Hmm. I hadn’t even looked at the rest of this nonsense you posted.
My guess is that he is now out to destroy the Twitter deal.
Okay. At least you say it’s a guess. Of course Musk actually said that he’s “Still committed to acquisition” but I guess you think he’s lying.
There is no way that a mere 5% of the Twitterverse is fake accounts (his sudden stalking horse), and he knows it.
I think that’s true, but we aren’t talking the “Twitterverse”, we’re talking about this assertion: “Twitter Inc. estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.” I don’t have any feel for what a “monetizable daily active user” looks like. It’s quite possible that the typical bot doesn’t show up in that list – bots don’t read posts, don’t make posts until activated, and probably are usually set to post only occasionally. But I don’t know. Do you?
Two things going on: the market is tanking, which means he can re-enter at a lower price, even after paying a breakup fee, as Intercst notes. Moreover, he is pledging his Tesla stock for a fat part of the acquisition price (so he doesn’t actually have to sell it), but those pledges are generally made in real dollars because the lenders don’t want to accept the volatility risk. With Tesla shares also tanking, he faces a ‘silent’ margin call and would have to pledge even greater numbers for an asset which is currently devaluing.
Actually, he’s reduced the amount of Tesla stock he has pledged (see subsequent SEC filings), by about half, and is actively pursuing other investors so that he need pledge no stock at all. So much for the rest of your theorizing. Oh wait, there’s more.
So he kills the deal, hoping for a mulligan and an even fatter pitch, acquisition wise.
I can imagine that he would like to renegotiate some aspects of the deal, especially if he’s finding that potential co-investors are saying something like “Sure, I’m in for $1B at a $10 lower offer price.” It’s possible.
I would surmise that it is extremely difficult to persuade him of anything he doesn’t already believe, but I wonder if the ‘everyone will pay to use Twitter’ theory has gotten some pushback from any insiders he does bother to listen to.?
You would be completely wrong about that. Musk is easy to convince he’s wrong. Just show him that reality says otherwise. Examples are how he reversed course on excessive automation during the Model 3 ramp; how he scrapped the approach of building the Starship out of carbon fiber and going to steel instead; and him ditching radar as part of the autonomous sensor suite on all new Teslas. These decisions take an almost unimaginable ability to say “What an idiot I’ve been. We have to start over.” Most people, even the best of us, succumb to the sunk cost fallacy (and ego) rather than do the right thing. This is one of Musk’s superpowers.
As to everyone paying to use Twitter, he never suggested that. You are making the usual error of reading what people say about what Musk says rather than reading what he actually says.
-IGU-