It would help, in making that case, if Twitter’s board and managers had a long-term plan. What is strange here is that the richest person on earth came in out of the blue with a not-particularly-preemptive offer to buy a service that he is obsessed with and that seems crucial to his success. Hearing that, you might think things like “huh this product must be pretty valuable.” You might sit down and try to think of ways to extract value from it, other than selling it to Musk at the first price he proposed. Twitter’s board had no ideas.

Meanwhile you know who does? Elon Musk. Maybe? He seems to think that he can make Twitter worth more than $54.20 per share: He has publicly denied wanting to make money from this deal, but he has pitched his banks on how he will improve Twitter’s economics. Perhaps he is wrong, but he has a decent track record. And he just got here! He started buying Twitter stock this year, and declined to do any nonpublic due diligence. Some random interloper has a plan to make Twitter worth more than $54.20, and has bet $33 billion of his own money that it will work. Meanwhile Twitter was trading in the $60s in October and Twitter’s board cannot fathom ever getting it back to those levels. Their position is pretty much “well we destroyed some value for shareholders and we’re gonna go now, bye.”

But it is worse than that.

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