The US has been formed religiously by various congregations that descend from Calvinism, which teaches that hard work earns you the grace of God. In modern times, this has morphed into Prosperity Gospel which teaches that if you are loved by God, you will become materially successful, as well as the flipside; if you are materially successful, you must therefore be loved by God.
The billionaire worship is simply the secular version of this faith. X made billions of dollars by owning a business that does Y, therefore X must be an expert on Y, and businesses in general, and is a genius, and is a morally superior person. Otherwise X wouldn't be a billionaire, because - horror of all horrors - the world is just, isn't it? It couldn't be the case that X just got lucky, can it? Surely, X has earned their billions, right?
You’re still fixating on the wealth part, which people on this site (at least the arguments I see upvoted) do not.
People are “worshipping” Musk because of his repeated success in making successful large innovative businesses. The wealth he has is a product of that, but the deference is to the success of the companies.
Any optimization he might do is unlikely to offset the cost of servicing the debt he offloaded to Twitter's balance sheet after the acquisition.
So at 5% interest the yearly cost is 650 million, even at some obscene and unrealistic payroll per employee (including not only developers), like let's say 400k he'd have to fire over 1600 people just to balance this out. There is no way to spin this positively. Also due to no more RSUs cash comp for remaining employee would need to increase.
Add to that the the loss in advertisement revenue do to obvious reasons.
Taking these facts into account could you please explain how is Musk NOT a liability to Twitter? He basically spent 31 billion (plus 13 billion he offload to Twitter) just to buy the trademark and the user base (and some proportion of advertisers...). From a financial standpoint that's an objectively terrible deal. Musk might have other goals and that's great but in no way this is comparable to Tesla or SpaceX.
>But he did change the world with his companies already, didn't he?
History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people who get blinded by their own success and start thinking that they are infallible. This ussually results which in pretty unhinged behavior when they get older. Musk does not seem like the most grounded person ever so he's likely at a much higher risk of this than almost every tech billionaire I can think of.
also: History is full of examples of extraordinary successful people [period].
Maybe somebody with Musk track record can be seen as more credible than some random "qwytw" on the internet? I mean incentives are on his side, aren't they?
For one his famous. It's his toy, so he won't let it disappear into irrelevance without fighting for it. There are not many people currently alive with comparable track record, being recognized world wide, with deep pockets like him.
What if in few years time from now people will be stepping on each other writing posts and books on how they really knew all of that from the beginning, that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
To be honest, I don't even think anything extraordinary needs to happen for all of it to work out just fine.
For all people saying technically it's not just rendering short messages - well it is just that at the end.
Look at stackoverflow - most people don't realize it's just single monolith application running on 6 servers - all of it.
There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Did I misrepresent any facts or figures? Did I lie? What does credibility have anything to do with anything otherwise? It's an objectively bad deal from a financial perspective, if you have any arguments against that you're free to share them.
Twitter might do "fine" as a platform. Sure, why not... Does not change the fact that he grossly overpaid and that the 13 billion in additional debt will be financially crippling for the company. He might sell some more Tesla stock to offset that. I mean it's his money, he can do whatever he wants (unless the SEC stops being a complete joke).
> that obviously he was right etc. - doesn't sound unreal or alien to me, quite opposite actually.
Right about what? Even Zuckerberg seems to have a clearer vision about the Metaverse than Musk seems to have about the future of Twitter. I might be wrong. Care to enlighten me instead of talking about some random tangentially related things?
> There are still thousands of people employed there, which feels like too many if anything.
Sure, can't really disagree. However is it better for a business to have an additional 2000 employees or so who are possibly superfluous or to fire all of them and spend ~600 million or thereabouts servicing a debt incurred for no reason? It's a pretty straightforward you chose to ignore for some reason.
And that makes him infallible? If anyone else but Musk bought Twitter and started doing what he did they'd be the laughing stock of the financial world. His reputation is the only thing keeping him afloat (in this specific case, he might still do great with SpaceX and Tesla but so what? People like Jobs, Buffet, Gates etc. also made significant blunders at some points in their career)
To play devil's advocate for a bit, are you certain he's solely responsible for the successes of SpaceX/Tesla, or that those companies succeeded in spite of his leadership?
In case it isn't clear, I agree with the parent comment. In the same tone as the comment above the parent, you could also write "Thing is - Elon Musk knows a thing or two about sexual harassment lawsuits. It's inevitable that he will have another at Twitter."
Stop idolizing billionaires.
>Musk has successfully run companies in the past and is running two extremely successful companies right now.
Is he actually running those companies, or is he posting selfies of whiteboards at 1:30am showing architecture diagrams of Twitter?
In these markets, after he was nearly forced by courts into completing a purchase deal for Twitter after making an overpriced offer, I'm genuinely curious to see how he pays the ~$1b in interest per year on the debt to purchase Twitter.
No, people are idolizing Musk because he is a billionaire.
People who obviously know absolutely fucking nothing about coding or manufacturing or running businesses or software engineering or cars or space or rockets or emerald mines are continuously defending Musk, and their only justification is that "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
> No, people are idolizing Musk because he is a billionaire.
No they are not. They are idolizing him specifically because of the success of Tesla, SpaceX, and PayPal.
> "he's rich, so he's obviously smarter than you!"
Nobody is making that argument. Its usually, “look at the success of the companies he leads”.
You can make an argument about whether or not he should get the credit he does for the success, but nobody is idolizing the wealth.
None of these people are going to defend the great insight of the winner of the last powerball because there is no repeated pattern of long term success.
Stop worshipping billionaires.