Elon Musk he will not remember 2022 with nostalgia. As we anticipated at the time, the attempt to buy Twitter was the first big misstep of his career as a techno tycoon. For those who did not follow the sequence, it was more or less like this: after years of a quite tense relationship and after announcing that he would found his own social network, “because Twitter does not guarantee freedom of expression” (this, according to Musk, of course) , on April 4 the founder of SpaceX and Tesla bought 9.1% of the shares of the trill network. He knew almost immediately that, despite having become the majority shareholder, he would still have to share the board with eleven other executives.
Apparently, it was not what he intended, so ten days later, on the 14th of that month, made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion. In both cases it was news and caused both rejection and enthusiasm. But it is one thing to go to space or compete with the centennial industry of gasoline cars and quite another to try to control that ecosystem that is the preferred place for the powerful to communicate what they want (including Elon, who has over 100 million followers today ) and at the same time the most dire factory of rumors and false news that has been reported. All this, nuanced with the best information, unfiltered humor and permanent assembly.
LA NACION was skeptical about Musk’s true intentions to stay with Twitter; after all, why hadn’t other colossi, like Facebook, caught up with him? It was very rare. With Instagram, WhatsApp and Twitter in its conglomerate, Facebook (that is, Meta) would have had the entire ecosystem of what we call social networks in one hand. Except now Zuckerberg got a TikTok, but that’s another story.
Anyway, it was rare that Musk wanted to pay so much money for something that was in poor condition and that no one else wanted to buy. But could you back out? Yes of course. There was a penalty for doing something like that, of $1 billion. But I could.
In any case, the decision to buy Twitter did not seem very wise, and things were only about to get worse. Shares in his main source of foreign currency, Tesla, began to fall; among other things because the tycoon had to get money from there to buy Twitter. What in almost any other context would have been just a show of power (you’re the world’s richest individual, with a fortune of more than $270 billion, for a reason), fell an inch from the category of civil war. Twitter resignations, Tesla scandal, and so on. Wall Street does not like scandals, it is known. Among other pearls that declared those days, Elon, a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, said it was wrong for Twitter to shut down former US President Donald Trump’s account, apparently forgetting that the takeover of that country’s Congress by Trump supporters cost the lives of five people. And to add insult to injury, Trump said he would not go back to Twitter or get paid.
To err is human
Towards the end of April, and after resisting a bit, Twitter’s board said it accepted Musk’s offer. Then, out of the blue, the tycoon started questioning the number of automated spam accounts (spam bots, in jargon) that the company had officially reported. If real, the accusation was serious and could cancel the purchase agreement. The problem is that Twitter is publicly traded (its symbol is TWTR) and they cannot go around reporting anything. The fight between Parag Agrawal, the current CEO of Twitter, and Elon Musk over the count of false accounts had much more of a WhatsApp group convent than a serious debate. The point is that, while for some Musk had finally realized the crazy money he was paying for Twitter and for others it had all been a big joke by the businessman (either of the two options is serious), the threat that the purchase would be aborted began to grow. But there was a problem.
No, not the 1 billion penalty (which Musk refused to turn off anyway, arguing that he had been lied to with the number of spam bots), but with the letter of the contract, that at this point it no longer allowed him to eject. Just as he had offered the initial 43,000 million, which later became 46,500 million (for something that we left aside so as not to extend ourselves), on the 8th of this month Musk withdrew from the deal. Put simply, in three months, true to his style, he had done something unusual. He went from offering 43,000 million dollars for Twitter (almost the same amount that in 2008 Microsoft had offered to buy Yahoo!, and that Yahoo! did not accept) to withdraw from the agreement, as if nothing had happened.
Predictably, the tycoon was sued by the Twitter board. Logical. With all this melodrama, the company, which had already been quite tilted, was left in a catastrophic state. That is not legal, prima facie. They had the first classic “see you in court” date tomorrow, July 19, 2022, but Musk was asking for the date to be pushed back to February. We will update.
But none of this is really bad for Musk. The really bad thing is that a large part of its power lies in its image, neat and meticulously constructed by the media. Now for the first time terrible child of business, the alpha entrepreneur, the homeless innovator who took the world ahead (Mars included), who had the luxury of violating regulations without flinching and whose will to power seemed capable of conquering everything, screwed up. Even if he comes out more or less well from this soap opera, this story has shown two things. That Musk is human and therefore makes mistakes. He spent years trying to show himself infallible. The story with Twitter is open-ended, but it was definitely a misstep.