Elon Musk is apparently going to follow through with the contract that he signed with Twitter and pay $44 billion to acquire the company. As I wrote here before, I’m not a Musk fan. I imagine there was a huge amount of fussing and fighting within the Musk universe until his lawyers finally got him to realize that his case was a loser and that he’s on the hook for specific performance (i.e., buying Twitter at the agreed-upon price) since he breached the contract in multiple obvious ways. It would be a big psychic blow to Elon to lose in court, so here we are.
I hate to make predictions about capricious assholes, but I have a few:
- As soon as he has keys to Twitter, Musk will overrule some user and content bans, and he may do something big and splashy like re-instating Trump. But I doubt he’ll make long-lasting significant changes since he lacks the attention span.
- Twitter will be worse as a platform and probably no better as a business, continuing a meh-at-best profitability record under Musk.
- Musk will soon lose interest and probably quietly sell his shares at a loss in a few years.
Twitter is a for-profit company, and the board did a good job tying Musk down with the contract to get shareholders a good return. The fundamental fact is that Twitter’s penetration has lagged the big socials (Facebook and YouTube), and the youngs are more likely to use Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok. Elon isn’t going to change that by doing a little feature twiddling and letting more fascists onto the platform. I realize that Twitter is the de-facto social media standard for political junkies, but we’re just a small part of the social media demographic. The real financial action is elsewhere, and Musk got suckered into a bad deal, no matter how much lipstick he’s going to try to put on this pig.
Alison Rose 💙🌻💛
I greatly dislike the fact that I am living in the same timeline as the world’s first edgelord billionaire (to borrow a phrase from the philosopher John Oliver).
Betty Cracker
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: Same.
dmsilev
Another prediction: Assuming this goes through, there will be an immediate exodus of most of the Twitter employees who can get better jobs under slightly-less-assholish bosses elsewhere. Without the people who actually understand how to keep the thing running, it’ll start to lose reliability almost immediately.
terry chay
Seems like you are counting chickens before they are hatched. Announcing/leaking is not the same as follow through. I’ll believe it when it actually goes through.
Plus, Musk is highly leveraged. Not sure he can “quietly sell the shares” when the company will not be public nor will he be able to afford to take any loss. He would have to take it public again which would be a couple years away and, ironically, it’s not actually guaranteed that the richest man in the world actually can last that lonn.
BruceFromOhio
Despised the twatter prior, even more so now. It’s rampant trashing of discourse and lightning-speed transmission of utter stupidity and simpering idiocy are unparalleled. Any business modeled on it should be unsustainable, how it even rates a ‘meh’ is incomprehensible. That an edgy techbro asshole can (and apparently now will) burn forty-four billion dollars on it indicates the last signpost for civilizations’ exit is in the rearview and getting smaller.
wegners shoppers club member mistermix
@dmsilev: Eventually, yes, they’ll lose some employees. But I’m guessing not right away. All these acquisitions come with some form of “golden handcuffs” for key employees (such as low-priced options that vest in a couple of years if they are still employed). So it will be a slow bleed, not a quick exsanguination.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Heh. F that guy.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
I imagine Twitter employees have been eying the exits for months.
wegners shoppers club member mistermix
@BruceFromOhio:
Come over here, friend, I have something to show you. It’s called TikTok. The transmission speed there, when compared to Twitter, is like comparing Ebola to Monkeypox.
StringOnAStick
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: They’ve already lost some. We have a neighbor who works there and he got his resume out there as soon as Elon started jerking the company around, and I’m sure he’s not the only one. I haven’t talked to him in a few months so I don’t know if he’s already left, but at the time he told me that a lot of his co-workers were eyeing the exits in order to beat the rush.
JPL
If we can find out who’s funding this, that would tell us the direction the company is going. If it is Russia or the Republicans, it can cause extreme havoc worldwide.
The Moar You Know
I was not aware they were in any way profitable at all. Well, this is why I keep coming here, it’s a continuing education.
Gin & Tonic
Speaking of Musk
matt
I wonder if he’ll move Twitter HQ to Austin. Fun stuff.
trollhattan
“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
–Sen. Everett Dirksen
NotMax
Entrepreneur shells out highest price ever paid for piece of sh*t. Film at 11.
matt
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛: The Oculus guy became a billionaire and staffed up an entire Russia-style boiler room of online shitposters for the 2016 election. Palmer Luckey is his name.
NotMax
First thing he’ll do is rename it Marconi.
//
Tony G
Besides being a general asshole, Musk really sounds like the World’s Worst Boss. I imagine that many Twitter employees have skillz that are useful elsewhere, so many of them will say “Take This Job and Shove It”.
cedichou
Here’s not buying it. It’s just a different approach to achieve the same (non) goal.
To buy, he needs financing. He doesn’t have the cash. If the banks don’t go with him, the deal can’t close.
He’s on the hook for the $1 billion fee, but not liable for the damage made you Twitter (his comments diminished the value of the company).
At this point, either he walks off on terms that are known and manageable ($1bil) or the board comes up to a new price at which he could find financing.
Humdog
He’s paying $44 billion to save his ego more bruising. His court case to drop his bid for Twitter included part one of a release of his communications about buying the company. Comms that provided more proof he is an idiot. Then the world dunked on his idiotic Ukraine “plan”. Part two of comms were to be released soon and I don’t think he wants to have more of his ignorance revealed. So his stupid ego is worth flushing billions down a toilet.
eversor
Social media in general is doing bad, ie facebook is losing people and in big trouble now. Part of the reason is it’s not cool anymore. These things all often follow a time line. First only the techies and extremely online get on them. Then you get the young on them, celeberties, and the kewl kidz. This is when things are great, then a funny thing happens, they go mainstream. All of a sudden you have peoples mom’s and dad’s, crazy uncles, political types, corporate types, and there is a massive “ewww, the people we hate and don’t want to talk to” and the original audience moves onto the next platform. The trick Zuck pulled was watching the next platform come up (what’s app, instragram) and then buying it out the moment he realized people were fleeing “the olds” to the new platform.
This is what the whole “metaverse” nonsense is about. Zuck has to keep moving wether it’s capturing the platform the young and cool are fleeing to or creating it. If he stops the whole house of cards comes crashing down. This is also drives people at facebook nuts, it’s not a cool place to work anymore because facebook the main product is for losers now so he’s losing talent to other companies. Tiktok is dangerous because he can’t aquire it.
Youtube does well because people like videos and it’s a core service. It’s going to be fine. For twitter it’s odd. It’s mostly just shit posting and people into politics arguing. Take the shit posting and arguing about twitter and all it’s good for dumping in your inbox messages from companies who’s products you like about new releases. I don’t think Musk can fix or break it.
Alex Smith
Respectfully, he’s gonna be a lot worse
In those Musk texts, the redacted senders and recipients lay the groundwork for a “war” and “battle” after Musk takes over Twitter — a “coordinated pressure campaign” that will lead to deplatforming of political enemies. https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1577344964404600832/photo/1
LeftCoastYankee
I read something yesterday (Bloomberg or Forbes?) saying he has a very large percentage of his wealth in Tesla stock.
This would be why he is leveraged (borrowing) for his other ventures. If he starts selling Tesla stock the price will go down (as will his wealth).
Also, he can’t sell any publicly traded stock where he’s an officer “quietly”. There is mandated SEC public reporting of officer trades and holdings.
He may be able to finagle “owning” Twitter and not being an officer, but that would probably not flush with his ego.
Short version: HAHA!
ETtheLibrarian
Sadly this will likely make Titter even worse (if that is possible) though I don’t expect it to be like a flipped switch.
geg6
@Gin & Tonic:
Jesus Christ. The crowns and dentures in that second pic. Horrifying. And I don’t even want to know what they did with the big pink dildo.
Poptartacus
The young’s in my life don’t tweet and their on Facebook for granny’s sake. They tik tok and you tube.
geg6
@matt:
So that will basically turn it into a sausage factory. Because no woman in her right mind will want to move to TX.
Pharniel
My money is still on him not wanting to be deposed later in the week, because holy fuck can you even imagine what a disaster that would be?
And no one looks cool during a deposition.
Another Scott
1. Supposedly he said his plan was to “turn it around” and sell/IPO it in 3 years. But he lies about almost everything, so who knows.
b. I too still don’t see a path to profitability and being a long-running concern.
iii. “Tech” is weird, even without narcissistic billionaires throwing their “genius” around.
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
@cedichou: According to Matt Levine, the banks have to provide the financing – as in contractually obligated.
geg6
@Poptartacus:
Definitely true for me also. And I have a lot of youngs in my life, being that I work directly with them every day.
Baud
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to stay the 11th Circuit stay of Judge Canon’s order (ie leave Judge Canon’s original order intact with respect to the classified documents).
Anonymous At Work
I thought Musk was proposing to take Twitter PRIVATE, as in buy out all shareholders. If that’s his plan, there won’t be shares to sell later. That would be his approach since he’d be answerable to any shareholder concerns and have a duty to them to manage Twitter profitably.
Anonymous At Work
@Baud: The Republicans on SCOTUS are either playing dumb (CJ Roberts, especially) or being arrogant and entitled (Alito) but both know that “legitimacy” is their sole source of power and being now openly partisan costs them any remaining “legitimacy”. They’ll reject the appeal, maybe say “Not yet” (which is the right move).
MisterDancer
Hunh. Funny — I’ve learned so much from Historians and others on Twitter, things I would never have discovered in a stack of reading.
The “two Kevin Ms” — Levin and Kruse — have done yeoman’s work in educating, via Twitter, on America’s History with Race. And that’s work that exists in parallel with Black people like Michael Harriot and Nikole Hannah-Jones.
And that’s aside from people who write on the connections between historical Conservatism, and today’s horror show, detailing in sometimes-painful detail how we got here.
Of course, that’s just one section of the service, and a section that is under heavy, sometimes second-by-second, abuse. I’ve not mentioned what I’ve learned of my many other interests, from being on Twitter over the years – but it’s been a major tool for my education and ethical development.
Adding to their burden — or the burden of ordinary people, esp. otherwise marginalized people — by tarring the whole damn service with a broad brush, is a bad look. Just because you derive no purpose from it, does not mean we need to throw out baby with the filthy bathwater of the degenerates and their bot farms.
catclub
No, Musk suckered himself into that deal. No due diligence is part of the contract. idiot.
catclub
@Gin & Tonic:
and Musk is contractually obligated to be helpful, not harmful, in obtaining financing.
StringOnAStick
@Gin & Tonic: Does that mean that if he can’t secure bank financing, he can walk away from the contract after paying the $1 billion fee?
I admit to being very concerned that he buys it and it turns into part of the R war machine, and we know the media loves Twitter as their own sandbox so they’ll never leave it. That combo puts the D side even farther behind the 8 ball.
MattF
As long as I can block and/or mute anyone or anything, my own Twitter usage is my own business— regardless of what Elon Musk does or thinks. The latest Muskrage is just noise, IMO.
Frankensteinbeck
Isn’t there an option of Musk paying a $1 billion off-ramp to not buy? I assumed he was trying to avoid paying that and the board was trying to enforce the contract so he had to.
Doug R
@BruceFromOhio:
Facebook would like a word.
Fair Economist
@The Moar You Know: Hunh, at that profitability, Musk is buying the company at a P/E of 13.4. Not that bad ,actually.
catclub
@Frankensteinbeck: Go read Matt Levine’s Bloomberg newsletters if you really are interested. A lot there. He is not terse.
Only if the financing falls through and it is not Musk’s fault – does he get away with only paying $1B. And there are some cases where even if the banks back out, Musk is still on the hook for the whole $44B
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: I saw on TPM, a 296-page filing! As if they’re going to read that.
Calouste
@wegners shoppers club member mistermix: Snag here is that Musk is taking Twitter private, and there is a legal limit on the number of shareholders (and by extension, options holders) a private company can have. It isn’t that low (4,000 IIRC), but low enough that there will be a lot of current Twitter employees who no longer will be getting options or stocks, and for whom the grass will be looking mightily greener just about anywhere else where their skills are in demand.
Sister Golden Bear
@geg6: Feature not a bug in Musk’s eyes.
gene108
Twitter is a niche social media platform used primarily by professionals – media, politicians, a few celebrities, etc. – to promote or send news stories around the world.
There’s some cat videos, and other cute and funny posts, but I find those are secondary to more serious topics.
Twitter’s what it is. It has niche. It can make some money. A larger social media platform that’s maxed out on engagement and new users will probably buy it in 10 years.
zhena gogolia
OT, but this is one of Colbert’s best monologues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiUS1a58aQw
trollhattan
Have you ever really faces the wrath of teenage girls? Well, one Iranian official now has.
https://twitter.com/ranarahimpour/status/1577006280736407553?cxt=HHwWgoDUvey20-IrAAAA
Geminid
@Fair Economist: Twitter’s P/E sure beats Tesla’s. The P/E for Tesla stock was 82 yesterday. It’s improved lately but only because the stock price has fallen.
zhena gogolia
Baud
@zhena gogolia: Reminds me of the Dick Cheney/Judith Miller scheme.
Frank Wilhoit
@cedichou: You’ve got it figured out. Meanwhile he’s probably been mitigating the $1B by playing the stock.
randy khan
I’ve been a bit more engaged on Twitter lately than I used to be, and I will say that I doubt that Musk will ruin Twitter, but not because I think he will make it better. It’s just not what you’d call a great platform in the first place, so there isn’t much to ruin.
Frank Wilhoit
@MisterDancer: Twitter, or anything like it, is of course a tool: let us say, a fine sharp knife. In the hands of a chef, it is one thing, in those of a serial killer another, in those of a toddler a third thing still.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@zhena gogolia: thanks, yes great.
Kelly
@trollhattan:
Dirksen once said it was a misquote but he liked it so much he never corrected it.
eversor
@gene108:
It’s not the money Musk and the right cares about though. They have this crazy notion that twitter controls discourse.
The savier stop the steal types believe that their inability to push their views, and launder stuff they admit is bullshit (doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be allowed to say it) is a way of rigging elections for Democrats. Which to them, is just as bad if not more powerful than voter fraud.
Then you have Christian Intellectual crowd who claim that not being able to say homosexuality is disordered and destroying the nation, the change in gender roles is against god and will doom the west, and all trans are rapists and groomers violates their religious liberty. Furthermore it’s (que Rod Dreher) totalitarianism. Also they demand guranted seats on all media programs and tech boards so they can get their views out and stand a chance in the culture wars or it’s anti Christian bigotry and they are being violently silenced.
You’ve got the white nationalists who think nothing is being done about Islam and immigration because they can’t say Islam is evil and about killing people and immigrants are rapists and drug dealers.
Then you have the people who want twitter because you can’t troll people on right wing media. It’s no fun if the libs can’t see that they have been owned and get mad.
The thing is twitter is some odd talisman to those on the right since Trump won. He who controls the twitter bans controls the discourse and the elections and the political debate.
They really are stupid enough to think if they just get to tweet enough and yell at enough people they will win and get their way. Musk is just the only one with enough money to try it.
Matt McIrvin
I find it utterly weird that Twitter, of all things, was the social media network that became beloved of people in the political media. With its atomization of all discussion into tiny bite-sized pieces, and an experience that incentivizes taking those bites out of context and creating panicked dogpile reactions, it seems uniquely inadequate to the task. Or maybe that’s why it was the one.
Getting Trump off Twitter wasn’t important because people actually use Twitter, it was important because big-media people for some reason regard stuff that gets farted out on Twitter as news.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Google blew its opportunity with its roll out of Google+.
Betty Cracker
@MisterDancer: Great point about Twitter’s utility in pointing people to long-form content they might have otherwise missed — I’ve discovered tons of new perspectives on existing and new interests there. I love it because you can curate your own feed, which is why I get tons of birder content on the bird app.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Betty Cracker: Birds are not real.
Keith P.
@matt: And his sister is married to….Matt Gaetz(!)
catclub
of course the best way to do that would be to charge Elon Musk per tweet.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin:
Matt Drudge, here is your chance!
Bill Arnold
@BruceFromOhio:
Twitter gives a voice to people who do not otherwise have a voice.
Some yearn for a world where voices (of others, especially) are by default blocked by Trusted Gatekeepers until they are approved.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I kind of like Twitter’s format. I rarely comment, but I see a lot of smart thinkers make good, concise arguments. Some become adept at delivering longer pieces in threads. General Mark Hertling is one.
Cheryl Rofer’s account presents a wide range of sound commentary in fields like health, foreign affairs as well as nuclear energy, through both retweets and links.
I learn a lot through the platform. Most of the accounts I follow introduce me to good articles as well as breaking news. I think the value of Twitter comes down to what you make of it.
MisterDancer
Oh, it is — I have came here and praised Twitter, so let’s do a little burial.
What people sometimes forget is that Twitter’s limits made it easy to use, and more accessible to a larger population than most social media, even way back when. You could SMS to Twitter! You had to be brief as heck on it, esp. pre-“threads”! You could even get an account easy, compared to a lot of services (even now-dead ones; anyone remember Friendster?)
OG Twitter was a weird beast — a wee mammal in a world of dinosaur-sized blogs and multi-paragraph posts that allowed for adverts to prop them up.
But all that also adds up to a service primed for hot takes. Twitter leans HARD into the same kind of concepts that fueled the rise of sound bites as the primary vehicle for political attacks (for a time). And although that wasn’t all a Conservative Movement “win” (Biden did literally Destroy Rudy’s Giuliani’s Presidential run with his “A Noun, A Verb, and 9/11” quip!), you can see where Reagan starts to use them as a tool, and how that spread throughout that movement.
And I’d bet anything there’s a book or three on how developing the art of sound biting accelerated certain trends in the Conservative Movement, as well as in mass media. And Twitter was and is, yes, a tool for that, built (likely by accident) in ways that made that kind of approach easy to implement! Even as it also has other, very positive, uses for spreading and debating real knowledge and awareness of issues.
trnc
Is there a pool on the number of seconds between Musk’s tweet announcing that he officially owns twitter (in some dipshit way, to be sure) and the Colbert level mockery tweet that will get the account banned? I give it 10 seconds max.
Jay
Musk has to buy Twitter.
It’s the only way he can stop getting ratio’d on the platform by Ukraine.
Kristine
@Alison Rose 💙🌻💛:
::looks up edgelord::
Learned a new word today. Actually learned two words b/c the opposite of “edgelord” is “”reglord,” A person obsessed with REGimented and proper moral conduct (as they define it personally).” According to reddit, anyway.
bjacques
@Frank Wilhoit: only a madman would give a loaded revolver to an idiot.
That said, Ukraine and #NAFO have made fantastic use of Twitter, so I won’t write it off just yet.
Jamey
Have you considered, in light of Elon Musk’s recent support of Russia in a proposed Ukraine war settlement, that Musk is getting Russian money to make the purchase, thereby giving him Twitter at practically no out-of-pocket expense?
That seems pretty plausible to me.
cain
@gene108: Also used a lot by Russian troll farms.
cain
@Baud: I loved that platform – every time though they fucked with it – they just made it worse. It’s like they were doing it on purpose.
Kristine
I like Twitter for bird photos, astronomy news, other sciences along with links to longform articles. Threads from medical professionals, which are sometimes lol. I also follow folks I don’t see anywhere else for different POVs (cultural, political, historical). Some interesting reads. Comments can sometimes be a rolling dumpster fire, but not always.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: I had to mostly step away from Twitter because it wasn’t good for my mental health. It seemed like all these people I had generally respected couldn’t stop either retweeting the kind of dirtbag-left types who bashed the shitlibs all day long (some of whom may have been troll-farm trolls), or fighting with them, and I got exposed to huge doses of their garbage either way. I don’t know, maybe it was the circles I moved in.
zhena gogolia
@Jamey: Me too.
trnc
It’s usually safe to bet against Musk following through on any announcement, but since the case against him is strong it may actually happen.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: I actually really liked Google+; in many ways it was my favorite of all the big social-media platforms, but maybe that was just because it had failed to attract an audience so the crowds were smaller and it made everything more manageable.
They did eventually have a problem with goddamn literal Nazis coming in and causing trouble. They weren’t diligent enough about booting those people.
Keith P.
From a technical standpoint, I loathe Twitter. It’s very slow with embeds (that EVERYBODY uses), particularly on tablets – this site among others can be damn near unreadable in the first minute or two, as it tries to resize and fill in all those embeds. Clicking on embedded anything is a pain – I want to watch an embedded tweeted video, and instead I get taken to the Twitter post itself, where I have to click it *again* to view it for real. Threaded conversations are pseudo-flattened so some replies are buried while others aren’t. The space between “click-to-view-subthread” and “click-to-reply” is small and unmarked. It’s got a Back button (I don’t like web pages to duplicate core browser functions….it’s redundant, takes up extra space, and in some cases has a confusing purpose.
So, in summary, I could give a shit if Musk nosedives Twitter into the ground.
eversor
@Matt McIrvin:
There’s a reason people like Ben Shapiro are still on all these things. The services need them. Like it or not alt-right nazi, trad christians, social conservatives, the crazies are what drives the most traffic and generates the most hits. Most of their value comes from this.
And it’s not just Shapiro. On Youtube and Twitch the most popular streamer, PewDiePie, was the number one thing on BOTH. A Swedish gaming streamer who still had acne. Now he was good at games… but he also was massively alt-right and his content was riddle with stuff about Jews. This happens repeatedly. It’s not just being “racist” either. It’s cheating on their wives, it’s child porn, it’s cheering for shootings. Over and over and over again. And these are the people who top the charts and drive the viewers that make these companies worth something.
In other words if the tech gods removed all the deplorables and cleaned out the Augean Stables… all these companies would implode and cease to exist overnight. So they can’t. This is required for social media to exist. But the people who want to remove this behavior (and I’m one) often don’t realize then the platform is gone or don’t want to admit it. I say burn it all to ash and let social media die forever.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I move in a circle that I found mainly through the sarcastic Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha). He retweeted a lot of people I found interesting and congenial.
A partial list includes Black Panther and DKos contributing editor Denise Oliver-Velez, Michael Paulauski, “Kenneth House of Pfizer,” Terry Watkins, “Wonderking 82,” Susan Vermazen, “Buffalo Meg,” Magdi Semrau (Mangy Jay), “Propane Jane” and Xeni Jardin. Some are Black, all are committed Democrats, and many are hostile to the Sanders movement.
Another three I sometimes check out are Liz Burgh, Justice Dem Watch, and Spandan Reclaim the Fight. They are very hostile to the Sanders movement, but do some good reporting along with somewhat biased conclusions
@CherylRofer and @BettyCracker are pretty good too. I also try to keep up with a couple commenters from here, @BenCisco and @ManyWorldsOneCat.
David Anderson
The place that welcomes in fascists and pig fuckers will soon only have fascists and pig fuckers.
terry chay
@trnc: We’ll now the letter is out (as well as Twitter’s reply), we can see that 1) it is contingent on Twitter dropping their lawsuit, and that 2) Twitter has no intention of doing so (and why should they, the lawsuit leads to a $44bln/$10bln certainty plus legal fees, while this is another delaying tactic based on a promise of someone who has a history of lying).
So if he follows through to avoid being deposed, this letter is not enough and effectively offers nothing. He’d also have to do it fast and in a manner that guarantees the outcome for Twitter above the current contract which is pretty cut-and-dry/certain be enforced since Twitter has covered their side (their shareholders voted). (I don’t know what, I guess the MNA equivalent of money in escrow?)
That is why I took umbrage at mistermix acting like this acquisition is a done deal based on a deliberate leak.
…
BTW, to the other commenters asking about if he can use the $1bln exit clause, financing from Russia, how he pays for it… the simple answer is on paper he is worth something like $230bln of which an estimated $90bln is already leveraged. He has funding secured for 1/3 from outside parties so he would need to collateralize at most another $30 bln to get the capital to make the purchase. This is doable (to give you an idea, that amount is more than the #2 on the list, Larry Ellison of Oracle). Less than that as he already owns a chunk of Twitter from earlier, but, while an insane amount of money, he has access to without going to Russia or going insolvent. That’s why, unlike Trump, actual banks are willing to allow him to borrow.
Yes, it’s stupid to take on so much debt when interest rates are this high, but taking on stupid risks is how he became the worlds richest and the same thing that got you there is just as likely (more, actually since losing a leveraged position is asymmetric) to send you to the poor house.