A hostile takeover has a specific meaning. It's simply a takeover attempt where a buyer approaches shareholders instead of the company's management, this is usually (if not always) because the latter fails. And it always comes with a premium and drama, precisely because it goes against the wishes of the management of a company. And the premium is also logical because presumably shareholders of a company "believe" in that company, and an outsider now wants to take it over. A good example [1] is when Inbev (massive multinational beer company) purchased Anheuser-Busch (Budweiser). It made the purchase of Twitter look downright cordial, but was probably outside of most of our bubbles.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch#Acquisition_by_...

Yea, to make people buy your company you need to offer a premium. He backed out saying he was lied to about the current level of fake accounts, which is also reasonable if that was the case.

If the “normal way” of doing things worked then Twitter wouldn’t have been in such a bad state when he took over in the first place. An unconventional approach brings more risk but can also end up being worth it.

Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.

As a person who occasionally uses Twitter, but has no interest in having an account, he has dramatically improved the experience. Before he took over it was made impossible to view replies from a user, users were spammed with popup login dialogues that could not be closed with a single click, and more. I expect Twitter probably drove more people away from the site with all this nonsense, than they coerced into registering.

I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.

What would you say has been irrational?

It was going to be tough to cut Twitter regardless of who did it. Advertisers were pulling out before the deal was even closed, mainly because of Tiktok.

How are the people that disagree with you in this thread trying to shut down your discussion?

It’s the CEO being able to write something and see where it ends up after going through the pipeline. It does not increase views. I can repeat this, other can repeat this, or you can look at the code.