With a fearless offer on Twitter, Elon Musk fights against the naysayers

The list of suitors who considered buying Twitter — then moved on without a second thought — is too long to count down one side, and maybe two or three.

That’s partly because for all its relevance to breaking news, starting revolutions — and generally increasing cortisol levels at breakfast, lunch, and dinner — Twitter is a lousy company.

Yes, he gets eyeballs, but a lot of the wrong kind. Let’s face it: Twitter is a weird social media platform that attracts some of the worst elements of the human race: the trolls, the people behind all those bots, and the ayatollahs are a tough sell.

Progressive Twitter executives and their programmers, meanwhile, overruled too many conservative voices. Again, let’s face it: the people who voted for Trump are a lot of ad dollars.

The result, quarter after quarter, year after year, has been wobbly revenues, shattered user growth and virtually non-existent profits. In the midst of it all, Twitter knew it needed to be sold and began a futile attempt to shop around; Disney, Salesforce, and many more dropped by after looking at the books.

Then came Elon Musk, the mercurial billionaire and visionary with a novel idea: Let’s take Twitter private and fix its business problems away from constant public scrutiny.

Musk’s agenda may seem revolutionary, but only inside the progressive bubble that dominates media and technology: let opposing views proliferate; verify users to combat trolling; Maybe start charging a nominal fee, even if it hurts Twitter’s already weak user growth (which continues to maintain an uncomfortable reliance on users trolling under weird handles).

Above all: long-suffering shareholders will finally be paid. Ignore the stock’s $77 high last year; which was initiated along with the rest of the market by Jerome Powell’s money printing, which has ended.

Twitter’s $26 IPO settled its first day of trading at $44.90, about where it was before Musk said he would pay $54.20 a share for the society. When the Fed starts to tighten, who knows how badly Twitter will fall.

Looks like a good deal to me

Last week, after days of speculation about his seriousness, Musk signaled that he was officially offering shareholders a lifeline. He filed documents with regulators saying he would pay $21 billion of his own net worth.

(over $260 billion) and finance the rest of the deal with debt that he has guaranteed to meet his price tag of around $46 billion.

Sounds like a good deal, especially to the smart techies who run Twitter and sit on its board, doesn’t it? Who else is willing to pay that kind of money for something that has never consistently made money? No one, it seems, because no one has taken over so far.

But this logic only works outside the bubble that is the ideological echo chamber of Twitter and Silicon Valley. Yes, tech geeks like to make money, but only on their terms. As this column goes to press, Twitter is considering rejecting Musk’s offer. And the business media, ideological blinders firmly attached, encourage it.

I don’t know how anyone with even a superficial knowledge of how markets and finance are supposed to work can endorse one of the greatest insults to shareholder rights in recent memory, but that’s exactly what pass.

For a change, it will be fun to root the bar of happy litigation plaintiffs, who would be on firm ground suing Twitter management for blowing up this deal in an effort to ensure that Donald Trump’s Twitter account remains suspended.

Hard to support man

Musk, of course, makes it hard to be around him. Remember the insane “pedo guy” tweet that got him sued, albeit unsuccessfully, for defamation, or the infamous “Secure Funding” tweet for allegedly taking Tesla private? On top of all that, he faces a lot of pressure from regulators over accounting issues involving Tesla, as this column noted.

But Musk is a survivor, having toppled Tesla and avoided bankruptcy even as he launched ambitious plans for space travel and more. More than that, it will pay investors while it fixes things at its own expense with a few sophisticated lenders who know the odds.

In a world that’s supposed to be dominated – legally, mind you – by what’s good for shareholders, rejecting Elon’s offer borders on illegal. Even with Twitter’s board putting up roadblocks (hurdles to poison pill takeovers, claims that its bid is undervalued), shareholders should ultimately have a say.

Musk is strongly advised to launch a takeover bid directly to investors. They will then have the choice to stay with the people who have not created any shareholder value or to side with those who have a habit of doing the opposite.

For all Elon’s craziness, this one should be a no-brainer.