This is the part you are overthinking: "Wouldn't it make the most sense..."
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" to excuse an institution or individual they like, but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour at Twitter as the performance of an evil genius playing a game that we're too subtle to understand, rather than those of a bully fool who is burning his life down thanks, apparently, to a crippling social media addiction and an inability to get over his ex.
It's funny how people will argue "never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" ...
... but here people are bending over backwards to justify Musk's behaviour ...
My issue with arguments like these is that these are collective opinions held by different segments of people, not some nebulous singular person whose opinion can be safely discarded because of contradictory statements.
Maybe you don’t remember the 80s but this is how pretty much every hostile takeover went down. Leveraged buyout > massive layoffs and restructuring > change in business model and the next thing we’ll likely see is some form of selling off assets or divisions, not sure what those would be in Twitter’s case but it won’t be a surprise if they come up with something.
I do, in fact, remember the 80s. And the point of asset stripping in that era was that the targets were generally companies with good fundamentals in parts, which had either merged or grown in ways that resulted in those good components propping up losing components, which was what allowed the asset strippers to make their money via the process described. The successful asset strippers also had generally done a lot of analysis before they made their aquisition.
What detailed analysis did Musk do? A bunch of DMs with Jason Calcinis pulling numbers out of his arse? What's the core profitable business that Twitter has that is encumbered by unprofitable components?
If I wanted to look at a case for an asset stripping target in social media, I'd probably look at something more like Facebook, where there's a case that unrolling their rats' nest of aquisitions like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus could result in some valuable spin-offs: for example, if WhatsApp went back to a stripped-down standalone company with a small fee it would probably be quite profitable, as it had been before being Facebooked. But Twitter is twitter. That's it.
The only thing I see with this is an echo of when this site's owners sacked Musk for fucking up PayPal with deranged, incoherent edicts. The difference is that no-one can sack Musk to save Twitter from him.
Yes, a lot of people remember the asset stripping wave in the 1980s, but not the merger wave of the 1960s. At that time, it was fashionable to assume that the core expertise of "management" could be transferred to pretty much any field, and so you had these bizarre conglomerations of businesses. It turned out that "management" wasn't so transferable, resulting in one big company having a few profitable ventures that were subsidizing unprofitable ventures, and the 1980s saw a lot of those conglomerates split apart (and they probably took it too far in the other direction).
At some point, we need a history of post-war corporate capitalism, because it sure seems like it is driven by one fad piled atop another fad.
There were a lot of awful LBOs, but Elon may take the cake. Even the worst LBOs had a business case, even if in terms of asset stripping, outsourcing, channel stuffing, and other aggressive financial engineering.
When Elon bought it Twitter had no free cash flow, existing long term debt, no assets to sell, etc. It's an enormous LBO with strange characteristics done by a guy with no LBO experience, advised by Jason Calacanis and David Sacks.
Most of the people judging Musk are unaccomplished 20-somethings with massive inferiority complexes, or mercurial line workers who loved Musk until he publicly rejected the nonsense of their precious political cult, I mean party.
> Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech…
Lol, that’s some good comedy. He’s already gone on a ban run of people mocking him. He didn’t even make a month before showing his true colors on this talking point.
I don’t know how anyone could possibly still believe something like that at this point. The past two weeks have just been one argument after another against every point you just made.
> Or maybe he's just a guy that believes in free speech and wants to change Twitter for the better
How many times does this need to debunked? Elon Musk has a long and storied history, with direct evidence, of attacking and taking punitive, perceived or actual, action on anyone that has even mildly disagreed with him. He even tweeted, several times I might add, "Chomsky sucks" just because Chomsky said a few mild things that disagreed with Musk.
> which includes making it not hemorrhage money
Why does he even care enough about it? Oh yea, Twitter is a source of people disagreeing with him. Further, he overnight added billions of dollars of debt to Twitter.
It would makes sense to hire a CEO. It would make sense to plan a layoff so you don't have to beg key people to return, etc. Musk frames this as making mistakes while working fast.
In this case it will push more people to leave. There is probably intent, if not exactly thought and planning behind this because Really Bad Things have not happened yet.
An indication that might change is that the CISO, security chief, and privacy chief resigned together, possibly with advice of counsel re the two FTC consent decrees.