Leveraged buyouts tend to be a great way to turn a struggling company into a payout for the current ownership and a dead company in 5-10 years. Usually there's not such huge cost cutting in the days after closing though.
It doesn't usually happen that fast, but that's pretty normal too, isn't it? Typically the buyer cuts the quality of the business down to the bone and stops all investment in the future of the business and tries to extract as much profit as they can from the brand name recognition and existing infrastructure before the company goes bankrupt. Then they sell off the remaining assets for scrap. It's like a controlled demolition.
If Elon follows this model, all updates to the site will stop and the amount of advertising and other forms of money extraction from users will skyrocket, and then as the site bleeds out users he'll eventually sell the IP and any other assets before having the firm declare bankruptcy so that he doesn't have to pay back the loans.
I thought that required asserts that could be stripped. Does Twitter have any assets in that category? Compute doesn't retain value, user retention is fickle, and there exists open source clones of the service.
The user base/social graph of Twitter is a thing of value, but given the changes over the past week, it's also in a tenuous position. How many newsmakers want to be in a place that gives any airtime to a community without standards?
