Is the Musk mojo running low on magic?
Trying to guess what Elon Musk will do from day to day is like trying to hold a moonbeam in your hand. The state of play this week is that he wants to buy Twitter for the $54.20 (about R975) a share he initially offered in April.
What does this mean for him and the social media company? Is it good or bad news for either that he seems ready to drop his legal challenges and take over the business he has criticised for months?
The answer depends on whatever strikes Musk’s fancy tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. Easier to put a cracked egg back in its shell than to forecast what comes next.
His decision to buy Twitter six months ago seemed based on a little more forethought than his decisions to, say, tweet he was taking Tesla private (which got him into a legal mess with the US Securities and Exchange Commission) or make fun of Bill Gates’s body, or claim his (not yet built) cybertruck can also be a boat.
It’s not the type of stuff normal
CEOs do.
But this lark had real consequences, driving up Twitter’s stock price and locking Musk into a process he has struggled to escape.
Twitter shareholders were thrilled to get bought out at Musk’s initial offering price and will likely be happy again, judging by the stock price surge on this week’s news.
Twitter’s employees were less thrilled. And Musk was perhaps least thrilled of all when it dawned on him he would soon have to scrape together $44bn and then own a social media company that has never figured out how to make money.
He may only be abandoning his effort to escape the deal because he seems to be losing ground in the legal fight over it, the discovery process of which gifted the world with a mountain of his sometimes embarrassing personal texts just this week.
In some possible future, Musk might be just the ticket for fixing Twitter, or at least keeping its stock price afloat.
His personal mojo has been the key ingredient in the secret formula making Tesla worth $760bn despite its own struggle to make money. But the mojo may be approaching its shelf life.
Potential electric-car buyers are being turned off by Musk’s online antics, which keep veering onto political third rails most CEOs publicly avoid.
Tesla’s stock price was only briefly bothered this week by the idea of
Musk selling more of it to raise cash. But his abrupt U-turn on buying Twitter, dropping all those vehement arguments that the company lied to him about bots and whatnot, seems like another blow to his reputation.
And there must be a critical mass at which Musk’s side projects, from building rockets and boring tunnels to negotiating peace in Ukraine, weigh on his ability to run Tesla or Twitter, or both.
As for the social media platform’s users and the public, we’re back to square one, wondering how Musk will handle Twitter’s censorship, the impetus for this fiasco in the first place.
Will he let former US president Donald Trump back onto the platform just in time for the 2024 election? Then there’s the whole bot thing, which is apparently still front of mind for Musk, at least if you take at face value his accusation that his Ukraine peace plan fell victim to a bot army.
Might as well shake a magic eight ball for answers. —