Musk is not what Twitter needs now

Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter Inc for $43 billion — but he has only about $3 billion in cash on hand. Most of the fortune of the world’s richest man, which adds up to some $259 billion, is tied up in Tesla Inc and other nifty things.
So if he’s serious about a takeover — and there is ample reason for skepticism — he’ll have to sell a chunk of his Tesla shares or get a consortium of big buckaroos with social media interests to chip in. Maybe he can enlist the help of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Donald Trump’s political action committee.
Musk’s Twitter takeover offer is of a piece with his other recent attention-grabbing antics surrounding the social media company: lots of noise but no real substance. He unveiled a big stake in Twitter under the guise of being a passive investor. Then he got very active and snagged a board seat. Then he got very, I don’t know, distracted, and stepped away. Now he says he wants the whole megillah.
This is the guy who invited a knife thrower to one of this birthday parties and then stuck a balloon between his legs and dared his guest to pop it.
Now Musk is the knife thrower, Twitter is the balloon, and Musk maintains his nonchalant attitude about the risk of disabling injuries.
As a thought experiment, however, take Musk at his word: He really wants to buy Twitter and take what he’s called the “de facto public town square” into his own two hands.
There are upsides and downsides to Musk’s greater involvement in Twitter. The ups largely revolve around the technological and platform enhancements he might push through, as well as the undeniable entrepreneurial mojo he’d bring. The downs reside in his track record as a self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist” who hasn’t always acted as a free speech advocate — and has been an avid disseminator of know-nothingism. In early March 2020, for example, he let it be known that the “coronavirus pandemic is dumb.” He also noted that the coronavirus was just a “form of the common cold” and advocated hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment. There’s much more in that vein. So maybe the issue is not that Musk lacks the cash to buy Twitter. It’s that he lacks the temperament to run it.
Effective and responsible media owners give their contributors the resources they need to communicate and share information easily, and have the self-confidence to tolerate various perspectives.

—Bloomberg