To strongman the case for him running twitter, he clearly has significant experience and success with running large engineering oriented companies - which is the primary job of twitter executives. Both Tesla and SpaceX have significant software organizations, and he also has experience in running a pure software company back when he was involved with paypall. As a heavy user of twitter, and the de-facto PR person for Tesla and SpaceX he also has a good understanding of the product, both from a normal users perspective and a marketers perspective.
That said, I don't think this is primarily about buying twitter being profitable, but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny. I also don't think he's likely to get that into the day to day of running twitter, just because he's already busy with Tesla and SpaceX.
I don't disagree. It's just that... what are his plans for Twitter? Add an edit button? Tweak the algorithm that delivers timelines? None of that is really complicated. Those could be 6 month roadmap projects.
> but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny
First, it’s more like 1/6 his net worth. But I don’t believe the proportion means anything at that level of personal wealth. He’d still have the other $210B, plus ownership of Twitter. Each of those other billions is worth a billion dollars. Almost everybody could make do with just one of them, and he’d have over 200 of them. Even luxury goods don’t scale up to that scale. All he can really do with that is buy companies anyway. And Twitter is what holds his interest right now.
It seems like Twitter's barely done anything new since going public over 8 years ago. Making a UI that was actually usable for following conversations would be a good place to start. What are all these product people doing? (I'm a small TWTR shareholder. It's one of my worst tech investments.)
That said, I don't think this is primarily about buying twitter being profitable, but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny. I also don't think he's likely to get that into the day to day of running twitter, just because he's already busy with Tesla and SpaceX.