Perhaps purchasing Twitter “makes no financial sense for Elon Musk,” as Megan McArdle posits. “The carrying costs for the debt he’s using to fund the acquisition are major, possibly as much as a billion a year. Even for Elon Musk, this is a lot of money.”
But with a net worth estimated at $219 billion, I think Musk will be okay.
It’s pretty clear Musk isn’t purchasing Twitter because he expects to make a lot of money once he owns it; he thinks he is doing the world a service by making Twitter more committed to unfettered and uncensored speech. McArdle is on more solid ground when she asks whether Musk will really be able to reinvent Twitter while he’s running Tesla and SpaceX at the same time. And it is fair to wonder if creating a new system of content moderation that sorts out the genuinely horrific stuff (child porn, terrorist-group recruitment, etc.) from mere controversial or unpopular opinions will make rebuilding reusable rockets and space tourism look easy, or whether Musk might get bored of Twitter and move on to some other novel challenge.
But at least for now, it appears all the right people are nervous about Elon Musk purchasing Twitter.