I mean, to be fair, the stakeholders of twitter had a chance to not allow a sell. Musk wanted to back out. They knew what would happen. Note, this doesn't absolve Musk of any of his actions, but the stakeholders are also assholes.
Isn't the board of directors legally responsible for obtaining the best financial result for shareholders? If someone makes an above-market-value offer for the company, I doubt they can just say "no" without severe consequences and lawsuits.
Do you know that "maximize shareholder value" trope that's trotted out every time a corporation kicks over a baby carriage? This is one of the few times it's actually relevant. Letting Musk back out of the deal would have been a gross dereliction of fiduciary duty, would have landed the board members in court personally, and perhaps wouldn't have even stopped the sale given how shareholder-friendly Delaware is.
Despite all the lofty platitudes about building good companies, startups are always headed towards the uncaring wood chipper of finance. In a way, Musk violently running the company into the ground (ala the cliche of the rich person buying a sports car only to crash it on the way home) is a better outcome than the surveillance-monetization pot slowly boiling.
Because he has money? Elon sounds like a real dick, but people forget that literal tech super-villains like Larry Ellison exist. Compared to the previous shareholders of Twitter, Musk is frankly a sidegrade. You literally cannot do worse than Jack Dorsey.
Beside his prolific crypto bro arc and attempts at effective altruism, he did very little during his tenure as CEO and let the company stagnate during it's most lucrative years. On top of that, his moderation double-standards were as bad as Musk and he even went on to admit that Twitter in it's current incarnation is a mistake. He did a good job of building a company from nothing, but struggled to turn it into anything profitable.
Twitter was losing a billion dollars per year when Jack left as CEO. He may have not run Twitter into the ground, but neither has Musk so I'd argue it's a moot point.
I'm not trying to compare Jack Dorsey to Larry Elison, but my point is that Elon exists somewhere between these two on the axis of "deliberate ruthlessness" and "bumbling incompetence". For Twitter to be profitable, it has to be run like a business instead of a parody of the tech industry.
> Twitter was losing a billion dollars per year when Jack left as CEO.
He left in 2021 when they lost $220M (not a loss of a billion dollars) because of an $800M settlement which means they -technically- made a profit of $580M (very much not a loss of a billion dollars.)
If you're thinking of 2020, that does seem to have been a $1.1bn net loss but that's somewhat balanced by 2019 which was a $1.4bn net income (according to [1])
> He may have not run Twitter into the ground, but neither has Musk
Musk has added a $1bn/year debt servicing obligation - the company will have to make $1bn/year profit just to reach net $0. I don't think there's any scenario available where this isn't "running it into the ground".
The Twitter board did not have a choice and were obligated to sell the company since it was in the best interest of the shareholders. If they hadn't sold the company because they didn't like Elon or whatever, they would likely have been sued by the shareholders.
