Elon Musk takes over Twitter

Twitter was not a very good business before Elon Musk bought it. It carried a decent amount (but workable) of debt, and it probably had way too many employees for a business its size and wasn't run very well.

But in order to overpay that badly for it, he put together the largest leveraged buyout of a tech company ever, and the amount of debt he heaped onto that balance sheet is going to come with an interest payment of more than a billion dollars a year. The company's entire operations last year generated only about $630 million in cashr. ... so the bottom line is that he has no easy way to make the hole he dug for himself work.

His whole MO has been subsidies, riding cheap money bubbles (to run up debt and dilute equity in his publicly traded company) and in the case of Tesla, a carnival barker act to try to pump up the value of the stock (enabling him to keep diluting the equity), because it is the only currency he has to work with.

NONE of those methods are possible to bail him out on Twitter. So you are going to keep seeing stories of him flailing, firing people, trying to cut costs, acting out, trying BS, etc. He's gotten accustomed to bullshit and bubblegum translating into ever more money he can borrow or more equity he can sell to kick cans down the road. ... and right now he's learning that this time he screwed himself and he can't BS his way out of it.

If his whole plan is to somehow make subscription revenue fill his shortfall. ... he's in over his head way beyond belief. If it was that easy, every flailing media (social or traditional) company would be coasting on easy street.