His ex-wife Talulah Riley asked him to buy the platform to restore the account known as Babylon Bee, a right-wing satire site that they both thought was funny but had been suspended by Twitter for breaching its rules. She wanted Twitter made "radically free-speech."
He secretly accumulated 9.2% of the company and when that was made public, in March 2022 he made a formal take-it-or-leave-it offer of $54.20 per share, valuing Twitter at $44 billion. At the time, the market capitalisation was about $33 billion, so he was paying quite a premium. Although a year or two before, it had reached as high as $56 billion ($70 per share).
The board eventually accepted the offer but Musk then had second thoughts. He decided he might be overpaying because he was convinced half of Twitter subscribers were bots, and he wanted to pull out. The board were forced to sue to get him to buy the business. As part of this process, they offered to provide non-public information about future revenue and earnings but this would have required Musk to sign a non-disclosure agreement and he rejected that. The so-called genius essentially bought Twitter blind, knowing only what was publicly available.
The really interesting stuff as far as understanding Musk's mindset is concerned comes at the point of sale. A court had set a deadline for the end of October and as the hours ticked away it became clear Musk was struggling to get the money together. He even wanted to 'borrow' $400 million from the $2.5 billion cash pile that Twitter had in the bank!!! In the event, however, he didn't need it.
Having acquired the business he set about swiftly destroying it. Executives who hadn't walked out as he walked in were summarily fired on the first day. And having assured a meeting of workers that no jobs would be lost, over the next few days he jettisoned over half, mainly those engaged in content moderation, legal, and engineering. Morale was at rock-bottom as you can imagine.
One of the ways he cut staff numbers was by offering redundancy via an email with "A fork in the road" in the subject line, exactly as he has recently done with US government employees, to slash the headcount.
At one point, after taking off with his family and others in his private jet from San Francisco late at night, he decided he wanted to go to one of Twitter's huge sites containing servers in Sacramento that was due to be closed and shifted to Atlanta, to start the dismantling work. They turned around over Nevada, went back to SF, got in cars to Sacramento, and started walking around the site which was still operational.
Musk pulled out a plug and stopped part of Twitter working!! It was only when the engineering manager pleaded with him not to touch anything else in case the whole site fell over and became unrecoverable, that he stopped. He's not a man who ever underestimates his own limited ability.
The workforce was ruthlessly and randomly cut. He loaded the business with debt (he only owns about 9% of Twitter), allowed the platform to descend into a cesspit of hate, packed with right-wing conspiracists, neo-Nazis, bots and trolls, driving advertisers and millions of dollars of revenue away. It's now worth under $10 billion although nobody really knows because it's a private company now.
He has declared that he wants Twitter to become an all-purpose app including the ability to transfer money peer-to-peer and pay bills, as a rival to Visa and Mastercard. But who now would trust Elon Musk with their private information or money after his DOGE department downloaded data on millions of Americans onto his own insecure servers using unvetted people?
Musk comes over as exactly what he is. A filthy rich megalomaniac who is nowhere near as smart as he thinks. He is headed for a serious fall.
