As everyone in the Solar System knows, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, bought Twitter earlier this year, and none of us know how he feels about it, but I suspect he would happily Ctrl-Z the entire event if he could. It occurred to me while walking my dogs in the pouring rain this morning, what would Twitter probably be worth now if he had never sought to purchase it? Let’s go through a simple exercise.

My first goal was to find another stock which is still actively traded that, prior to the buyout, was highly correlated with Twitter. I thought it would be something like META, but in fact Spotify (SPOT) turned out to be a much better fit. Here is the percentage performance of SPOT and TWTR up to when Musk announced the buyout.