For His Next Trick, Musk Should Take Twitter Public
Even by Elon Musk's own accounting methods, taking Twitter private has been a disaster. Worth somewhere between half and one-third of the $44 billion he paid for it only seven months ago, the social media platform has become a case study of value destruction. There is an easy fix: Musk should take Twitter public now.
The idea defies traditional logic, of course. In the ordinary world, a primary reason for taking a company private is to improve its operations and profitability before returning it to shareholders. Musk's world is not ordinary. He has fired more than 80% of Twitter's workforce, and it shows. Advertisers have fled in droves. He just hired a new CEO.
Even putting aside the torching of several billion dollars, the glitchy vibe and a mission that could at best be summarized as fluid don't make a compelling initial public offering narrative. Nor are prospective investors likely to be juiced about Musk Twitter's singular operational achievement: becoming a service whose primary use case is providing a platform for complaints about itself. But none of that matters because Musk himself defies traditional logic, and there's no reason to wait.
What do people see in Musk? Vision, genius, irreducible self-belief? Shallow contempt? Rolling contradictions? All of the above? I am neither a fan nor a fanboy. I don't have a Tesla. I tweet little and don't want to go to Mars. I can't code. I still don't fully understand the 420 thing. I also think he's the most influential person alive.
One manifestation of this is his ability to focus economic conviction around ideas that flout traditional investment analysis. Tesla Inc. is a stock market outlier in every conceivable sense. It trades at multiples unimaginable for other
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