is on. Elon Musk has officially filed to kill his own Twitter takeover, and Twitter is calling his hoax. They will see Musk in court. And while it’s only going to get messier from here on out, an important ruling has already been made by Elon Musk himself: He doesn’t have what it takes to run Twitter. And this is a huge blow to their own central mythology.
We’ll look at the specifics of Musk’s formal SEC filing in a minute, but first it’s important to remember what he said about the deal and why he wanted to do it in the first place. Not that the world forced on the world’s richest man to acquire a relatively small social network. And Musk’s conduct around the deal has been marked by a lot of outright troll behavior. A reasonable person would conclude that he was never serious with it to begin with, which is already splitting a 4D-chess narrative for a lot of Musk stances and Twitter haters who blame his mistake. Seems intentional. but.
Musk has said a few things in the Twitter takeover frenzy that just can’t be ignored. That’s because they strike at the heart of his original reputation: a visionary, a bold industrialist, a futurist, and perhaps even the man who will solve climate change and multi-planetary civilization. Certainly, lately he has worked tirelessly to attract a vast base of social reactionaries and various right-wingers who seem to care more about his trolling than about SpaceX or Tesla’s missions. But Musk’s real credibility – if he ever had – was in the face of truly enormous and ambitious efforts to change the world and make it better.
He probably didn’t need it, but he brought the same world-saving energy to the Twitter deal:
- Musk said he was inspired by the fact that Twitter had become a “real city square” and that it was “really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely.” (He talked a lot about “free speech” during this time.)
- Speaking at a TED conference, Musk said the deal is not a way to make money. Some of his precise words: “It’s about the future of civilization, but you don’t care about economics at all.”
- Later, speaking internally to Twitter employees, Musk said, “I want Twitter to contribute to a better, longer-term civilization where we better understand the nature of reality.”
- Musk: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I’ll unlock it. ,
These statements are above everything because (a) things that are important for the future of human life It’s not something you normally know about when people troll, and (b) this should be especially true if you’re Elon Musk, who spent his entire modern career developing the idea since Tesla That he is on a mission to save and spread the future of humanity. Civilization Beyond the Stars. Does he tweet dumb memes a lot? Yes. Did he send a car into space as a joke? Sure. But their companies’ missions are serious. Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy”. Neuralink wants to build devices that help people with paralysis “gain freedom.” And SpaceX? This is nothing short of “enabling people to live on other planets”.
So: Musk has intentionally spent his career solving some of the world’s toughest problems. He delivers a lot of keynotes, puts big ideas on board, and makes a lot of promises. Incidentally, this campaign to save the world made him one of the biggest and most active fans of on twitter, And let’s be real: The guy loves to tweet. The only person in the world who could love to tweet more than Elon Musk has been banned from the platform and impeached twice by the United States Congress.
But remember: Musk didn’t say, “I want to buy Twitter because I love tweeting and I command an army of users here.” he said Twitter was vital to the future of human civilization, And so, spiritually, the deal joins the ranks of the Tesla and SpaceX of the world.
What kind of problems will keep this guy from unlocking Twitter’s true potential? To help run it and, along with your other companies, help humanity flourish in the future? He actually makes only two claims in his SEC filings:
- Twitter won’t give it the data it needs to find out how many spam bots are on the platform.
- Twitter fired some people and lost some executives.
This is weak crybaby stuff.
Musk has been at loggerheads about the alleged bot issue for some time, even in a public beef with Twitter’s CEO about it. I am not going to open this whole controversy – Delaware Court of Chancery gonna examine this in some detail – but tl; The DR is that Musk wants to make a great deal on a problem known to every social media company on the planet that has had vast amounts of resources spent fixing it over several decades. This is simply a fundamentally insensitive position of a man prepared to solve problems shaming the world like climate change.
But let’s just assume for fun that Musk is right. When he started the deal and looked under the hood and laid out his plans for Twitter employees, he found that Twitter’s bot population is up 5% to 20%. So what? What is the spread of 90 million users when TikTok and Facebook are ahead of you Arabs, If your position is that Mark Zuckerberg is an unelected dictator of speech, how will leaving Twitter help you pick him up? And why would you argue in your SEC filing that revenue from active users is at stake? It doesn’t sound like “the economics doesn’t care at all.” It seems to care only about economics.
And to blow the deal because some Twitterers lay off employees and roll out new features (hi, co-tweeting!) while continuing to operate as normal – get real. You are buying Twitter for $44 billion. It’s yours now. If you want, you can clean the house and fix or reverse all those wrong decisions that basically bring the stage to your sight. No one will stop you! The SEC couldn’t even tell you to stop tweeting!
There are several possible theories as to why Musk put himself, Twitter, and the world through this charioteer. But in the end Musk wrote a check that his myth couldn’t cash.
We are left with two possibilities. Either Musk doesn’t think he can do the work he promised on Twitter, and isn’t the world-changing force he’s been made to do. Or, he was lying about the lofty ideals and philosophies that built his companies and his image.
What kind of man trolls the world for a better future?