Yes and no. The acquisition is now complete, so we can judge what led up to that. And it was terribly done. The dude made an offer on a lark, thought he could wiggle out, and discovered that, however much he normally can get away with shenanigans, a Delaware chancery judge was not among the people who would let him slide. So he was forced to buy a business he had spent months trashing publicly. He easily lost $20 billion the moment the deal closed. It's one of the most spectacular own-goals in business history.
We can also start judging the actual takeover. There is absolutely no reasonable business goal that justifies the level of chaos and mismanagement during the takeover. Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done. If someone had wanted to maximize the level of media attention, they could have hardly done better than all the dramatics.
So is it possible that he'll pull Twitter out of a dive and turn it into a functioning business again? Yes. Network-effects businesses are notoriously hard to kill, which is why Twitter survived all these years despite its problems. But it it likely he'll ever turn a profit on it? I doubt it.
But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while, with a lot of people buying his Tony Stark/Edison 2.0 routine. But those days are over. Tech reporters can be pretty credulous, as they are paid to get eyeballs. But business reporters are much less forgiving, as they're paid to be useful to people trying to make money. And now that Musk has made himself look so erratic, there will always be questions about his competence. His media honeymoon is over, and given how much he used his brand to hawk products and get cheap capital, that's going to be a big problem for him going forward.
I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.
Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.
The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
Thus far a lack of one is being demonstrated.
> Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1...
When was Musk "liberal public enemy #1"?
> he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff
My house would hum along for a few months if I died suddenly, but eventually the power would get cut for lack of payment. The impacts of cutting staff dramatically may take time to become evident.
I'm sure he regrets a lot of it, and wishes he could go back and change some of it. However, a big part of that was poor timing with the economic cycle – if Putin hadn't invaded Ukraine, the markets might be in much better shape right now, and the deal would have turned out a lot less bad. He took a stupid risk, and it blew up on him – but it might not have, and people would have paid far less attention if it hadn't. Anyway, while US$20 billion is a huge loss in absolute terms, it is only around 10% of his net worth, even less at the time it was incurred. I'm sure he's not the first and won't be the last billionaire to lose 10% of their net worth on a bad deal, and many have bounced back from that kind of loss before. Maybe he's even learned his lesson, and will be more financially conservative in the future.
> Even if one believes that cutting 75-80% of the staff was necessary, it was very poorly done
I find it very hard to work out what is actually true about that. I heard people here condemning him for planning to let people go with no severance, and then suddenly he is giving people three months instead. Did he backtrack under pressure? Were the earlier claims just unsubstantiated rumours? How am I supposed to know. My gut feel, is he probably did make somewhat of a mess of the whole thing, but not quite as bad a mess as many claim.
> But I think the real long-term cost here to Elon is in brand damage. He was a media darling for quite a while
I think that is somewhat overstated. Remember the whole "pedo guy" incident? The "Texas Institute of Technology & Science"? A lot of people (both in the media and the general public) have disliked him for years, and they do have some legitimate reasons for that dislike. All Twitter has really done, is added to those reasons, and drawn attention to them, rather than creating something which wasn't there before.
How is SpaceX Starship going to go? Nobody really knows. Worse case scenario, is it flounders and turns into an expensive boondoggle. Best case scenario, it successfully pulls off Artemis III and dearMoon, people forget about the delays and Musk's endlessly over-optimistic timelines. If the best case scenario happens, what are people going to think of him when Twitter is yesterday's news, and Musk-founded SpaceX played a key role in returning Americans to the surface of the Moon? Especially if it happens under a Republican administration, a GOP White House will probably be rushing to give Musk a "Presidential Medal of Freedom" if Artemis III succeeds, and those who can't stand him will probably just have to bite their tongue.
Are there value systems by which Musk's bid for Twitter was well done? yes. For one, comedians certainly appreciated it. But by the value system of the Wall Street Journal or the average business school professor, it was terribly done. And that's the one that interests me here.
I agree that the post-purchase stuff is harder to evaluate. But I don't think there's a good case to be made that it was competently done for any set of reasonable business goals. If you'd like to try, feel free. Any value system you like.
There is more to the service than just the technical. His decimation of the moderation teams is immensely noticeable.
> The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?
When the CEO is spreading outright hate speech, sane people go elsewhere. Brands won't want their image tarnished by looking like they are supporting hate speech.
Right now there isn't a great alternative to Twitter. Mastodon is definitely not it. But once there is, e.g. something like t2.social, my guess is that Twitter will be toast faster than people imagine. I'm sure the hardcore alt-right will hang on, but it will be a shadow of its former self.