Nobody who wants to make money signs a binding agreement to buy an unprofitable company at a substantial premium...
If you want to make money, you at least make sure you try to drive hard for the best deal possible. But we know that he was more interested in trolling and making jokes, down to the purchase price of $54.20 per share.
Unless he's willing to throw about $1.4 billion a year at a personal free speech absolutism project in which Twitter is no longer beholden to advertisers. He's certainly capable of doing that for the rest of his life, if he really wanted to.
A compromise solution is Elon carries Twitter until he can turn it around.
It was best to get the bad news in terms of layoffs and an extra charges out of the way early and over quickly.
I have little doubt that he can build on the product to make it more attractive in terms of functionality.
The difficult part is setting moderation standards and having a quality debate. Anything built on top of the "town square" is limited by the quality of the "town square" environment.
Elon is too optimistic and sees himself as in the "reasonable centre" but he is actually to the right of the "reasonable centre". The other problem is expecting rational and respectful debate,. constructive debate whch changes people's opinions. Certainly the extreme left and the extreme right are very unlikely to engage in respectful debate and to change their opinions.
If Twitter viewers are able to set filters such as "no politics", "no cryptocurrency", "no violence" etc, to filter out debate they don't want to see, that will be a big help.
Elon has hinted at the development of these filters and I think a default to age appropriate filters, or "no nasty stuff" for new users is a good idea.
To be successful, Twitter needs filters
l've joined Twitter, but never posted, and I don't intend to post.
The reason I joined was to subscribe to "State Emergency" information about wild fires, storms, floods, road closures. That service is working well, and saves lives, I expect them to pay the $8 per month though there is a slight case for the fee to be waved for some public service users.
jalopnik.com
