All: speech here isn't very free when the server can't stay up, and it's smoking right now, for obvious reasons.
I'm going to prune some of the top-heavy subthreads and possibly restrict the page size a bit. There are over 2500 comments in this thread, and if you want to read them all you're going to have to click "More" at the bottom of each page, or go like this:
...and so on. Sorry everyone! (Yes, fixes are coming, yes it's all very slow.)
Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it's true. Make sure you haven't lost your password!)
So Twitter was at $70 per share a year ago. So what? Jack Dorsey was CEO a year ago, too. The share price was $33 less than a month ago.
But, despite an absolutely incredible roller-coaster news cycle, things have been definitely trending down at Twitter ($33/share last month), which was reflected in its share price. The current executive team (and Dorsey) had wasted time focusing on things that didn't matter instead of things that did matter.
Boards have several fiduciary duties to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
If the board elects to reject this offer, then their reasons for doing so need to be very clearly elucidated, because, as Twitter is a public company, they would have to see something in their crystal ball that the rest of the market does not.
Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
To make a successful hostile bid, you need to pay not just "more than the current price", but "more than the holders of 50% of current shares believe the company to be worth". Usually bidders use analyst price targets to guess at the distribution of holders' internal price targets.
This is what makes it so difficult, and why this bid is very likely to be rejected.
(This is easier to explain with a white board, tbh.)
If the shareholders are rational and believe the true value is greater than current price, why aren't people buying until it asymptotically approaches that price?
Optimism and hopes for future gains aren't priced in because they are fantasy and not yet material.
I believe a lot of my long positions are worth more than their current price, doesn't mean I'm going to spend all my money buying them up to that price.
If I lock in a 20% gain today that's nice, but I might believe with high confidence that it'll rise 50% in the next year. Then Elon's bid doesn't move me that much.
If they believed this, they wouldn't be selling at the current spot, sellers would all be putting their asks ~46% above spot (discounting time value of money), and the market would move.
That risk and upside is already priced in if you believe in market efficiency.
> If they believed this, they wouldn't be selling at the current spot…
They’re not. You’re mixing up the market as a whole and the owners of a majority of shares.
The ask price is the lowest ask. If you buy a lot of something, you reach further into the order book and the price is going to be higher. If you want a 51% stake, then a lot higher.
Depends on the index fund and the rules / guidance they follow to balance.
Many of them are passive, and only adjust once a quarter or once a year. Additionally, big spikes by one stock match drops in other stocks, aka they're not likely to make a big sale because one stock (twitter) had a good day.
The market is large and has plenty of participants with different strategies. There are people selling at the going price, and there are people who are not. The trading price is a good reference price, but it's not the "right price" for everyone.
it is also the price of what is currently for sale, most shares of most companies are not actively for sale at their current price.
Every market participant has a buy price and a sell price for one share influenced by their personal opinions and the state of the whole market; each at a different level and trading price is only calculated on actual trades. So all the shareholders that are unwilling to sell for any of the current offers do not influence it.
Yet if you were to buy 100% of the shares then you would eventually have to climb up to their price.
This is an interesting point I never really thought about. There is a distribution of buy prices and another distribution of sell prices. But if we plot these on the price axis there will be NO overlap because all shares in that region have been traded. I wonder if there's a way to sample these distributions to get the bigger picture.
I don't anyone would find your squishy confidence it's worth 50% more than current value any more credible than shorters who think it's worth 50% less. Both seem like fringe opinions without much foundation.
> I don't anyone would find your squishy confidence it's worth 50% more than current value any more credible than shorters who think it's worth 50% less
It's not my opinion that TWTR is worth 50% more. Please don't understand it as such. It's an example of what someone long TWTR could be thinking when they simultaneously hold their position and want to reject the Musk takeover.
I don't think it's worth continuing this thread anymore though. Have a great day.
you may believe that your positions are worth more than their current price but the reality is that they aren't otherwise they would be selling at the higher price. the price of an asset is its true value
If you can buy 1 share at $1, that means that yes.
But a controlling interest in something almost always requires more than 1 share. It may require millions or billions of shares.
And once folks figure out that they’re the couple percent that will block that controlling interest, their own prices tend to change.
That volume of shares also means you can't just buy from the person who is happy to sell right now, you need to convince folks who don't plan to sell ever, or aren't in a hurry, or don't need money right now. Their prices tend to be different too.
And just like buying a tank of gas is different than buying an oil field, the value propositions and likely price discussions are different.
If you can buy an oil field of gas one tank at a time, more power to you - but you’ll likely quickly discover it doesn’t scale the way you want.
These guys are literally betting that it'll go up 100% to that mythical $77. If they actually believed HALF this amount was going to happen, they'd be buying until it reached $50-60. Instead, we see Goldman Sachs saying that $30 is their sell price.
A dollar in the hand is worth a LOT of imaginary gambling dollars.
This can only be described as political/ideological or a huge gamble that Musk would come back with an even bigger offer rather than walk away. Neither of these seem to be in the best interest of shareholders.
I don't think investors are totally rational, but here's a simplified example. If you think there's a 90% chance that a stock price will triple and a 10% chance that it will drop to zero, you could resist a takeover bid and still not want to put all of your money into it.
If you're gambling with your stock, under what circumstances would you not take a massive 20% ROI and turn it over into a new stock?
In my opinion, the real reason behind the board's decision is ideological. If Someone with their ideology made the same offer, I'd bet big that they'd be announcing their acceptance and talking about the bright future for the company.
Screwing your shareholders over for ideology would not sit well with a jury. I'd love for them to go to discovery over this and see what the board REALLY said.
The current shareholders, who vote on this, think that the current value is higher than what is being offered to them to sell. Those are the ones that Elon has to convince with his higher offer.
Well, along with if they don't sell to him it feels like he will become create a Twitter competitor with up a budget of up to $42 billion to spend - which based on his past successes he will efficiently spend.
>
The company had an income of $438 million, including a $101 million "positive impact" from the sale of Bitcoin, and $518 million from selling zero-emission regulatory credits to other automakers. That means Tesla continues to lose money making and selling vehicles.
Sorry you're so glum. Buy a Tesla. It'll put a smile on your face.
-Space access is leading the world. Satellites bring freedom, access, and peace.
-Cars are the safest, fastest, and smartest you can drive.
-Tunnels solve waaaay more problems than they create. Hyperloop isn't so much an 'active' project, see tunnels.
-Robots are extension of AI work for self driving.
-Brain project will help those with physical disabilities, and learning.
-Solar roof and battery at home is wicked cool and useful.
I'm leaving stuff out. Don't know if they take a loss on their cars, but if so that's very common for hardware manufacturers.
I'm not an Elon apologist by any stretch, but you have objectively bad takes here. I can only imagine you just don't like his personality.
Are his companies not leading in Space access? Clean energy? Transportation? Maximizing life? Fun.
The guy is a workhorse He innovates at every turn. He hires the best, and expects the best. He has done a marvelous job incentivizing great engineering, science, and research. Their goals are lofty. He thinks long-term. His teams are largely motivated for the right reasons, and he helps make many of his employees very wealthy.
His intentions are good. He's an environmentalist. He loves Earth. He loves people. He's positive and optimistic for the future. He can be abstract, artistic, and goofy.
From our perspective, he's rarely wrong, and when he is, he owns it. Is he perfect? Hell no. But he accepts responsibility. He engages with the public, and his fans.... and his haters.
One thing is for sure so far, people who bet on him win.
We'd be so lucky to have Elon lead a communication/social platform.
This is a little silly. I returned a Model 3 after they told me I'd have to wait months to get body defects repaired. These were defects that were apparent within 2 days of having it. They refused to simply swap the car out. For a little while it seemed unclear that they were going to repair it at all... just abysmal service.
> I'm not an Elon apologist by any stretch
I'm sorry, but you really really are (and that's fine, people like what they like). You're practically fawning over him in this comment.
> We'd be so lucky to have Elon lead a communication/social platform.
I think the opposite. He is in fact an excellent physicist. Like Nikola Tesla if Nikola Tesla both cared more about money, though he did a lot; and was better at getting money; and critically, if he had a predecessor who got fucked he could learn from (hence the name of the company, and why I say "Nikola Tesla" instead of "Tesla", because at this point the brand is bigger than its eponym). Only 99% sure about these statements, not absolute. And people remember Nikola Tesla because of the electricity, well he also designed the Tesla valve, a valve with no moving parts. Who knows what else.
So keep in mind while Elon Musk has a lot of monetary capital ie rich, and sure he's also still in the game of pushing the boundaries, he's not better than anyone. He's not better than you. So for there to be things he's that good at, to get to that level of success by the metrics most people are obsessed with, he has to be bad at other things. Well not exactly, it's not like skill points. In fact physics is highly analog, so that limits how good you can be at digital. They just naturally compete for neural resources.
So in fact, he's vulnerable to ML, he's been getting hacked by its promises for the longest time, Achilles heel. But you realize it cannot be any other way? You can't have an Iliad with no Achilles heel, it doesn't work as a story, like Superman without kryptonite, you can tell the story of Popeye without spinach but not Superman without kryptonite.
Like he sees demos and he's like "finally shit that actually works" and then it's like no, this is more shit that doesn't actually work, one-trick ponies, not even, one-trick PhD's disguised as ponies. Like he believes he needs PhDs because at some level he believes in credentials, when what he obviously needs are dropouts like him. Day one dropouts ideally. I mean if he wants inventors. If he wants to prove something is impossible, then yeah a PhD is the best. I don't know what the hell it is, maybe it's a recent thing, I believe in the idea of a PhD, I like people with PhDs.
I think it's because they're intelligent, they're not stupid enough to try to fly by flapping their arms. They don't do one single flap. No idea what happens if you flap your arms. Sounds stupid right? That's how aviation came into existence, guys would try flying off the Eiffel tower with a bird costume, splat. But then less stupid guys said, OK you can't use your arms, you need wings in a stronger structure, and that's why airplane wings are called wings. They're not actually wings, that's a really weird metaphor for birds' arms. And it was strictly necessary for guys to go splat for there to be gliders and all the rest.
People usually want to earn money, so it's a good idea to buy low and sell high. You don't want to buy close to the price you think it will reach. Not only because of the risk of it being wrong, but also because other options exists that is believed to make more money compared to the risk.
It would be stupid to buy a stock even if there was a 100 % guarantee for a stock to increase 2 % in 1 year as there are other basically risk free options available.
All shareholders may believe the true value is greater than the current price but still not buy or sell at the true value price because they don't know when the company will sell for the true value. You see this when a company makes a bid for another company but the deal hasn't gone through yet. It sometimes trades for a little more or a little less, and that's when a deal has been accepted. When it's a little less, that's because there is some legal risk that the deal won't go through. When it is a little more that is because someone thinks the deal will get held up and renegotiated (like another bidder might show up).
So it is possible and common for a stock to be lower then what people expect it to be worth. A really good example of this is when you have a powerful CEO or a person with more voting rights who might hold up a deal for their personal ambition. Think about Shari Redstone at Viacom. Most people think the company is worth more but difficult to sell because she wants to run it awhile to show she can.
Twitter is worth a lot but difficult to sell for all the reasons this deal is showing. Supposedly Disney thought about buying it but realized it would be very controversial. When it takes a long time for the right buyer to show up investors trade the stock at a discount. It happens all the time in media stocks. (Full disclosure: I have Twitter stock)
His point is, that at least half of the share holders are not happy selling for that price. Selling is a personal decision, and if at least half are not happy to be forced to sell, I don't see it being a good idea.
Even if the optimal price that's some supernatural being will suggest is lower than current price, it is still the decision of the share holders.
Optimism and hopes are worth a price, you are in ycombinator.com, a major buyer of optimism and hopes.
One can easily imagine how useful it's for such a country like Saudi Arabia to control the #1 worldwide media platform without being too exposed on the frontline (i.e. as a large, but not too much, shareholder).
>Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
This is not exactly true. Everyone holding Twitter believes that it will outperform the next best available asset. This can mean that it will decline less than cash (i.e. inflation) and decline less than other stocks. In our current market, this means people believe that Twitter has a good forward looking IRR, but it does not mean that all holders believe that the stock price should be $70.
>To make a successful hostile bid, you need to pay not just "more than the current price", but "more than the holders of 50% of current shares believe the company to be worth".
Again, this comes back to IRR terms. Sure Twitter may be worth $100/share ten years from now, but most people would take $50 today than $100 then.
>This is what makes it so difficult, and why this bid is very likely to be rejected.
The bid is likely to be rejected b/c it's likely made in bad faith. Read the SEC release and count how many times it says ' non-binding'
How was Musk's offer - a public disclosure with few conditions or contingencies, made in bad faith? At face value, it does not violate basic standards of honesty or appear to deliberately mislead.
"Funding was indeed secured. I should say I do not have respect for the SEC in that situation. I don’t mean to blame everyone at the SEC, but certainly the San Francisco office. The SEC knew that funding was secured. They pursued an active public investigation, nonetheless. I was forced to concede to the SEC unlawfully."
> Mr. Musk called the bid his “best and final offer,” adding that if his proposal isn’t accepted “I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.” Mr. Musk earlier this year built a position of more than 9% in Twitter.
> This can mean that it will decline less than cash (i.e. inflation)
This is meaningless because stock price is denominated in dollars. Inflation expectation means that the stock price is going up; that is, be worth more in dollars. Anyone choosing to hold a stock prefers that stock more than the dollar price it would fetch. Otherwise they would sell.
Holding a volatile and risky asset implies that the holder thinks there is a significant win available to offset the costs of the risks. It's reasonable to assume that projected price is far above market.
the problem is that said "new platform" is doomed to fail, just as every free speech twitter competitor before it (gab, parler, truth, etc). this is an idea thats been attempted numerous times but doesnt succeed because no one wants a platform where they can be harassed. so im not inclined to believe that the share price of twitter will fall once he makes a competitor, because if free speech was truly a differentiator (versus decentralization / federation e.g. mastodon), then these other networks would have actually seen continuous use, but at the end of the day everyone still uses twitter
Even just him announcing a new platform would scare twitter investors. If successful it'd drive twitter even further down.
Paul Graham thinks he would be able to compete:
"It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
"You don't need to get everyone to switch right away. All you need, to start with, is a critical mass of users — enough so that people don't feel they're talking to a void. You'd very likely have that from the start. Then it grows."
I doubt Musk has the patience for building or owning a graph based technology business. The complexities of Twitter’s architecture are not trivial and a huge reason it’s not been successfully disrupted.
The other big reason is balancing the greater good vs unrestricted access, which has taken years to accommodate.
Musk is just an ego-centric billionaire with a lot of money and an unproven belief that Twitter could be better with his proposed changes. I’d bet he’s thoroughly aware that those changes could destroy the platform.
I believe the offer is rejected and the other top ten shareholders (all hedge funds) buy up anything he dumps and the price remains stable.
Twitter is complex. But not nearly as complex a building a mass produced EV, charging and servicing infrastructure and space company. You have a bug in twitter? Easy try something new. Bug in either of the others? People DIE. Twitter will barely be remembered next to MY___________ in a few years. It's blank for a reason.
I'd argue Twitter is just as complex, because Twitter's product is its users and the content they create, where the others are governed by the laws of physics and making a good car (i have one, they're good!). What you have is a bunch of engineers on twitter going "ah yes, its just a social network feed! I wrote that in CS244 as my class project. how hard could it be", forgetting that twitter is an international network with tens of thousands of hyper targeted communities that feed off each other, diplomats that negotiate with governments and communities, etc. Not to say that this is impossible for anyone else to make, but it's a lot harder than just launching a site with your hundred engineers. i'd recommend reading platformer.news for a good
This is laughable. Social graphs are not trivial. It may not be as complex as landing a rocket booster on a platform, but it’s definitely as complex as monitoring a car.
Twitter had 100M MAU after 3 years and it was still operated entirely by just 300 people. So it’s not that hard. Musk could easily recruit 300 engineers and cost will be peanuts to him. Additionally, early growth of Twitter was driven by various celebrities signing up and bringing their audience to the platform. Here Musk has unique advantage as he has huge celeb network which can be convinced to move over or at least cross post. He can count on enabling slew of features like edit button, more chars, easily verified accounts etc to lure many users. Musk can hang in for years and easily eat up the cost. Earlier competitions did not had these advantages.
It’s not been successfully disrupted because a disrupter came and went viral, and AWS literally deleted their servers as they were becoming the most downloaded app
It will tank the price because other people will sell if he does. I don't know if his threat is strictly illegal, but the feds have to reign in some of this behavior sooner or later or all of the Musk day-trader fanboys will think they too can get away with it. A few people can't, but the SEC can't deal with thousands of Musk's fanboys skirting the law.
> "It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?
Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.
Musk wouldn’t do such a blunder launching it. Truth Social with a sizeable war chest, took Mastadon (while [still] lying about it) with many months if not over a year to get it ready.
Being able to launch a product with more than enough resources is almost intertwined with drawing in users. Truth Social never had the bare minimum expectations. Something that is not given to most people since most aren’t abnormally focused on grifting and so on for such a big venture.
Another critical failure of Truth: Trump wasn't posting on it. Trump can't carry a platform he himself couldn't bother to use. Truth might've survived launch on that core difference alone, and an Elon-backed service might work if Elon himself actually uses it.
That is wildly baffling. Not only Trump not using it, but does that mean the dozens upon dozens of popular figures around him who his fans also like, are mostly not using it either?
The SPAC stock is still holding strong snd it self making no sense day to day. It went up 7%+ on news Fox joined two weeks ago. The next day when this was found to be false. It didn’t even drop 1-2%.
Truth will fail no doubt. However all the SPAC, other investing and political insiders and the Trump family themselves still have a realistic shot of cashing out pretty well. Nothing close to if it was competently rolled out, but tens of millions to hundreds of millions going to many diff insiders is still a ton. Trump’s cash out should still be huge and would probably give him his largest cash stock pile ever (before it goes to pay debts off)
Indeed, this will fall into the long history of Trump branded failures. The thing is it would be so difficult for him to avoid. The only "thing that doesn't scale" he'd have to do is talk on it for a while. How many of his followers would flock there if there was a non-zero chance to actually talk to him.
I'd argue Trump has more immediate, impressionable supporters than Elon and his twitter like platform is a complete bust. I'd also argue people don't switch, they add. Rarely is someone popular on a single media platform, they tend to use to all of the vertices to engage. There would have to be a value proposition, one that persuades users, the name Elon in my opinion isn't a large enough selling point on it's own.
I don't think Elon's fan base are any more capable or driven. I would argue Trump is vastly more popular on social media than Elon and that Trump supporters are at the very least motivated for reasons outside of billionaire worship and straight trolling.
Billionaire worship/trolling
vs
Blindly following regardless of the amt of double speak, hypocrisy, blindly rejecting things because they are not on your side and following things that go against your best interests + billionaire worship + allowing the amount of grifting that occurs...
The motivation may be different. Is it any better? Or change anything for the better in terms of social media success?
Trump’s popularity may be larger, but it’s also more isolated and siloed. The total possible user base for a social network of almost any billionaire will be larger than Trump’s. Not that most would ever get close to reaching that amount or getting numbers more than Trump. Just that the addressable market is bigger.
Trump was also kicked off of twitter while being excoriated in the media and then took, what, two years to launch something?
Musk is not nearly as trashed in the media and could leverage promoting an alternative while still on twitter. Obviously there does need to be something that is at least reasonably differentiating from twitter, and I think that is the real challenge as just saying it is twitter but more free is not as tangible.
I think Paul Graham overestimates Musk’s social media influence. He’s powerful on Twitter in large part due to Twitter. Same with Trump, btw. If it were so easy for Musk to recreate the network, why spend 43B on some infrastructure? Musk knows he’s muzzled outside of Twitter.
Would that not have been true about Truth Social? They would have had enough users on day 1 to get network effects, but it hasn't happened. You could blame technical issues, but as I understand, Trump isn't even on the platform and neither is Fox News. So why would a Musk Twitter clone work any better?
Clearly that's not the only reason or gmail would have been a flop too. I actually think that marketing choice was the only reason they got as much initial traction as they did, without it I think most of HN would never have heard of Clubhouse, rather than that it would have been more successful.
If the former president of the United States with a distortion field around his politics and the largest cable news network backing his every word couldn't succeed in launching a platform, I doubt Elon can. Unlike Elon, Trump has constantly blasted news networks and tech companies in the U.S. as being fake and run by lefties, to the point where his entire base believes it, and even that wasn't enough to migrate them off of twitter, because again, network effects. Twitter benefits by having everyone on it, and with no one to yell at Trump's audience is left to talk to themselves, which is boring.
Additionally, with all due respect to Paul, his logic here is absurd. "I'd be interested so that means everyone must be" is the wrong line of thinking for a product launch like this. Everyone is _interested_ in something the first day, but whether or not that's enough to build on is another matter. So many social networks had massive first day signups. I was "interested" in Byte on the first day. I signed up, posted a few bytes, and stopped using the app after a week. Parler, Gab, Truth, had "interest" too. The problem is that critical mass of users he describes are all just talking to themselves in their insular group (elon fans) just as the right-wing networks had their conspiracy theorists etc. It's enough to have users, but its not enough to promote long term growth. I know it's not something _i'd_ be interested in, which refutes his point because its purely anecdotal.
So, the only demographics that'd actually stick with an elon twitter competitor are: People who love elon musk and everything he creates, and people who are banned from twitter. If it shakes out to be anything like Gab and Parler, the later means the site is going to swarm with Nazis like every other free speech competitor to twitter, which as a jew is something i'm deeply uncomfortable with. There's not enough free speech in the world for me to put up with being harassed by people who share the views as the ones who murdered my great grandparents. And as much as people here enjoy grandstanding about free speech, its likely something you're uncomfortable with too, otherwise you'd be on those sites.
Basically, the product elon wants to make already exists and it has no users. If Trump (who had a significantly bigger following on twitter than Elon) wasnt enough, if big right wing stars like Milo werent enough, what's gonna be enough? Because copy pasting Truth and slapping Elon on the front... wont be.
Getting someone to onboard to a new platform is ultimately a sales job. Selling is about telling people who they want to be, not who they are.
A social media platform advertised as a politics-first/free-speech platform is the social media equivalent of a beer ad featuring a divorced balding man at last call in a dingy basement bar. No one aspires to bicker about politics with strangers on the internet, even though in reality that's the engagement that pays the bills.
It seems overly reductionist to ascribe the essence of 4chan to this one, singular idea. For example, m00t reports that 4chan was inspired by another image board he used to frequent. It is also hardly the first or only website to have light moderation.
The failure of those other platforms has nothing to do with free speech or lack there of. Twitter has a moat that you aren't going to be able to break by just trying to out Twitter them.
Every competitor has failed because it prioritized free speech above user experience. Almost all have had terrible UI's, terrible performance, lots of bugs.
BigTech owns the mindshare of how to build these platforms. Musk would actually have the resources to pay for the level of expertise and competence to build such a platform. However, it would be years in the making which might all become irrelevant with web3.
Or Musk could throw support behind web3 tech as ultimately free speech will only exist when controlled by no one including free speech advocates such as Musk.
I don't think the technical challenge is the blocker here. Lots of people on HN could build a really good version of Twitter in a month and be ready to tweak things as scale increases. (Nothing is an overnight success and you will have time. Twitter didn't even get it right for a couple years, remember the "fail whale"? The idea being right as much more important than choosing the right distributed database or whatever.) The reason people don't do that is because they don't know what they could do better than Twitter. People leave Twitter because nobody wants to read their tweets; you can't build a Twitter clone from people whose tweets nobody wants to read.
One idea that I have is that I noticed a lot of people went from blogging to making YouTube videos. I'm guessing YouTube is the sweet spot that balances monetization potential (they will find ads to put in your videos, and advertisers pay a lot for video ads) with a recommendation engine (that essentially forces people to watch your content; or more charitably, tells people that will like your content that they should take a look). Blogs didn't really have monetization or recommendation, and people were willing to switch media (text to video) just to get those two things! Now we have things like Substack bringing those to text, and people are taking advantage of that.
Maybe that's where the next Twitter wants to be? Paying smart people to write? That sounds a lot more appealing than "free speech" (which is great to have, but I don't really want to read anyone's free speech), which is all we've seen as the differentiation point for Twitter clones.
The next step is a social media company that is (1) private (2) membership based (3) no reliance on huge ad contracts, just promoted content (4) can tell the difference between political opinion and hate speech (5) gets out of the way of legal public discourse.
It doesn't need to be web3. It just needs to be somewhat transparent and minimally auditable. Web3 doesn't know what web3 is yet. Most is just garbage, sorry.
Dan olsen has a great video about this, something along the lines of "platforms are not your friends" with the specific case of some YouTube competitor.
The real problem with competing platforms is that they don't offer anything to the main people they need to attract.
The guy has launched more than 2 companies. Last I checked there aren't any super tunnel sleds under LA fixing traffic there yet, and my car was supposed to be able to autonomously drive itself a solid 4 years before I got it. It's very easy to be in the mindset that elon never fails if you think all his failures are just very long delays
It would be funny if he's already selling his shares for a tidy billion dollar plus profit and has no intention to buy even if the board accepts his non-binding offer. Not sure if this would be legal.
You explained it perfectly, no white board needed.
I can only add one minor point from a general and international perspective: 50% may not always be enough. At least in Sweden I think you need 90% to accept a bid before you can legally force the remaining 10% to sell their shares. Even if you accept that there will be minority shareholders you will need 67% before you can do some things, like e.g. issue new shares without giving minority owners right of first refusal.
I'm sure there's a lot of devils in the details all over the world, and I'd be surprised if there are none in the US.
>Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price.
I don't see how this is relevant. All stockholders of any non-dividend paying company believe the price of the stock will go up. Takeovers with relatively low premiums happen all the time. That being said, Musk is definitely bargain hunting. I think the bid shows he isn't that serious and has no idea how to answer the fundamental monetization questions.
Funds vote the way the fund managers choose. And they tend to do backroom deals with other shareholders to vote a particular way, and such deals can be pretty profitable for their golfing career...
You'd have to be really damn sure that Twitter is worth more than what Musk is paying.
It's hard to see how an owner of Twitter stock could rationally reject an offer with a guaranteed +38% return. For any serious investor, even if they believe Twitter is worth twice what it is now, they must have several other stocks they believe are also worth twice what they are now. And if Elon bought all of them out at +38% returns, that would be a tremendous year investing.
What happened last week is irrelevant. If I can sell my shares on the market today for $46 and Elon is offering $54, that's a ~17% premium. It's better than nothing but not nearly enough to convince >50% of shareholders to vote in his favor. Several major ones have already said no to the offer (https://www.reuters.com/technology/saudi-prince-alwaleed-bin...).
If it was a serious offer the market would have already valued TWTR at ~$54, but it has actually gone down after Musk announced his bid.
Information about a potential takeover bid is absolutely relevant, and it's generally reasonable to calculate the premium from before that news first existed.
What happened last week was information about a potential takeover bid.
It is not at all irrelevant. I would be surprised if any reputable financial source would think of this as a 17% premium and not include last week.
gpm said the rest already as a reply.
As to the Saudi prince. Regardless of the topic. In any situation, it is hard to take the prince at face value knowing he pushed hard to successfully give the Kushners and co $2B[0]. If there’s more at play for the prince than short or medium term money, what he says is irrelevant then.
It was 30 when the price was at 33 and musk wasn't on the picture. Someone's buy nearly 10% on the open market then bidding for a significant chunk of the rest is new info.
Not really. The OP in this thread is very overblown. The business judgement rule is a cornerstone of corporate law in most western jurisdictions - Delaware's framework, if anything, enhances the value of the scope and level of deference offered by the rule.
I don't get how the logistics work in a move like this. If you're a shareholder and the board approves the sale are you forced to sell your shares to Elon at the stated price? What if you don't want to sell?
Edit: I also wonder how leveraged positions, especially shorts, get resolved.
Depends on the shareholder agreement and how the board fits into that.
By default it would be something like - if the board approved it goes to a shareholder vote, and if 75% or 90% of the shareholders approve the rest are dragged.
I doubt the board can force all shareholders to sell, that would be an insane power position for shareholders
This is informative, thank you. I wonder what portion of Twitter investors are index fund companies like like Vanguard and "institutional investors" like pension funds that are unlikely to object. And obviously Elon himself is a ~10% shareholder. Seems likely that this would pass a vote easily.
That's actually crazy to think about... so besides Elon, only 11.6% of shares are privately held? Meaning Elon holds about half of all privately held shares? Unless somehow he is in the 78.4% but I don't think so.
To my understanding, this at the moment is neither hostile nor a takeover, but a (rather direct/rude/aggressive; pick whatever adjective you want) question to the board to advise shareholders to accept Musk’s offer.
It could become any of the four options failed takeover, failed hostile takeover, takeover, or hostile takeover.
If the board says “good idea” and advises shareholders to accept the offer, it could or could not become a takeover, depending on whether enough shareholders (by share count) accept it (I don’t know how many is enough, but it’s almost certainly more than 50%, as an OK would force _all_ shareholders to sell. You can’t take a company private and keep shareholders around)
Technically, that wouldn’t be a hostile takeover, though, as it would be with agreement by the board.
If the board advises shareholders to reject the offer Musk could persevere. In the end, if enough shareholders sell their shares to him, the board’s opinion doesn’t matter. if enough shareholders do that, it would become a hostile takeover.
> To my understanding, this at the moment is neither hostile nor a takeover, but a (rather direct/rude/aggressive; pick whatever adjective you want) question to the board to advise shareholders to accept Musk’s offer.
Right, but a board is never going to say yes to this. If he was actually trying to get the board's agreement, the negotiations would have all happened in private and the announcement wouldn't have been made until it was basically a done deal.
I'd assume he wants to make the price shoot up and then when he gets rejected be the first to sell as previously proclaimed making big money in the process.
ie market manipulation.
No, this is not a hostile takeover. A hostile takeover is if Elon bought up more than 50% of the shares. Which he can do much more cheaply than buying outright at a 38% premium.
If they decline his offer plan B may be to buy up the cheap shares until he has 51%.
Plan B makes sense if Musk was actually serious/determined (I have no idea but I doubt it). Especially once the stock gets volatile while going down after he sells [part of] his stake before re-buying privately.
1. There's <100 billionaires with enough wealth to buy 51% of Twitter. And even for most of them, such an investment would represent a larger share of their wealth than it will for Musk, meaning greater risk.
2. Most just aren't interested. Unlike Musk, who shows a strong affinity for the platform.
Well yeah, he's never seen any real punishment from all the other times he's broken the law. So why would he stop?
He'll pump & dump again. Make a ton of money. Then after he's forced to pay a modest fine, he'll make it his mission in life to hunt down and destroy the careers of anyone involved in the investigation.
One risk may be that a lot of the blue hairs among the staff may choose to leave the company. Then again, that might be a positive thing for the company’s economic performance.
There is a very clear risk of transformating the social media titan that is Twitter into Truth Social, a sideshow of a forum that is dedicated to the worship of one man. That would plummet the stock price.
This is a fear based on nothing that I keep seeing peddled by people with no experience moderating anything in their entire life, and don't remember early Twitter. Other companies have actually censored theirselves into irrelevance (almost happed to OnlyFans, already happened to Tumblr, Yahoo, etc.) So a model with more fair and transparent moderation would likely be a business boon. Twitter is not at all transparent on why some things are allowed to stay while others are banned entirely.
Also the shareholders would get cash, they would no longer own the company at all and the future of the company would no longer be of their concern. Musk could shut it down and it wouldn't matter to investors, they'd already have their money.
I don't think you can really analogize much about Twitter from the examples of OnlyFans and Tumblr... the porn/adult-content situation is a whole different can of worms than the stuff people get mad at Twitter about.
There are a bunch of dead subreddits, forums, sites, etc due to over moderation. Facebook is kind of a dead platform itself, being carried along by other properties, in part because of moderation mismanagement (also in part due to a changing demo.) And their moderation has actually been better than Twitter's in terms of transparency. There is certainly a delicate balance, there's no denying that, but there has to be some level of transparency and accountability for the censors or it just doesn't work. You can't have the whims of a moderator determine the fate of accounts with no explanation or consistency. Twitter has been an utter failure in this regard, even Jack had no explanation for some content bans and inconsistencies. The current CEO is even more aloof, or just supports the lack of transparency outright.
A more fair moderation system doesn't mean Twitter is going to turn into 4Chan. Everyone seems to hint that is going to happen, but have 0 evidence to support their claim. It just seems like some people are afraid some speech they disagree with might once again be allowed, like during early Twitter...it's almost like a power thing.
Fair moderation is one thing. What people who say Twitter has a free speech problem have something else in mind. They want a platform where they can say whatever bigoted things they want then hide behind it because “hurr durr free speech”, that never works. Twitter is already toxic, can you imagine the things that would be said with no moderation
Thats a strawman. I hate right wing bigots as mich as you do, but I don't think Musk belongs to that crowd. Here is what he actually said: (a) censorship decisions should be made by courts not private companies (b) moderation should be transparent (c) priorisation algorithms should be open source.
I think this is a sane and principled stand that is very different from: "I want to enable bigots."
A platform should have the right to have whatever speech that they deem appropriate. A court deciding that literally contradicts your argument. 2. Moderation is up to each private organization, they can moderate, moderate lightly, heavily moderate, etc, it’s their company and their choice 3. “They should” aka it’s their choice. You don’t have a sound argument at all
allowing abusive people to remain on the platform until the abused somehow get court orders, definitely doesn't sound very sane to me
rather, it sounds like a way to turn twitter into another in a long line of mostly-empty "freedom"-touting social networks that prioritized tolerance of abuse over user experience
as a Twitter shareholder, I'd prefer ElMu not ruin it, or my investment, like that
You can’t moderate a free speech platform, that’s the thing. So I can realistically harass someone online and be well within my bounds of “free speech”. I can say the most vile things ever and be well within my bounds of free speech
What people say must still be legal and harassment is basically not legal. I have big problems to a) see where people see their free speech limited, i.e. examples and b) there are plenty of platforms with much more laissez-faire to no moderation. But the latter has its price, those communities tend to be quite repelling to most people.
To me it seems a theoretical discussion about the definition of free speech that is mixed up with a business discussion which makes no sense.
What qualifies as harassment on a social media platform? It’s quite easy to say you’re exercising your rights. Elon and alt right conservatives want a no moderation platform where they can say anything. If that’s what they want to do, go for it but it will die because the same things always happen, echo chamber that repels everyone except a niche group
From the point of view of the investors, there is no risk. If offer is accepted, they get their bags of cash and walk away with hopefully more than what they paid for those share. Musk could shut down the business to the ground on day 1 and they still get to keep their cash (I wish he would).
And to note, Musk is going against the trend. Ark, the tech permabull, reduced its Twitter position. Cathie Wood just said she started selling after @jack stepped down as CEO. Interesting times.
To be fair, Ark isn't doing so hot. So I wouldn't be concerned much about what Cathie "God wanted me to create an ETF and told me about it as a child" Wood thinks or does, when it comes to financial performance of tech companies.
Here is the yearly performance for every single fund that Ark is running. Keep in mind that some of them have existed for barely a year if that, but the point still stands.
ARKK (ARK Innovation ETF) - 54% down.
ARKW (ARK Next Generation Internet ETF) - 50% down.
ARKX (ARK Space Exploration & Innovation ETF) - 18% down.
I am not trying to attribute such performance exclusively to poor decisions, not at all. There is definitely a good amount of unforeseen circumstances that drove ARK ETFs down. But it is difficult to consider ARK's actions as a good source of predictions for tech companies they get involved with, given that 4 out of 6 of their funds are over 50% down in a year, and the rest are still down by a significant amount.
Cathy seems to eat up a lot of completely out there stuff like no tomorrow. Lesson I learn from Ark is that don’t trust tech ETFs by people who are not actually in tech. It’s like investing in VC who has never spent time building actual product as entrepreneur and engineer. It’s also fascinating to see their fall from the sky. Just couple of years ago, every finance guru invited Cathy on their shows and asked for her wisdom. Everyone thought she had managed to get that magic bullet.
Yes. Not only does he get $100M for a few tweets and talks with an accountant, he gets to hurt people he doesn't like, and he builds his reputation as one who plays hardball.
See Musk's net worth. It's entirely possible that whatever the loss is, it's an entertainment expense in his mind for a vanity project, a bit of spite, and perpetuating his reputation.
He's risked more for less in the past. Does Elon strike you as being acting purely from a place of logic and reason? If so you might be the only one to think so.
Seeing and hearing Jack, I think he is good and what he likes to be more like “spiritual” leader. He can makes bets and give guidance but he doesn’t want to manage, or get to the weeds. The way he set up Square is more like individual groups working independently and he just provides the aircover for things he believes in.
He pushed the Square Tidal acquisition because in a weird way it makes sense in his mind. He also pushed for bitcoin because he believes in it, instead of it being part of company strategy.
Twitter needs someone who could reset the current thinking and be the product visionary but also a person make people execute on the vision. Kind of someone like Elon. Unclear if Elon’s ideas are good but at least he doesn’t tolerate bad performance.
I do miss Steve Jobs, or mainly, his leadership style in tech. Every year with SJ was full of surprises and delightful visions coming true. In a way, people in the late 90s and early 2000s experienced the peak of the tech landscape. The smartphones revolution was just one of the visions that came true in that era.
In a way, Musk is like SJ, but greedier and cockier. SJ was about products centered around humans. Musk is about humans centered around technologies.
Greedier and cockier than Jobs? The same Jobs who wouldn't admit paternity for years? The same Jobs who wouldn't acknowledge certain teams that had worked on certain products at Apple? The same Jobs who tried to buy Dropbox by telling them they were an app, not a company? You've got to be kidding me. That is a colossally high bar for both those qualities.
Oh, I thought it was ungoogleable so I didn’t try.
> According to "Hatching Twitter," a new book dissecting the history of the short-messaging site by the New York Times' Nick Bilton, Facebook's founder once told close friends that "[Twitter is] such a mess, it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in." Although the comment is not given a specific date, the book notes that Zuckerberg made it "within the last three years." The comment was highlighted by venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky on Bloomberg TV last week.
Zuckerberg took the reported jab at Twitter after he was frustrated by the startup not taking one of his acquisition offers. Al Gore had also whiffed on buying the hot startup, despite being emboldened by "copious amounts" of wine and Patron tequlia, and of course, his deep pockets.
Didn’t know Facebook wanted to buy twitter.
Or Al Gore for that matter.
Jack Dorsey: 'I'm partially to blame' for helping create a centralized internet. Censorship is the first thing that comes to my mind.
Source: https://twitter.com/jack/status/1510314535671922689
How has it improved now that Jack is gone?
It hasn't. Maybe a shake-up like this is overdue. We'll see!
It's literally impossible for a system run by a single company to not be centralized. Dorsey acknowledging that or not does not change that nor would having some other owner.
It's actually possible (although not easy by any stretch) for us to build a decentralized Twitter that would not be controlled by a company for profit and would be more censorship resistant. It probably will not happen because of ignorance and political manipulations rather than hard technical limitations.
If only there was some sort of "user network" which could just be some sort of distributed posting service where a rotating group of companies would host the posts (more than one host for both fault tolerance and avoiding a single point vulnerability). People could post to discussion groups about the news (or "newsgroups" for short). Perhaps it would be so attractive that ISPs would advertise access to portions of this posting service and provide support for its hosting.
Something like that seems like it would be simple enough we could have had it decades ago. If only someone had thought of it then...
If only someone had thought of a way to monetize it so that Google would not purchase it and later run roughshod over it before letting it fall into disuse.
Isn't that what Mastodon, or various projects using Mastodon, are trying to do anyway? It's not such a thing can't be built, it's just it's unlikely for such a project to gain mass adoption.
I'm talking about social media specifically here. Good luck with trying to get a blockchain-powered project up with mass adoption in that space. Maybe you can include a messenger feature running Matrix in it, too.
The problem is how to make money on Twitter without alienating users with too many ads or monetization of posting. I have zero desire to ever spend money on anything Twitter like, I enjoy the feed I've curated but if it starts costing me money I'll find another way to get it.
The company's laggard growth, and never issuing a dividend because he wasn't responsive to making the company profitable, and couldn't grow the user base for quite a while.
"Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I'll happily provide video commentary." — Dick Costolo
Truth of the matter is before Elon ever gets Twitter another tech giant will buy it without hesitation.
They should sell to him because all he is doing is either buying Twitter at fair value or doing pre-launch hype for a competitor which will include the accumulation of other platforms including Trump’s Truth social, shit like substack, which he can easily get for less than 10 billion, Mastadon, etc.
You can't buy mastodon, the software is licensed AGPL and the network is run by it's users. You could buy stewardship of the software and the trademark if it's registered, like google did with android, but you never own GPL licensed software, only the users do.
I think you still understand my point. This guy roughly says if there’s no electric car, build your own. If there is no reusable rocket, build your own. If big tech is stifling free speech …
All successful people continuously repeat what worked for them in the past.
I get your point, I just figured I'd point out your misunderstanding of mastodon specifically, to you so you can better understand it. It isn't a just a twitter alternative.
A company is not a bag of potatoes in the market to sell at the whims of the highest bidder.
Here is what would be looking after their fiduciary duties:
The company had a loss of 200 million dollars this year. Was only profitable 2 years out of its 16 years of existence. The board should state that Twitter in the hands of Elon Musk, could jeopardize its current unique and somewhat also precarious, place in social media.
The company should ask Elon Musk, to first explain to shareholders what he plans to do with the company, and how it would benefit them. Provide details on shape and form of how his plan would be implemented. Until then, rejecting the offer is looking after their fiduciary duties.
I think you have it backwards. Twitter has always struggled, usually losing money, and Musk is coming in with a cash offer. He doesn't need to change anything for this to be a financial relief to shareholders. Not to mention shareholders will no longer have an interest in the company, as it will become private. There really isn't any impetus to prove Twitter's future will be better (and better than what? bad?)
Say the board has a reason to believe that Twitter is going to double in value in the next two years. ie, they have a secret "Twitter Gold" product that they are certain will triple profits.
It would be a disservice to me, as an investor, if they sold the company at a value of $54/share knowing that it could easily be worth much more than that in the near future. As a shareholder, I hired this board specifically to make decisions with information that isn't public. I either trust them or I don't.
That is the whole point of my argument. As a director, I am rejecting the offer because my fiduciary duty, it to veil for the future of the company, not the bank account of the shareholders :-)
[1] "The court reviewed and affirmed the following principals:"
"...Directors do not, by virtue of their office, owe fiduciary duties to shareholders. Circumstances may arise in which duties are owed but only by way of exception. To achieve this, there here must be something unusual in the nature of the relationship. Special circumstances which “replicate the salient features of well-established categories of fiduciary relationships” must be present."
"...The mere fact that a director has access to the company’s affairs, or that their actions have potential to impact shareholders, does not, of itself, amount to “special circumstances“, or give rise to a special relationship. These are “inevitable” features of the relationship between directors and shareholders..."
"...The purchase of shares from a shareholder is not (on its own) sufficient to create a fiduciary duty. Even in a situation where a director is purchasing shares from a shareholder, the existence of such a duty depends on the existence of special circumstances..."
No. They choose to go public to finance based on the public funds instead of asking a bank loan. You go public and sell shares to get money from investors. Then you do what you think is best for the company, not the shareholders. If the company does well, hopefully the shareholders do also.
Amazon stock price went nowhere for years, no profit, but investors stick with the company. Sometimes the investors are VC's, sometimes they are the bank of Mom and Dad, and sometimes they are the stock market.
It will be rather difficult for the board to argue that it's satisfying it's fiduciary duty by rejecting an offer with such a high premium so the current shareholders can continue to own a company that's losing money.
> The board should state that Twitter in the hands of Elon Musk, could jeopardize its current unique and somewhat also precarious, place in social media.
But see, this point is irrelevant in this scenario. If they sell, every current shareholder gets bought out in full, they no longer have a stake in the company. He could shut it down the next day and it wouldn't affect the former shareholders, the company's future at that point is only Elon (and Twitter employees' and users') concern.
It's fiduciary duty to the shareholders, not the company itself, not the employees.
"Board of directors have a fiduciary duty to exercise due care in how they manage a corporation's affairs and also have the duty of loyalty and obedience to the corporation. A fiduciary duty means that both directors and officers handle their powers only for the collective benefit of the corporation AND (my emphasis) its stockholders."
You can have all 100% of the shares, and there are still things the law can punish you for, like running a company to the ground. You can't say: I owned 100% of the shares, so ordered the board to set fire to it as I though the flames would be beautiful and would give me a calming ego trip.
Shareholders can't order any type of action from directors, just because they might have votes to elect them.
Look at Facebook, and the CEO special shares. Do you think you are an owner of Facebook or a passenger along for the ride?
> Look at Facebook, and the CEO special shares. Do you think you are an owner of Facebook or a passenger along for the ride?
That's not a great example, because in Facebook's structure, Zuck has special class shares which give him 10x the voting power of regular shares, per share. So he actually does have the majority of the shareholder power, irrespective of any rationale of the responsibility of directors.
And why did he do that? Because he founded Facebook as Director/Owner and want's to drive the company the direction he wants. Once more, it's about the governance of the company the priority. He did not put first optimization of the shareholders profit. That hopefully will come.
Or to give another variation on my argument. Let's assume that with his decisions on governance, he embarks on a road that provides for a steady stream of profits, on a new domain of guaranteed margin and high entry barrier for competitors.
A business model that will provide steady, slow, stable, but minimal grow.
That will be good for the company on the long term, but not that good for shareholders returns. The lack of grow is unlikely to create a stock price increase.
You don’t seem to understand. If Elon buys 100% of shares, it will become a private company. It won’t be traded on a stock market any more, and won’t have a share price.
If he buys 100% of the shares the company can still be traded and shares will have a price. Shares can traded over the counter or via private deals. Just not through the Nasdaq.
The point here is that he does not own the company yet, and directors are the managers of the company and free to run it as they see fit.
You have a hilarious misunderstanding of the financial system, and using Financial Times is proof of it.
Like a lot of HN posters, you seem to have zero understanding of the rules behind the rules and think what's actually found codified in law somewhere sitting on a shelf is how things actually work. It isn't.
If it was, Hunter Biden would be in jail, the last 4 or 5 American presidents should be impeached and in prison for war crimes, most of the high level executives at large banks would in jail after 2008.
Shareholders can absolutely order directors to act on their whim, or guess what happens at the next shareholder meeting? That board director gets fired.
Being the FT, the article is written from a UK perspective but not entirely. Does not look like you read it, and I am only using it as an example of my rationale.
I will post here some partial quotes and you can read the rest if you are interested.
"...Shareholders own the corporation, and the duty of the directors to maximise shareholder value follows from that. I have lost count of the number of times I have been told “that is the law”. But it is not the law. Certainly not in America, as Lynn Stout, a professor at Cornell University Law School, has pointed out..."
"...Shareholders in England have more rights — but even there, the obligation
of a company director is to promote the success of the company for the benefit
of the members. The company comes first, the benefit to the members
follows from its success. And English shareholders are definitely not owners.
The Court of Appeal declared in 1948 that “shareholders are not,
in the eyes of the law, part owners of the company”. In 2003,
the House of Lords reaffirmed that ruling, in unequivocal terms..."
"...Ownership is not a simple concept..."
"...But shares give their holders no right of possession and no
right of use. If shareholders go to the company premises, they will
more likely than not be turned away..."
"...Shareholders do not have the right to manage the company in which they
hold an interest, and even their right to appoint the people who do is
largely theoretical. They are entitled only to such part of the income
as the directors declare as dividends, and have no right to the proceeds
of the sale of corporate assets — except in the event of the liquidation
of the entire company, in which case they will get what is left;
not much, as a rule..."
Deep state via its pension funds that have unlimited access to free cash from Fed in cases like this, will long Twitter. This bidding war cannot be won by Musk. He probably factored this in, and will take significant profit once he dumps his share as he promised. Hopefully that would go towards funding a Twitter alternative.
> Boards have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision.
The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
If someone offers to purchase your home or other property, the decision to accept that offer lay with the property owner(s), not the municipality, county, or state who may or may not consider impact to humanity. In what utopia do you think we live?
You don't have 300 million people (including heads of state) outside your house (that you jointly own with millions of other people) standing on your lawn interacting with each other and the rest of the world.
You likely do have people or organizations on the loan to your house though, and they don't really get a say most of the time as long as they can be paid off.
What if instead of a house we were talking about a small business that serves people. Can that business not sell itself to someone else?
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement. Personally I'm happy they're not doing the latter, I suspect quite a lot of people would not agree with the judgements they were making at any specific time, depending on the specific groups in power.
Property rights and the government stepping in to force changes don't interact well, and goes against a free market type system. The government does step in sometimes, but usually when they see what's being done as being anti-competitive and hurting people through reducing market effectiveness, not just because they've made some moral judgement.
Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities. The world is not encompassed by The Profit Motive.
I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
> Tobacco advertising, pollution, lead gasoline... Clearly we do make moral choices and, as a democracy, pass laws restricting some activities.
We do, but I think it's rare, and much rarer than that list would imply. I see most of those as clear issues of public health. The one where that's a harder claim to make, advertising, it's about making the market function better. Free markets requires require widely distributed and accurate information to function correctly, and false information is extremely damaging to a free market.
> I'm not quite sure that unrestricted hyper-optimised misery factories are the thing we should be shooting for.
Neither am I. I'm not some free market only anti-regulation type. I think a completely unregulated market is trivially shown to be unworkable by our own history, so regulation is required to curtail blatant market manipulation. I even think more regulation restricting the size of large companies (or disincentivizing them) would be useful, but I think they need to be applied to foreign companies as well or we're just hurting ourselves without solving any problem.
There's probably a hundred ways that is infeasible and has problems, but it's obvious there are real problems to address with inequality and outsized companies with outsized influence, and something needs to change. I'm just hesitant to couch it in moral terms when it comes to what the government can and should do, because I think that's a slippery slope.
People claim that free markets, capitalism, and government noninterference lead to good outcomes.
Then when we look at examples of these things causing harm rather than leading to good outcomes, people shout and say "Hey you can't do that, its a free market!"
If people want to use the argument that free markets should be able to cause harm if they want then people need to stop using the argument that free markets are good because of all the good they consistently do.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of my position or point. You can see my reply to your sibling comment for further explanation from me. In short I don't think a free market is a panacea or perfect, but I do think it's a tool that when used appropriately and kept in check to keep it's known deficiencies from making it a net negative, it's better than what else we have available.
You can criticize Twitter's leadership all you want, but I don't see how allowing Elon Musk to take ownership control of Twitter would better humanity.
and not allowing him to take control would better humanity? I wanted to eat dinner today but I don't see how that would better humanity. I don't see why humanity should be taken into considerating when it's irrelevant. Most people don't even use twitter.
Yes, I do hold some criticisms against Twitter leadership, true, but I'm also fascinated by your view. So I wonder, what if I'm wrong? And then it would be really helpful to see your argument, if you have one. I'm on the fence on a number of things, so this is really your chance to change my mind. And if you do, I might do stuff like investing in Twitter right now, instead of waiting for Musk to take over. Just an example. I'm not saying I will, but it would be a logical next thing to do if you convince me. If not, then I'll probably just wait like everyone else.
> Free speech is dangerous; without censorship, progressive ideas cannot propagate because people can then make them look as silly as they truly are.
By this definition, the US never would have abolished slavery. Those who praise conservative ideas always put those ideas in a vacuum where they can't be proven wrong. Fascinating, isn't it?
the statement asserted has nothing to do with any specific party at any specific point in period. This is an example of progress during an era of which, apparently, free speech was unquestioned. The past accomplishments of the Republican party much more closely mirror the current Democratic party due to the Southern Strategy, but again, not relevant to the point being made.
> Progress for progress's sake isn't always progress
then it's definitively not progressive, isn't it? Conservation is a reactive stance, not an active one.
Imagine someone sets fire to a masterpiece, art conservatives don't take a reactive stance and say "hey you shouldn't have done that", they take an active stance using safeguards to ensure that it doesn't happen in the first place because it can't be undone.
But isn't this demonstrably false? (Not even to mention that "progressive" in this context seems to mean something very different from the dictionary definition).
Which Twitter are you using? Pick up any conservative YouTube video talking about social media and you'll see plenty of examples.
One example that comes to mind is Hunter Biden's laptop (recently confirmed as true, even by left wing publications) being censured vs all the Trump's Russian allegations (which didn't go anywhere) which weren't.
Many of the silliest progressive ideas are being / have been normalized thanks to Big Tech and the establishment doing one or more of three things:
1) actively censoring people who speak out against them
2) preventing discussions from happening in the first place (comments disabled, dislikes hidden)
3) actively promoting the ideal progressive version of the idea to cut down on dissent
Take the pronouns thing. Every other Instagram account of a female has her official pronouns (which you may only choose from a list of officially allowed ones so as to cut down on dissent via things like “your majesty / his highness”) set to she/her. I’m sorry but we all know you’re a woman. Why are you putting your pronouns up? The idea is a preposterous one; don’t even get anyone started on the they/them abomination.
And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored. As a result it’s bleeding out into the real world.
I hang in very progressive social circles. Trust me when I tell you, you do not want this reality. Their lives are defined by their progressive causes and perceived slights and micro aggressions. Every introduction “must” involve your pronouns and if you “forget” them they will innocently ask you of them. As a result people are bumbling pronouns all the time, I cannot tell you how many times even the pronoun experts start to say “she” or “he” in casual conversation referring to someone but then panic and stutter and say “they” because they can’t quite remember what pronoun this particular person wants to go by today or if they’re a they/them who despises people who feel like they should be able to speak freely without knowing they’re very, very special and are too special to go by a binary pronoun.
Mockery is the best defense against stupidity. Which is why it’s under such a big threat. And it’s why Elon is taking over Twitter.
To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
> they/them
They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
> And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored.
Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.
>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.
This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns.
It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous.
Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded.
>They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.
Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy".
>Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia.
Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress.
This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely.
I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns. Don't you think it's at least a bit weird that you're so obsessed and irate about such a minor detail?
Also, it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios, yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform (by all means wealth inequality is one of the major problems of the modern age).
EDIT: About the singular "they" thing: that whole paragraph is hilarious (quantum what?) but it's a pet peeve of mine to correct those misconceptions. Your sentence is grammatically incorrect, even when the function is singular, the agreement in number is still plural, e.g. "someone wrote their name here" -> "they have written their name", not "they has written their name".
Plus, singular they has been attested since the 14th century. Plural they...? Since the 13th.
>I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns.
Eh, not really. I don't even live in a country where that's a common practice (thankfully), my comments naturally tend to be long whatever their subject are, you can verify this yourself by looking at my post history.
>it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios
So, first off, I'm not 'up in arms', it's just that as a man with a certain propensity towards heresies, it's second nature for me to look at a social web and immediately notice the conformists, and I'm not a big fan of conformists. Secondly, I never implied those people are doing anything 'world-ending', although they are participating in their fair share of censorship-defense and general internet poisoning, but really they are just engaging in a pitiful and obvious illusion. I'm bringing that up, half-ridiculing it, and half-pointing-out it's counter-productive to what they actually want.
>yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform
Where exactly did I mention that I support or even care about Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter :) ? and who do you think controls facebook, youtube or reddit, the progressive spaces who ban you when you look funnily in their general direction? or are billionaires only bad when they hold opinions you don't like ?
>Your sentence is grammatically incorrect
Congratulations on noticing the obvious, that's kinda the whole point of the example. 'They' doesn't make sense for a known person of a definite gender, your examples are all assuming the default usage of it as a placeholder for somebody of an unknown general gender, but the moment you start using it to refer to a specific person you start running into issues like whether to use "is" or "are".
>singular they has been attested since the 14th century
OK ? how is this relevant ? where did I express problems with the fact that 'they' can be used to refer to a single unknown person ?
what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.
>are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad?
Well, considering this word can be basically JIT-redefined to mean anything on the fly, I wouldn't say this question is necessarily meaningful without some shared state. What I can say is that I would never like or support making fun of people for things they can't change, if your meaning of 'transphobia' includes that, sure that's bad.
But you know what else is bad? religious authority. The existence of a vague and ill-defined sin that a select class of people can arbitarily expand and contract it's definition to include and exclude anything and anyone they like or dislike, and civil authorities and institutions bending over backward to please that class. Transphobia is the modern day heresy, it's something you can throw at someone without the slightest understanding what they have said and get a mob to descend on them if you get your timing right. Lgbt 'acceptance' groups are strikingly similar to the fanatically religous, down to the particular language used to redirect criticism and pretend they are open to dissent.
>Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia.
In order for this to be a real 'talk', and not just a one-directional sermon between identical replicas, you have to allow people who are hostile to the artificially-dominant stance. Those who think transphobia isn't a real problem, or those who think it's a real but exaggerated, and so on and so forth. I'm not seeing any of that on any trans conversation I have ever seen on social media, all I see is an incredibly aritifical and incredibly religious "As We All Know Tran Lives Matter, Much More Than The Rest Of Us Actually", it reminds me of when dictators invite themselves to staged talkshows and pretend that the conversations aren't scripted.
>I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation
Considering the amount of censoring and manipulation that happens on social media, I think that's not convincing argument for censorship. If you kill 90% of humans you're going to eradicate an aweful lot of diseases, if you imprison 70% of people you're going to catch a lot of criminals, etc... Any strategy where you do the same thing to a significant percentage of the population is going to work more or less like random guessing aka a 50% coin flip, unless you're really unlucky or the population is really skewed. You're better off measuring ratios of where it works and where it doesn't work.
Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear.
I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.
Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me.
We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.
It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them.
I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.
it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.
Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.
>bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine
>I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters
My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?
In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.
I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly.
Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.
It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.
Some relevant offtopic here. Long time ago I came across a book of occult nature that, among other things, outlined 6 soul types, one of them being a curiously accurate portait of what we call wokeness now:
...individualised by vanity were born into city populations, and life after life they tended to drift together by similarity of tastes and contempt for others, even though their dominating idiosyncrasy of vanity led to much quarrelling and often-repeated ruptures among themselves. Separateness became much intensified, their minds strengthening in an undesirable way, and becoming more and more of a shell, shutting out others. Their emotions, as they repressed animal passions, grew less powerful, for the animal passions were starved out by a hard and cold asceticism, instead of being transmuted into human emotions; sex-passion, for instance, was destroyed instead of being changed into love. The result was that they had less feeling, birth after birth, and physically tended towards sexlessness, and while they developed individualism to a high point, this very development led to constant quarrels and rioting. They formed communities, but these broke up again, because no one would obey; each wanted to rule. Any attempt to help or guide them, on the part of more highly developed people, led to an outburst of jealousy and resentment, it being taken as a plan to manage or belittle them. Pride grew stronger and stronger, and they became cold and calculating, without pity and without remorse.
I could also write up paragraphs of text filled with vague generalizations and prejudices about people living in the rural countryside, and paint up a picture that all the people who live there are abominations who uniquely suffer from the negative aspects of the human condition..
But I won't, because this and that are both mindless factionalist drivel.
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
I know very little about public trading or the laws regarding it - especially compared to many other HN users - but here's my novice response:
Think about why that's a rule. The board doesn't own the company; the shareholders do. The board's role is to make decisions on behalf of the shareholders. The rule exists to ensure they do exactly that.
A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment. A public company intentionally acting against the financial interests of its owners would see its stock value immediately collapse, causing immense damage to its shareholders, employees, and customers.
If you want a company to act "for the good of humanity", it has to either be privately owned or align with the financial interests of its investors.
> A board deciding to financially harm the investors they represent for the "good of humanity" goes against the very concept of investment.
It does not. It goes against a very specific concept of investment, which is that I should be able to buy a thing and make money with absolutely zero regard for anybody else. It is not a rule of the universe that owning something should allow me to harm others.
I agree that ownership of a company does not entitle you to harm others. There are many laws which exist to prevent companies from harming others and we probably need more of those.
But this isn't about what rights a company has. This is about the obligations a board has to act on behalf of its shareholders within legal limits.
Please don't confuse my comments for an approval of public companies choosing financial gain over the good of others. This is one of the primary reasons why I am very critical of companies going public. Going public essentially means a company sells its soul for investment money. The owners and investors may see a big payout, but the potential long-term good a company can do is handicapped as soon as it goes public.
The concept of shareholder value really got started in the 1970s, pushed by Milton Friedman and others. And value seems to be interpreted as nothing more than the stock price.
Hence the idea that anything is justified as long as it gooses the stock price, and that a corporation has no social obligations whatsoever.
It's really just a silly common misinterpretation of a vague legal concept, the stock market equivalent of "correlation doesn't imply causation", in that it's the only thing many people know about the subject and that they consider this very complicated information that needs to be mentioned at every possible opportunity.
In reality, there has been more or less exactly one successful invocation of the concept in history, against Craig Newmark, when he explicitly said he was going to do something that would harm shareholders.
In reality, you do whatever you want and if anybody complains you tell them it's good PR and will therefore benefit shareholders in the long run. You can be as wrong about that as you want as long as you manage to avoid explicitly stating that you know to be wrong.
That's all very well and good but aren't you arguing in a circle? You're essentially saying "since shareholders have absolute power over an enterprise, therefore they have absolute power over the enterprise". Sure, but we're arguing that it's not a good idea to have companies be immune to any public accountability or and democratic control. In fact we already do this: there are myriad laws that constrain the behaviour of companies: rules about financing, transparency, pollution, taxes, etc.
I read the comment as being a complaint specifically about the rule that board members should have to act in the financial interest of shareholders. If the intention was to criticize ownership rights of shareholders or to argue for legal limitations on the powers of a company's owners, then my response definitely doesn't address that.
Why is Twitter important enough to require democratic stewardship? Lots of people don't use Twitter; it's the least used platform among all the other social media companies. When you're thinking about stewarding capital democratically, think about where the lines are, and why. The critique I'm reading behind the lines here is that Twitter, despite being a private institution, has a large amount of impact on society and so should be subject to democratic oversight. I'm not sure that's the reality; Twitter is a failing business with a stagnant, albeit highly engaged, userbase. It's unclear to me why we should subject Twitter to democratic control for the good of its small userbase. If anything that critique would be more applicable to something like Facebook in the US or WhatsApp in other countries (HK, India, etc) which actually have come to take a sort of infrastructural role in communications. Twitter does not have this role. Should the government have stepped in during the Tumblr acquisition?
That's the tricky thing with making the case to steward corporations democratically. Just for example, my parents don't know anything about Twitter except its name. I think they would find the government regulating Twitter to be an overreach of democracy simply because it's not something they know or even care about.
Because...they own the company? They literally hold shares representing their ownership of the company and then vote on what to do with said company. That is democratic.
Legally, the Board can consider stakeholder goals and morality. I think if Musk announced a profitable-but-legal foray into genocide, you could urge shareholders to reject it, and no court will hold otherwise.
But at some point the shareholders can overrule you. And in those cases, we find management’s highest goal is usually preserving their own special salary, not the “interests of humanity.”
> The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes
Let's ignore personality and societal issues for a moment and look at the value proposition. The 'best and final offer' of $54.20 per share is just too low to be acceptable for major investors.
Just over year ago, Twitter shares traded at about $70 per share. Musk's offer is about 25% lower than last years peak. There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again, nothing much has changed fundamentally over a year.
Musk's offer is a cash only offer. $43 billion is a lot of cash. That's a lot of Tesla shares to sell, or massive loan. If Musk thinks Twitter is that valuable to take such risks, current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
I think the takeover offer is just as believable as last week's announcement that Musk was joining the Twitter board.
> There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again
but it depends on how far that "again" is.
If you bought at $33 a month ago, you'll be now getting a 60% return. You can put that in another less risky investment and still have a very healthy return over the next 5 years, say 5% , less than the historical sp500 rate, you'd get to ~$69.
So if Twitter gets back to $70 in five years Musk's offer is still an ok investment, but its growth has been almost zero for the last 8 years, it's not trivial that it would become a powerhouse in the next 5.
Think about it this way – if Twitter shares were to rise ~17% from where they are today, would >50% of investors immediately hit the sell button? If not, then why would the same number agree to this deal?
The difference is that one option is selling a declining company today for 17% bonus, the other option is selling a company that has shown 17% growth. Its not the same comparison
There's a selection bias you need to consider. Twitter investors probably wouldn't be Twitter investors if they thought it was on the decline without significant growth prospects.
> There's no reason to assume Twitter shares can't reach the same levels ever again, nothing much has changed fundamentally over a year.
The Fed's covid policies in terms of interest rates and money printing had a very high impact on the stock market and stocks. Why else would the market have increased to the degree it did during covid?
That is a fundamental reason why it may not see $70 again any time soon.
And yet, despite your belief that the majority of the investors should/are valuing the stock at >$70, it is trading at ~$45, which should at least provide some evidence that the majority of shareholders--today, not last year--value it at <$55; to me the next question is "exactly who is voting on this: the shareholders or the board members?", but even either way it doesn't seem insane to me that getting a guaranteed 10% increase in your purchase isn't in the best interest of the majority of the shareholders.
> which should at least provide some evidence that the majority of shareholders--today, not last year--value it at <$55
The price is only determined by who is buying and selling right now. Trading at $45 merely implies a nonzero number of shareholders value Twitter at $45.
The problem is we can use that to determine the belief of the zeitgeist: if you--or anyone else--truly believes Twitter is worth more than $45--and has any hope of getting to that value in the not-distant future (of course: time is also money)--you should go buy it, as there are apparently a number of suckers right now willing to accept a mere $45 for their shares. People trade because they think things, and if no one is trading right now it "should be" because they largely agree with the zeitgeist.
(This is also why we can use this price to indirectly learn something about how the market views the likelihood of Elon buying Twitter: if it were a "sure thing", the price of Twitter stock would be trading close to $55, as you'd be able to make a fast profit.)
It's not that binary though. Imagine you belief Twitter is worth 45.01USD but it's trading 45USD, would you throw your life savings at it (disregarding fees), no, of course not, way too risky!
The way I see it, people (and other entities!) don't think Twitter is worth X, they think there is a distribution of worth.
This means there is risk in their bet, so if I thought Twitter was worth (on average) 100USD, that wouldn't mean I would sink my life savings into it but would put in some, based on the risk and also what else I need capital for.
Also, how much one thinks Twitter is worth probably also depends on your time horizon: like the old adagium that the market can stay stupid for longer than you can stay solvent, e.g. when shorting a scam.
In short, the reason you wouldn’t buy it right now, despite believing its outlook is rosy, is because you think it’ll go lower in the short to medium term. Which is more or less what all the analysts are predicting about tech stocks broadly.
If a non-zero number of people thought it was a good idea to buy it at $60 a non-zero number of people would sell it at $60. The large number of actors each trying to outsmart each other acts as a dynamic value-setting strategy.
You’re worth your share price today. Not what your share price was last year. Not what you think your price should be.
> current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
This isn’t how risk or portfolio allocation works. Musk has offered current investors $43 billion as risk-free guaranteed cold hard cash. Depending on their portfolio and risk allocations they may prefer the $43 billion today instead of an uncertain chance at the future. And to take that cash and diversify in alternative endeavors.
That's dumb. My company IPO'ed at $20/share. Hit $50 in the first year. Second year went down to $18. Then dropped low. A few years later the company was bought out for $7 a share when we were trading at $3.
Twitter is a dying company. They would be dumb not to take that money.
> If Musk thinks Twitter is that valuable to take such risks, current major investors will probably want to unlock that value themselves.
Doesn't this depend on if you actually agree with Musk's thinking and valuation of Twitter in the first place? Given the share price has been all over the place, clearly the market is not on the same page.
your comment about the price being $70 a year ago seems off to me. that's not the value now so why should it be seen as such? if you were buying a house worth $400,000 and made an offer of $540,000 but were told no, this house was worth $700,000 a year ago the value of this fictional house now is still $400,000
Depends on your definition of “soon”. In a volatile market like the current one, tons of people sell stock in the short term despite believing the long term outlook is good. The simplest reason is to go into cash to avoid the worst of the downturn.
I do love reading about how unbelievable stuff elon does is. He should frame all the quotes. SpaceX had lots of these including from the heads of europe and russia space programs.
Does he have perhaps more of a vision for twitter than current mgmt?
Did his involvement increase / decrease the stock price?
If they turn him down could he build something for lets say $20B in spending?
Going to be some interesting times.
And by the way, twitter DID invite him to be on the board with the requirement he not get more stock.
>And by the way, twitter DID invite him to be on the board with the requirement he not get more stock.
this was a trap - both barring his ability to gain more shares, as well as putting him in a place where he can't talk about twitter publicly to the same extent as a hostile takeover.
Counterpoint: Twitter lost over half its value in the past year (share price from $70 to $33). Can the board justify that they’re on track to turn that around so quickly?
Frankly the board doesn’t seem capable of ‘unlocking Twitter’s value’ based on their recent performance.
It's hilarious why people care so much about the price of a financial instrument. Even Bitcoin. Do you care what wheat or copper or kerosene trades at? Why not take him at his word.
Plenty of Americans spend 5 to 10% of their worth on stuff. Who cares what your neighbor paid for his boat....maybe dude just likes to drink Coors light on the lake.
Another non trivial aspect is his offer price. No one seems to be pointing out the obvious half trolling nature of an offer that yet again includes the number 420. In that respect part of his motivation for doing this is self amusement.
I fully agree that part of his motivation is self amusement. It's one of the things I really like about Musk, is that he's clearly still connected to his inner child, and I think that's part of what keeps him dreaming.
I think the people most offended by it tend to be the people who have lost that joie de vivre and miss out on the fact that we're all just existing here and now. Sure, do the very serious things that need to be done for a person with his resources, but in the end, we can't even prove it's not all just a damn simulation can we.
Vanguard and Blackrock always votes with management and sadly lot of times with bad management. This is the hidden cost of passive investment. They don't do anything.
I personally think this is excellent, in the great scheme of things, maybe this will open a real discussion about the real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life at the top.
I mean, with tech titan (and second wealthiest man on the planet) Bezos owning the WaPo, the moment the tech titan (and the wealthiest man on the planet) Musk will put his hands on Twitter hopefully will also be the moment of some "enlightenment" for the educated masses. Or maybe I'm just day-dreaming.
As much as I don’t like WaPo’s Opinion columns and Twitter’s double standards in content moderation, I don’t think the two companies are puppets of their owners. The staff there have their mostly left-leaning political view point and their own moral standard. I don’t necessarily agree with their view, but it’s their view and their voice nonetheless.
What other reason could the billionaires possibly have for owning these companies? I doubt it's out of the goodness of their hearts and given the success of their other businesses probably isn't about making money.
This is just robber barons all over again and to believe otherwise one would have to be pretty ignorant of America's history. Chomsky's best insights are about how this kind of control actually works and it isn't really that journalists are censored by owners (though this does occasionally happen).
They probably own them for a lot of reasons: WaPo was failing and running a loss at the time that Bezos purchased it. Twitter is in the same boat due to poor management; it's losing money and headed towards failure. If Musk can turn it around he can A) Make a bunch of money, B) Save a useful tool for online communications and C) Promote his values when hiring leaders at the company.
I doubt Elon is going to be personally moderating every Tweet, however it is likely that their corporate values system might change.
Buying a media outlet is like buying the yacht and buying the plane. It's like just something of the "everyone in the club has one!" types of stuff you buy when you have enough capital to run your own private country.
To expand on this, billionaires never park any significant fraction of their positive net worth in cash. Inflation rates alone make that a losing proposition.
So they look for other things to own that will lose less value over time.
You completely missed the context of my comment. This was a discussion specifically about the acquisition of media companies unrelated to the businesses which create billionaires' wealth.
Elon Musk himself said explicitly in his interview yesterday that he "doesn't care about the economics at all" which supports my argument. For Musk owning Twitter is not about making money from it the way he does from Tesla.
I realized that "left-leaning" is an inaccurate characterization. To me being left means being liberal. To quote wikipedia, "Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. " And I subscribe to liberalism.
Twitter and WaPo's staff, sometimes, are nothing but liberal. A liberal wouldn't call anyone who questioned Fauci nazi or anti-science. A liberal wouldn't want to lock someone up or doxx someone just because they criticize Biden government. A liberal wouldn't celebrate the illness of Justice Thomas just because he is a conservative. A liberal wouldn't call someone who criticizes Sharia a xenophobic yet thinks it's totally okay for Khamenei to call for "eradicating" an entire nation and its people. A liberal wouldn't blatantly call Asian parents racists just because they support standard tests and entrance exams by popular schools. A liberal wouldn't call a government Nazi who didn't even try to consolidate power in the pandemic but celebrate another government for consolidating lots of power in the name of handling the pandemic.
Those people do not appear to be liberals. They are radicals.
This is quite a rant and quite a lumping of diverse and unrelated opinions. You have quite a chip on your shoulder.
Without researching or commenting on the bulk of your strawman army, I will posit this: Wishing for the death of a harmful actor with a lifetime appointment to political office is not immoral. If there were some avenue, some knowable end date of a terrible human's influence on a critical pillar of government, maybe it wouldn't be so. Alas, we have no term limits for this role.
Historically, "liberal" encompassed markets. I.e., historically, "liberalism" encompassed capitalism (in the sense of being mostly free to trade one's labor for others' goods and services). "Left-leaning" thinking is generally very suspicious of, if not outright opposed to, capitalism, and in that sense "left-leaning" is very illiberal. The meanings of these terms have shifted somewhat over time, so to equate "left-leaning" and "liberal" isn't wrong at all.
One distinction I find helps is between "capitalism" and "capitalist". To me "capitalism" == "freedom to trade property, labor, goods, and services" (which, due to human nature, does lead to wealth accumulation), while "capitalist" doesn't mean "someone who believes in capitalism" so much as "oligarch" / "robber baron".
A colleague once put it to me like so: trust in capitalism, not capitalists.
Capitalists all too often rent-seek, and because they have accumulated enough capital to have outsize political power, they are a threat to their societies.
Capitalism, in so far as it produces capitalists, is dangerous, but if the alternative is less freedom for individuals lest some of them become tomorrow's capitalists -especially if it is significantly less freedom- then I'd rather stick to capitalism. Of course, this is a result of my definition of "capitalism", and you might well disagree, but forget what word we should use to name a system with such freedoms. The important thing is the idea that those freedoms are a good thing, and that not having them is a bad thing, and that the price to pay for them is the risk of oligarchs arising, and that we need mechanisms to deal with that problem that don't throw the baby out with the bath water!
Your definition of capitalism is actually compatible with left-libertarianism, in the original sense of the word not Rothbard's, market socialism and other forms of left-anarchism and socialism. The only difference compared to your definition are the views on capital, which could be generalized as saying that those who mix their labor with capital should have democratic decision making with regard to that capital.
So you are saying that it's a coincidence that WaPo, owned by Bezos, who was in a public fued with Bernie Sanders, ran 16 hit pieces on Sanders in less than a day?
Wow, I didn't know that. By the way, the first piece in the article is titled "Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals". This curiously contradicts to Dem's narrative in the past two years that our criminal laws are too harsh and too racist and we should drive more leniency.
That’s because they only hire staff who have the opinions that the people who own the organization want them to have. There’s nothing left-leaning about corporate censorship, which Twitter embodies. It’s all neoconservative war propaganda.
This is a good point. Everyone that thought it was great twitter was centralized and saying "it's a private company, they can censor what they want" and "go make your own platform" will have to contend with their once convenient unprincipled position.
So should AT&T be allowed to cut phone service for customers who use their phone service to discuss political opinions the AT&T execs disagree with and therefore consider “misinformation” or “lacking context”? They’re a private company, right?
I do see it differently and disagree with that perspective, but moreover would point out that we as a society for several decades have agreed that private companies do not have the right to such practices, precisely because the effect on society is so harmful.
AT&T today, under the law, does not have that power and I would argue for good reason.
Isn’t lack of moderation an even more harmful thing for society?
We have all seen how 4chan and 8chan turned out. We are in one of the most heavily moderated forums of the internet and we keep each other accountable to the system.
Lack of accountability and moderation will cause discussions to regress and devolve onto pointless dog whistles and virtue signalling.
While protecting speech is important, not all speech is important nor worthwhile.
We have moderation under the law. If you discuss something or say something that crosses a line that we as a society have deemed to be a danger we have a fair system for that.
There’s a reason we have concepts like published laws, a jury of our peers, appeals processes, etc. Replacing that with hidden arbitrary rules that are interpreted differently from one day to the next, by faceless IT oligarchs that have no accountability, no observable appeal process, etc is dystopian. You have to ask yourself, if you’re no longer using the law to make the speech rules, who is making them?
If we had what we have now over the last 150 years, where any viewpoint that isn’t aligned with the establishment in power is banned, we wouldn’t have racial integration, women’s rights, gay rights, marijuana reform, all things the political establishment would have happily banned from discussion at one point.
We have multiple concrete examples where these IT companies have banned discussion of ideas that later turned out to be 100% legitimate. You were banned for discussing the lab leak theory, a year later Fauci comes out and says it’s very possible. The New York Post had its story about Hunter Biden’s laptop banned, possibly changing the results of the election, the NYT comes out later and says the laptop is real. Silicon Valley executives should not get to decide for society what is true and what is false and what we’re allowed to discuss.
The whole “private company” thing is fine when you’re not big enough to change the results of an election or steer the discourse of our entire society. Once you are big enough to do that, you need to be hands off, which is precisely why we have common carrier laws that legally ensure that outcome.
No, I think he is saying an oligarch that has a lot of focus on the rest of the oligarchically controlled media taking control of this piece of media already controlled by the haut bourgeois oligarchy will draw more public attention to the oligarchic control of the media without actually changing the fact of that control one bit.
Which is still, IMO, foolish, given, among other things, the degree to which large swathes of the public have parasocial relationships with the particular celebrity oligarch in question, but it's not saying that making the problem worse will draw attention.
search news.google.com for "oligarch" and see the pattern of how the media has propagandistically twisted this word to only mean a specific kind of person now, conveniently excluding those that control our (Western) societies.
'Oligarchs' historically have gained influence and fielty to a nationstate. We are at a new form of Oligarchy, where the business magnates are able to operate internationally on a scale never seen before.
Historically, taxation has been the most profitable form of revenue generation. But thats no longer the case. With globalism and multi-national product creation, a single person in a nation can be many times richer than any nationstate, with technology above and beyond any nationstate. What happens when musk has electric jets and fully-reusable ICBM's, has remade the world power grid in his image, is one of few entitys even able to get to mars let alone command and control the resources of the astroid belt.
The US economy flits around $22 trillion per year and the US budget last year was 30% of that. There isn’t a single trillionaire in the world. The US government has the historically unprecedented ability to project hard power around the globe within hours of deciding to do so. Musk has little more than influence, and congress doesn’t seem to like him very much.
While saying any nationstate might be hyperbole, it's fair to say they surpass all but the richest.
The most recent figures I can find for Amazon's operating budget list it at well over $500B, which puts it within an order of magnitude of the single richest country in the world; it would end up in the top 10 if it were itself a country[1]
Keep in mind also that a large part of the US's wealth is derived from having these nation-state-level corporations within its financial jurisdiction.
My new personal pet peeve has been the torturing of the word oligarch. It’s now come to mean “rich person I don’t like.”
From my vantage point, it’s hard to see how Elon Musk is making any governmental policy decisions - and thus isn’t an oligarch. But maybe you have some examples?
Musk is extremely rich and can buy a lot of stuff. That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does.
> That’s entirely different than determining agricultural policy, or putting people in jail, or conducting the census, or maintaining the border, or doing anything else that a ruler does
You’re making a mistake of your own by conflating oligarchy with tyranny. They often go hand in hand, with the former generally preceding the latter. So it’s probably better to cry oligarchy before it’s a given rather than afterwards.
The poorest 70–90% of Americans effectively have no representation – there is almost no correlation between their policy preferences and the voting record of their representatives.
On the other hand, enacted policy aligns quite well with the interests of large corporations, and I'm not aware of any causal explanation besides the obvious one.
If Elon steers Tesla and SpaceX, he is indirectly steering congress (or at least has his hand on the wheel).
Being a lawmaker in the current capitalist society doesn’t make you the ruler (see lobbying). I’d say the few that rule are those with large amount of capital and influence, so oligarch is well applied here
Edit: also one of the perks for rulers on the worse regimes (authoritarian regimes, monarchies) is that law is not the same for the few that tule than for the rest, law is definitely not the same from the point of view of this wealth maxers
A media company having a legal obligation to maximize profits seems at least as bad for journalism as private ownership as there's zero room for any sort of integrity.
I mean by and large the success of first generation billions and the power they manage to control kinda show with enough money it doesn't matter that he is explicit not part of the "real oligarchic nature of the US political and societal life".
Speaking about enlightenment, isn't it strange that Elon Musk is into politics now? I mean he wants to go to Mars, his project was "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun", and now he goes right in the opposite direction. Did he have any major setbacks with his Starship?
I'm wondering if this whole 'buy twitter' idea is some sort of displacement activity from stressful problems in either spacex or tesla. I'm a fan of both companies but I know he drives them hard and takes lots of expansion risks/gambles with them (innovation is a gamble at the end of the day).
Chris Anderson of TED asked Elon a lot of the questions and concerns being discussed here. Check it out if you want to understand his perspective and goals with twitter.
“Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization”
To that end, he committed to transparency. For example, changes to tweets or users would be made visible and apparent so there's no more behind the scenes manipulation. The algorithm itself would be open sourced. Anyone could view it on Github and suggest changes or point out issues.
I agree it would be nice but it would also be a boon for bad actors who want to manipulate the system. Reddit now closely guards its algorithms (it didn't used to) to make it more difficult to game the system. For every honest curious developer who wants to vet the system, there are plenty more people out to spread miss-information.
At some point this concern becomes invalid in my book: Take democratic elections — hiding the rules of how elections work, because you are afraid someone might game them would be absurd. Because the point of democratic elections is to get results that most people can accept and for this transparency and simplicity is crucial. If it would turn out someone is gaming the system it would be time to change the rules and/or how they are enforced.
Now you can't really equate Reddit with an democratic election, but places like those are the closest we have come to an public square in the online world and hiding the mechanisms which decide who gets how much visibility is not without effect (on the trust within the system).
The cost of actually administering fairness in elections (maintaining voter rosters, verifying identities, preventing double-voting and providing public auditability while ensuring voter anonymity, prosecuting fraudsters...) is quite high compared with what an ad-supported global platform can afford. Just look at how tough it's been for Twitter to kick out inauthentic actors, eg Russian troll farms or spam bots. Spending more resources on botfighting is difficult from Twitter's standpoint since it doesn't by itself drive revenue or engagement, and they are fighting determined permanent attackers, some even state-funded.
Speaking of, the primary revenue feed for Twitter is advertising, which directly competes with fairness and transparency goals: ad business is predicated on the idea that more $ = more speech, regardless of the intrinsic value of the speech; and since there is no practical way to know where the $ came from, it does an end run around transparency goals.
I know they will never do it. However I cannot help think having a twitter with only non anonymous verified identity would be nice. Personally I don't have special interest speaking with people that want to be anonymous when I use Twitter.
I also don't like anonymity, but some people might need to remain anonymous for safety reasons. Those living under repressive political regimes, for example. They'd need anonymity to get their message across.
There's no way for social platforms to tell apart which anonymous users are "good" or "bad"...
KYC wouldn't help against state actors, which are the offenders with potential to cause most damage. They're the issuers of their national IDs in the first place, it's useless to verify their ID.
you can easily verify who this account belongs to, you cannot verify easily that this is the only account I have.
which is the problem.
further complicated by irrational attitudes to official identity such as you see in america. have a fraud resistant national ID system? fuck no! we want to use an unsafe mechanism never built for this purpose and impossible to safe guard!
I think you have buried the lede, which is that these platforms are no longer about an acceptable good. Votes or in twitters case, engagement metrics, are just one part of the magic mixture that drives more engagement. It's not about fair outcomes, or social good, and it is hard to hide your engagement optimisations when everyone can see how you are tweaking the system to generate more ad revenue. A cynical take I know, but we are taking about billion dollar corporations, not cheeky startups.
Yeah. The issues is that in the environment they work in, there are no known secure recommendation algorithms that give good recommendations. So the only option is security by obscurity.
I agree. Is anyone? Full disclosure: I used to work at Reddit. I was just putting in my 2 cents why Elon's proposal might not be immediately actionable without a lot of hard thought about how to deal with bad actors without the obscurity layer.
if the algorithm is open source, bad actors can see it as well. it'll become remarkably easy to spam and game the system. this could drive users away, decrease revenue and leave Mr. Musk holding a $40B hot potato
Counter point, maybe it just accelerates the game of cat and mouse already played between bad actors and algorithm designers, possibly leading to faster iteration and improvement of their algorithm to find hard to fake signals.
Musk could start his own Mastodon right now and do what he wants, but if he wants to bring along his Twitter network (or make it easier for any Twitter user to switch), then perhaps hurrying up Bluesky is another way to get what he wants short of taking Twitter private.
It seems like the focus needs to be on what can fight back misinformation/spam better given the context: more speech or moderation. The need for human moderation will likely still exist, but if Musk wants to accelerate the process as you say, Bluesky seems like a good way to start.
If Twitter is making choices that increase their bottom line at the expense of community, then absolutely, more transparency and open source would help with that.
If Musk really cares about free speech, speech should be more important than user engagement and algorithms manipulate the visibility of speech. They should be the first thing to go.
And revenue will shrink accordingly. If that's his plan, he's right that it can only happen in a private company. Otherwise the resulting revenue deceleration will send Twitter into a stock price self-fulfilling tailspin as stockholders start seeing it as a doomed platform.
I just wish we would implement a system where users vouch for each other in order to use the platform. A sort of web-of-trust to stamp out (or at least temporarily punish) whole areas of the social graph that are being used for manipulation and abuse.
This is standard operating procedure for takeovers, but I think you're massively overestimating the amount of pressure someone selling 9% of the company places on the stock price. Someone buying 9% (with an expecation that they would buy more) moved the stock $10. The same person selling 9% stock (with no possibility that can sell more) is unlikely to move the stock more than that.
I think you should look at the historical volatility of TWTR before calling a 22% move "insane pressure".
It's also worth noting that the stock price is almost unchanged today as of this writing, which tells you that the market thinks he's not serious, or his lowball offer is going to be laughed out by the board, which significantly reduces the amount of "insane pressure" he's exerting.
What does historical volatility have to do with it? If Elon can basically manipulate his investment into a 22% return why on earth wouldn't he do that? A single person able to pressure a single commodity to the tune of 22% is bonkers.
I'm not debating whether that will happen, just contending your first statement.
He can't manipulate it into a 22% profit, for exactly the reason you articulated. His buying pushed the price up - his selling will push the price down. He might might make a small profit from the increase his buying news generated if he were to sell now, but his VWAP would be well below 22%.
Because the existing volatility sets the tone for the underlying risk tolerance that shareholders already deal with. It sucks, it’s not insignificant, but I do agree it’s not immensely significant as you are making it seem. It’s just the exposure a public company on the market can have have these days.
I agree it's bonkers that this is possible. I agree, in an environment where the SEC seems unable to stop him, Elon Musk might well consider 22% return worth doing. None of that is relevant to the point I'm making.
I'm contending the claim that the implicit (and completely pro forma!) threat in his SEC filing places "insane pressure" on the Twitter board. The the possibility of a 20+% stock price change will not play a large part in their calculations. It's just not a big deal in the context of such a volatile stock.
It’s a cascading effect though. 9% sell off. Ticker drops by some value. This then triggers stop losses, and another set of sell offs. It goes down the line until retail is left holding the bag.
I disagree. The fact that someone is willing to buy a stake in a company suggests the company has some potential. The fact that someone having bought a company is willing to dump their entire ownership so quickly suggests the company may be rotten from the inside. The latter would exert a much stronger downward pressure on the stock, in my opinion.
That makes sense if you assume Musk has learned something shocking about Twitter from the inside in the past couple of weeks. How likely is that?
It seems spectacularly unlikely to me that a demonstrably impatient person with a pre-existing thesis about Twitter would take the time to investigate and learn new things about its product/financials/culture/governance.
It also seems unlikely that a person with a known strong stomach for legal and ethical "flexibility" would be especially bothered by anything they did learn, assuming they took the trouble. But YMMV.
I do think something like twitter longterm could a big play at something like authenticity verification in the world of deep fakes, similar to what keybase was trying to do but they already have traction with public figures
> suggests the company may be rotten from the inside.
Even if there are 0 actual facts open to the public that prove this, the optics suggest that this narrative can be made. He moved the stock 30%+ in a few days by publically buying in. If he sells it, why wouldn't it give up all of the gains he brought (and maybe more)?
I don't know what he thinks he stands to gain by buying Twitter. Can a rocket scientist/electric car guru really get into tweets + advertising?
To strongman the case for him running twitter, he clearly has significant experience and success with running large engineering oriented companies - which is the primary job of twitter executives. Both Tesla and SpaceX have significant software organizations, and he also has experience in running a pure software company back when he was involved with paypall. As a heavy user of twitter, and the de-facto PR person for Tesla and SpaceX he also has a good understanding of the product, both from a normal users perspective and a marketers perspective.
That said, I don't think this is primarily about buying twitter being profitable, but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny. I also don't think he's likely to get that into the day to day of running twitter, just because he's already busy with Tesla and SpaceX.
I don't disagree. It's just that... what are his plans for Twitter? Add an edit button? Tweak the algorithm that delivers timelines? None of that is really complicated. Those could be 6 month roadmap projects.
> but that he is motivated by a mix of politics, fun, and funny
First, it’s more like 1/6 his net worth. But I don’t believe the proportion means anything at that level of personal wealth. He’d still have the other $210B, plus ownership of Twitter. Each of those other billions is worth a billion dollars. Almost everybody could make do with just one of them, and he’d have over 200 of them. Even luxury goods don’t scale up to that scale. All he can really do with that is buy companies anyway. And Twitter is what holds his interest right now.
It seems like Twitter's barely done anything new since going public over 8 years ago. Making a UI that was actually usable for following conversations would be a good place to start. What are all these product people doing? (I'm a small TWTR shareholder. It's one of my worst tech investments.)
Washington Post can control what is posted through journalists, etc. (digital or not)
Twitter is like... an aggregator of a bunch of people tweeting. The people tweeting aren't being paid by Twitter to tweet (like journalists are for Washington Post, even if it's like $75 for an opinion piece/basically blogspam)
Twitter likely decided to not allow him onboard just because of his constant shitposting about the company, his volatility, and really just wanting Twitter to be his sounding board for whatever offensive things he has to say, so they're trying to ensure he can't try and takeover as we speak.
The price moved from $33 to $40 as he bought the shares[1]. THEN it moved from $40 to $50 when he announced that he bought the shares on April 4th.
Hard to say what the stock would have done without the purchase, but Musk has both the threat of dumping his shares on the market AND the threat of him announcing that he's dropping his shares. A case could be made that he has at least $17 of influence on share price, but my guess is that the market frenzy will drag it lower if Musk backs out.
Note: Please correct me if I misunderstand the meaning of the filing. I read it as Musk began buying up shares March 14th, and finished near the end of March, then reported Friday/Monday April 1/4. I don't think he bought and announced the same day. Musk owns ~73M shares, and trading volume was ~15M on the 13th, then jumps to ~35M/day over the next few days before settling down at ~15M/day again. https://finance.yahoo.com/chart/TWTR#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6ImRheSI...
What we do know is that it's not a 1 to 1 mathematical if one buys 9% it moves 10$ if one then sells 9% if falls $10. This has historically proven over and over.
Seems like an amazing move by Elon. Buy a sizable portion of the business to hold hostage, and then make the company an offer that they essentially can’t refuse because of fiduciary responsibility. If they reject Elon’s offer the stock price will sink like a rock. They pretty much have to take it.
> "overwhelm or confound with sudden surprise or wonder," 1580s, back-formation from Middle English amased "stunned, dazed, bewildered," (late 14c.), earlier "stupefied, irrational, foolish" (c. 1200), from Old English amasod, from a- (1), probably used here as an intensive prefix, + *mæs (see maze). Related: Amazed; amazing.
"amazing" never meant "this is of surprisingly high quality and good"
>Did pointedly ignoring common usage add anything here?
Yes, there are plenty of words going though the natural process of dilution. Providing some backpressure is, I think, useful to the language to preserve the richness of meaning. I'm responding directly to a discussion about the meaning of a word not interjecting into another conversation with a "well, actually..."
When you're writing a dictionary, words mean what people use them to mean. I'm not writing a dictionary.
Except that your 'well actually' still exists because you ignored the much more common usage when you made your point and didn't mention anything about your valiant effort to preserve etymological treasures until questioned?
If you read the Lord of the Rings, you'll see quite a few usages of the word "amaze" not at all in the sense of "dude, that's amazing". It is not like reading that is some archaic text exclusive to english scholars.
I think it is good to be reminded of the higher quality meaning of words that are falling into bland generic meanings. Words do change and there's nothing wrong with that, but some changes are better than others and the degeneration of specific strong meanings to generic common place ones isn't something that should be celebrated.
Celebrated or don't celebrate. Language evolves, meanings change, recognize it when it happens or you become the pedantic boring person at a meeting or party trying to explain, "No, 'begging the question' does mean what you think it does. It's a type of fallacy, not some segue into asking an obvious question.
Then you misunderstand my point entirely. It's no longer wrong to use "beg the question" in this way. It is now part of everyday vernacular. It is now one of at least two correct ways of using the phrase. Language is weird that way, it's not set in stone, so if the "wrong" thing gets used enough and hits critical mass, it becomes a correct usage.
Look at the Great Vowel Shift, or how creoles, pidgins and patois develop and evolve. Language isn't static, and in the case of "amazing" its current vernacular usage has changed to almost always have a positive connotation.
One was trying to decide whether to call the first version of something. Revision 0, revision 1, or version 1 followed by revision 1. The users that we were making the application for didn't care one bit what we called it, but the programmers sure had a lively discussion with a lot of eye rolling in the room.
Not if the argument is essentially about dictionary definitions. FWIW, if I had to imagine someone saying something is amazing without any context my understanding would tend towards the “old” meaning.
You say, in response to somebody using it to mean something else.
There is a strange circular logic to saying words mean something new because they are commonly used in a new way and at the same time telling somebody how they're using a word is wrong because it doesn't match this new meaning.
That's not how it works, the board would look at the long term value of the company, not the current price or what it will be in the next few weeks if Elon sold.
For instance Twitter stock was $60 last october, if they didn't ask for at least that it would be shortchanging shareholders and also imply a declining company.
We will never see those prices again. They occurred during overvalued and speculative market conditions and we will not return to that for several years, if ever.
You don't need an implication of decline when the market has already explicitly indicated it believes Twitter is declining as evidenced by the falling stock price.
'Knowing' you will put an offer to buy a company is insider information. The assumption here is he has been acting on this information recently and it was part of his plan.
Unless you think he just woke up today and said: You know what, I'm going to buy Twitter! Which, I mean.. given Elon maybe that's what happened. But if it was premeditated then he has clearly been acting on insider information.
If you have no intention to actually follow through and it's a false promise, that's a pump-and-dump. It's securities fraud, but it's not insider trading.
If you have an intention to actually buy and make a good faith effort and fail, that's just business.
Duh, but they are not acting on the insider information.
Elon is. He bought shares, then put in an offer which drives his existing shares up. Perhaps you can argue until he sells them he isn't acting.. perhaps.. but if he sells them today, are you still telling me he isn't acting on insider information?
From the SEC website: Who is an insider? An “insider” is an officer, director, 10% stockholder and anyone who possesses inside information because of his or her relationship with the Company or with an officer, director or principal stockholder of the Company.
A principal shareholder is a person that directly or indirectly owns or controls more than 10% of any class of voting shares or securities of a company. The principal shareholder has the authority to vote using those voting shares.
Elon has less than 10% share (9.2%), so he's not an insider. Probably he stayed under 10% because of this law.
Hopefully your correct and Twitter tanks and maybe we can finally be rid of this crap
I don't hate Twitter like I hate Facebook (mainly for ideological reasons and their propensity for exploitation) but god damn is their interface and entire product model annoying.
That is a great question and I wonder the same thing.
"I am going to dump 1/10th of the company that I very publicly acquired if they don't do what I want them to do" feels like manipulation since he's controlling the value of such a large amount of it.
But is it illegal to be willing to lose money if a threat isn't met?
Furthermore, would it be illegal for him to dump his shares, allow the trajectory to tank the price further, then rebuy when it bottoms, rinse and repeat?
It’s not illegal to say “I want to buy more shares at what I believe to be a generous price. If the board won’t sell me these shares, I don’t trust the judgement of the board and will subsequently sell my existing shares.”
How? The laws absolutely allow for hostile takeovers. If Twitter gets to determine what to censor because it's a corporation, well, they get to get bought like one too.
>All I can see in this thread is 1) masquerading as 2).
Indeed. One would have hoped that Hacker News would be immune from Reddit/Twitter-style "Anything I don't like is illegal/unconstitutional", but apparently not.
"Someone buying up shares of a company before he announces a hostile takeover is inside information and thus illegal!" Good grief.
It will hit back at 40$ is as if the Elon pump never happened, is that so bad? However, it does create pressure from “activitists” to sell to Elon. The main thing is: Is Elon a good leader for Twitter. There is a lot of positives because Elon has already proven himself in multiple companies, plus he understands Twitter as much as anyone from his use of it
His absolutist "free speech" attitude would absolutely be horrible for Twitter. There would be literally nothing to stop bots and state-sponsored messmakers from completely gaming Twitter far beyond what they already do today. I think a lot of people do not realize the can of worms they are opening when they advocate for zero moderation on a platform as large as Twitter.
He's not a free speech absolutist (he even tried to get a particular account shutdown for tracking his private jet, albiet he was offering them money to stop), he more or less just wants a more transparent form of moderation with only moderation leaning in one direction. That's actually a -good- thing. I've seen accounts banned for mild jokes, while some accounts literally post death threats and skirt by. The Taliban, Russia, etc all have Twitter accounts at the very moment and you think this is some new thing of "state sponsored" whatever. I am pretty sure many people here with comments like this have rarely if ever used Twitter for anything.
I don't think he's campaigning for "zero moderation" -- he's spoken about plans to fight bots. I think he just wants zero moderation for accounts run by actual humans, which is still a can of worms, but a different can of worms.
He isn’t smart. Just like trump isn’t smart. How could such guys be so successful if they aren’t smart?? Well, they are just the right amount of stupid, careless and bold to succeed in today’s world of mindless masses.
Perhaps you're an example of how its censorship spreads misinformation. I'm not really passionate about the Biden laptop, but my understanding is that the NYT did recently admit* that it was real and they had some sort of policy to report on it as if it weren't. If you believe the laptop story was a fabrication by right-wingers, is it possible you have been deceived?
Disclaimer: I have no confidence either way to the veracity of the laptop. I don't know that much about it and whether it were true or not wouldn't change my political views much.
*I googled 'NYT biden laptop' and the most legitimate looking of the results was a WSJ article. I don't have a WSJ subscription to evaluate it, however.
It's crazy to me that people _still_ don't know that it's been confirmed by a "reliable" news source. The veracity of the NY Post story wasn't controversial, just the effect it would have on getting Biden into the White House. The corporate press ran cover for the Biden family to get the outcome they wanted in the 2020 elections.
It wasn’t given scrutiny. It was silenced. And, turns out it wasn’t misinformation either.
Thank God with Musk’s new Twitter we won’t have to have this sort of discussion anymore anyway, people won’t be able to just shout Russian disinformation at anything that makes the left look bad and have Big Tech scramble to do their bidding to help influence elections.
Since there would no longer be any public investors in Twitter after this, that does not actually matter as far as the present investors are concerned.
That's where the market manipulation comes into play. Acknowledging/threatening a possible pump and dump if he doesn't get his way could clear the SEC's bar of "Intentional or willful conduct designed to deceive or defraud investors by controlling or artificially affecting the price of securities, or ... designed to drive a stock’s price up or down"
Someone much smarter than I could likely argue that the "threat" of Elon possibly pulling out his investment in a company is affecting the stock price, and now suddenly Elon is in control of the direction of the stock, even though the underlying fundamentals have not been changed.
AFAICT, there's no deception or fraud in his behaviour; nor is there anything artificial - he's put real money down, and is offering real money. It's not like he's made a one-off tweet about it.
Not to get pedantic, but if you read their definition of market manipulation, there's another point that's unrelated to the deception/fraud clause (though those are loaded terms legally, and one again likely could argue they are)
"Intentional interference with the free forces of supply and
demand"
He put money down (a lot of money down!), but that doesn't give him the right to manipulate the stock price purely based on the fact he has a stake on it or not; in fact it gives him a duty not to do so, because he now has a motive/vested interest in profiting off of it. There's rules to follow and forms to file to protect against that, and he's already has one lawsuit against him in that vein: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/twitter-lawsuit-...
It sounds to me that you're interpreting that in such a broad way that you could argue that any stock purchases he makes would be in violation of this.
If the market decides the stock should go up or down after someone invests/divests (or files the applicable, standard form), that's one thing.
If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.
This essentially why he got in trouble with Tesla for tweeting he wanted to take it private at $420/share, immediately making the stock price jump up, even though he did not have "funding secured" and did not take it private. And he almost lost the ability to be a CEO or on a board of a public company for 10 years because of that!
> If he's prematurely saying what direction he's going to go one way or another, that's another thing. You don't see Vanguard tweeting "we're going to invest in this company if X happens and divest if not" to the general public, especially if they're trying to influence X to happen.
Because Vanguard is a passive fund. Activist funds do this all the time.
Him putting money down literally is a free market demand for that security, and his ability to freely publicly offer lots of money literally is the "free forces of supply and demand" that's not supposed to be interfered with.
This clause is explicitly not intended to do what you imply, it does not restrict this particular action by Musk at all.
Certainly someone out there agrees with you. Realistically, a lawsuit would certainly quell the interest in this and drag this issue into relative obscurity over the course of years. Timeless tactic.
It is almost certain that whatever happens, there will be a lawsuit. Suing twitter, the board, elon, maybe the SEC (possibly multiple in different directions). It happens with almost any large move where there is even a hint that something happened incorrectly.
More like it happens with any large move period, no hints needed, because the expected value payoff of a lawsuit in that case typically makes it a worthwhile exercise.
> is it not against the SEC's rules for market manipulation?
Maybe, but he's also being sued over a violation of market manipulation rules with regard to non-disclosure of his recent Twitter purchase, and that's not the first problem he’s had with those rules.
“Elon Musk” and “securities rules” don't really go together.
I know; But I can't help but feel the SEC is just waiting to build up an open-and-shut case to really make an example out of him, as they usually do to high profile people who openly challenge them. Of course the richest man in the world is going to put up a very strong fight in court, and the SEC will not risk its authority by losing, so there can't be much ambiguity in any evidence they present
On the other hand - the stock was flat over the time that he bought... So not in total agreement with you on the stock impact of his selling. It seems like the only impact is the headline risk - and not so much actual selling pressure.
I'm going to prune some of the top-heavy subthreads and possibly restrict the page size a bit. There are over 2500 comments in this thread, and if you want to read them all you're going to have to click "More" at the bottom of each page, or go like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=5
...and so on. Sorry everyone! (Yes, fixes are coming, yes it's all very slow.)
Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it's true. Make sure you haven't lost your password!)