Elon Musk needs to purchase Twitter once more, spam bots and all

Elon Musk needs to purchase Twitter for $44 billion. Once more.

The world’s richest man has reportedly informed Twitter that he’d like to maneuver ahead with the deal he first agreed to in April: He needs to pay $54.20 a share for the messaging service.

The distinction between now and final spring, after all, is that within the interim Musk tried to stroll away from his signed contract to purchase Twitter. And that Twitter sued him to attempt to implement that deal, and that the 2 sides are at present in court docket getting ready for a trial that’s scheduled to begin October 17 — lower than two weeks from now.

What modified? We don’t know but. We do know that Musk is at finest unpredictable, and that we shouldn’t take something he says or does at face worth. Even when the 2 sides met in Delaware court docket on Tuesday to debate the proposal, because the New York Occasions has reported, it doesn’t imply it’ll undergo or that he gained’t have one other reversal in some unspecified time in the future.

Nonetheless, we will briefly recap how we received right here, and focus on the challenges Musk will face if he really does find yourself proudly owning Twitter.

The tl;dr backstory: Final spring, Musk, one in all Twitter’s most prolific customers, gathered a 9 p.c stake in Twitter however mentioned he wasn’t planning on buying the service. Then he agreed to hitch the corporate’s board, then determined he didn’t wish to try this, after which introduced that he wished to purchase Twitter. The corporate first rejected his supply after which, after trying round for a greater different, agreed to his phrases.

Inside weeks of that announcement, although, the marketplace for tech shares started sliding, as did the worth of Tesla shares — Musk’s major supply of wealth. Then Musk, who had introduced that one in all his targets in buying Twitter was to rid it of bots he felt plagued the service, started complaining that Twitter might need too many bots, and that the deal “couldn’t transfer ahead” till he received extra knowledge about that. In July, Musk formally introduced that he wished out of the deal, after which Twitter sued him for breach of contract.

The truth that Twitter was making an attempt to drive Musk to purchase an organization that initially didn’t need him as an proprietor, coupled with the truth that most authorized specialists believed that Musk had a poor authorized case, led to a standard knowledge amongst tech observers: In some unspecified time in the future Musk would settle with Twitter, pay some sort of multibillion-dollar penalty, and stroll away.

The present information wipes away that risk, for now. So we’re again to the query we began asking again in April: What’s going to Musk do with Twitter if he really owns it?

Keep in mind, the explanation Twitter was out there for buy within the first place is that the messaging service appears essential to at the least a slice of its 238 million energetic customers, however has a enterprise that’s nowhere close to as huge or beneficial as, say, Meta’s.

So with a purpose to change that — and to make Twitter value at the least as a lot because the $44 billion Musk would shell out to personal the corporate — Musk would face main challenges: He’d must discover a strategy to improve its consumer base, lower prices, and generate extra income.

Nevertheless it grew to become clear, nearly instantly, that Musk didn’t have rather more than a hunch about what he would do with Twitter if he owned it. An early proposal he floated to potential buyers final spring included fully fanciful notions, like discovering one other 750 million customers inside a couple of years.

And the discharge final week of textual content messages Musk acquired and despatched final spring bolstered the notion that Musk, together with a few of his richest superfans, weren’t positive precisely how Musk would do all of this — simply that they had been positive {that a} man who pioneered electrical vehicles and despatched rockets into house after which landed them again on earth might simply clear up Twitter.

Now — perhaps — we’ll get an opportunity to see in the event that they had been proper, in spite of everything.