Elon Musk Bought Twitter to Settle His Jet-Tracking Beef, New Book Claims

Incidentally... https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.

Holy shit this dude fucking lives on his plane. Like I feel guilty about the 2-3x per year I fly to see family but this fucker has flown that far already in the past week. Why? Does he not know how to do a video call?
- Ugh, I feel the same. I know the top 1% of the world or whatever emits tons and tons more CO2 per year than the other 99%, but I didn't know it was this bad. That plane is flying multiple times per day. Sure Musk is probably not in it all the time, but that doesn't matter.
  
  Private jets should be banned all together, let's see how quickly they suddenly find out the internet exists.
- You shouldn't really feel guilty about anything like that. Asking hundreds of millions to billions of people to drastically change their lives and practice austerity is insane while billionaires do whatever they want and corporations push legislation that makes it harder to conserve. Our meager efforts won't matter much if the biggest offenders go pollute wantonly.
  
  Individual's biggest efforts are pushing for legislation and politicians who will curb corporate abuses. Everything is a drop in a bucket that's already overflowing.
- Others close to him use the jet as well, but I imagine it's still heavily Elon
- Dude takes a 22 minute flight. My god how small do you need to feel to boost your ego to do that instead of video.
- This follows classic maritime law: You don't have to pay taxes if you live in the air. That is what my lawyer Chareth Cutestory said. I have the best lawyers
- Do your bosses (and their bosses) support work-from-home? They know how, but it's about control for these people.
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
- The profile is "elonjet . net" (without the space) on bluesky.
- Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
I don't get this. What is the point? Why would anyone care where a billionaire is flying to and from? Just for kicks?
- I think it's mostly aboit the massive carbon footprint of a private jet and Elon has a rep for really short frequent flights.

Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn't disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.

So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn't back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.

The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn't that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I'm pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He's dumb, but he's not that dumb.

Ah so Musk was trying to increase his profits super publicly and super illegally.
- I honestly don't think he was TRYING to do anything but shitpost. It didn't look like a well thought out plan, it looked like an idiot talking out of his ass and realizing that his memes were also crimes.
I think you're giving him too much credit. The announcement that he owned Twitter shares already hiked the price. If he wanted to ~~short~~ pump and dump he should've just kept his mouth shut, get on the board and then sell his stocks. The initial hike to his 9% ownership was on par with his buy offer hike. If his plan was to pump the company he could've done it without the legal trouble. Also the second price hike was after he had already made a public bid for the company and the company had accepted the offer. At that point he was locked in to buying the company. There was speculation if such a deal is allowed to go through, but the reality is that unless someone else steps in Musk had two options, he either buys the company or he gets taken to court and is forced to buy the company.

He had to buy the company, but not because he was risking going to jail. He had to buy it because he screwed himself over by making the bid in the first place. I don't get the need to make him seem like an intelligent man. He didn't have any grand schemes or ulterior motives or someone else footing the bill. He simply made a horrible move, probably because he's a huge manchild who didn't like that the CEO of Twitter didn't completely lick his boot.
- He wasn't trying to short Twitter. He was trying to pump and dump. Though the dumping probably would have been done more tactfully than the standard pump and dump. Musk getting publicity for holding the stock helps to keep the value up. Tesla's been inflated forever, and he thought he could do the same with Twitter.
  
  Yes, the primary reason he bought Twitter is that he screwed up during his pump and dump scheme. There are several reasons he was looking at Twitter in particular, including the jet tracking, how much he loves Twitter anyway, his hate for being told what he can and can not post, etc. I also suspect he's lost most of the people who will tell him the truth and is now surrounded by right-wing grifters (for politics and aiming his money, they're smart enough to not try to take the money directly). All these reasons were part of why the pump and dump was plausible as something else, and why it was Twitter that it happened to. Probably not even Musk knows how much of the intent to buy was legit (though not for 44b) and how much of it was the pump and dump.
  
  He had a scheme; I don't know that I'd call it grand.
- He could had pulled out of the bid as well me thinks. Between presenting a bid and closing the deal there should be **due diligence **.
  
  This is what I understand Mr Musk failed to do, after that it would have been nearly impt to cancel the deal.
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.

Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.

(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
- I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
  
  Really wish he'd kept fighting do we'd see that.
If he had really cared about the jet tracking thing, he wouldn't have burned $44b buying twitter to handle it. He just would have bribed / lobbied politicians to put a "public safety" exemption into effect for public data about flights. Make it so that private jets aren't available in the public feeds / databases. Getting a law like that passed would have cost him tens of millions rather than tens of billions.
Yes AND he's desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.

The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.

It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn't) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, "you're the coolest, bro" and him replying, "watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I'm probably the fastest dinner ever actually" [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
Likely story. Rich people don't go to prison, you think I was born yesterday?
Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn't afford the penalties because he didn't have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.

Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
This

Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.

That's the definition of "fuck you" money.
- Yeah $50k isn't even that much to Musk, what an idiot.

Just fucking stop.

Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter after doing several incredibly stupid things publicly.

Quit assisting this fascist dumbass in his attempt at laundering his reputation.

I don't see how claiming he bought Twitter to try and shut up a teenager does anyting to help his reputation.
- It re-enforces the idea that he is a "genius" who is playing "4D Chess" and that he "has a plan" and not that he's a fucking drug addled freak who is making decisions based on his emotional state at the time.
  
  There was no plan, there's never a plan. Rich people just play this game where, because they have enough money to insulate themselves from their bad decisions, they pretend that "this was always their plan."
  
  Pretty much Musk:

Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he's ever taken and that's a long list to fight to the top of.

And totally on par for him.
I love that for him 🥰
And you know the worst part about it? Burning that amount of money makes basically zero difference in his life.
- But you forget the best part. The tracker still exists and everyone still knows where his fucking jet is flying to because that shit is public information by air navigation regulation. There's still bots that regularly posts the MuskJet location both in Twitter and Mastodon. So he spent all that money and still failed.

I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.

He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try it. I think he had made several gestures at buying before to try and get some kind of influence over how it was being run, so they drew up the contract to make him put up or shut up.
- Makes you wonder what they're og twitters guys are doing now besides drinking mai tais on the beach
I'm also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right "try and shame people for standing up to nazis".
I honestly thought this was common knowledge.
Pretty sure that's illegal
- That's his entire business model. Just look at starship, hyper loop, solar roofs and Tesla semi. Overblown Tesla stock bubble too. All complete vaporware, but he profits greatly from the hype alone. He belongs in prison as he is a classic conman.
- So is racking up debt in shell companies and claiming bankruptcy on them but it didn't stop Trump either.
- When has that stopped billionaire dummasses?
- People who control the organs of communication usually end up writing the laws, even if it's at arm's length.
It's worse than that. The usual way of buying a company is a memorandum of understanding followed by due diligence, followed by signing a contract and then the actual completion. Elon went straight to signing the contract and then had big old shit fit when the Twitter board held him to the terms of the contract and the penalties for pulling out.

Money well spent: https://mastodon.social/@elonjet

isnt he also back on twitter?

Stop talking about this guy.

Citizens say go

Muskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There's no "grand design," just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.

Made a legally binding decision to massively overpay what the company was worth, or probably ever would be. Of course the current owners are going to take it
- I think the deal was so good for Twitter that it may have been illegal for them not to sell to Musk because their job is to maximize profits or value for the shareholders or whatever. As a publicly traded company, not doing the deal would be choosing to not maximize profits.
  
  Now in hindsight the idiot is killing current stock value, but that still has nothing to do with the shareholders who had stock when Twitter was sold. Those shareholders were thrilled to sell all their stock well above market price. Corporate ethics.

For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.

Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.

A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.

ETA I got these values when we were discussing Bloomberg's wealth in 2019 when he was trying to Secret Hitler the Democratic party, and how much could be bought with the $500 million (at the time only 200 million was declared) he spent on his campaign. The $30 billion to feed the world value came up in in one of the news articles.

Well, the economy is much different and we're dealing with considerable inflation (and our billionaires, including Bloomberg are much richer.)

I'm having trouble figuring out the math for this. My assumptions lead me to divide $30b by 8b people, which is about $4/person. I'm not confident that people can eat on $4 for a year.

What am I getting wrong?
- I just did the math myself before seeing your comment and you’re right that math is fucked lmao.
- Maybe it's to provide food security just for those who don't already have it
- That the costs scale down the more massive the production. If you're in the industrialized world, the money you pay for food is almost all profit. Not the cost of agriculture, not the cost of harvesting and packaging, not freight time, maintenance and fuel, not logistics and accounting. Profit.
  
  Most of our money spent is bribes goes in the pocket of each of the capitalists along the way taking their bit of rent.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide

Since there is about few billion people on earth, does that mean that high speed internet costs about a dollar per person? You did not think this through, did you?
- There are eight billion people on earth, so it's even cheaper. Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up. At a global level, yes, internet should be ridiculously cheap per capita.
  
  The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile. Licensing fees because they control access via legal obstruction. If I were to create a community server, it could be much cheaper as a non-profit cooperative, but for the cost defending from litigation from the established chains.
  
  In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.
Yea, now $30B will buy everyone on earth a McDonald's hash brown, including tax.

So is Taylor Swift going to buy it next?

Probably. She'll change it to eX. Tweets will be called ditty and you'll be required to sing them.
- I'd go for Swiffer.
- She would keep the pay to play mentality though, as that’s how she got her start after all
- snap snap snap and dance fool

So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though "Fuck it, maybe I can't beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!"

...If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements... Like "For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!" -
We would be living in a totally different timeline

What a snowflake

A visionary snowflake.
- How is he visionary, exactly?

If they weren't doing anything wrong they shouldn't care who watches where they go, right?

Even when he wins he does it like such a loser. Fuck this guy.

Jesus Christ this is low point even for him.

Called it! 100% called it!

Yep. I called that too. Talk about burning money...

LOL. There's a silicon valley bigwig jet tracker that I see pop up on my Reddit account, and I'm not even that interested in it.

Yes this makes far more sense then the brain dead “bought it to kill it” theory that’s just cope for phony stark

Here we are talking of very debatable definitions of “making sense” tbh

this is so astoundingly petty, it might just be true.

although i doubt that's the only reason he bought it, i wouldn't be surprised if it's a major factor that got him serious about buying it.

Information control
- Infrastructure control. Transportation, communications, banking, etc. He's going after it all. I'll never touch anything he's even remotely involved in.

Or really, he wanted to talk shit and pump and dump, and he got caught by some savvy lawyers at twitter.

Then he tried to turn it into a political tool sprinkled with his narcissism, hoping foreign governments would pay him to manipulate narratives. But now nobody gives a shit, he has lawsuits left and right and is likely going to go broke, and he's scared away all the advertisers who were his life blood.

He tried to pull a trump but nobody actually backed him up, and they're likely going to let him fall.

it had to be politically motivated. even elon must be smart enough to know that kicking the kid off twitter wouldn't stop the tracking of his plane.. which is still readily available via multiple sources. he could have been dumb enough to spend $billions just to steal the @x handle though.
Twitter was the main tool in the Arab Spring revolutions. Whatever the Saudis paid to buy and destroy it was cheap for their goals.
- This is the more likely, political big pockets paid to fuck it up.

I've read all his texts. He definitely bought it because d-list celebrities in his chat groups begged him to.

What stopping someone from recreating this on mastodon or any other website?

There is nothing special about Twitter which allowed people to track this jet.

The guy running it did just that.

Musk's actions are hilarious and pathetic. Anti censorship hero censored... Public data.
I think it's really about visibility. If you don't have the same visibility as twitter, you can have this wherever, it doesn't matter.
https://grndcntrl.net/links/

They have links to all of the various social media sites for all the celebrities they track.

So... it was a really good call from the CEO to not remove the account?

Considering that...

The Republicans encouraged him multiple times to buy it
He quickly stopped blocking (mainly Russian) state-sponsored social manipulation campaigns
He allowed right wing agitators back on the platform
He almost immediately banned droves of journalists that weren't blindly Pro-Russia and Pro-GOP.
He censored / banned all kinds of activists that pushed back against authoritarian (Russia-backed) regimes in other countries

...I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.

Didn't they hang dissenters in public squares back in the old days?

He just didn't clarify when!

All that money could have gone to something useful that would have benefited everybody and instead it went into investors pockets

Like the $6 billion Musk promised to end world hunger.

Pretty sure ended up buying Twitter because the courts made him.

That tends to happen when you sign a legally-binding contract saying that you will. 🤷‍♂️

Elon is first and foremost a con man.

He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.

I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was involved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.

Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.

The only thing of his that is ever ready to ship today is his ~~crowdfunding~~ pre-orders and investment opportunities.

The rest of it is just bullshit, smoke and mirrors, inevitable delays, and gaslighting his cult into thinking he never previously promised something "ready within 3 years" would be completed last year.

I truly hope we eventually pass the tipping point where it becomes more widespread knowledge that he's an incompetent "idea guy" instead of a visionary inventor.
THE DOT COM OF CON MANS!

Why settle your jet-tracking beef when you can just eat it?

So Taylor Swift is going to buy it next?

If that's true, Saudi Arabia probably wouldn't have given him $22B of their dollars with no expectation of a Return on Investment. They have no horse in the "does Elon look foolish?" race.

Twitter is really big in SA so their king wanting extra controll of it makes sense.

Butchering a reporter in Istanbul worked for them but the backlash was likely a bit of an embarrassment to these monsters.

Kashodi was murdered over countering SA bots. Easier to have a controlling interest in the platform than to fight dissidents with dirty assassin tricks. Allah forbid granting some freedom to the press.
Its possible for them to have different interests. Its also possible for this to be the nucleation point that got things rolling without it really being the full cause.
Saudis? No interest in control over what was THE app to get world updates and news?
- And a key tool in the Arab Spring uprisings
- I didn't say that. I said they have no horse in the "does Elon look foolish race". My post is communicating that they very much have a horse in the "information control" race.

Assuming this is true, there are methods to have the same result that are way less expensive...

Yes. By giving the jet tracking account $50,000 that the kid asked for.
- How much even is that to someone like musk?

I think he got talked into thinking the Twitter files were real.

So, lawsuit against Bloomberg incoming?

What a fucking glorious waste of fucking money. YOU CAN FLY COMMERCIAL YOU ASSHAT.

And sit with the peasants? No way.

This won't stop people from trying to eat him though.
- I don't wanna eat Elon I don't know where he's been and ketamine had made that meat all stringy.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A particular beef involving a college student tracking his private jet was the catalyst for the billionaire purchasing shares of Twitter, commencing his takeover of the social media platform, according to a new book about the ordeal.

“Musk had also unsuccessfully petitioned Agrawal [CEO of Twitter at the time] to remove a Twitter account that was tracking his private plane,” says an excerpt from Battle for the Bird, a new book on Musk’s takeover, published by Bloomberg on Thursday.

The book seems to confirm that Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform.

Musk touts “free speech” as the main reason he bought Twitter, but the billionaire was actively trying to silence a college student he had a feud with before he was CEO.

The person behind the account, Jack Sweeney, is a college student who’s now famous for tracking the private jets of Musk and Taylor Swift.

Musk was heavily focused on promoting right-wing speech when he bought Twitter, which was lacking under Jack Dorsey’s management, but also on settling his internet beef.

The original article contains 405 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I wouldn't doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.

I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.

Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He's a crappy CEO for Twitter but it's kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.

He offered Twitter more money than the company was worth with no due diligence.

The leadership of the board could have been sued by shareholders if they didn't push Elon to actually pay over market value.

The end goal of any for profit leadership is to make as much money as possible and exit.