Great summary of the current financial situation at Twitter and the likely scenarios going forward - most likely bankruptcy within 6-12 months fueled by either employee lawsuits or regulatory fines. This seems spot on to me. davekarpf.substack.com/p/how…

I also agree with the conclusion that Musk will attempt to blame everyone else for this situation. The rhetoric will be, “They made such a mess of the whole thing, it was unfixable, and then aggressive regulation killed it”

The reality of course is if he had not taken on massive debt and alienated 50% of his advertisers, Twitter could have quite probably plausibly survived fine after some significant (but much less dramatic) pruning. (Thanks to @nelson for the link)

My main question now is whether or not it can survive *after* bankruptcy. Normally such things are not the end of a company of this size because they have IP, name recognition, a respected brand and some kind of revenue they have value and are normally picked up by another giant.

I’m not as sure about this one though. Twitter - even before Musk’s takeover - was sort of seen as a fairly toxic and politically risky company to acquire. Republicans were going after it aggressively. Microsoft and Apple aren’t going to want to bring that heat on themselves.

I wouldn’t think Google would want it, and they are notorious for not really understanding social products of this kind anyway. It might make a decent acquisition at a knock down cost for a large media giant, but mostly those companies don’t know how to run tech platforms.

So you need someone with a bunch of money who thinks the brand has value, won’t be too nervous about the political fallout from buying it (so no big consumer brands) and has some technical competence or can buy it or bring it in.

To me that sounds like maybe like some massive private equity powered by Saudi money? Maybe they dig around and try and find someone with some rep to run it? It’s already private so that’s easy. Do they approach @ev maybe? Or try and get @jack back in?

That’s the only solution other than just being outright bought by someone ultra-rich in a Musk-style fashion that I can think of. Except they’re buying it for $5-10bn instead of $44bn?

I suppose it’s possible Musk just sticks with it interminably, burning through his own cash in a desperate attempt to rebuild his credibility? But I doubt it. What do you guys think?