LogFAQs > #975122878

Aressar posted...

Musk is the richest guy alive.

That's no longer true, thanks to all the value he lost purchasing and mismanaging Twitter. The Muskrat has been knocked down to #2, with Bernard Arnault (the first French person to ever top the list of the world's richest billionaires) overtaking him this year.

He can just keep pouring resources into it to keep it alive, no matter how much he messes it up.

That might be true, depending on where he's pulling those resources from and how many of them he can consistently access. Most billionaires don't actually have a whole lot of liquid funds available to them at all times ( la Scrooge McDuck, who famously takes "liquid funds" literally via his Money Bin), with their wealth instead being tied up in property and investments.

Musk would either have to sell off some of his assets (which even he wouldn't be able to do forever), take out loans to keep Twitter afloat (and if any bank is foolish enough to lend to him now, with how much debt he's taken on with the buyout and will likely never be able to pay off, they'll almost certainly be going belly-up soon), or siphon funding away from his other companies to prop up Twitter (which might well be thorny from a legal perspective and which would almost certainly kill the public's and the investors' faith in said companies, as they can no longer use that money to pay employees or shareholders, conduct R&D, service existing products, etc., which would inevitably end up with Musk's companies pumping out inferior products and services compared to their competitors with no accompanying decreases in price). He has options here, but they're not as infinite as you might think, and all of them would put him further down the list as he either loses assets, accumulates more debt, or both.