Why Elon Musk should forget Twitter and stick to Tesla

I spent Easter agonising over whether to throw the considerable weight of this column behind Elon Musk’s maverick $43 billion bid for Twitter. One thing I didn’t do, however, was consult the multitude of opinions on the matter available via Twitter itself, because I’m afraid I regard it as a satanic cacophony of misinformation and vanity. If that puts me in the position of the late-15th-century scholar who said ‘Printing presses? Pah! The only news I trust is handwritten by monks’, so be it. But when I read Musk’s claim that ‘civilisational risk’ would be decreased by his sole ownership of the ubiquitous microblogging site, I laughed out loud.

Not that I think Musk a fool. On the contrary, his leadership of Tesla since he bought into the fledgling electric car company in 2004 really has contributed to civilisation, in the sense that it has pioneered the global automotive industry’s post-carbon transition. And despite a notably loose grasp of corporate governance and an extraordinarily lucky ride on a tech-crazy stock market, he’s a pretty shrewd financier.

But he’s also, frankly, a bit bonkers: obsessed with dreams of building cities on Mars; prone to public weed-smoking and strangely inarticulate interviews; deluded, we might suspect, by the adulation of a vast army of online admirers. His Twitter bid may not even be serious: there’s no indication how he’d finance it, the market hasn’t embraced it – and neither, in conclusion, will this column. Keep your wandering focus firmly on Tesla, Mr Musk.

Virtuoso investor

The contrarian New York investor John Paulson will go down in history as one of the monsters of the 2008 financial crisis, having earned $4 billion out of others’ folly by betting that the US mortgage-backed securities market would implode.