Elon Musk vs. Twitter – Photo: Imago
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The canceled takeover of the 280-character service makes both Twitter and Elon Musk look bad. However, the former social media pioneer has a lot more to lose, says MEEDIA author Nils Jacobsen.
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It was a smoke screen from the start: $44 billion for a microblogging service that was clearly past its prime – why did Elon Musk do that to himself?
“In the social media era, there was probably no service that squandered its potential with such consistency as Twitter,” says MEDIA Author Nils Jacobsen – Illustration: Bertil Brahm
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Sure, there’s the matter of relevance. Twitter may not scale remotely like Instagram, or even grow like Snapchat, but the world’s supposed intellectual elite have been circulating and dueling here for the past 16 years. Donald Trump is the paragon of rise and fall in 280 characters.
So were there political motives behind Musk’s move? Finally, the richest man in the world came out as a (future) Republican voter. As the new Twitter owner, Musk could and wanted to lift the ban on the controversial ex-president. Nothing is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because three months after the full-bodied takeover announcement, Musk no longer wants anything to do with the social media pioneer, which was worth $44 billion to him in April.
Elon Musk stays true to himself with the role backwards. His behavior is as erratic as it was four years ago when he flirted with a stock market retreat at the height of the Tesla crisis and pulled the joint on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The difference: Four years later, thanks to the miraculous rise in Tesla shares, Musk is 25 times wealthier and, as the richest man in the world, can afford just about any nonsense, even an apparent intention to acquire in the double-digit billions, which he then does does not go through.
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It is quite possible that Musk’s Twitter posse will end up costing more than the stipulated $1 billion break-up fee, which for the 21st century Howard Hughes is still no more than the much-cited peanuts – fluctuating on a normal trading day Musk’s fortune quickly by ten or more billion dollars.
The thing is really bitter for Twitter. Much loved by us journalists, there is also arguably no service in the entire social media era that has squandered its potential as consistently as Twitter. Twitter could have been anything: a veritable Facebook alternative, the first Instagram, or at least a highly profitable news medium like Bloomberg.
At some point in the past decade, Twitter should have been worth $100 billion. The $44 billion offered by Musk was the last, really very last payday during the ongoing stock market crash of tech and internet stocks, reminiscent of Microsoft’s Yahoo offer before the great financial crisis. An unusual but not undeserved check for pioneering work.
One question is whether Twitter would have benefited from Musk’s culture shock. Certainly, it would have been an open-ended restart. What follows now, however, is foreseeable. Twitter’s management was humiliated and counted. Due to the lawsuit against Musk to enforce the takeover, the US company is strategically unable to act, presumably for years. The game is over. Twitter is like a defeated Confederate army that is now suing its new landowner to ask to be taken over after the first refusal. It’s hard to imagine a more degrading end to this proud social media service. But it was never without drama on Twitter, after all.
