The billionaire had last year tried to back out of his $44 billion offer to buy what was then Twitter, but financed the deal by borrowing $13 billion from a consortium of banks. (…)
Musk may be looking to reduce those payments by ensuring X isn’t worth very much, Bloomberg commentator Matt Levine posited in January.
I feel like that’s a side effect, where it’s being done because now he owns twitter and can.
Originally, I’m pretty sure the reasoning was less convoluted - it was just a pump and dump stock scheme. Which he has a history of doing. He bought a bunch of twitter stock, he posted memes about buying twitter, a bunch of his idiot supporters correspondingly bought twitter stock, which drove up the price.
Then he tried to back out of buying it, he got sued and the SEC got involved. Because he’d had an ongoing vendetta with the SEC they helped force him into buying it.
Then he was stuck being required to purchase an asset which was known to be nearly impossible to get a profit out of, with big loans from multiple parties.
I mean that’s a story. Its not the one I believe, and I don’t think my reasoning is that convoluted. Elon had to sell something to his backers and the argument that controlling these platforms is how you control the social fabric of the US is what I would have done for a pitch.
Like, he probably should have figured out Trumps contractual obligations to Truth social. Should we lay down a gentleman’s bet on Twitter acquiring Truth social in the next 12 months? If he can deliver an election for the Saudis, it will have been well worth it from their perspective.