Is Elon Musk’s Twitter ‘pause’ a ploy to save billions of dollars?

Billionaire Elon Musk. Picture: Brendan Smialowski / AFP

TESLA and Twitter always seemed like a weird combination.

That’s to say, beyond the obvious meeting of somewhat weird minds, so to speak.

On the one hand we have ‘Mr Tesla’ Elon Musk, who has breathed new 21st century life into the term ‘eccentric billionaire’.

On the other, Jack Dorsey, who drove Twitter and has just given himself a formal new title ‘Block Head’, as he’s now the CEO at Block Inc, and feels it’s more descriptive. Too true, I say, too true.

In a more formal business sense though, it was and remains hard to see just exactly what the synergies there were between a company making electric cars and a company retailing the abbreviated random idiocies of morons.

The only ‘synergy’ I could really see, is that you could fire off dozens of tweets while you sat in your parked Tesla as it was being charged.

Not, I hasten to add, while it was driving itself: that’s an absolute no-no, at least downunder.

Now true, Tesla wasn’t going to buy Twitter, Musk was going to do it directly, personally. Or so we were told; I think, via a ‘formal filing’ in yet another Elon tweet.

You know, like the late Alan Bond bought (one of) Van Gogh’s ‘Irises’ – on a whim, on an indulgence.

Ah, but how times have changed and money’s been devalued: but then, most of you know that from having to pay a million dollars for an average - indeed in many cases, very average - house.

Bondy paid, if my memory serves me right, $55m – for the painting he never got; he went broke before payment and delivery. That tended to be the Bondy way.

Musk is – or is it now, was? – going to pay closer to $60bn, with a ‘b’, for Twitter. The maybe ‘was’ is because he is now ‘re-assessing’.

Why is he re-assessing? Why is his purported offer now ‘pending’? Although, he says at the same time, that he’s still ‘committed’?

The first bit, the ‘pending’ bit, formally announced via - what else? - a tweet, sent the Twitter share price down.

The second bit, the ‘I’ll still love Twitter in the morning’ - that’s to say, ‘I’m still committed’, also ‘announced’, what else, via a tweet - saw the Twitter share price pick up a bit.

Nevertheless, Twitter closed on Wall St overnight Friday at around $US40 ($58) – substantially and significantly below the $US54 of his purported offer.

Clearly, investors interpreted Musk’s ‘just pending’ as much closer to the ‘just resting’ Monty Python parrot: that it was well and truly dead and stuffed.

Musk says he wants an audit of how many fake accounts – spam, bots, whatever – there are on Twitter.

Goodness knows why that matters: they are the tweets that actually make some sense and are probably the only one that have mentally functioning readers and followers.

Twitter formally says less than 5 per cent of accounts are fake/spam. Others have suggested the percentage is much higher.

Now, his errant fingers keep getting Musk into trouble on Twitter.

Now, that’s a surprise. You mean people actually tweet out things they come to seriously regret; or worse, that gets them into actual legal trouble? Well, well, you learn something every day.

Back in 2018, Musk was sending out tweets that suggested he was going to buy out all the other shareholders in Tesla. He never did.

Hmm, sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?

That seemed to get him into trouble with the SEC – the US version of our corporate cop ASIC.

But it also seems to have just disappeared into the vast regulatory swamps that are the American regulatory and justice systems.

To digress, I remember some decades ago, being told how the SEC had over 3000 lawyers working for it, chasing down, prosecuting, and sending up the river the white-collar bad guys.

That at a time, when our earlier version of ASIC, the NCSC, had if my memory serves me right, two lawyers, two articled clerks, a couple of rotating law students getting ‘work experience’ and a part-time tea-person.

We of course also ‘had’ Bondy and Skasy and all the rest.

But then, they – the US – had more than their fair share of white-collar wide-boys; and when I look back over the decades all those lawyers ended up being as effective as four-fifths of five-eighths of copulating all.

Anyway, back to Musk, his tweets and Twitter.

I’ll leave the last word to – who else? – ‘The Donald’, the ‘Orange Man Bad’ of his ‘unofficial’ Twitter handle.

He said there was no way that Musk was going to pay such a ‘ridiculous price’ for Twitter. Not since realising it was based largely on Bots and Spam account

And he added – what else? – “Fake anyone?”.