The New York Times has a current circulation of approximately 350,000 print copies which, predictably, is down from 1.3-million a decade.
Twitter is not a newspaper but it is, I would argue, the largest user-sourced Town Square.
So what does he want? Almost certainly he wants what media moguls like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner before him and William Randolph Hearts wanted before him: control of the narrative.
Of course, borrowing a pile of money right now, with rates reliably expected to rise might be a little aggressive with rates about to rise.
A DAO is a structure that is, according to Forbes writer Cathy Hackl, an “organization represented by rules encoded as a transparent computer program, controlled by the organization members, and not influenced by a central government”.
In cases where concentration of media ownership has been an issue in the past, it was more straightforward than today: no one individual could control more than a certain number of newspapers or media outlets.
A colleague recently commented to me that the management of Twitter may not go for it because it would be an admission of failure by that leadership team.
When someone offers to buy their shares for cash at a reasonable premium to their current trading price, and at a valuation of 60x P/E, in an environment where high growth tech stocks have no near-term future and inflation + interest rates are high and about to rise materially, those funds are definitely sellers into that cash bid.
This is unprecedented, but what other outcome could arise? Jeff Bezos, already steaming from Musk for slapping him down in the world of rockets, not to mention being supplanted as the richest individual on the planet, could launch his own competing bid.