Elon Musk makes Twitter a 'Godfather' offer it can totally refuse

It has been said that there is no such thing as a good tweet. While that remains up for debate, no one would deny the existence of those that are unfathomably bad. This is the Input Bad Tweet Hall of Fame.

ENTRY #004: Elon Musk

Cult leader, Elon Musk, farts out bad tweets almost as often as he fails to deliver on his tech utopian promises. Every few days, Musk will pen a social media missive or repurpose someone else’s meme in a way that is totally worthy of induction into our Bad Tweet Hall of Fame, but today feels especially appropriate to offer him a long overdue place among the internet’s worst.

And so the Technoking earns his induction based on this morning’s “offer” to Twitter shareholders for Musk to buy the entire company in the hopes of taking it private. “I made an offer,” Musk sent off at 7:23 a.m. ET with a link to his SEC filing on the subject. You can just picture Musk sending the tweet, smirking at how cool his rabid fans will think he is for the brusk, casual message that treats $43 billion as a drop in the bucket, which it is, for him. Welcome, Elon, to the Hall of Fame.

Protagonist, he is not — Despite what he likely thinks, Elon Musk is not Tony Stark, and he’s no Don Draper — he’s not even a particularly compelling Ozymandias. He’s that kid in school who people only hang out with in the summer because he’s got a sick pool in the backyard. He’s the neighbor with the badass car who claims that he restored “her” himself but actually paid someone else to do it. His midlife crisis resulted in smoking a bunch of weed and trolling 4chan years’ after its infamy and/or relevancy, and this is what he has to show for it. It would be sad if it wasn’t for the fact that this is without question the world’s richest man, and therefore one of its most powerful.

An offer they can refuse — But all that power and wealth won’t necessarily buy Elon Musk a gently used social media platform. The internet chorus largely seems to be treating Musk’s acquisition as a complete certainty, when in reality it’s anything but that. Plenty of legal and financial experts have already pointed out that there are arguments in favor of shareholders not selling their stakes, and they even have some legal coverage in that respect given that Musk already threatened to sell his portion of the company.

Then there’s the actual money here. Elon Musk is worth $246 billion dollars; that doesn’t mean he has that money on hand. Musk would likely need to sell a bunch more of his stock in Tesla or borrow against it to finance his purchase of Twitter, both of which aren’t terribly likely. If Musk is truly serious about his offer (and he may well not be), it is easy to see it as one Twitter can and will refuse.