it - but Musk didn’t actually want to buy Twitter. It was basically a gag gone bad and he ended up with a court ruling that he had indeed made an enforceable offer to buy it. He then tried to get out again on alleged misrepresentation by the company but that failed too. So he put together a package that included his own money and investors and financing to buy it - because he had to.

But he also embraced it - his efforts in buying stock and taking an interest in the company weren’t all in jest. I think a big part of it for him was dismantling what Twitter was. We talked about this a lot back in the earlier pages of this thread but Musk was part of a specific view of Twitter that was basically “who do they think they are??” They viewed Twitter’s legitimate ecosystem of blue-checks and moderation as a structure of liberal American politics. He also found himself on the outside of that ecosystem - because his political views were different and mainstream twitter didn’t find him as funny and entertaining as he thought they should have.

So stuck with having to buy it, he decided to dismantle what he and his ilk rejected about it and open it up to be their own playground. He also sees it as possibly being a platform for something else in the future and he justifies its dramatic loss of revenue as an expense in having it for possible reimagination - but for now, his jokes land, his allies and their viewpoints have a platform, and the Elon-bros love him for it.