Elon Musk Completely Succeeded With X / Twitter
Just 2yrs ago, there was a huge schaudenfreude coming from libs on this site that Elon was failing with Twitter. The problem is, all of these guys are only capable of thinking linearly and not even very far at that.
The truth is, Elon has managed to build / scale multiple $100bl+ companies and several more $10+bl companies...why in the world would you bet against this guy, no matter how much you hate him personally? I wouldn't want to be buds with Elon, but it's plain as day the guy operates at a different level
He played the long game -- I don't think he masterminded the 'plan,' he just adapted very quickly, tried a million things, and figured out what stuck and went with it. Twitter helped him get in Trump's good graces, gave him influence with advertisers, helped provide the data for X, etc
He bought Twitter at a $43bl valuation in Oct 2022 and now with the X AI meger, the company is now worth $80bl. He 2x'd while at the same time achieveing his non-financial goal of making the platform free & open. Yet you'll notice his lib detractors being oddly silent, after bashing him for buying Twitter in the first place
Classic case of man in the arena vs. the bystanders who are so insecure about themselves that they can't stand to see others succeed. Ignore these folks, they are as pointless and fickle as their opinions -- dunk on them and move on to better things
Hearing the left's absolute silence, after gleefully foretelling Twitter's demise is gold haha
Don't worry though, these mouthbreathers will just find another way of trying to bash Musk and conflate different issues like 'muh DOGE' to feel like proud little keyboard warriors. That's the cycle
Where's CBRE or whatever his name is. Probably crying somewhere
Banging your mom, you fucking dork.
Why would I care either way if Elon buys one of his companies with another one of his companies? I didn’t use Twitter before he bought it and I don’t use Xitter now that it’s full of a bunch of fascist chuds.
Go do something with your life.
Even from the get-go, it was clear he wasn’t in it for a simple buy and flip or traditional returns. TBH I don’t think he cared too much if he ever made a ton of money on it as long as he would be able to sustain it and make it more free speech and all that.
He didn't want to buy it he got forced to buy it because he waived DD and would have owed billions in fees. He didn't make it more free speech either he throttles tons of accounts and bans things he doesn't like.
But nooooo Elon's actually really stupid and only rich because his daddy was an emerald importer South Africa. He doesn't know anything about business, he's only the richest man in the world that built 3 decacorns and one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. Random low/mid-level finance nerds on a discussion forum know way more than him about being successful!!!
XAI bought it at a non-arms length questionable $45B EV. They didn’t 2x.
He actively takes away from verification and demotes in the algorithm he disagrees with, he didn’t make it more free and open.
This is a bad argument. Point to a single deal in history done at a $44b valuation that did 2x in barely 2 years. That's a benchmark not a single MF could be held to. The deal isn't "done", the investors in the buyout now own half the equity of one of if not the currently fastest-growing AI foundation model decacorn in the world. Seems like a huge trade up from just owning a social media platform with more limited growth prospects no?
Verification used to be a blatantly biased virtue-signaling badge unclearly determined by unwritten, unenforceable metrics that frequently sold on the side by Twitter employees for 10s of $1000s to journalists and left-wing activists. It's fair to argue it's a less "deterministic" metric now, but it has become a revenue source for the business and still requires some level of verification via acceptable payments that helps limit bot activity.
The algo demotion claim is spurious and unprovable. The algo previously was unquestionably more biased because it would blatantly exclude viral events from any possibility of trending and showed clear favoritism for left-wing content, backed up by the company employing 100s of people whose sole job was to cherry pick topics and censor/alter their exposure to the userbase at their own discretion or the behest of management. There is more right-wing content now available on X than any time previously due to it no longer being systematically oppressed, and even though I and many acquaintances don't follow many if any left-wing influencers there is still a significant amount of content from the "other side" that makes its way into our feed. It has more users and higher user activity than any time prior to the acquisition. To argue something isn't more "free and open" when it has a wider range of discussions occurring on it than any other social platform just because there's been a surge of views expressed on the platform you disagree with and no longer clear promotion of a single political ideology doesn't make logical sense.
I’m not arguing anything. I’m just letting the OP know he is lying. They did not 2x. Elon actively censors those he disagrees with. Most recent example I’m aware of is during the H1B internal republican thought war where he took away verification badges, though I’m sure there are more recent examples.
I will argue though, twitter, even pre-acquisition, is for those sick in the mind. No human is supposed to witness that volume of screaming from nobodies.
In my opinion the constant negative press the Elon has recieved for his purchase of Twitter trended towards a financial bent because there was nothing else the media could really do about it. It is easy to shit on someone who takes a company private as destroying value becase you can always find some disgrunted analyst at a debt provider to say the company has written down the value.
In reality it doesn't matter what some debt provider values the company at so long as the debt service is being met.
I tend to put zero value on anything the media says because their opinions on things are entirely self serving. Journalists liked old twitter because the platform would skew public opinion inline with what the journalists think or want. It is as simple as that. Elon took away the special privilges that people had on Twitter and made X more of a meritocracy. Is it perfect? No, but it is a hell of alot better than Twitter in allowing users to understand public views on things.
Factually he bought and sold X to himself at roughly the same valuation. The xAI value you quote is the combined business of which xAI raised a $6bn Series C at a $40bn valuation so he basically broke even but lost on time value of money.
Not to mention operational distraction from his other enterprises and weakening of his Tesla ownership stake
I am not sure how Musk made money on Twitter stock when the company had a lower value at the time of the merger compared to his acquisition price. I am hoping some IB people who work in M&A will comment on the topic.
Short answer: No. Not even close.
💸 1. Gross Overpayment
🔁 2. No Strategic Synergy
⚠️ 3. Major Governance Issues
📉 4. Post-Deal Dumpster Fire
🤷♂️ 5. No Value Creation for the Buyer
🧾 Verdict:
Objectively a terrible business move.
Looks more like a personal acquisition disguised as a corporate transaction — the kind of thing you’d fail a corp gov case study for.
thank you chatgpt
You're welcome! Though I’m pretty sure even ChatGPT would’ve questioned the logic of turning $44B into a dumpster fire.
Yeah it's pretty funny how REPE_Monkey is probably patting himself on the back thinking he's such a genius for using ChatGPT to affirm his lopsided views
What else to expect from an RE guy though, those guys lacked the chops or intelligence for much else
The purpose of this post seems to be a platform to invite other conservatives to trash liberals. There has to be a better way to accomplish this goal because there are people in M&A who are going to rip the thesis apart.
They're too dumb to try anything other than low-hanging fruit.
I haven’t followed it but is it a stock for stock merger of his own 2 companies ? Can you put any valuation for that ?
"Elon Musk Completely Succeeded With X / Twitter."
This is, to be as generous to you as possible, only partially accurate ONLY IN REGARDS TO the investment itself. If you believe ExTwitters recent raise and merger values are real (and there is very good indications that these have nothing to do with the actual value of the underlying business), the investment is barely breakeven. "He bought Twitter at a $43bl valuation in Oct 2022 and now with the X AI meger, the company is now worth $80bl" is you lying. ExTwitter is not, and has never been, valued at $80 billion. Try $45 billion. The $80 billion is the proforma value of xAI, not ExTwitter. Of course an Elon simp would not be capable basic reading comprehension skills.
Now if you actually look at the underlying business, it is substantially worse off now by just about every measure. The only way to say otherwise is to ignore how Elon took out opex and replaced it with financing costs which would be an incredibly dishonest thing to do.
xAI is owned by Musk. He just bought his own company at 2x valuation. He could buy it at 100x valuation. As long as he's paying to himself, it doesn't matter. Once he sells it to an external buyer, then you can actually judge the value of X.
In late '22 when all the headlines were popping about how Elon is "destroying" Twitter and Fidelity was marking down their position and even the bondholders were taking heavy markdowns too, I called every broker I know to see if someone would consider selling me their Twitter equity for just 30% off. They had clients with allocations, but none of them were willing to let the shares go. At some point I said what about just 20% off and still no dice.
People talk a lot of shit in the media, but their actions tell you everything. Everyone knew deep down Elon was on the right path, because his early operational hiccups weren't going to create irreversible damage. What was creating irreversible damage was that before Elon came along, Jack basically dipped out and put those two censorship-obsessed morons Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth in charge of the company. They were quickly destroying its credibility and Elon knew all he had to do was bring some non-cancerous leadership to the company and he'd have runway to fix it up.
I can't get past this phrase:
"He bought Twitter at a $43bl valuation in Oct 2022 and now with the X AI meger, the company is now worth $80bl"
---
How is X worth $80B? Are you saying the total merger price is $80B?
The poster is just illiterate and conflated xAI's value with ExTwitter's value
It is not worth 80 billion. It was reported to have a value of 33 billion at the time of the merger.
Ive previously defended Musk in other posts but I wont defend this. X did not double in value. The stock chart clearly says otherwise. META did better. Musk literally bought Twitter athe top of the chart specifically to save free speech in time for the election. X has not been wildely a financial successful under Musk; they lost alot of revenue due to the politics of his taking over ownership. He is just now is starting to grip back some advertising revenue that was lost at the hands of pissing off the lefts long arm of billionaire/government funded NGOs for playing the political game of catering social media to free speech. Lastly I have my doubts that the deal with XAI will go through at the valuation that was stated..
To his credit, as a user, I find X has been much more open and diverse in opinion than Twitter. But to say its been a financially successful endevour so far when the financials and market cap say otherwise is just having a wank.
What the fuck kind of math is this lmaooooo? You guys really can't be this dense.
I am surprised to have read to the bottom without somebody pointing out very obvious aspects of financial engineering that should be apparent to anybody in finance that has gone through a PE interview. Maybe even IB now that its competitive compared to the days I did it.
I am going to just give a brief example of why looking at the headline number for any of this shit is nonsense and you are all getting your undies in a bundle to make a definitive point based on metrics that have nothing to do with each other. It doesnt matter if its 44 to 45 or 80 or 33 or anything.
My example: I buy a house for 100 with 20 equity. Over two years I pay down 30 of debt and sell it for 90. My valuation went down but I 2x my money. I buy and sell a business for some headline price each time, and I 2x my money - who can tell me why the first half and the second half dont necessairly have anything to do with each other?
I point this out, albeit not as explicitly as you did here
Do you really not see the disconnect here?
And no one was "bashing" him for buying Twitter. People called him an immature manchild, and predicted that his policies in running the platform would cause it to lose users, advertising revenue, etc... and those people were basically right.
Your argument boils down to "I put $100 into GME and even though it lost half it's value, I bought another $150 worth, so now I have $200 of GME and my position has doubled in value!"
The fact that Mr Musk merged one of his companies with another does not somehow mean the first is now intrinsically worth more. X may be worth $44b again... but if that's because it now has an AI arm (or xAI has a social media platform) that says nothing about the actual standalone business of X.
We need a street-wide perma blacklist from HHs and BDs on these retarded individuals
Considering this is supposed to be an investment banking forum, this post and most of these comments are straight embarrassing.
I am genuinely baffled that this is where the reading comprehension is at. Forget merger math, just basic common sense is completely absent lol
Fucken hilarious than an ib forum has a trash ass post like this 😭😭
Cmon bro do you really think he doubled twitters value?
My buddy and I did a stock merger of our two companies. The transaction valued my company at $1tn and his at $5tn.
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