Show Us On the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the platform against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use it for their own ends — then one made himself the CEO. @ZoeSchiffer , @CaseyNewton , and @alexeheath report, in collaboration with @verge https://t.co/Trw0ulxWeP pic.twitter.com/JWifgB7zzv

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 17, 2023

He’s so far over his head, he doesn’t even grok how much he doesn’t understand:

… On October 26, an engineer and mother of two — let’s call her Alicia — sat in a glass conference room in San Francisco trying to explain the details of Twitter’s tech stack to Elon Musk. He was supposed to officially buy the company in two days, and Alicia and a small group of trusted colleagues were tasked with outlining how its core infrastructure worked. But Musk, who was sitting two seats away from Alicia with his elbows propped on the table, looked sleepy. When he did talk, it was to ask questions about cost. How much does Twitter spend on data centers? Why was everything so expensive?

Alicia was already tired of Musk’s antics. For months, he had gone back and forth about buying the company where she had worked for more than a decade. He’d tried to back out of the deal, but Twitter sued, and the chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court said a trial would move forward if the acquisition wasn’t complete by October 28. Facing what many legal observers called an easy case for Twitter, Musk caved. So here they were, trying to show Musk what he was about to buy, and all he wanted to talk about was money…

Fine, she thought. If Musk wants to know about money, I’ll tell him. She launched into a technical explanation of the company’s data-center efficiency, curious to see if he would follow along. Instead, he interrupted. “I was writing C programs in the ’90s,” he said dismissively. “I understand how computers work.”…

Unlike some of her colleagues, Alicia wasn’t reflexively anti-Musk. She respected what he had done at his companies and felt hopeful that, as someone who thought of himself as an engineer, he would support her highly technical work. But Musk had a different interest that day. Twitter, he said, should immediately get into video.

“We really should be able to do longform video and attract the best content creators by giving them a better cut than YouTube,” he said, according to Alicia’s recollection. The infrastructure engineers in the room agreed that adding support for longform video was technically possible, but their job was building stuff — not strategy or marketing. It seemed as though Musk didn’t understand the basic organizational structure of a social-media company; it was as if a rich guy had bought a restaurant and started telling the cooks he wanted to add a new dining room. Might he want to speak with the media product team instead?

Just then, David Sacks, a venture capitalist and friend of Musk’s who had advised him on the acquisition, walked into the room. A fellow native of South Africa, Sacks had worked with Musk at PayPal and later led the enterprise social-networking company Yammer to a $1.2 billion sale to Microsoft.

“David, this meeting is too technical for you,” Musk said, waving his hand to dismiss Sacks. Wordlessly, Sacks turned and walked out, leaving the engineers — who had gotten little engagement from Musk on anything technical — slack-jawed. His imperiousness in the middle of a session he appeared to be botching was something to behold. (Musk did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)…

Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: those trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum https://t.co/Trw0ulxWeP

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 17, 2023

hahahahaha fucking owned pic.twitter.com/Oi26EDbuLw

— fell out of lulag watchtower (@michaelleung) January 17, 2023

i would be extremely curious to see what this looks like plotted out on a month to month chart, because i'd bet cold, hard cash that most of the finding out began once he started fucking around https://t.co/RPq6GfX3o5

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 18, 2023

he was never going to be able to cut enough cost to afford the debt service (and the banks were either fools or foxes to let him do it), but he single-handedly created multiple other existential problems for them, all by himself

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 18, 2023

anyway, still very bullish on the idea that he will not be running twitter *or* tesla by the end of this year

— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) January 18, 2023

It’s funny how Twitter was actually making a profit, then Musk bought it because he took a bit Too Far, then came in with an agenda of Making Everything Worse https://t.co/vEpngsJsTZ

— Peter Wolf (@peterawolf) January 18, 2023

“Bankers are in discussions with Musk to replace about $3bn of expensive unsecured debt that has an interest rate of 11.75 per cent, with margin loans, backed by Musk’s stake in Tesla, according to two people close to the matter.” What. https://t.co/se0lVE1Oa5

— Joseph Cotterill (@jsphctrl) January 17, 2023

The bill for Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is coming due, with the billionaire facing unpalatable options on the company’s enormous debt pile, ranging from bankruptcy proceedings to another costly sale of Tesla shares.

Three people close to the entrepreneur’s buyout of Twitter said the first instalment of interest payments related to $13bn of debt he used to fund the takeover could be due as soon as the end of January. That debt means the company must pay about $1.5bn in annual interest payments.

The Tesla and SpaceX chief financed his $44bn deal to take Twitter private in October by securing the huge debt from a syndicate of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi. The $13bn debt is held by Twitter at a corporate level, with no personal guarantee by Musk.

The company’s dire finances — it made a loss of $221mn in 2021 before the acquisition and Musk has said revenues have declined since — have led the new owner to regularly raise the prospect that the company could crash into bankruptcy.

How Musk deals with the looming interest payment is a crucial test of his leadership of Twitter, which has so far been marked by chaotic management that has alienated its corporate advertisers…

Tesla stock down 46% in the last 6 months, interesting
Interesting
Twitter interest payment due end of January, looking into this now
Looking into this now pic.twitter.com/KyQOjXQSyH

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 18, 2023