He was kicked off the board before he even started, now he's pouting like a spoiled child. A spoiled child who can afford to throw around tens of billions of dollars, but a spoiled child just the same. He's like the archetypal rich kid in a children's show who tries to buy friends because that's the only way they can understand the world.

He never joined because of the restrictions over how much stock he could own.

That would suggest he planned to buy more from day one.

Why buy Twitter for vastly inflated price when you have the cash - and the gumption - to build your own MuskSphere and Musk all you want ?

You're targetting Twitter just because it's there, like a whore on the street corner ?

Even a whore can say no.

The pimp (shareholders) might disagree. Does that make Wall St. a red light zone?

I agree with your 'what's the point' though !

rem - how to make millions in a few days (aka pump and dump)

10 - buy shares at x

20 - offer to buy the company for x+y to push up the price

30 - sell shares for x+y

40 - keep profit y

50 - goto 10

Erm... not quite...

40 Keep profit of (y - (y*T))

Where T is the Tax %.

You're forgetting capital gains tax.

sorry - i assumed rich people don't pay tax

You forgot that Pump and Dump schemes are illegal.

The US SEC would love nothing more than to take Elon down a peg or three.

Simple: Twitter is an established platform and has a lot of users already, so there's less risk.

there's less risk

On the one hand, Musk could start Mutter and fail to get enough users to make it viable. On the other, he could acquire Twitter for an eye-watering sum of money and have sufficient of its users leave after his transformation that it's no longer viable. There's certainly less at stake in the former.

If he gets hold of Twitter then high on his list of things to do is to allow No 45 back on the service.

The same goes for Marjorie 'Jewish Space Lasers' Taylor Greene.

The new Messiah... aka Elon Musk will be applauded by his cult members. Controlling Twitter will give him a few million more disciples.

"I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy."

Should read: I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be my platform for marketing spin around the globe, and I believe is necessary to silence my critics after consistently failing to deliver on multiple occasions.

If a billionaire wanted to silence critics and spread their own message wouldn't they just buy a major national newspaper?

the platform for free speech

Anyone who thinks free speech needs a single technological platform has rather misunderstood what free speech is.

I wonder how's he going to pay for it. He may be "worth" $300m but almost all of that value is in shares of companies - mainly Telsa - he's not going to have $40m sitting in a bank account. Sell some of his Telsa shares? (Would he risk becoming the non-top shareholder in the company he's most associated with?)

Paradoxically I think the practice with super rich people like that is actually to borrow the money. The lender knows that you should be good for it, as you have that worth in stock. Lots of empires (Trump comes immediately to mind) are built on debt.

I read somewhere that Trump is so heavily in debt that his net worth is significantly less than zero.

Trump is so heavily in debt that his net worth is significantly less than zero.

As a certain Sergeant-Major Williams once put it, and I think rather succinctly, "oh, dear, how sad, never mind"

Pretty sure it was: "Oh dear. How sad. What a pity"

Ah, that reminds me. How is Mr Trump's new social media platform doing?

Jimmy Carter is rumored to be ready to buy it for peanut

The point of wealth is it's the estimated value of what you own minus what you owe.

Converting that wealth into money is a risk, and you lose value via capital gains tax (Capital Gains Tax is a tax on the profit when you sell (or 'dispose of') something (an 'asset') that's increased in value. ).

It gets complicated with the various allowances and exceptions - and don't expect me to explain them as I'm not the right person to do so.

Anyway, liquidating assets to gain money to buy something is very, very inefficient due to taxes. Instead it's better/cheaper to borrow against your assets to buy more assets then pay off the loan. It may be possible to sacrifice existing assets to do so, but that depends on the exceptions under Capital Gains.

So no, it's not paradoxical: It's how to avoid liquidating $2m in assets just to make a $1m purchase.

That's why it's cheaper to borrow. The value of assets is collateral against the debt. If the debt defaulted the lender would take over the assets.

The downside is all on the victim the company being bought. That ends up being saddled with the debt. The interest and payments can become a money pit. Maplin is an example UK readers will be familiar with.

"Maplin is an example UK readers will be familiar with."

Or pretty much every major sports club owned by million / billionaires.

>The lender knows that you should be good for it, as you have that worth in stock.

If the bank is convinced the stock has long term value they will take the stock as collateral.

You never pay back the loan and the bank takes the stocks when you die.

Effectively you get tax-free money for life in return for considering the bank in your will

" I wonder how's he going to pay for it "

Folks in Musk's financial league can borrow almost any sum (indeed as Trump could).

He may be "worth" $300m

I think you've dropped some zeroes.

Another dangerous megalomaniac throws a strop.

Another dangerous megalomaniac throws a strop.

LOL, don't worry.

It's not like he's trying to R&D an army of self driving robots, or has access to a giant missle factory or anything really supervillanous.

"Give me what I want, or I'll sell my shares and you can watch the value of your shares plummet." ... that's serious toys out of pram territory which shows exactly why he shouldn't be the head of a social media company. But then, we have Zuckermuck... so... what a world we live in.

With Elon Musk, it appears to me that before expressing any strong opinions on what he says and/or does, one should at least consider the possibility that he might be a Troll of epic proportions. If one is so inclined, one might even see rather quirky messages in his stunts, possibly even critiques in a "theater of the absurd" kind of way.

But then again, there is no way to know for certain. In any case:

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day.” Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

[Arthur Dent] "And are you?"

[Slartibartfast] "No, that's where it all falls down, of course."

"Pity," said Arthur with sympathy. "It sounded like quite a good lifestyle otherwise."

That's a great idea. Reconsider your position and then Shut The Fuck Up for a while.

5-year old child trapped in a 50-year old man's body.

Watch this be a pump and dump. Buy a ton of shares, announce he's going to buy the rest, inflate the price and back out while dumping what he has. Same trick he pulled with Tesla accepting bitcoin payments.

If Musk wants to be able to post whatever he wants without infringing on the T&Cs of a platform run by a third party, why not just create his own blog where he can post whatever he wants? Even if his blog were getting millions of hits per day its going to cost a significantly lot less than $40B to run.

After all unlike us plebs, who if we made our own blog would unlikely to get too much attention. Musk has enough fan who would follow him elsewhere even if he closed his twitter and posted everything on a private blog. And hes still going to make the news when he posts something controversial. I've just checked and pedoguy.com is available if he wants it. Obviously Pedoguy is a local slang term from where i am from meaning tech entrepreneur, and im sorry if that means something else where Musk is.