Elon Musk asks ‘if I’m so smart then why did I pay so much for Twitter?’

Elon Musk posed a teaser recently at a conference by asking ‘if I’m so smart, why did I buy Twitter?’

Well, the first reason is because he’s really rich - we all know that - but it’s still a decent question.

Twitter isn’t exactly the most lucrative of social media platforms, or at least it wasn’t when Musk took over.

It’s more of a forum for people to bitterly argue about anything and everything than a place to buy stuff, sell stuff, or whatever.

Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy

Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, YouTube, these are where people who make money on the internet really get it done, presumably generating money for the people who own the platforms in the process.

But Twitter? That seems harder to cash in on.

Well, unless you can convince one of the richest men to have ever lived to buy it from you, much like the old owners did to Musk.

The South African Tesla and SpaceX supremo bought Twitter for $44 billion, which is admittedly not even that much compared to his actual wealth, but it’s still a fair chunk of cash.

Musk admitted that he bought the platform at an ‘expensive’ price but said that he was motivated to do so because - as a prolific tweeter himself - he was worried that the platform was ‘moving in a negative direction’.

At the VivaTech conference in Paris on Friday (16 June), he even joked: "If I'm so smart, why did I pay so much for Twitter then?"

Musk then explained: "I was concerned Twitter was having a negative affect on civilization and corrosive affect on civil society, and anything that undermines civilization, I think, isn't good.

"I felt Twitter kept moving in a negative direction and my hope and aspiration was for it to be a positive force for civilization."

So, he coughed up the dough and took control in October 2022.

Piotr Swat/Alamy

Musk believes that since then he’s managed to sort out some of the problems at Twitter, adding: "I felt Twitter kept moving in a negative direction and my hope and aspiration was for it to be a positive force for civilization.

"We've gotten rid of 90% of bots and scams and various bad things happening.

"We've gotten rid of 95% of child exploitation material on Twitter, which was a shock to see ... some of what was going on for 10 years."

He’s still got a long way to go though, I think we’d all agree.

Still, he’s got the money and the time.