Buying Twitter was the biggest gamble of Musk's career. Now he — and his empire — are cracking under the pressure.

This is why using Tesla stock to source cash all the time gets hairy. If Tesla shares fall below a certain level, the banks can call in those personal loans — leaving Musk on the hook. And the quickest way for Tesla’s stock to drop off a cliff is for investors to get wind of a big Musk sale. And of course, he needs to make sure that he still holds on to all the Tesla stock he’s pledged as collateral to the banks. Unfortunately, though, the easiest way for Musk to fill the gaping hole in Twitter’s balance sheet is to sell Tesla shares. You see how this could be a problem.

  • ArugulaZ@kbin.social
    151·
    11 months ago

    Because he’s stubborn, and vain, and also stupid. Losing Twitter to bankruptcy is likely to be one of those great historic failures in consumer tech history, like the IBM PC Jr. and the CueCat from Radio Shack and that Mixer thing from Microsoft. Once the history books are written, it’s going to be right there in black and white, without spin from Musk. “Elon Musk ruined this once successful social media platform with one wrongheaded, self-serving decision after another. He’s the New Coke of IT.” Once it happens, he can’t claw it back. History will have judged him, and the verdict is “guilty by reason of being a dumbass.”

    Elon wants to stave that failure off for as long as possible, but it’s gonna happen, mon ami. The longer you wait, the more painful the bruise from your massive tech blunder is gonna get. You can either make this a noble failure, like the ambitious but outrageously expensive 3DO, or it can go down in flames like the Atari Jaguar. Actually, it’s probably way too late for Twitter to become a noble failure. Musk could at least make it a less humiliating one.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      91·
      11 months ago

      On top of this- he will always be rich. He will die rich. There is no way he will never not be rich barring some very unforeseen circumstances. The only way to hit him is by humiliating him. And he really wants everyone to think he’s awesome, so that will really hurt.

      On top of that, the reason why he renamed Twitter to X is because he has had this years-long dream of an everything app/site with even more options than Weibo. He thinks people want that. He thinks people want Twitter to be a bank. He thinks people want Twitter to be a dating site. He thinks people want Twitter to be a place to order pizza. He really doesn’t understand that most people don’t want a single app for everything. Especially when it’s really not a challenge to have 150 apps on your phone and find the one you need.

      That’s why he’s clawing on to Twitter for dear life. It was his one and only chance to make his X idea work ever since PayPal said that X was a stupid name.