Good morning! Just sitting down to get going after the weekend, and what do I see? Elon Musk’s Twitter deal is (maybe) on again.
The saga of Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase Twitter has been a long one. In April, Musk offered $54.20 a share to purchase the social media giant. The BlueCheckTwits predictably came unhinged, claiming that Musk taking over Twitter would lead to the end of free speech. After a couple of contentious months, during which Musk suggested Twitter contains far more bots than the company is letting on, Musk pulled out of the deal in July.
You’d think that would be the end of it. I certainly did, reasoning that there was no way the ‘Swamp’ would allow Musk to expose the seedy underbelly of Twitter that is shadowbans and government-directed censorship. The control that Twitter is offering to the ‘experts’ is far more valuable than $44 billion divvied up between the shareholders.
I’ve written multiple times about how the government is using media companies (including the social variety) as an extension of the state, getting people banned for ‘wrongthink’ or even censoring entire stories before a presidential election. And the revelations just continue to come out:
Nothing to see here! Just the government acting in accordance with private industry to censor the political speech of others — including the sitting political adversaries of the current administration! (If only we had a name for that!)
All these signs pointed to Twitter remaining in its current (awful) hands. But a lawsuit filed by the Twitter shareholders may be the key to Musk ultimately acquiring Twitter after all. The shareholders claimed that the ‘bot talk’ was simply Musk trying to tank the deal — a deal that they didn’t even vote on until two weeks ago. Now to avoid going to trial, Musk has shoved all his chips into the middle of the table, once again offering to buy the company at an inflated price.
With so much control on the line, the game is essentially the same as it was in April: How does the Twitter Swamp find a way to avoid the Musk deal to prevent him from looking under the hood and telling us all about what he finds there? For now, it seems like they may have painted themselves into a corner by villainizing Musk.
More a game of chicken than 4d chess. Still not sure who won.
This time the market believes it will happen so those that hesitated to buy earlier missed some profit taking. Of course, bigger fool theory remains intact. If Musk finds monetary value then the shares will do well under new management. If to affect and guide public opinion, who knows. As SubStack has discovered the conservatives do wish for a platform but given the fools on several of them, even some conservatives are intolerable. Perhaps Musk is observing Truth Social having difficulties in financing going forward where he feels his financing secure in a Twitter buy. Now that Alexa is gone are there tools that show traffic comparisons for the big social media sites?