> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no?
I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose.
If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his assets to compensate.
Is Levine seriously suggesting that US courts don't have the authority to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets? This is such an absurd thing to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.
Anytime the idea of a wealth tax is brought up, I see commenters coming out of the woodwork to say that it would be impossible to actually collect it from the wealthy. Though I will note that it seems like we are able to collect yachts and planes from Russian oligarchs now, so perhaps our techniques have advanced in the last few months.
This is a different problem and has to do with privacy. The government can't compel you to disclose everything you're doing without cause, and without due process.
Having a court ordered judgement entered against you is cause and is a result of due process. It's an entirely different scenario.
Assuming that a wealth tax was passed, wouldn't the cause here be proper reporting and collection of said tax? You can declare illegal income on your federal return and pay taxes on it. They're not (in this hypothetical I guess?) asking what you're doing, just how much it's made you.
The issue is that people can change how they own things so they don't have to disclose. The law is necessarily public and people can adjust the way they structure ownership accordingly.
We see this all the time already. For example, Medicaid won't pay for your extremely expensive end of life care if you have assets. So, people give away their assets (to a trust, to family) before applying for Medicaid to cover their nursing home. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. People will adjust where they can to avoid tax.
This also already happens with income tax. For example, executive compensation is primarily provided as capital gains rather than income because it's much more tax efficient. Everything is in the open.
The other issue here is one of cost. The IRS has to fund the cost of analyzing filings and deciding to audit. This is very different from a post-judgement scenario.
And the added problem that the assets need to be valued to tax them - for liquid assets this will be much more challenging than income. Things like CGT or income tax happen at the same time as a transaction in dollars so they are easy to value. Wealth taxes would be open to gaming using the same process you describe here.
I don't think there's really any way around this. It just lowers the maximum amount you can extract via that tax. You have to tax at a rate low enough where it's not worth the expense to get around it in the first place. Maybe this is enough to make a wealth tax altogether not worth it federally (how much does it cost to set up a trust and transfer assets? can't be a lot), I don't know. But I think that's all part of the calculus of whether or not it's reasonable to institute the tax in the first place.
The IRS has no trouble prying and finding out that you have unreported income. The idea that they can’t find out you have an unreported Picasso painting that you bought for 40 million or a beachfront mansion is silly.
Roe's finding of a fundamental right to privacy in the 14th amendment is VERY different from the rights provided by the 4th amendment, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
1. A surprising departure from the rules and norms - I assume probably illegal.
2. Part of a campaign designed to ruin Russia.
You might have misunderstood the argument the anti-taxers (pro-property?) people are bringing up. There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all. The fact that wealth confiscation is being deployed against Russians is no surprise from that perspective and not undermining the core argument.
However, if it makes you feel better, I do agree that given that the War on Terror was pointed inwards fairly quickly I expect the techniques used in the War on Russia's Economy will also move to US home soil in the next decade and there may well be large scale wealth confiscation in the US.
>There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all.
But this does not apply to us when we seize Russian assets? By your very logic if seizing wealth is so problematic, well we just seized a whole lot of wealth. I don't think this example actually works here.
We want to damage ourselves by sanctioning others? You said that taking others wealth makes people lose trust in you and therefore hurts yourself. So I don't see why we would do that on purpose.
I think you're confusing me with someone else. I didn't say anything about trust.
But, I suspect the other guy was referring to trusting in economic stability. I don't think there's any reason why sanctions against bad actors like Russia might undermine trust in American investments.
I dunno. I'm not a lawyer. Possibly one of the ones against piracy?
If you want to make the argument that it is literal and raw might-makes-right on the high seas, ok. But that type of barbarian world is not one I encourage and it'd be a bit stunning to find someone who wants the world to work that way.
The US wouldn't do well in a world like that either, US citizens have more assets to seize than foreigners do.
Has stealing random stuff from Russians helped? I'm not a maritime lawyer or an expert on how war in the 2020s looks, but I don't think Russia was sailing troops into the Ukraine on billionaire pleasure yachts.
There is a pretty good chance this is just making people feel bad and making it harder to normalise the situation. This is action is literally not helping, and is a breach of good norms against stealing. It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.
> It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.
Any Russian billionaires that don't realize that this is more of Putin's incompetence than western antagonism deserve a random punitive gesture.
In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
I'm still not following. How do you think this has helped the situation? What do you expect to happen differently in the future that will be to our benefit?
Maybe I've missed out on some life experiences, but I've never seen petty theft help defuse a tense situation. It is not going to be beneficial to achieving a sane outcome.
> In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
This is wishful thinking. All of the thievery was done by NATO - there is a very high chance that they will identify NATO as the threat to them.
And if they do blame Putin (which I think is unlikely, groups tend to close ranks when threatened) how is that supposed to help? What are the billionaires supposed to do that the Ukraine military or US State Department can't do? Billionaires aren't that big compared to a government military.
Why would you expect your day to day interactions to act as framework for how members of a warring nation displacing millions and killing innocents under the guise of "nazi hunting" should react to things?
Putin may have them under his thumb, but that doesn't mean they should be left to their comfort rather than forced to face the direct consequences of Putin's actions.
1. You're linking the Washington Post. Do you want me to go find an article on RT that says the Oligarchs are united against the US? That is a long article claiming to know things that they can't and don't know and is political propaganda to help push this terrifying US proxy war.
2. What do you expect to happen here? How do you think these thefts have helped the situation? Even if you want to argue that these people now hate Putin, they are powerless. The west just stripped them of all their assets.
There's an entire profession who's job it is to go full scale threat modeling on assets held directly or indirectly by the extremely rich. Seems likely they either didn't account for war sanctions or thought the impacted assets would not be worth putting behind 10 proxy legal owners for the unlikely case of such sanctions. Yachts and planes seem like they'd be particularly hard to turn into assets owned by a local proxy entity, since they move around so much.
Yachts and planes are physical objects and represent a tiny, tiny fraction of a billionaire's wealth.
Wealth is actual ownership interest in valuable companies, which can be moved offshore or the person can renounce citizenship and relocate to a country with friendlier tax laws in the extreme case.
Might still be worth it if there were a significant wealth tax and you did it in advance of an IPO or other event that greatly increased your net worth.
A wealth tax would also have the effect that people expecting to generate lots of wealth would just move somewhere else to do so, or not come to the US in the first place.
Wait, is that what you always see as the argument against it?
Whenever I've seen it brought up it's always that it would require a constitutional amendment (specifically in the US). The federal government isn't allowed to do taxes that way under the current system (Article 1 Clause 2 Section 3).
Hell, the feds weren't even allowed to do a straight income tax until the 16th amendment.
Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point. Who knows, perhaps that's astroturfing by troll teams employed by billionaires to try and discourage the masses. As you said, they've already got plenty of lawyers to work on it from the constitutional end - including 6 of the lawyers on the Supreme Court.
It’s easier to collect from foreign billionaires who don’t have the connections. Igor will probably not fund your re-election campaign, but Musk might.
Russian oligarch yacht seizures are a better argument for them than for you. They're worth tens of billions of dollars, and all the US can get is a nine figure boat.
So, 10% of their net worth by leveraging what was thought to be illegal and unexpected seizures? Most of which was done by the EU. Sounds like a ringing endorsement of how the US would implement a tax that the wealthy can prepare for and happens within the rule of law.
Levine has addressed this in past columns. Of course the courts have such authority, but individual people have to enforce the court's decisions, and sometimes those people are reluctant to take on Musk.
Musk is a special case because he has done things like threatening to ruin the careers of SEC lawyers who have come after him, and he has the power to make that happen.
Is this illegal? Probably. Does Musk get away with it? Yes.
You're talking about Musk pressuring Cooley to fire a lawyer who previously worked against him at the SEC. But the result was that Cooley told Musk no. Hardly a success story for Musk.
There's no shortage of law firms willing to go up against billionaires. Hell, there's no shortage of firms willing to go up against criminal enterprises like drug cartels.
The idea that Musk is somehow more threatening than the types that the US court system regularly puts under their thumb is simply laughable.
So what? This is business as usual for law firms. They will lose clients every time they take a case due to conflicts of interest and so on, even if everyone has a happy outcome.
What Musk did was petty and questionable, but it didn't fundamentally change anything for Cooley.
It's unlikely Musk expected Cooley to cave to his ridiculous demand. It's very likely the intended target for this action was every person who deals with Musk's future illegal actions.
"“What are they going to do if there is a judgment and he says, ‘Well, I’m still not going to buy it’?” said Zohar Goshen, professor of transactional law at Columbia Law School. “They don’t really have tools to force him to go through with it. You don’t put people in jail because they don’t buy something.”"
1) The court would issue a judgement for Twitter, against Musk, for $44b.
2) Musk would either voluntarily pay it by selling his own assets, or he would refuse. If he refuses, then:
3) Twitter would go about seizing and selling Musk's assets, until they have raised funds to cover the $44b judgement.
Twitter could levy whatever brokerage or account Musk uses to hold his shares. Somewhere there is an account which records the shares. Twitter would serve the entity managing the account with a levy, and order the shares be liquidated.
1) Sure, but this wouldn't give him any protection. On the contrary, there would be a ton of extra liability and exposure if he were to refuse to process a levy.
Shares don't need to be held in a brokerage. There's always a process to identify and seize the property in question.
2) There's no such thing. TSLA is a US public company, traded on US exchanges. It's simply not possible for shares of the company to exist outside of US jurisdiction.
Just having a share certificate doesn’t make it s bearer form. The corporation would have to set up this ahead of time. I don’t know the status of Tesla shares that he owns but it would be very weird if they aren’t registered securities. It would also raise a ton of questions if they started issuing bearer shares after a court injunction.
Order the legal entities which possess the shares to transfer ownership of them. Actually keeping track of stocks is complicated but ultimately a boring bureaucracy.
The one used by most is DTCC, it’s basically owned by the banks who use it, not something that could be bought.
The legal entity which maintains the list of teslas owners is ultimately tesla, but that duty will be likely given to dtcc.
A stock is ultimately just an entry on a list maintained by the company, most offload the managing of the list to DTCC and usually the pointer isn’t to you but to your broker dealer.
There is no sense of being able to hide ownership overseas, we’re talking about an American company keeping a list that points to someone, that list can’t be offshored.
A little more nuanced take: the transfer agent maintains a list of shareholders at the company's behest, the DTCC is one step further down the chain, operating as a clearinghouse between brokers and banks. The list of shareholders is managed by the company or it's bookkeeper, the "transfer agent". Insiders and people who own paper certificates are on the list kept by the transfer agent, directly owning their shares on the company's books, alongside Cede & Co (a partner of the DTCC), who owns the bulk of all publicly traded shares. Cede & Co, and it's partner, the DTCC, then maintain a list of which shares beneficially belong to each of the DTCC members (brokerages, banks). The brokerages and banks in turn maintain lists of which clients beneficially own the brokerage's shares.
Yeah for every explanation there’s another more complicated one, it’s a pretty crazy mess. A long chain of abstractions and not every one uses the same stack.
Note that the last time I checked, DTCC had over one quadrillion dollars of assets under management. They operate at a financial scale unlike any other entity on the planet.
For them, $44b is the crumb left behind after you've eaten the small potatoes.
Totally agree with not being able to hide owner ship (especially when are a director, major shareholder, and ceo) but I think DTCC is really only in the mix when you buy/sell shares via an exchange, and their focus is the settlement between brokers and exchanges. The registrar and transfer agent is who maintains the list of share holders (Computershare is the resgistrar and transfer agent for Tesla).
He (or an entity he owns and controls) owns the shares, and and another company (computershare in the case of Tesla) maintains a list of all the shareholders (registrar and transfer agent). No one else “owns” them
He may just own the shares directly with the company (we’ve largely done away with paper share certificates). Or he may have transferred them to his broker (Morgan Stanley?) (who in turn might custody them with a custodian BNY Mellon?) who holds them on his behalf. If he then transferred those shares to say DBS in Singapore MS/BNY is going to inform computershare “fyi we just sent all those Elon musk shares to DBS in Singapore” and DBS is going to say (FYI we know have custody of all those Elon musk shares)..,and when you go looking for those shares all you have to do is go to computershare with a court order and say where are Elon’s shares, and they’ll be like, oh over at DBS in Singapore… and for all I know the registrar can probably just send a note to DBS in Singapore and be like (ahh we got a court order to transfer these shares to some other guys so we did, subtract $44b from his account)
All of this is a long winded way of saying that “shares” are just entries on a ledger maintained by the company or someone else on their behalf, which makes seizing them, typically pretty easy…
Who cares, why would Tesla be beholden for the actions of its largest shareholder? Musk is acting in a capacity completely outside of Tesla. To think that Tesla is somehow connected is disinformation.
Yes, and they need to get paid in order to do something. Nobody really thinks that Elon Musk did something greatly terrible to Twitter by not buying it, this means Twitter will always get more crap from chasing Elon than not chasing him. It just happens to be that the payout will be big enough for them not care about the flak.
BUT, if Elon fights back hard, Twitter will have to stop.
Contempt of court is independent of the original cases criminal vs civil distinction.
You can have criminal contempt in a civil case and criminal contempt in a civil case. The rules vary by state but in PA it’s civil contempt is used to force people to comply where criminal is punishment for disobedience.
Are you under the impression that judges presiding over civil cases cannot exercise their inherent power (in some jurisdictions) to jail those in (severe) contempt of court?
There is no ability to not comply. Seizure of assets is handled with financial institutions complying, and with the police backing up court seizures for physical assets.
No one is going to assault a cop, or have their bank shut down due to non compliance.
Where I am, what often happens is the damaged party has papers showing debt owed. It then becomes a colllection issue, sometimes, in some jurisdictions court takes an active role, in others, you have to do the work yourself.
Eg, you have to find their bank, hire a sheriff(the seizure kind), and go get what is now "your stuff".
If there was then a lot of America would become slaves by not paying their debts. There may be contempt here though if Elon does something to really piss off the courts.
Perhaps it's just a general sense of disillusionment, but I've come to see that "court orders X" and "X happens" are entirely orthogonal. I will be personally surprised if Musk pays a single cent.
Depends I guess on how 007 you think the world operates (reference to James Bond) - X will happen, but maybe 2-10 years after various counter-suits.
Case studies are what has happened e.g. with Microsoft, other large businesses - long legal battles are fought, nothing happens while things are in limbo.
When the rubber finally hits the road, things happen fairly quickly, but until then it does look a bit like "nothing happens".
This is of course, a problem, perhaps one that needs innovating around.
What has happened to Microsoft? They still have a default browser pre-installed, Office wasn’t spun-off to another company… and I don’t remember the Java stuff anymore but I think nothing happened either, even though it’s a lot less relevant now.
> Is Levine seriously suggesting that US courts don't have the authority to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets
No. He’s suggesting that Musk’s wealth and power will make the people who work in US courts reluctant to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets.
Not to mention his bizarre hold on the public imagination. He's the worlds most simped compulsive liar. I think authorities may also be afraid of looking like Nazi jackboots on the neck of this innocent guy who would be in federal prison serving long sentences if he was just some obscure hedge fund dude, known only to other hedge fund dudes, like Bernie Madhoff.
I can't believe people are looking at this from such a silly angle. It's obvious that no court can order you to buy something. That goes against the personal freedom we have in this country, and if a court tried it, it would be an easy appeal. But that misses the point, because nobody is going to order Elon to buy Twitter. What MIGHT happen is, a court declares "Congratulations! You already bought Twitter! It has nothing to do with us, we just interpreted the contract. Again, congrats on your purchase, don't go getting buyer's remorse now winky face"
What are you trying to assert is false about this viewpoint? Specific performance is actually a kind of legal remedy and it can in fact be ordered by a court. It might be one of the last tools in a judge's toolbox, but I don't think it's anywhere near a "silly angle" after a quick googling of "specific performance".
That was a stupid order that would never survive scrutiny under prior-restraint doctrine. Specific performance is something different, though... I can't think of any constitutional problems that might block enforcement of that.
If he had the cash to buy it, they could force him to. But if he lined up financing and those people bail, what then? Would the court make him liquidate all his Tesla stock, without regard to how that would injure other Tesla shareholders? Having assets does make one more vulnerable to court judgments, but savvy birch people will set themselves up to remain in the driver’s seat when possible.
Note that in TFA, the continuation of this very silly statement is footnoted [6], which literally starts with "I made this joke before...", so none of us ought to be taking it seriously.
The footnote only applies to the "Chancery jail" bit, not the suggestion that the court may not want to risk a public showdown: "A showdown between Musk and a judge might undermine Delaware corporate law more than letting him weasel out of the deal would." - this sentence is after that footnote.
Well, throwaway09223, you certainly sound like as much an authority as a former Wachtell and Goldman Sachs associate. Strong arguments like "this is utter nonsense" and "this is so absurd [that I can't actually argue against it]" are sure to sway the educated crowd on HN.
If you would like to go see ways in which the government fails to penalize powerful entities, look no further than the financial crisis fines. What you were told were 10 figure fines ended up becoming a few million dollars in consumer relief headaches
> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.
If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning.
(Here, Levine is making a specific claim about the remedies that the Delaware chancellory court typically employs, not about the authority of US courts)
This is an appeal to authority that is not valid: there are plainly a lot of lawyers out there who's legal opinion leaves a lot of daylight against the actual law. Rudy Giuliani took a long time to get disbarred.
> This is an appeal to authority that is not valid
I'm open to that criticism; I'm typically pretty skeptical of appeals to authority myself.
But to be clear: the appeal to authority I'm making isn't "legal opinion of a lawyer" (I agree that's very weak) but rather "opinion on corporate law by a Wachtell attorney who practiced corporate law" (Wachtell is probably the best corporate law firm in the world, and clearly in the top handful)
It doesn't matter if they're affected. A judgement is going to be for a dollar amount. A court will rule that Musk must pay twitter X billion dollars. Twitter can then pursue Musk, taking basically anything he owns in terms of business.
They could contact the broker holding his shares and restrain them, order them sold, and collect the proceeds.
They could seize and sell at auction the real property of any of his businesses. SpaceX rockets? Office chairs? Servers? Anything.
All of this enforcement costs money. Twitter would account for the money spent seizing assets and charge those expenses to Musk as well.
Assets seized in this way (including stock) are often sold for much less than they're ideally worth. It's Musk's problem. Twitter would be empowered to seize seize seize until they've raised enough cash to cover the judgement plus expenses.
> They could seize and sell at auction the real property of any of his businesses. SpaceX rockets? Office chairs? Servers? Anything.
They could not, because he does not own those businesses outright. Doing so would violate the other owners rights. They can seize his shares in SpaceX, but not SpaceX property.
I’m having it hard taking you seriously given you making such a basic mistake of thinking they could seize spacex property directly. What industry do you work in?
Oh give me a break. Property of a privately owned company can be directly seized.
I have not done an analysis on exactly which of Musk's private companies are jointly owned, and how the ownership is structured. It's a comment on hn for crying out loud.
SpaceX is well known to have a bunch of investors. Put a little effort in before explicitly calling out that the government could seize rockets. It’s as silly as saying they could start just taking Model 3s from the Tesla factory to get their money back.
I think you're misunderstanding. It's absolutely possible to seize rockets, or model 3s, etc. That part isn't silly at all.
The only question is regarding which entity is liable. If a judgement were entered against SpaceX, for example, then absolutely rockets and real property owned by SpaceX can be directly seized.
Without looking, I'm certain there are at least a few companies owned by Musk which could have their assets taken directly.
We’re talking about Elon, not spacex. I don’t get how you’re confusing the two so easily. You claimed they can seize spacex property for Elon debt, which is 100% unadulterated bullshit.
If they take all of Musk's shares in SpaceX and acquire a voting majority, they can then use those shares to vote to sell off the company's assets at the next board meeting.
They could simply keep selling Elon's Tesla stock it until they had the money to cover the court order.
Why should the court or Twitter care if they end up converting 10x more of Elon's stock to cash?
I guess some day traders would get rich (and people that had to sell for the day or so when the stock tanked would take a bath), but that's the biggest problem I can come up with.
No, they still own the stock, the government hasn’t taken anything from them. The stock might be worth less money the same way a house might be worth less money if a city government decided to stop repairing the road in front of it, or if the city relaxed zoning laws, but the price of assets in the market isn’t a responsibility of the government, and it generally does not incur liability when it causes them to change.
I think a more appropriate example would be if the government did some work around the house and in the process damaged the house, thereby lowering the value. The thing being damaged is shareholder confidence, which I thought (but IANAL) taps into different securities-related laws.
If the government damages physical property it is frequently liable for the cost of repairs, but to the extent that a share of Twitter stock represents something that can be damaged, that thing is Twitter itself. If through illegal meddling of some sort the government impaired Twitter’s ability to do business (say, for example, by flagrant targeted refusal to grant work visas), then the company or shareholders could have a cause to sue the government. The government is under no obligation to avoid impacting Twitter’s share price, especially as a side effect of some unrelated fully legitimate exercise of government power like auctioning off seized assets.
Elon and Twitter have a contract. Elon wants out; Twitter doesn't want to let him out; the contract only has limited conditions to allow Elon out. The court is simply deciding which of two options is the case:
1. Elon's reasons are valid; he gets out of the contract for a $1B payment.
2. Elon's reasons are not valid; he has to satisfy the contract and pay $54.20/share for Twitter.
If the judge decides in favor of #2, it is Elon's responsibility to come up with the money. (If he doesn't do so willingly, someone court-appointed will step in and do it for him.) If that tanks Tesla, that has nothing to do with the court.
Now, Tesla shareholders can sue Elon for getting the company into this pile of stank....
If someone's car is seized by the government, it doesn't cause the value of everyone else's cars to drop by 50%, and if it did, I think people would sue the the government.
It's not like the shares are destroyed or immediately sold. If anything, they are prevented from being sold under pain of contempt, so could increase prices by limiting the supply.
You just continue seizing assets until the accumulated cash value realized from the sale of the assets matches the value of the financial judgement against the guilty party.
The drop in share prices as you do this is not your concern.
The Twitter board would have a tough time explaining why they didn’t enforce the rock solid agreement allowing the shareholders to sell their shares for an extreme premium.
But tech workers don't need unions, right. Must be fun for twitter employees to completely powerless spectators with no seat at the negotiating table while the lunatic has a chance at becoming their new King and turning their labour in to an election-swinging doomsday machine at the end of human civilisation.
He absolutely has the ability. He's demonstrated that publicly, with his verified presentation of having raised the $44 billion a few weeks ago (through a combination of financial instruments).
I don't think so, I mean, you are not just going to place a single market order for $44bn of stock, you are going to have liquidity problems because there is not that much buy-side volume in the market, so the price must fall drastically to attract new buyers. Also I assume musk has legal obligations not to do stuff like that to begin with, as an executive with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. If Musk can tank Tesla, Exxon execs can dismantle Exxon to save the environment. But there's also the fact that a lot of his Tesla shares are already leveraged on loans. The most likely course would be for him to take out loans on the remaining unleveraged stock, but he doesn't have enough of that at the rates the banks are offering.
Anyway, I'm no expert on Musk, and I have almost zero interest in Tesla, or Twitter, or any of this clown show. So maybe my ballpark guesstimations of all the relevant numbers are way off. So take it all with a huge pinch of salt. I am just some uninformed spectator watching two lizards fight in the dust and speculating who will win or whatever :)
To the extent that Elon Musk might represent a corner case w.r.t. the legal system even more than you’re average billionaire it would most likely be because of the national security tie-ins around SpaceX.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I don’t think it’s insane.
It appears that that's the remedy for failing to get funds, not for cold feet; there's a performance clause for the latter, so Levine suggests "Musk’s goal here is presumably to walk away from Twitter and pay only $1 billion in damages." - that Musk is negotiating by making a stink to even be able to pay instead of going through with the deal he signed.
Your repeating opinion of someone with extreme biases for clickbait. This fantasy of forcing musk to buy the company doesn’t exist in any contract. Your asking the court to make up a new contract and enforce it.
That’s not how the court works, except in extreme circumstances which don’t apply to this twitter acquisition attempt.
Also, Musk asserts that upto 50% of twitter users are bots, which is totally believable. So the chances Musk will have to pay anything is actually remote, since twitter would have to produce evidence that would reveal trade secrets.
Here’s my prediction: Musk will pay nothing because Twitter has allowed itself to be infiltrated with bots and revealing this will be far more damaging than losing out on a billion. Musk will walk away.
Ok let’s say he has a bunch of stock as well as paintings, cars, etc. how do you divvy that up? Cut the painting in half and give it to Twitter? The rich are very wise at hiding money in assets that cannot be evenly divided nor distributed. That’s why the vast majority of taxes in the US comes from the middle class, they usually sit on piles of cash and have salaries from which to levy fines to.
Most of the middle class in America has a salary, or at least a paycheck, but distressing little cash saved.
But they do pay the taxes that pay the bills.
I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose.
If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his assets to compensate.
Is Levine seriously suggesting that US courts don't have the authority to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets? This is such an absurd thing to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.