It Is Very Clear What Elon Musk Wants to Happen to Twitter Now

What does Elon Musk want with Twitter? It depends when you ask. After Musk first made an effort to buy the company in the spring of 2022, he seemed as if he just wanted to have a little fun and make his fans clap for him. He tweeted “love me tender” as he pondered—or wanted to look like he was pondering—a tender offer for control of the company. When the process escalated, Musk offered exactly $54.20 per share because 4.20 is a marijuana joke. He was having fun. Later in the acquisition process, Musk was not having fun, and what he wanted with Twitter was, well, nothing. He wanted to kill his deal, and he kicked and screamed in the legal sense but in the long run had to close.

In October 2022, when Musk’s Twitter takeover finally went through, what did he want with it? A sensible answer, at that moment, was that Musk wanted to salvage his $44 billion investment property. Musk acknowledged he had overpaid for the company. Yes, Musk had said he didn’t “care about the economics at all” and that buying Twitter was a matter of his ideological commitment to free speech. But by closing time, he’d been sounding a different tune for a few months. He published an open letter to advertisers in which he noted the need for some content moderation and said he wanted to make Twitter the most respected ad platform in the world. He told the bankers who gave him huge loans (which he saddled Twitter with) that he would help them market the debt to investors. Musk had put more dip on his chip than he meant to, and he had to have realized that erratic behavior at Twitter reflected poorly on his leadership of Tesla. That in turn dragged Tesla’s stock price, at least for a while. What did Musk want from Twitter then? A business.

What does Musk want with Twitter right now? The likeliest answer has changed again. One sign came two weeks ago, when Musk offered an unqualified endorsement of an antisemitic post. That, coupled with a Media Matters report that showed blue-chip advertisers’ spots running next to posts containing Nazi agitprop, sent some of those advertisers fleeing from the platform. There was no possible business benefit to Musk’s tweeting his approval at some random person’s antisemitism, but he did it anyway. And there was no possible business benefit to Musk sitting on a stage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday and telling advertisers, “Go fuck yourself,” but there he was anyway:

“I hope they stop,” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.” He said advertisers were trying to blackmail him with money and suggested they fuck themselves. He repeated it slowly. “Is that clear?” He said a sarcastic hello to Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose company has quietly pulled back its Twitter spending, and asked if he was in the audience. Musk then said that advertisers who left Twitter could cause the company to go under and he would show the world that it was those advertisers’ fault that the company, which he recently renamed X, had not survived. In this reality, Musk would be a hero. Or something.

The past two weeks have made clear the new answer to that age-old question. Antagonizing his old advertisers points in the exact same direction that Musk’s boring endorsement of antisemitism pointed: He is no longer interested in salvaging Twitter as a business. As a financial investment, he has taken $44 billion (mostly his and his banks’ money, with a few billion coming from other investors) and lit it on fire. Musk will never make Twitter worth anything near what he paid for it, but he can use it to make himself a free-speech martyr and recast his own business failures as an ideological stand against censorship. That, today, is what he wants with Twitter. Take Musk seriously when he threatens (if that’s the word) that advertisers will kill Twitter. He might like that just fine.

A $44 billion investment is a big one to write down to zero, but Musk is most of the way there already. In October, the company valued itself at $19 billion. Musk pays a lot of taxes, and if his entire investment goes up in smoke at some point, his accountants will have a lovely time finding him a vomit-inducing amount in tax savings. But there are bigger financial reasons for Musk to just not care that much if he finishes what he started and lets Twitter die altogether. An early constraint on his behavior was the inherent connectedness of all of Musk’s businesses. In those early months of his Twitter bid, then ownership, his shtick did not play well with Tesla shareholders. A lot of Tesla’s very high stock price revolves around confidence in Musk and his ability to innovate and sell, and Musk floundering around at Twitter was not good for Tesla’s stock price. That stock is the main source of Musk’s wealth. One year ago, cursing out Twitter advertisers could have cost him hundreds of millions of dollars in a blink. But as I type these words right now, Tesla’s stock is up about half a percentage point in after-hours trading. (Musk took the stage after markets had closed on Wednesday.)

At this point, Musk’s obnoxious failure at Twitter seems priced into his Tesla shares. If he lets Twitter sink further into the abyss, will it change anyone’s opinion of his ability to run Tesla? Maybe not, but maybe it would work in Musk’s favor. “Look at how distracted I was!” he could say. Now his full focus—or not quite full focus, because Musk has lots of companies, but at least more of his focus—can be on his big publicly traded company. Enough of a lift to Tesla’s share price could easily mitigate Musk’s Twitter losses.

The money wouldn’t be the point anyway. Running Twitter does seem like miserable work, even for a man who so clearly loves to be the center of attention every second of every day. Many people ask Musk for things all the time. Some people might even ask him to stop talking, which couldn’t be easy. He’d have a much easier life if he just let the company die. Maybe he could sell it off, but taking a loss on a trade would look like retreat because it would be ceding the future of free speech to someone who cares about it less than Musk does. (Because no person cares about free speech like Musk does.)

So what does Elon Musk want with Twitter? The best-available guess is that he wants it to fade to black. Musk won’t have to work as much, and his other businesses might benefit.

More importantly, it’s his way out of Twitter on something close enough to his own terms. Musk will have no trouble getting right-wing media and other credulous individuals to treat him like a soldier in a just war. As onetime star journalist and current antagonizer of liberals Glenn Greenwald wrote on Wednesday of Musk’s advertiser dis: “This is exactly what people should tell corporate advertisers who try to control the content of speech from media outlets or social media platforms.” Greenwald doesn’t have to explain why not subsidizing speech with ad dollars is the same thing as trying to control it, and Musk doesn’t have to contort himself to justify himself to his adoring fans. At a $44 billion price tag, it will be the most expensive point anyone has ever made. But Musk will make it to people who desperately want to hear it.