There’s always one deal that symbolises the end of an era. In the early 2000s AOL’s merger with Time Warner served notice that the dot-com boom was over. Royal Bank of Scotland’s over-priced takeover of ABN Amro was followed by the global financial crisis of 2008-09. The question now is whether Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter will be seen as the moment the global economy tipped into recession.
The signs are not promising. Even before Musk sealed the deal, tech stocks had seen a sharp sell-off. The stock market value of Meta, the parent of Facebook, fell by $80bn on Thursday after Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced a 50% drop in third-quarter profits. The reason was simple: advertisers are reining in spending in response to slowing global growth.
