Is Elon Musk Bored Of Tesla?

Everyone has been talking about Elon Musk buying Twitter – even people who rarely or never use the platform. But the acquisition has another implication. Will Elon Musk become distracted by his new toy, and lose interest in his older toy – Tesla? After all, most of us have had attention span difficulties because of social media at some point. Just think how much worse that could be if you actually owned the social media platform, rather than merely being a participant.

Another consideration is how Musk will be paying for Twitter. He is one of the richest people in the world. Both Forbes and Investopedia place him top of the list now, having surpassed Jeff Bezos since 2021. But he is still “only” worth $219 billion (Forbes) or $273 billion (Investopedia), and the Twitter deal is for $44 billion, which is a significant proportion of his fortune. He has been selling Tesla shares in the last week to the tune of $8.4 billion, then a further $4.4 billion on Thursday. But he is reportedly paying $21 billion in cash for Twitter, and he supposedly only has $5.7 billion of that knocking around, prior to these sales.

There will be a $12.5 billion margin loan secured against a further $62 billion in Tesla shares, and then the remainder will come from various other loans and credit. As of this month, Tesla had a market cap of over $900 billion, and Musk is still the largest shareholder with about 15.6% of the company, which amounts to $147 billion. So he will still be the controlling financial force. But his aim is to take Twitter private, becoming the sole owner with no shareholders to assuage. Considering his claims to be a “free speech absolutist”, there have been wild theories about how he plans to change the culture of Twitter. How much will this distract him from the original plan of making electric vehicles the dominant form of car?

Musk’s ownership of Twitter has gotten Tesla competitors worried. Henrik Fisker, designer of the beautiful Karma GT electric car and now the force behind the Ocean SUV, has reportedly quit Twitter and directed his followers to Instagram instead. He is clearly worried about being on platform controlled by the competition. Musk also recently lost a bid to get out of an agreement made with regulators requiring oversight of his tweets about Tesla. His tweets have regularly caused tectonic motion in the prices of shares and cryptocurrencies he has mentioned. There is a question whether he should be allowed to influence the market in this way.

If Musk really does take the protections on speech off Twitter, it has been argued that he will also collide with the European Digital Services Act, which requires that online systems protect users from disinformation, hate speech and other harmful material, or potentially face billions in fines. Sure, Musk could afford it. But he’s unlikely to want to waste money in this way. There are indications that Tesla built its biggest factory yet in Austin, Texas – opened in April – to avoid the stricter employment laws of California. But he’s not going to be moving Gigafactory Berlin outside the EU just so Twitter users can say whatever they want.

Assuming Twitter does end up in the Musk portfolio, it will be another company for him to manage. It’s worth bearing in mind that Musk wasn’t just Tesla CEO before the Twitter foray. He also runs SpaceX, Boring, and Neuralink. He is almost the living epitome of the adage, “if you want something done, ask a busy person”. But he has a proven track record of taking an existing – possibly even failing – company and pushing it to realize its true potential. Even Tesla fits into this category. Musk didn’t found it, but invested in it a year in, then grew it to the position it is in today – the most valuable car company in the world.

There are possibilities that Musk will feed technologies from other businesses into Twitter. Tesla is developing the most sophisticated AI supercomputer to train its self-driving cars and the TeslaBot. Connected to both will be sophisticated Natural Language Processing (although admittedly the voice control on Teslas isn’t great). Musk has talked about getting rid of fake accounts and bots on Twitter. All social platforms now use AI as the first stage of their moderation strategy, and most users will tell you that they universally do a poor job, failing to spot the difference between jokes and truly damaging speech. Better AI could really help here, just as it is essential for safe autonomous vehicles.

It’s still far from certain the Twitter deal will end up going through. But even if it does, Musk probably won’t take his eye off the ball with Tesla. He may even leverage some existing technology to make Twitter a better place to be, not a worse one. You never know, in the future you could be DMing your Model S Plaid the location to pick you from, or it might be tweeting about examples of bad driving it encounters on the road automatically. Whatever happens, since Elon Musk is involved, it’s likely to be a bit of a surprise.