This is also why there’s a crowd who loves Musk and people like him. Lots of people regard polish as synonymous with fakeness and PR with deception.
I think Musk has lost his mind, not because he speaks frankly but because of what he says (and boosts / promotes).
I’m sure there are loads more business leaders and other high ranking people who entertain what many (including myself) would find to be awful social and political views but we don’t know it because they go through publicists and PR people. Musk just hangs his ass out there.
I like Musk on the whole and have a lot of respect for his engineering stuff with the cars and rockets at which I think he's very talented but really on social media he's a bit rubbish and seems to be losing it slightly.
I mean accusing advertisers who stop advertising of blackmailing him and saying he'll let Twitter/X go bust to show them what for is a bit bonkers.
Building a business around online ads is a race to the bottom as the younger generation does not buy what they're advertised but instead what's advertised by people they follow. Ad revenue was never enough for twitter, and people acting like they were doing any better under previous management are uninformed at best.
The userbase will exist (growing or otherwise) so long as the platform does. They don't care whether its profitable or not. If he wants to turn X into another wechat/wepay for US or a Line competitor for Japan, then ad revenue is a low priority.
An "even greater discount"? He offered something around 30-35% above market value shortly before social media stock prices crashed. There was no discount the first time around, he made an unnecessarily high offer with terrible timing. Even absent his mismanagement, it would have been a long and difficult road to turn Twitter into a company actually worth anything approaching $44bn.
As far as "buying a second time," he could potentially buy out his other investors at a discount if they're willing to sell to get away from the dumpster fire, but that doesn't magically free him from the (11 figure) chunk of the price tag he paid himself the first time around.
Video: https://twitter.com/jd_durkin/status/1729991850079990080