BACK IN APRIL, Elon Musk, the world's richest man, made a dramatic attempt at a hostile takeover of Twitter, for a cool $44 billion. That's a lot of money, even for a billionaire tycoon, and the takeover attempt quickly descended into public mud-slinging and court battles. But whoever wins (we're not going to know for some time), I think the most interesting part of the story is the more fundamental question: why would Musk even want to buy Twitter in the first place?
If you look at the size of Twitter, its appeal isn't obvious. The company makes a relatively meagre profit each year, and in terms of the number of users, Twitter is a relative minnow among social media networks. It has around 436 million users every month, which isn't nothing but is also a long way behind the likes of Facebook (near three billion), Instagram (two billion), and TikTok (one billion).
So why does Musk want to spend a considerable slice of his own enormous fortune on a social network that not many people, in the grand scheme of things, actually use?
This story is from the October 2022 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
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This story is from the October 2022 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
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