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Multi-billionaire Musk: Is it just about power, thick pants – and a lot of money?
Photo: JIM WATSON / AFP
What had the German car bosses once made fun of Elon Musk.
The Tesla boss is an announcement world champion who only burns money with his electric cars.
Musk gave them all the lies.
Tesla is now generating returns on sales on par with Porsche.
And hardly anyone seriously denies that the future belongs to e-mobility.
But the recent Twitter takeover battle brings back uncomfortable memories of entrepreneur Elon Musk's early days, when it was difficult to be sure whether he was the genius his followers thought he was, or just a phony.
Does he actually primarily want to save the planet, accelerate the global switch to renewable energies, as he claims?
Is he actually pursuing the goal of increasing freedom of expression on Twitter?
Or is Musk just about power, thick pants – and a lot of money?
Crude plan
From the outset, it was unclear exactly what Musk intended to do with Twitter, what leverage he saw to significantly increase the value and benefits of the short message service.
Especially since Musk's strength so far has been in building new, revolutionary companies like Tesla or SpaceX instead of investing in corporations that have been stagnating for years like Twitter.
In order to implement his idea of e-mobility for the masses, he would probably never have thought of taking over a fading industry star like Chrysler, Fiat or Opel.
His crude plan to bring Donald Trump back to the platform obviously didn't work.
Twitter permanently banned the former US President after his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Not even Trump himself accepted Musk's idea.
Musk's $44 billion quick bid from April is far too high from today's perspective, and the tech stock markets have plummeted in recent months.
If the Tesla boss had taken the usual time for such a mega takeover, he would probably get Twitter for half today.
That hurts twice: Musk's fortune has also shrunk considerably in recent months because Tesla has also lost a lot of value.
The fact that Musk and his lawyers are now denouncing alleged false information from Twitter management seems like a cheap excuse to withdraw from the high-risk billion-dollar takeover.
He is now threatened with a lengthy and costly legal mud battle.
His chances of winning are not good.
more on the subject
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The time and energy Musk is wasting on Twitter would be better invested at Tesla.
Because after several quarters of sales and profit records, the e-car pioneer has recently suffered a few setbacks.
In China, the e-car pioneer is suffering from the government's rigid pandemic control.
In the US home market, the NHTSA is investigating the extent to which Tesla's autopilot could have caused accidents.
And in Germany, Tesla has already lost its pioneering role in highly automated driving.
So far there is only one manufacturer on the local autobahns whose driver assistance allows its customers to take their hands off the steering wheel and turn away from traffic in certain vehicles and situations: Mercedes, the oldest car manufacturer in the world.
Volkswagen boss Herbert Diess is already exulting, actually a Musk supporter, who usually hardly misses an opportunity to exuberantly praise the rival: Tesla has to “solve problems”, has “difficult tasks ahead of it”: The challenge is “to tackle two new ones locations to ramp up production at the same time” – in Austin, Texas, and Grünheide, Brandenburg.
It has just become known that Tesla will stop production in the German factory called "Giga Berlin" for two weeks in order to change the work processes.
In addition, Tesla has to fix a software error in more than 59,000 vehicles worldwide, as the Federal Motor Transport Authority published on its website at the end of June.
The authority had found a fault in the emergency call system.
Tesla now needs Musk more than Twitter.
