| Hi folks, it's Brad. Elon Musk's now-completed acquisition of Twitter reminds me of the long-ago story of Steve Jobs's return to a failing Apple. But first… Today's must-reads: • Big tech stocks lost $400 billion
• A Covid outbreak ravaged Apple's biggest iPhone plant
• India created a social media appeals panel This week marks the beginning of a new chapter in the already long and twisty Elon Musk-Twitter saga. On Thursday, the Tesla Inc. chief visited Twitter's San Francisco headquarters carrying a sink and then signaled he was ready to metaphorically throw it at the company itself. In the span of two eventful days, he completed the acquisition, sacked Twitter's top brass and took over as "Chief Twit." The world's richest person now owns the world's loudest megaphone. Musk's Twitter also happens to be a wounded asset that lost $221 million last year and whose number of daily active users — despite internal projections a decade ago that it was on track to surpass a billion people — has never cracked 250 million, less than the population of Indonesia. The tangled tale of Musk and Twitter is, in many ways, without precedent in high-tech history. But to me, aspects of it call to mind another iconic story: of Steve Jobs, returning to Apple in the mid '90s after getting ousted in 1985 from the computer maker he co-founded. Just like Twitter today, Apple in the 1990s meant far more culturally and politically than it did financially. Back then, Apple had been decimated by Microsoft Corp. and commanded just 4.4% of the market for personal computers. Jobs often said Apple was just a few months from bankruptcy in 1997 before Microsoft, trying to stave off an inevitable antitrust review of its Windows monopoly by propping up a competitor, helped save Apple with a $150 million investment. Like Musk, Jobs was a charismatic leader who had a messianic view of his company's importance to the world. "What is Apple, after all? Apple is about people who think 'outside the box,' people who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things that make a difference and not just to get a job done," he told Time magazine in 1997. And here's Musk last week, trying to calm jumpy advertisers: "The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence." Both Musk now and Jobs then were infamous multi-taskers who were happy to take on extra responsibility. Musk, of course, has Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Jobs had a failing software company, NeXT, which he would sell to Apple, but he was also riding high from the emergence of Pixar and the blockbuster success of its first film, Toy Story. Both men were impatient and imperious bosses. When Jobs took over Apple in '97, executives had a similar experience as former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and his colleagues did last week — they were shown the door. Jobs, like Musk, seemed to thrive on and crave media attention, even as he railed against negative coverage. Both had imperfect records as fathers. And on and on. So now that we've interrogated this straw man, let's set him ablaze. The situations, of course, are much different. Jobs's return to Apple was that of a prodigal founder, retaking the helm of a company he knew intimately. NeXT laid the foundation for a new Macintosh operating system, and Jobs's impeccable taste and experience with hardware led to a string of hits — the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone — that ignited an historic turnaround and, ultimately, the largest market capitalization in the world. Twitter already saw the return of a founder when Jack Dorsey came back as CEO in 2015. Musk knows Twitter only as one of its most popular and obsessive users. While Apple was bloated, hobbled and losing badly to its largest rival when Jobs returned, it had relatively little debt. Musk's purchase of Twitter will saddle the company with a $13 billion debt bill along with annual interest payments near $1 billion. But the most critical difference is this: Jobs returned to Apple right in the midst of the PC age, with the mobile revolution around the corner. He narrowed Apple's product lineup and took daring risks. Musk takes over Twitter at a moment when social media has apparently stopped being a growth business. Meta Platforms Inc. demonstrated this last week, with a bleak financial projection that erased a quarter of the stock's value. Musk has shown a surface level understanding of the problems facing Twitter specifically and social media in general. His self-styled "free speech maximalism" is destined to clash badly with the social justice mission of many Twitter employees. And his plans to use Twitter as "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app," are nebulous at best. It's also impossible to imagine Jobs engaging in the kind of pointless provocation Musk did this weekend, propagating a ridiculous conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi. Back in the '90s, customers and even the media were rooting for Apple to succeed. "Pray," Wired famously said on its cover. I'm not so sure that's broadly the case here. "To be perfectly honest, my ideal scenario at this point would be a total shut down of Twitter," a former executive said to me last week. "It's dangerous in his hands." —Brad Stone Can't get enough Twitter news? Here's what else is happening: Netflix vs. HBO is the defining rivalry of the streaming era. It started with an insult, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek excerpt of an upcoming book. There are four-dozen mutual funds and ETFs with the word metaverse in their description. They're all doing very poorly. 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