There was some grim stuff happening in the Chancery case: multiple bits of evidence suggesting that Peiter Zatko had in fact been in touch with Musk's team, in advance of the "whistleblowing" release. The Chancery court had just come in with an order giving Twitter extended discovery rights to look for those communications.
If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team, that would be a very big deal, not only undercutting a big part of Musk's current case (which he was set to lose anyways) but also falsifying several statements made both to the Delaware court and also to Congress(?!).
I wonder also if the appearance, performative as it is, that Musk is choosing to buy Twitter rather than being forced to buy Twitter is helpful for financing. He's more or less obligated to purchase Twitter, but there's no rule preventing him from offsetting the expense with a syndicate of co-investors; that syndicate might be easier to put together if he can shift the narrative.
Not surprising, this is actually the least-shitty path for Musk now.
He fucked up and his other alternatives were waaay more expensive (e.g. being forced to sell more stock and lose control of TSLA, shorters have a field day, people lose confidence on TSLA even though FSD is "one month away from working", it could all go down because of this).
No one sheds 44B "to honor a deal", at least not him, lol.
Epilogue: Matt Levine was on point all the time, I'd like to hear now from all the folks who were saying that Musk was going to get away with it.
inb4 "it was all 4D chess, this is what he wanted" Yeah, sure pal ...
You would shed $44B pretty fast if the Delaware Chancellor sets an emergency conference with you where she is about to say to you, "I am going to force you to buy this pile of garbage, and a lot more embarrassing shit is going to come out because I'm not going to let you seal the proceedings. Settle so we can all save face here."
> ...I'm not going to let you seal the proceedings.
The Delaware Chancery email/twitter account that follows proceedings noted that Musk's defence team sued to unseal a great deal of the comms for some reason that, frankly, defies all understanding. So it's not as though this "leaked" or Musk lost a motion to have them sealed. They were sealed by default. Musk moved to have them unsealed over Twitter's objections.
And by 'settle' they mean carry out your end of the deal as inked, no compromises :)
I can't help but feel everyone is getting exactly what they deserve. Elon is buying a company he didn't want to buy as punishment for trolling that company and their leadership on that company's own platform. Twitter is getting new leadership and lord knows they need it [*]. And the shareholders are getting paid what they were told they'd be paid.
[*] Twitter truly is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, and as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. [1]
A settlement could have been a $20-25 billion payout to Twitter to exit the deal, or something similar (no, that is not precluded by the contract limiting damages to $1 billion, the settlment agreement [edited] overrides the contract). Twitter's lawyers likely would have been okay with that.
The court can force performance of the contract. It can't make up a fine or damage award. Twitter, after winning performance in court, is then free to make up any price short of $44B for Musk to wiggle out of the deal.
That's true, but if he really wanted out, it was a good chance for him and Twitter to set a price to exit the deal. I would bet that Musk had offered a settlement of a $5-10 billion payout to get out of the deal, but Twitter rejected it.
The $1B is pretty much a red herring, it's only in play under a specific circumstances. There's no "pay $1B to get out of this no questions asked" clause in the contract. It doesn't limit damages.
Technically, that's exactly what it does, and $1B is the damage limit (that's one reason the court can't just make up a damages award in the plural billions to compensate Twitter). Twitter is relying on their right to specific performance, not damages.
Twitter is not "getting new leadership", or at least not leadership as that term is commonly understood. Musk will be distracted and is manifestly unqualified, not to mention uninterested.
thats the understatement of the century but true. abdicating your responsibility for a discovery phase during an acquisition is tantamount to fraud in the United States, but when he started to drag his feet and publicly proclaim a "hold" on the twitter deal due to spam accounts, it likely started triggering investigation into securities fraud. Musk may have wound up in the frying pan, but he didnt exactly do much to turn down the heat.
The court of public opinion is a bully pulpit for the wealthy elite but only if its the public opinion you intend to sway. Elon was about to start taking swings at investors and board members, who arent generally moved by public bloviation or jingoist egocentrism. Chancery court didnt last long but im sure it was a sobering experience for such a cloistered elite, assuming the near constant looming presence of the SEC hasnt rattled his bones enough.
> abdicating your responsibility for a discovery phase during an acquisition is tantamount to fraud in the United States,
Skipping due diligence is the buyer's option. It may be irresponsible if you're using other people's money (especially money from public capital markets), but there's nothing that obligates me to closely look at an asset that I'm buying with my money or even my money and my buddies' money that they pledged.
Might appear like that at a glance. I wonder…the additional costs in terms of time, ongoing expense, etc. might make $10 billion to cut it off seem correct in some paths.
I mean... maybe? But I highly doubt 'additional costs' would bridge the $34B gap between the figures. You also have to consider the damage accepting the settlement would do to Twitter in the eyes of the markets / shareholders. It would be huge and would likely have an enormous impact on their share price. Also, if Musk did go to trial and then lost, I would hope there is some way he would then be compelled to pay Twitter's legal costs.
The commitment for financing had already been made by banks and could not be rescinded simply because they suddenly don't like Musk anymore.
Throughout this whole saga it has been popularly believed that (1) the breakup fee represents an option for Musk to get out of the deal and that (2) the financing contingency is easy to get out of by having the banks cancel their commitments.
Both have been untrue the entire time. If they were true, then Musk would not be proceeding with the deal at the original price.
A Delaware court has previously made an acquirer buy a company when evidence showed they had sabotaged funding to get out of an agreement. So while it may be possible, it isn't easy.
That would be looked on by Delaware judges about as kindly as using a cigarette lighter to burn the only copy of a contract in front of them. He had the financing contractually agreed, that clause was in case something happened like Tesla or one of the banks providing a loan going bankrupt (actually writing that makes me think I remember that the clause was only applicable to the loans part of the financing and not even the other investors - but I'm not sure I'm right, and too lazy to go find and re-read the purchase agreement they signed).
Some people did speculate that the reason Musk started publicly disparaging Twitter was in the hope that some of his financing would try to pull their agreements thus triggering this clause, but the expert opinions I saw were that the court wouldn't accept that, especially after Twitter filed suit against him, and sure enough that strategy (if it was a strategy) didn't pay off - otherwise he wouldn't be where he is today. (Matt Levine covered this particular theory well in his Bloomberg newsletter.)
Someone could probably translate it better than me [-1], but it roughly says that the investors Musk has lined up are legally obligated to provide the funding they agreed to, and explicitly states that there are no justifications for getting out of the deal except for "paragraph 6 of Exhibit E".
Exhibit E is the part of the deal Musk signed to buy Twitter that's titled "Equity commitment letter dated April 20, 2022", and #6 is the final point of the exhibit which is a generic boilerplate clause with a sub header of "Governing Law; Consent to Jurisdiction". This point basically means "unless any laws make this contract illegal, because our contract isn't allowed to supersede any laws".
Exhibit E #6 is on page 113 of the contract [0] and I'll paste the full text below but it's a boring read! [1].
Also worth noting that even within Exhibit E, paragraph 2 says that the investor's obligations to fund this deal end only in two circumstances - either when they pay their obligation as part of the deal closing, or when the deal falls apart because of something in the contract terms (ie out of their hands). Full text also below [2]
[-1] edit to add that I'm not a lawyer (nor is this comment advice), just a bit of a nerd who's had the pleasure (:|) of negotiating and sometimes writing a few more contracts than I wish I had over the past decade, including with a couple of big publicly traded US companies. (Nothing close to as big as this deal of course, but these bits of the contract are pretty typical.)
[1] "Governing Law; Consent to Jurisdiction. This letter agreement, and all actions, causes of action, claims, cross-claims, third-party claims or proceedings of any kind (whether at law, in equity, in contract, in tort or otherwise) that may be based upon, arise out of or relate to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim, third-party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith) shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, regardless of legal requirements that might otherwise govern under applicable principles of conflicts of laws. Each of the parties hereto hereby irrevocably and unconditionally (a) submits, for itself and its property, to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Delaware Court of Chancery (or, only if the Delaware Court of Chancery declines to accept jurisdiction over a particular matter, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware), and any appellate court from any thereof, in any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind arising out of or relating to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third- party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith), or for recognition or enforcement of any judgment, and agrees that all claims in respect of any such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind shall be heard and determined in such Delaware Court of Chancery (or, only if the Delaware Court of Chancery declines to accept jurisdiction over a particular matter, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware), (b) waives, to the fullest extent it may legally and effectively do so, any objection which it may now or hereafter have to the laying of venue of any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind arising out of or relating to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith) in the Delaware Court of Chancery, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware, or in any Delaware State court, (c) waives, to the fullest extent permitted by legal requirement, the defense of an inconvenient forum to the maintenance of such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind in any such court and (d) agrees that a final judgment in any such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind shall be conclusive and may be enforced in other jurisdictions by suit on the judgment or in any other manner provided by legal requirement."
[2] "Termination. The Equity Investor’s obligation to fund the Aggregate Equity Commitment will terminate automatically and immediately upon the earliest to occur of (a) the consummation of the Closing (if the Closing occurs) (but only if such obligation to fund the Aggregate Equity Commitment shall have been discharged in connection therewith) and (b) a termination or expiration of the Offer in accordance with its terms. Upon the termination or expiration of this letter agreement, no party hereto shall have any further obligations or liabilities hereunder."
The banks had already signed up for financing. They didn't need another reason to pull out - because of the changes in interest rates since they signed the deal, they stand to lose hundreds of millions over the life of the loan.
They agreed a cap of 12% on the interest, if they cant get it away for less than that they will just stick it on the books and wear it, the debt may be poorly rated, but cant see Musk defaulting on it over the next few years at least.
The merger agreement stipulates that Twitter can require specific performance (that is: force musk to buy them). It's an open question whether or not the judge would have ruled that way, but Musk was consistently losing the early battles.
My personal opinion is that Levine was always off base in one important way- Musk always intended to buy Twitter, and this was merely a negotiating tactic on price. He bid at the wrong time, so he's paying a lot more than he "should", and this whole thing was an attempt to get the price down.
I don't think at any point was he actually backing out of the deal, and I certainly don't think the whole thing was an elaborate scheme to sell Tesla stock.
This is… not how your negotiate on price. What you call his “bid” was in fact his binding definitive agreement to acquire the company at an agreed upon price.
Yeah, plenty of deals get re-traded between signing and closing and purchase prices get re-cut, but the extreme bad faith by Musk after he signed the merger agreement made it functionally impossible for twitter’s board to do anything except hold him to the deal he made.
You don't sign a purchase agreement with absolutely zero wiggle room to negotiate (and agree to the sellers additional seller-friendly terms along the way) in order to lower the price. You negotiate before you sign the agreement.
This is like going into a Honda dealership, signing a bill of sale at 20% over MSRP for a Civic without looking at it, then arguing you should get a discount because the floor mats are ugly.
He fucked around, and he found out.
There's a reason everyone incorporates in Delaware. They don't have time for shenanigans.
> You don't sign a purchase agreement with absolutely zero wiggle room to negotiate
You also don’t do that for a company you don’t truly intend to purchase, especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
It’s pretty evident that Musk is falling into the same sort of spiral that autocrats do when they surround themselves with sycophants and get used to breaking the rules for fun. What signal does he have that he’s gone too far? Well… none… until Delaware Chancery requires him to pay tens of billions of dollars that he signed over on a lark.
IMO the fact that he made even one tweet ever about this whole debacle (prior to resolution) is evidence that he can’t trust his team (or his team is truly bad).
A lark is fleeting feeling. This was far from it. This wasnt an overnight whim…it was weeks in the making. If it was a lark, Musk would have backed down before anything was signed or made the offer terms completely unpalatable to Twitters board but instead he made them an offer they wanted to refuse, but couldn’t. Musk definitely wanted to buy it and was more than willing at that price.
Your opinion relies on a couple things that are pretty unlikely. One, that someone as successful as Musk wouldn’t engage counsel that he completely trusts with 20% of his net worth. Two, that he went down this road without a real commitment to buy it, despite spending a ton of money in the effort to buy it.
The market turned, the valuation changed, and Musk tried a tactic to renegotiate his position. In the end, he is going to ultimately get what he really wanted, but the value of what he wanted will take a little more time to recover.
A lark is not a fleeting feeling. It’s “a quest for amusement.” This is pretty much the only thing that explains all of the behavior. He was doing it for fun and no one stopped him in time. Partly because, as has been reported, so many in his inner circle thought he wasn’t serious about it.
He entered into an entirely reckless contract because he was riding the high of his Big Joke. Not sure what’s hard to believe about an egomaniacal self-described troll getting himself into a tricky situation. Schoolchildren do it all the time.
Who knows what the deal is with his relationship with counsel but go ahead and read some of their filings to see what a clown show it is. Some of them seem to have been written by Musk himself and making claims that don’t even resemble legal arguments.
> go ahead and read some of their filings to see what a clown show it is
I have, but I am not a lawyer. Perhaps you are and can speak intelligently to their validity. What I will say is that there is a better than average chance that exceptionally good and well paid lawyers drew them up and a better than average chance that many of the armchair legal analysts commenting here and elsewhere are not good and well paid lawyers.
Wealthy business people I know are not adverse to risk, but they are methodical and are generally careful when large amounts of their own capital is at risk. This smells more to me like a calculated negotiation tactic to try grab a lower buy price that didn’t pay off for Musk more than anything else. In then end, he got what he originally wanted and at the price he was originally willing to pay.
You can be the best lawyer of all time but if the police have a 4k close up of your guy pulling the trigger from five different angles there may be no sequence of words you can write that are gonna get him out of jail, and it's also possible anything you do write will sound absurd. That's more or less the situation here with Musk, although in contract form, not criminal.
I'm curious if there will be any attempt to recover damages from his legal representation. Maybe there was deficiency? Although I doubt any legal form is sufficiently capitalized or insured to make more than a tiny dent in the harm done to his fortune by this whole debacle. To be clear I assume he's been adequately represented but I mean he did make this offer so further buffoonery would not surprise.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean your lawyer doesn’t still try and make a case in your defense if you want one. That’s what lawyers do…
Think about it, no one really got hurt here. Musk ultimately buys Twitter for the agreed price, no shareholder loses. Musk assumes the cost for Twitter’s lawyers for the lawsuit to preserve the deal by buying Twitter and Musk paid his lawyers to defend it. It was chump change to a billionaire to take a long shot bet to maybe make the deal a little sweeter and it didn’t work. Oh well, Musk has not lost any more than he was originally willing to risk.
Their point is that no one was financially hurt. Nobody in this thread mentioned anything about people getting physically hurt, unless I’m missing something.
You don’t think anyone was hurt by the absolutely enormous amount of stress he chose to create? Or the army of lawyers that Twitter shareholders had to pay for?
I think you meant to reply to my other comment[0], since that's where I did make that argument? But as to your questions:
> You don’t think anyone was hurt by the absolutely enormous amount of stress he chose to create?
Fair point, I imagine the last couple of months have not been great for many Twitter-employees.
> Or the army of lawyers that Twitter shareholders had to pay for?
As far as I know the shareholders don't directly pay for the lawyers, that money comes from some financial reserve Twitter has. In normal circumstances massive legal costs can reduce the value of a company, but in this case the shareholders will be able to sell each share for the same $54.20 as before the lawsuit. If the company becomes less valuable because of this, that's the problem of the next owner of the company. Since Musk will end up owning Twitter, he'll end up paying for the lawyers on both sides of this suit. Or am I missing something?
Under this theory of damage, there’s no such thing as theft until you die because there’s always a chance you’ll get your belongings back on your deathbed. So no biggie, right?! Time value of money is a thing. Time under stress is also a real thing, and Musk seems to relish in putting other people in it.
> Under this theory of damage, there’s no such thing as theft until you die because there’s always a chance you’ll get your belongings back on your deathbed.
Only if you take really specific statements and turn them into a general theory. But this discussion isn't about theoretical thefts and deathbeds, it's one about the reality that Musk is buying Twitter[0]. There is no "army of lawyers that Twitter shareholders had to pay for", because the current shareholders won't have to pay anything. Twitter is paying for the lawyers and Musk will and up owning Twitter. That's not some moral judgement, it's a description of the facts. Nothing I've said so far is in defense of what Musk does.
To be clear: I behavior is justifiable. He created this mess by making really dumb decisions and then trying everything to get out of this situation by not caring about anything or anyone but himself. It has been a huge waste of time and money. But as it turns out, Musk will be the one owning a company he doesn't want, and as that owner he'll be the one paying for that wasted time and for the costs made by both parties of the lawsuit. It just seems that the person that's by far the most hurt by Musks actions is Musk himself.
[0]In this entire comment I'm assuming the deal actually goes through.
There are a few other parties that could claim some sort of injury, although I don't know how much of a legal case any of them would have.
Some employees may have suffered undue emotional distress due to the excess uncertainty.
Anyone who sold TWTR while the price was depressed due to Musk's unjustified legal maneuvering certainly suffered economic injury.
Elon's creditors and co-investors may view his maneuvering as having damaged the asset, thus decreasing their expected returns.
To reiterate: I don't know if any of these people have a legal claim. And I acknowledge that Musk certainly injured himself the most. But the economic injuries suffered by these other parties are not trivial.
Sorry it's hilarious that people would be emotionally distressed about their jobs potentially disappearing? Curious to know what year this new "fragility" kicked in, in your eyes.
People with Musk's wealth can't lose dignity in any meaningful way, because social consequences don't apply to them. He's going to remain one of the richest, most powerful and influential people on the planet regardless of what he says or does.
You don’t purport to terminate a merger agreement (three times, no less!) if you are merely trying to re-cut the price.
Even if this had been a negotiating ploy, Musk (through his extreme bad faith, including apparent destruction of evidence) put Twitter’s board in a box where they couldn’t possibly accept a lower price without exposing themselves to substantial personal legal exposure. He already agreed to buy the company at $44 billion, after all. There was no reason for them to return to the table, and many, many reasons for them not to.
Your previous comment literally argues it is too early for anyone to make informed judgements about the motivation of the parties involved. And yet, here you are:
> The market turned, the valuation changed, and Musk tried a tactic to renegotiate his position. In the end, he is going to ultimately get what he really wanted, but the value of what he wanted will take a little more time to recover.
Is this not someone making an informed judgement about Musk's motivations?
> You also don’t do that for a company you don’t truly intend to purchase
You can defend Musk all you want, but you simply cannot make the argument that he is a traditional, by-the-books, conservative business man. He's an impulsive, irrational, self-obsessed, risk-taking billionaire who flouts convention, tradition and consensus. His reckless instincts and his willingness to bend or break 'the rules' have worked incredibly well for him in the past. This time he fucked up big-time.
> ...especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
You think Musk is the kind of person who lets lawyers lead him around by the nose, that he is someone with a well-known and well-established reverence for the legal profession and the rule of law? This is absolutely not the case.
> Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
This is hilarious because the first part of your comment is literally you presenting sharing your view Musk's motivation (eg. "He has every intention of buying Twitter because he signed a purchase agreement! People who sign purchase agreements don't not buy the companies they committed to purchasing!").
Anyway, it's definitely not too early to make an informed judgement about the Twitter conflagration. Musk did everything he could to drag this debacle into the spotlight rather than handling it more discretely. He tried to weaponize public opinion for his own aims, and he also (very publicly) made a series of misleading or patently false allegations about Twitter in order to get his way. It's too late to argue that we should approach this with a neutral perspective.
Nah, I am not defending Musk. Frankly I don’t care if he buys Twitter and burns it to the ground, loses all his cash, becomes a pauper; or spins it into something bigger and sells it for $1T; or doesn’t buy it at all and is penalized and socially destroyed on the world’s stage.
I’m literally indifferent to to the man and his musings and I think that gives me a bit of a different perspective then the binary Musk opinions here on HN. However, my opinions are as uninformed to Musk’s internal intentions as all of the armchair lawyering and MBA’ing that is going on here…I guess I am just willing to admit it.
What is a fact is at the end of the day he is buying a company that he wanted, at a price he was willing to pay, and will do with it what he wants, despite Twitter’s attempts initially to keep him from buying it and apparently half the worlds horror that he is actually going to get it.
> What is a fact is at the end of the day he is buying a company that he wanted...
I appreciate the perspective you take, I think it's refreshing.
I think a lot of this debate centers around exactly this premise - we don't know that. We don't know he wanted it, and we don't know it's a price he was willing to pay. He said that but his actions don't really align with his words.
He has a history of playing fast-and-loose with the truth, either sharing optimistic or totally unrealistic deadlines that had not a chance of being met. Crazy technical solutions like the hyperloop that had to be walked back almost completely for being nutty. And a history of publicly attacking people who cross him ("pedo guy"). While he's got a lot of achievements too, his communication style leads (speaking for myself at least) people not to put quite so much faith into what he says, - and to pay a lot more attention to what he does.
This is purely revisionism / spin. If musk truly did want to buy Twitter but wanted to do so at a discount because the shares were overvalued, you really think this is the plan any sane person would come up with? Waiving due diligence and rapidly signing a purchase agreement that leaves you no outs and no wiggle room? Absolutely not. Musk is a narcissistic, unstable ego maniac but even for him, your retcon'd version of events is laughable.
Close. Read his text messages. He wanted to reduce headcount, both to remove "the woke" and to reduce the wage bill. "2 day a week office requirement = 20% voluntary departures"
Everything he has done since signing the deal has been about delaying so he could sell TSLA, and letting tweeps know their values don't align with his. Hence asking the court to release his texts, and going full Russia Today right before he makes this offer to complete.
> inb4 "it was all 4D chess, this is what he wanted" Yeah, sure pal ...
He would need more sleep for that. I think a lot of his bizarre behavior can be explained by (a) generally being an asshole (b) medicating to avoid sleep.
> Last night Musk tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” which sounds exhausting. The app will do everything, but it will start with two functions: You can read tweets, or you can be shot on a rocket into space. Choose wisely.
And also:
> Is he going to try to raise more money? Is he going to go out to potential investors again and say “changed my mind, Twitter is great now, this’ll be fun, can I pencil you in for $1 billion?” (...) Every little bit helps, no? What does the disclosure document for that investment look like? “Yes Elon Musk has said that Twitter is a dysfunctional fraudulent conspiracy, but everything is fine now, and it’s an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
> Programming note: I apparently have some very bad sins to atone for.
And then at the end of the Twitter saga:
> Anyway I’m tired of this and I have a new retirement plan. Every time this newsletter starts with “Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow,” Musk does something outrageous, and Twitter’s stock swings up or down. So I’m going to buy a bunch of Twitter straddles and then take a vacation, while Twitter is still public and that trick can still work. I’ll make a fortune.
It would not surprise me if we come to find out that some people in the know (not Twitter insiders) were stocking up on TWTR shares during the lawsuit drama. Wonder if SEC has any restrictions on non-insiders with material knowledge.
I think Hindenburg Research, normally an activist short seller, published a report that they were loading up long on Twitter shares b/c they were confident Musk would lose.
> 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. Rule 10b-5’s application goes considerably beyond just officers, directors and principal stockholders. [1]
> This rule also covers any employee who has obtained material non-public corporate information, as well as any person who has received a “tip” from an Insider of the Company concerning information about the Company that is material and nonpublic, and trades (i.e. purchase or sells) the Company’s stock or other securities" [1]
The formal Insider Trading Policy applies to any person who has the information, for the purposes of this law Insider ( as defined in the first part) is materially same.
While you are half right that they are not "Insider" the law does not differentiate any person who got the information from the "Insider", so they are still a insider from the SEC regulations PoV and law applies to them if they trade on material non-public information obtained from a "tip".
Yes, if you get your information from someone with a duty or relationship to the company, you're also an insider. But if you come by material nonpublic information on your own (for instance, from drone surveillance, or some clever analysis of public IDs in URLs, or whatnot), you are allowed to trade on it; that doesn't make you an insider trader. I'm just correcting the statement made upthread about what constitutes an insider.
> if you come by material nonpublic information on your own
Provided you got the information legally.
Of the examples you cite:
Drone surveillance -> Probably illegal depending on local laws
clever analysis of public ID -> Likely legal, although given how CFAA is extremely loose on its interpretation of unlawful access I wouldn't be shocked if a prosecutor successfully argues that it was illegal .
Pretty sure acquiring it illegally doesn’t make you an insider, and you could still trade on it - albeit be liable for the crime you committed to get the info.
A famous recent example was the hack of press releases before they were released and used to make 100+M profit. [1] .
Note the SEC pursued this case not DoJ . SEC has only civil mandate and cannot pursue cases for hacking directly under CFAA which would be a criminal offense only the DoJ can and perhaps also did concurrently
I can't find the actual complaint, but the wire there seems to say they are charging them under antifraud rules, not insider trading rules.
"The SEC’s complaint charges each of the 32 defendants with violating federal antifraud laws and related SEC antifraud rules and seeks a final judgment ordering the defendants to pay penalties, return their allegedly ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and be subject to permanent injunctions from future violations of the antifraud laws."
It's a bit confusing though, because earlier in the same article they seem to imply it's for insider trading. But they don't seem to actually say that's what they are being charged with.
My bet is on the rest of the communications being publicized by the court. Billionaires aren't used to their private texting being public like that.
Musk might like the circus around him, but a lot of people who have been texting him probably aren't enjoying the hundreds of news articles analyzing their private conversations. He could have gotten some communications that he'll become a persona non grata in many of his circles if he doesn't stop the court procedures immediately
> he'll become a persona non grata in many of his circles if he doesn't stop the court procedures immediately
When you are the richest or one of the top 5 richest people in the world, you are always at the center of circle and people flock (or bend) to you. I suspect this was more about him and how he looked than concern for those folks texting him.
I'm sure you already know this, but the deal has already been financed. He is not buying the whole Twitter by himself, just the majority. If co-investors bail out, investment banks who signed the deal take those stocks.
If you compare the purchase price to what Twitter likely would cost without the deal–using the price change of other social media platforms and internet ad platforms as a benchmark–it seems likely that Musk is paying ~$20 billion over the current market value.
If Musk wants to offload even more stocks, he takes huge haircut. At least 50% or more. It's likely better to wait for better times and restructure Twitter.
No matter how you look at it, this is horrible deal for Musk unless he can make Twitter shine again.
I'm assuming that part of this settlement was that some of his funders told him that they wanted the embarrassment to end. This whole process has made him and all of his co-investor friends look like assholes and idiots, and I'm sure they didn't like that.
Back in middle school the "F" word for a bundle of sticks was often used as a derogatory term directed at people you didn't like, regardless of their sexual orientation. That doesn't make it okay for me to call someone that on the public stage because as an adult you are supposed to know better and keep up with changing public opinion
Just because you did something stupid and wrong as a kid doesn't mean you should be able to get away with doing it as an adult.
A lot of people think that Elon Musk was the modern Nikola Tesla or (yes) Albert Einstein. These texts let them know that he is actually the modern PT Barnum.
He is musk, there isn’t a great historical analogy because globalization has truly enabled him to rapidly impact the entire world with his antics and successes.
Having a very brief look at the world of the ultra rich through an acquaintance of a friend, Im pretty sure that "reputation" to those people means a very different thing than it does to us. The key thing to remember is that these people live a very luxurious lifestyle that they can fund without ever having to work a day in their lives, so funding stuff like that to them is pretty much entertainment.
If you watch the expert testimony from the Depp v. Heard trial, you can see a little bit about how "reputation" is measured and how much it can matter to the rich and famous. It is a lot more like how companies measure "brand equity" than how normal people think about reputation.
(I had to look this up) Musk is worth ~$240B, ~1000x more than Depp. Honestly, I'm impressed that a (and I say this with love) junkie actor could do so well.
Not only that, but Depp is notoriously irresponsible with his wealth. Before he had to liquidate some properties because of the trial, he had an excess of houses, condos, boats, cars, and all kinds of expensive to maintain personal holdings. I don't know for sure, but from what I've seen of Elon Musk, he is a lot more conservative with his wealth—even considering the Twitter deal.
Elon Musk is conservative with his wealth because it's mostly on paper - he would need to sell shares to get access to it. Johnny Depp's wealth was mostly in cash.
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk only had about $1 billion liquid (aside from whatever goes towards paying known obligations, like the Twitter deal and tax bills), making him only 2x richer in cash terms than Johnny Depp at his peak.
I don't really know or care about the fine details of Musk (or Depp's) wealth. All I'm pointing out is that Musk seems to have a more moderate lifestyle. He doesn't live like the archetype of a rockstar or billionaire.
Byproduct PMU foals cost less than a purebred kitten or puppy sold by a breeder, sometimes as low as $125. With two acres for grazing, annual cost of feeding can be as low as $100-$300 a year for an adult horse.
But, I believe, you are largely correct. I don't think rich people rescue PMU horses.
His co-investors are the Saudi royal family, Larry Ellison, and the Murdoch family. These do not strike me as a group of people overly concerned with the opinions of ordinary folks.
No one knows the details of the agreements Musk signed with potential co-investors and banks, but considering it has been 6+ months since and the reputation, value and bank balance of the underlying asset – Twitter – has fallen (partially due to Musk's own antics), not to mention drastically different overall economic conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if they all have second thoughts as well.
Second thoughts, absolutely, but also hell-or-high-water contracts that require MAEs to break, and Musk has been notably unsuccessful in making that argument (hence where we are now!). Gonna be a lot of blood on the floor when folks have to take the writedown on this.
Musk failed to prove a material adverse effect by Twitter.
But if his investors wanted to get out of their contracts, they might have legal standing (IANAL), or at least enough threat of it to be allowed out of the contract by Musk to avoid more court battles, based on the fact that he has caused MAE...
After all, there is an open court case of Twitter v Musk (separate to Musk v Twitter) in which Twitter claimed:
"Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price."
and
"Musk’s strategy is also a model of bad faith. While pretending to exercise the narrow right he has under the merger agreement to information for “consummation of the transaction,” Musk has been working furiously—albeit fruitlessly—to try to show that the company he promised to buy and not disparage has made material misrepresentations about its business to regulators and investors. He has also asserted, falsely, that consummation of the merger depends on the results of his fishing expedition and his ability to secure debt financing."
The commitment papers are publicly filed. True, Musk’s equity syndication terms aren’t public, but that’s basically irrelevant - Musk personally is on the hook for 100% of the required equity to the extent any of his coinvestors don’t show up at closing.
I mean, if they cannot shift it to the markets, it's because the markets think its not worth what they paid for it. And it's a lot of risk and capital to tie up themselves.
They may have to resell some of it at, say, 14% to get some of the risk off their books.
$7.1 billion in equity from 19 independent investors.
$20 billion cash from Musk, $6.25 billion in personal bank loans to Musk (he is hooking his Tesla stocks)
Rest is senior secured bank loans and subordinated debt loaned against Twitter stock. The cost of the debt is about $1 billion per year if I remember correctly.
Making Twitter profitable cannot possibly include magnifying the alt-right minority of the U.S. Driving the moderate users and progressives away with TFG and moderation changes that allow QAnon misinformation would severely damage Twitter as a company.
I also guarantee some group of savvy developers are building Twitter 2.0 and will release it if and when Musk starts destroying the company from within.
Employees will quit. Users will abandon the site.
And I still think Musk is clueless about the tech stack. It's mindbogglingly complex and he's not going to replace the hardcore tech staff with sycophants off the street.
There's a necessary equilibrium required to keep Twitter going and growing the platform. I just don't think he's going to outright gut it and turn it into a mindless "free speech" platform. The shit-posts would humiliate him.
Or he turns it into Maga Social and doesn't care about financial losses.
>If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team
42 days ago I commented on the Mudge whistleblower article that there is no way that news coming out at that moment was coincidence, and that the Silicon Valley powers-that-be were aligning against Twitter. Of course, I was accused of "blind hatred of Musk".
This community has some massive blindspots for it's heroes.
I was massively downvoted and flagged for expressing similar concerns, and kept getting new accounts all saying the same thing.. "Zatko's reputation speaks for itself".
It appeared at the time that there was a PR campaign of some sorts just parroting the same talking points. It was obvious it was related to the acquisition.
> If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team, that would be a very big deal, not only undercutting a big part of Musk's current case (which he was set to lose anyways) but also falsifying several statements made both to the Delaware court and also to Congress(?!).
I largely agree with this supposition, which makes it unfortunate that Musk (and co) can take a step like this to try to eliminate discovery that could point to perjury and a clear conspiracy for market-manipulation.
It’s a longshot, but it would be simply amazing if Musk managed to expose himself to criminal liability becaused he convinced himself in a pot-induced stupor that Zatko was going to somehow free him of his obligation.
Don’t assume that this prevents the matter from being looked at more closely though. Musk is a juicy target.
It would be truly amazing. All Musk had to do to minimize his exposure was to do exactly what he was doing - loudly and repeatedly proclaiming “won’t someone rid me of this troublesome merger agreement!” and seeing what crawls out of the woodwork. If he couldn’t help himself and went beyond that - well. Like you said, just simply amazing.
I can’t exactly blame Musk for taking the lesson from the last several years that the American social, political and legal systems are seemingly incapable of dealing with bad-faith actors who are loose with the truth and fluid in their commitment to their, uh, commitments, but it’s nice to know that Delaware Chancery is a place where bluster and obfuscation doesn’t fly. Yet, anyway.
> I largely agree with this supposition, which makes it unfortunate that Musk (and co) can take a step like this to try to eliminate discovery that could point to perjury and a clear conspiracy for market-manipulation.
The court case hasn't been paused yet. There has been, to my knowledge, no documents filed with the court even requesting it be stayed (or dismissed), let alone any such requests being granted. Musk's credibility before the court is pretty thoroughly shot, so I suspect the judge isn't going to grant such a request unless Twitter agrees to it--and Twitter so far hasn't shown any inclination to agree. And why should they? They're likely to win anyways, and having a court order telling Musk to go through with the deal provides an extra guarantee that Musk will actually go through with the deal rather than changing his mind for at least a third time.
Twitter wants to keep looking in light of a mysterious email from May 6 that turned up in the files of Quinn Emanuel, a legal firm that represents Musk.
Specifically, someone reached out with an anonymous ProtonMail account on that date purporting to be a “former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation.” In the email, the sender suggests that Musk’s team get in touch on another platform (through “alternate secure means”) in order for them to provide information about Twitter.
One thing that’s odd about that letter — not the only thing, but one thing — is that it makes a demand on the Chancery Court to adjourn the trial. That is, it’s not a notice of settlement or even a request for adjournment, but some kind of weird attempt to bargain with the Chancellor, even though the issue at trial is whether Musk already reneged on this exact same offer. Not sure I understand what they’re trying to do here.
I am not following the court oroceeding, and I am not a lawyer. So honest question, if one of the issues being at trial whether or not Musk reneged already, isn't an letter stating, basically, "never mind this whole trial, I'm willongbto honor the deal now", kind of not helping?
Musk is now offering to execute the signed deal – which is the only thing Twitter asked to court to enforce. So it's absolutely helping resolve the dispute faster, without further legal costs or burdens on the court – and probably with the same end state as was most-likely earlier. And perhaps by signaling a specific clear future, damage to Twitter's position from the uncertainty & acrimony will halt & start to heal... benefiting its future owner, Musk.
I may go down in history like Bill Gates’ interrogation in 1998, which is still taught in every law school as “what not to do” unless you want to upset the judges.
So “what not to do, Elon Musk style”: Be unclear about intentions, have second thoughts, trying to play 4D chess with apparently no advisor than absolute amateurs to tame him or PR department to sway the public opinion your way, then keep being erratic with the judge.
I don't find that too odd, because I believe the plaintiff, Twitter Inc, can more-or-less get a stay on request, especially if it's likely to make any further burdens on the court become moot. So wording it this way is just being clear about what Musk wants Twitter to cause to happen.
Further, Twitter's complaint only asks the court to compel performance under the original agreement - it doesn't ask for extra damages from Musk's flip-flops. If Musk is offering exactly that performance, there's nothing for the court the compel, unless & until things change again. (If that happens, the stayed action can resume – and the judge would be even more disposed against Musk et al.)
I'm not sure that Twitter could really sensibly demand damages if the sale went through.
If Twitter is still sold at the original fixed price, then Musk is left holding the asset he himself damaged and would have to essentially pay damages to himself.
The shareholders will still get the same payout regardless of the alleged damage to the company, unless they decided to sell before the sale, but I am not a lawyer so I don't know if they'd be able to sue successfully.
Of course, I don't believe Musk is the sole owner, so his co-buyers might have a case.
I think Twitter Inc agrees with you, as they've made no request for damages.
Shareholder lawsuits are weird; maybe someone who owns Twitter Inc stock could claim Musk's actions caused them to sell early, or otherwise suffer losses (margin calls?) due to his actions temporarily pushing the stock value below the deal price, even if the deal concludes. But I've not seen hints of any such stretches.
I feel that statistically speaking there would be at least one shareholder (perhaps an employee) with a stop loss order that could've been triggered after Musk's shenanigans. Someone in this position had a material loss.
At the price being paid it's one of the dumbest acquisitions, by price, by any entity (individual or corporation) in the past 30 years that I've been watching markets closely.
Twitter would be lucky to be trading at $20 / share minus the supporting bid. Musk overpaid by a minimum of $15 billion because he doesn't properly control his impulse problems. There were numerous ways he could have proceeded more slowly in pursuing a purchase, without so tightly locking himself into that grotesque price tag.
Let's put his stupidity into perspective: $15 billion was his total net worth five years ago. It was half his net worth a bit over two years ago.
Next up, Tesla's stock is going to sink considerably from where it's at. It'll just amplify the pain of this over-pay.
> Next up, Tesla's stock is going to sink considerably from where it's at.
Dragging the rest of the stock market with it.
It’s like that domino meme, where the tiny brick is “19 year old writes bot tracking Musks private plane” and the huge brick being “stock market crashes”
I think that's not the right lens to view it through. To me, this is more like a turbo charged version of Bezos buying the Washington Post. Twitter might be totally insignificant in terms of eyeballs/dollars compared to TikTok, but it is extremely important in cultural terms. It's not just about money but about influence. Also, Twitter was horrendously mismanaged for many years, probably because none of the key execs or board had enough skin in the game. Elon can probably terminate or "manage out" 80%+ of the employees without harming the underlying business meaningfully, so you can't really just look at historical financials here.
Bezos paid $250M for the WaPo. Much more like a hobby purchase than Musk blowing such a huge fraction of his net worth on a company that's unlikely ever to be profitable.
Right, Snap, somehow similar and also unprofitable social media company is down 67% since April 14 when Musk disclosed his offer. Twitter stock would likely experience similar kind of drop in this period.
I agree this is a smart move (or rather, salvaging an impulsive decision) if Musk uses Twitter to increase the value of SpaceX and Tesla by an amount greater than the premium between Twitter’s enterprise value and his purchase price.
Hard to believe that people still see this as a smart move. Musk has been acting really erratically the last couple of years and was due to fall flat on his face. He's now done that in possibly the worst way. I'm really not sure what happened to the guy, if you read any of the material that was published in the course of the lawsuit, he just seems to act totally unprofessional. I find it really hard to understand how someone like that has achieved what he has. His decision making just seems impulsive most of the time.
> I find it really hard to understand how someone like that has achieved what he has.
I think it's just strong evidence that a lot of rich people got lucky once and managed to leverage that into getting richer because so much of life becomes Easy Mode at that point. Immediately not being subject to the "Boots" theory, but at scale, makes a huge difference.
I think there's a strong argument that Musk actually made a few smart decisions - right time, right place for electric cars. But reading some of the documents that have come out of this make it seems like he hit his limits a long time ago and is now floundering along uselessly.
To me it's just another strong argument that we shouldn't tolerate billionaires and they should be taxed out of existence until they're merely "extremely incredibly wealthy" and not nation-states unto themselves.
Honestly once you have so much money that you can no longer spend it all, any extra immediately goes into making you even richer. You eventually are able to sustain your luxurious life just from interest and investment returns, potentially requiring 0 work from you. There's no reason we should be accepting this when people are starving and homeless.
Won't be a bitter pill if he can offload most of the expenditure by selling it to Saudi Arabia, which would probably love to own such an influential chunk of the "public square."
Potential buyer is offering what they think is current market price. Something like like $15-$20 per share than $52 per share. Musk would sell with huge loss.
They already are a major shareholder. And I presume they can (or could in the future) have stakes in other Musk companies. That might predispose a private Musk Twitter to offer access (for example, provide access to private customer information on dissidents, something Saudi Arabia is very interested in [1]) in ways that a public Twitter might not.
Being a major shareholder is different than having a controlling stake, which is implied by your comment that Musk "can offload most of the expenditure by selling it to Saudi Arabia."
As I understand it, MBS and Co. prefer to drown out the criticism rather than censor it, so they already have that API, and a crusade against bots would put it at risk. Granted, it's possible that Elon isn't committed to shutting down bots so much as shutting down non-friendly bots.
> If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team, that would be a very big deal, not only undercutting a big part of Musk's current case (which he was set to lose anyways) but also falsifying several statements made both to the Delaware court and also to Congress(?!).
But I was assured that Mudge is a hero of impeccable personal integrity, that he is beyond reproach, that only an ignorant brain-dead moron with no knowledge of greybeard hacking could even think that he might be anything less than a paladin of righteousness!
Seriously, though, that doesn't even begin to touch the Bad Shit coming out of discovery. For a guy claiming to be a centrist, he's co-ordinating with a pro-AfD/Putin German press baron, and for a "free speech champion" it's pretty odd that "the redacted senders and recipients lay the groundwork for a "war" and "battle" after Musk takes over Twitter — a "coordinated pressure campaign" that will lead to deplatforming of political enemies." (https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15773449644046008...).
The fact that he's started tweeting pro-Putin talking points might be because of the political company that he keeps, perhaps it's because the source for Telsa and SpaceX's aluminium is Russia, but it's interesting that he's suddenly decided that he does want Twitter, after all, now that Ukrainian forces are making serious inroads toward the territory seized by Russia in 2014.
> Plaintiff argues that its broader proposal is necessary to investigate an unusual May 6 email produced from the files of Quinn Emanuel. The email was sent from an anonymous account hosted by protonmail.com (a popular encrypted email provider) to Quinn Emanuel attorney Alex Spiro and purports to be from “a former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation.” The author offers Musk information on Twitter and suggests communicating “via alternate secure means.”
That's only a single piece of evidence that someone claiming to be a former Twitter exec reached out. Better than nothing, though; thanks for sharing it.
He got slammed in discovery, lost a lot of his pre-trial motions, and started losing a ton of his net worth by appearing like a buffoon. He was about to go into an emergency conference at the Delaware Chancery court, and I assume that he was being told "you are going to lose" by his lawyers if not the Chancellor herself.
There was some indication that Mudge may have been in contact with him. He lost a lot of discovery motions about bots. His own experts told him that he had no case about Twitter bots. This case has been a loser from the beginning, and I think he thought he could get a better price by doing this. He likely didn't want anything else to come out.
The Twitter board did a great job not bowing to the pressure.
What? Why would you say that? Much more plausible is the view that if you have high dollar lawyers on both sides crafting an airtight contract, and a jurisdiction that is heavily incentivized to stick to the letter of the law, then you can count on proper enforcement ... in contract cases. I would not apply this lesson to literally any other area of the legal system.
The idea that the rich don't influence the courts in America is absurd. The reason why Musk couldn't just "do what he wanted" is because the other side of the table was also the wealthy elites. When it comes to elites vs elites, things start to get played by the book.
If Musk were allowed to make a mockery of the Delaware court, it would have shaken the bedrock for the trillions of dollars that corporate America rests under.
The Delaware Court of Chancery is not exactly a small court. Almost every high-budget matter of corporate law goes through this court, and they regularly deal with cases involving billions of dollars. Given how important corporate law and corporations are, it may be the most powerful trial court in the country.
It's interesting to consider how Musk's behavior might change if his net worth was more liquid. I'd expect him to buy up a platoon of lawyers, send them off to battle in his stead, and go join Larry Ellison on his island for mojitos at sundown.
What do you mean by his behavior changing if his net worth were more liquid? Are you suggesting he couldn't afford expensive lawyers because he couldn't get enough cash?
He has had no issue paying lawyers. The fundamental problem is that the case is dumb and without merit and he was always going to lose it. Expensive lawyers can't fix that, at least not against a counterparty who also has expensive lawyers.
Once you're spending $10 million on a case, you can find the best lawyers, and it's hard to get much additional meaningful work from just hiring more lawyers.
He was losing because he had a bad case, not because he had bad lawyers. The law was not on his side, and neither were the facts.
And it is not like Twitter doesn't have good and enough lawyers either. So the outcome between those is pretty much neutral. Which only leaves the facts and laws, which are on their side...
Musk made the share sales months ago, you can find them on Bloomberg. Lawyers need to be in constant communication with their clients, but Musk's bizarre behavior this case is largely just because he's Musk. Look at his attempt to take Tesla private in 2018, look at the insane shit he tweets. He's a very smart leader who has accomplished incredible things (he may not be responsible for every line of code but leadership can be a lot more important, look at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella), but he also has serious issues
> and go join Larry Ellison on his island for mojitos at sundown.
Of all his behaviour and stupidity here, I have never for a second believed he will just kick back and live the billionaire life.
He’s a workaholic, and he loves Tesla, starship and more too much. Say what you will about his character and decision making, you can’t deny the guy works extremely hard and is devoted to making stuff better
Presumably all with stage 3 cancer from the radiation on our way to a mandatory shift to pay off our several million dollar fare over the next 300 years of multigenerational indentured servitude.
Oh man, I’m usually not one for drama, but I really want this deal to go through.
I don’t use twitter and as such don’t really care if it implodes, but from what I’ve heard twitter has been a cesspool of negativity for a while now and on a slow but steady downtrend in general.
I’m sure Musk will try anything to recoup his investment, so it’ll either go out with a bang, or he somehow manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat and actually turn twitter around. Though I don’t think that’s very likely.
Either way it’ll be a fun pastime to follow the unfolding of it.
Stock up on the popcorn because once he lets the nutters loose on twitter to say anything and everything they want without limit other than a direct personal threat to someone or directly advocating terrorist actions, it's gonna be a real shit hole. That is if he wants to watch his $44 billion go up in smoke, no sane person will stay there amongst the nuts and Q's
I'm sure this kind of thing feels emotionally satisfying to say, but if you think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense. It's like saying that RSS is a shit hole, that no one will want to use a feed reader "amongst the nuts and Q's".
But with RSS, I only see stuff from the people I subscribe to. There can be a billion of nut jobs and one reasonable person in the whole world of RSS, but if I only subscribe to the reasonable person's feed, all the other stuff doesn't affect me at all. With Twitter, I see random stuff suggested by the algorithm and I see comments in tweets from the people I follow. I also see quote tweets and replies made by the people I follow.
This comment honestly reads like you reached for the first difference between twitter and RSS you could think of. "No comparison to be made." Really? A lot of people use twitter and RSS for the same purpose, but there's "no comparison to be made"?
I didn't think this really needed explaining, but here goes anyway.
As a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter, you have no control over what content will be served to you (the same goes for any filtering tools said ecosystem offers it's users). The state of a closed ecosystem today, does not guarantee that there won't be future state changes (and users have no control over those).
With a protocol like RSS you have full control over the content being served up to you. If a source you previously agreed with and enjoyed, starts souring for you then it is as simple as unsubscribing. It will not be pushed on you.
So as said before, the example doesn't really hold.
Twitter might some day remove the block button? They might some day push certain people on you, without recourse? Therefore, they have to ban these people now?
There is no concern here, as I do not use Twitter.
Rather it was an attempt at an simple example to explain to you the differences in control that a user of an open protocol has, versus the control a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter has.
The value of your RSS feed comes from the websites you have the feeds from. The value of twitter comes from the tweets on twitter. The more terrible tweets and tweeters, either terrible in their quality or terrible in their offensiveness to the reader, the lower the value. The more terrible tweeters, the more they will inject themselves in to the dialogues that were previously considered non terrible by the reader. At a low enough value, when people are wading through the racist crackpot right wing sludge, they will stop using it.
You're forgetting the value of following people you like on Twitter. As such, you are browsing your own curated feed, without the need to see much sludge. BTW sludge and toxicity can be found in quantities across the political spectrum, in case you're implying otherwise.
What happens is that the nutters follow and reply to popular threads (see epidemiology Twitter during the pandemic, for example). If there are more of them, Twitter loses value.
Twitter has started to let you control who can reply, but that removes some serendipity, so if everyone worth following does that, Twitter loses value.
People want to control what other people are being exposed to. They don't care that it's entirely opt-in who you follow.
They say the only want to ban Q, Alex Jones, and conspiracy types but then you look at sites like Reddit who have adopted this moderation heavy approach and it's slowly becoming one giant mono-culture where the set of bannable wrongthink only ever grows larger. It's highly selectively enforced and usually does little to stop people from actually having opinions they don't like.
It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do. And they want unaccountable tech companies to be the ones with this power.
>It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do.
Well, marketing empirically proves this to be true...
This is about not wanting the "other nutters" on there along with "our nutters". Which will make things worse in some ways, so keeping it confined to one set of nutters is not without its merit.
I like Twitter for all it's spaceflight related stuff from NASA and ESA, DLR and others, where live streams can only occur in form of text and photo updates. I couldn't think of a replacement platform for this use case. Or current news events for which the press is to slow to publish, or where they quote Twitter as the source, like today's "Fuck you" message, which is something which might make it into some history books. Sometimes some IT related posts are interesting, from people who are at the source or generally have a very good understanding of the topic.
I never scroll my "feed" or whatever they call it.
If you count podcasts it would be a lot less than that. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine under the right conditions a (micro)blogging equivalent of Apple Podcasts could take off.
Maybe get some first hand information on something before wishing to blow it up because someone told you it's bad? Never understood people taking joy and having fun watching others work get ripped apart.
Huh? Just because I don't use twitter doesn't mean that it's a foreign website to me. It's basically impossible to completely avoid interacting with it. Tweets are embedded everywhere, twitter threads get screenshotted and shared on reddit or in youtube videos and every now and again there's an interesting submission on hn that links directly to twitter.
I really don't need to use it regularly to know that it's filled with endless "hot takes" designed to aggravate instead of inviting meaningful discussion.
The way twitter works actively promotes negativity, which is precisely why I don't use it.
Also, I didn't never use it, I left the platform because of the above mentioned reasons.
I'm aware that twitter provides plenty of value for plenty of people and that it is very possible to curate your twitter experience in a way that avoids most of the negativity. But if twitter blows up there will be alternatives where the same people can derive the same value from.
And in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy a billionaire megalomaniac getting fleeced because he couldn't control is impulses.
I mean, if you just browse website picking out hot-takes and negativity from twitter, maybe it's not twitter that is the drain, but the websites that you visit that amplify those people.
I use twitter a lot to stay up to date on tech and follower developers. Your feed is what you make it, and if you curate it to only follow decent people you don't have to read all of the arguments and politics that happen on other parts of the site.
Society has been worse off since it got popular, it's a sewer spewing garbage at us in small chunks. I for one wish it implodes and cannot wait for that day. I don't care who built it, who owns it or how much it is worth on paper. It needs to go. And tiktok too, its the twitter for video. Cannot understand how any rational person can defend either one. Probably because attention span got destroyed so cannot remember life without it.
Everyone moans about centralization and screams "The internet is dead / the internet is 5 companies".... well if it implodes, maybe people will start writing proper blogs/arguments/documentation again and not try to make everything digestible in 15 seconds by the dumbest persons.
I wish that twitter will ban all politics/politicians off of it and push science topics instead. Ever since politicians hopped onto twitter, it's been a nightmare to be exposed to their thinking patterns and lies.
I don't/won' get joy from these platforms disappearing...it would be relief.
I have no inside info but I think this is because he is getting wrecked by discovery. More and more about him is being leaked from that and he doesn't like it. He'd rather lose billions.
Its an AND not an OR. He either proceeds with purchase and loses billions, or proceeds with discovery/trial, has personal info exposed, and is then forced to proceed with purchase and lose billions. He's tried to stall proceedings so far, but has reached a legal dead end.
There are two cohorts who dramatically overestimate Twitter's influence and importance - tech people and journalists. Twitter really is not very important. At my non tech workplace of 800 people, I'd be surprised if 50 were active on Twitter.
“Most people aren’t on twitter” is not a valid argument against twitter’s influence. Compare with “most people aren’t CEOs”, “most people aren’t politicians,” etc.
Some people have a lot more influence than others, and the influential people are disproportionately on twitter.
That is the whole problem though, isn't it? A few hundred random people on Twitter are often more than enough to manufacture a wave of articles across multiple news websites and newspapers.
Twitter isn't important, the problem is that influential entities think that Twitter is important (and representative).
See: Facebook's declining usage, and the rise of TikTok.
Social networks are all quite replaceable, there are no exceptions.
Twitter won in its micro blogging space (there were numerous competitors for a brief time, way back), however it has never been a stellar product. It can and will be replaced if Musk turns it into a disaster.
Well the TSLAQ community is certainly assuming they're gone.
It will be funny of the Blue Checkmarks have to form their own social media platform - or in incredibly irony - end up in one of the "right wing" platforms as a refuge of free speech.
The Musk brand damage could exceed a "paltry" $44B when his dirty laundry becomes public, especially given he'll only need to put in less than 50% of his own money.
Regarding the information leakage, does this signal that Mr. Musk treats people poorly in his private dealings?
Note that the above article has at least one outright lie and is overall misleading. Just go read the actual communications on page 85 of the report[1], it'll be quicker and less inaccurate than reading the article.
>"Within days of the announcement that the Twitter board had accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer, Benioff, who is currently worth more than $6 billion, sent Musk a cryptic text about his own vision for the platform, writing on April 27, “Happy to talk about it if this is interesting: Twitter conversational OS—the townsquare for your digital life.”
Wow. This is like something right out of an episode of Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley." These people might be extremely wealthy but jeez they are basically buffoons. I'm guessing Beinoff only shares his "A" material with Musk and he obviously felt that "Twitter conversational OS" was worth sharing. You couldn't get any more Gavin Belson than either "conversational OS" or "the townsquare for your digital life.”
Probably something like "I no longer have time to fool around with trivial things like Twitter. Ignore it ever happened, since I'm now using my vast intellect teaching world leaders how to end their wars".
He was set to be deposed this week. I'm guessing his advisors finally got through to him that he's fucked and dragging out the trial will only further publicly humiliate himself and potentially open him to even more consequences. Musk finally has to face reality, for once.
More like kudos to Musk's lawyers for creating several months' worth of billable hours out of trying to poke holes in a "I agree to buy it sight unseen, no refunds" contract.
Probably "specific performance", which is pretty much enforcing the contract that he already signed. So that would come down to forcing him to buy Twitter, yes.
>Twitter issued this statement about today's news: We received the letter from the Musk parties which they have filed with the SEC. The intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.
Don't forget the juicy morsels from Musk's orbit we got from discovery - we weren't going to get those if Musk hadn't been recalcitrant. Too bad there may not be more without a trial.
I'm not actually sure they would have made him go through with it vs. just pay some large fine to Twitter if he was insistent on wanting to get out. The issue is the road to get to that point would have run through a LOT of discovery and legal wrangling that was already starting to drag out some suspicious-looking stuff.
Maybe it's all nothing, but even so, fighting anything in court is a punishment of its own.
There's basically no chance it would have been a fine.
Almost all experts, and Twitter, believed the court would force him to buy, meaning Twitter absolutely wouldn't discuss a partial settlement, even if that had been put on the table which it wasn't (unless something happened during the court case that shifted the odds so far towards Musk looking likely to win that at that point he would be the one not interested in a settlement).
And there's no legal basis for the judge to suggest or order a settlement. Either Musk is right and the court would have ordered the contract breached (and perhaps fines on top for one or both sides), or Musk is wrong and he has to fulfil the contract he signed and buy the company at the price agreed.
If a fine were possible as a middle ground, Musk would still be pushing for that option.
I don't know if that's a guarantee. The Chancery Court is interested first and foremost with keeping commerce running smoothly; they would've been aware that Elon didn't want Twitter, and ordering a company to be bought/owned by a hostile entity which hates it is not exactly conducive to commerce. There's a chance they at least would've ordered him to choose between specific performance and a huge-ass fine.
> The Chancery Court is interested first and foremost with keeping commerce running smoothly
At a very high level, that's true. But at a slightly less high level they do this by guaranteeing predictability over fairness. And at a low level they do that through a lot of very specific implementation details people spend their lives studying.
So the level of abstraction you're operating at isn't very useful for this kind of prediction.
What if this whole thing was to shift the narrative from the sky is falling Musk should not be allowed to buy Twitter to let's force Musk to buy Twitter. Cost him +/- nothing.
Overpay is relative there is no meaning-full difference between your net worth being 250 or 230 Billion. Now having control of a key political discourse platform of the world while being the richest dude that def comes with benefits.
Yes, 230 vs 250bn isn't much of a difference. However the question is liquidity.
If he has to sell 20bn of Tesla stocks that may lower the value of Tesla, thus pull his net worth down.
In addition some of his sponsors might pull out of the deal after seeing his erratic handling of the case, thus he has to provide even more liquidity. Which means selling off more Tesla, which reduces his control.
This already happened. Tesla is one of the most liquid stocks in the world (check their volume and option chain), it didn't effect their stock price much
Elon has more money than God. Boo hoo 20bn less of Tesla stock. It means literally less to Elon than $40k does to me as a tech worker which is very little.
Because Twitter's failures are all semi-public anyways. He's scapegoating. Attacking them for these things firmly attaches blame to the previous management and becomes his first success as a manager. It's what always happens, but he did it proactively.
It won't hurt Twitter's value because it never really had credibility, but also doesn't need it. Nobody is going to get up tomorrow and say "I was going to tweet this, but I'll rumble it instead because Twitter has lied to the FTC since 2011!"
It is always a good question to ask when entertained by these stories of titans and their 'games': whose mind are they playing games with? Couldn't possibly be the collective yours, could it?
I honestly don't know why people try and find weird and convoluted answers for a very simple events. The narrative that Musk shouldn't be allowed to buy twitter doesn't matter, it's as simple as that, there was no mechanism anyone had to stop him, and he showed no sign of bowing to that pressure when he was originally offering the deal. He only tried to pull out when he saw the stock market collapse. It's very simple.
And what have his shenanigans achieved? We now have all his text messages which prove all the worst fears of the people who don't want him to own it.
That would work if the convoluted answer made any sense. I can see looking at simple events, seeing a simple answer doesn't explain it well, and looking for a more complicated answer. This is a simple event with an obvious, simple answer. Then people go looking for complicated answers... and come up with answers that make less sense.
I am not a Musk fan and I really don't want him to buy Twitter. However, neither do I want him to get away with his shenanigans. I want to see, for a change, a billionaire held accountable.
The pendulum hasn’t swung at all on that. The people who were unhappy with Musk buying Twitter are still unhappy and have the same concerns. The only thing that changed is instead of him getting Twitter for the same price (but probably higher value, since he has spent months damaging it) months ago, he had to wait. In the meanwhile he made a bunch of humiliating statements, has suffered a humiliating defeat, and with the intervening damage sustained by the likes of Meta Twitter appears far less powerful today than it did then.
There are lots of obsessive Elon fans which has also created a set of obsessive Elon haters. I don't like him but I don't see how he'd do a much worse job of running twitter than the guys running it now
Elon Musk is very good at hiring motivated people who can figure out how to make things work. It's hard to imagine that skill going to waste at Twitter, whose management didn't seem to really know or care much about the platform or the business they were in.
Twitter hired good lawyers and listened to them - it's a very different skill than managing a company. The way he handled Twitter, I wouldn't put Parag Agrawal in charge of a supermarket.
There is an important caveat to that positive take: if Musk has the time to properly keep his eye on Twitter, so as to know which good people to hire. He's already dividing his time into a lot of pursuits.
The agreement was fully approved by Twitter's board and shareholders, so not sure what push back you are referring to. If you mean there were some people unhappy with him buying Twitter, they are still around today, and are overall irrelevant to the deal.
He's too volatile to take advantage of what Twitter gives him. Musk is great with vision, but his day-to-day execution just isn't great. He can't keep a straight opinion from one day to the next, so half of Twitter is just ignoring him at this point.
Twitter would need some cool-headed, smart leadership for him to get the political gains out of it.
But a court will not terminate or delay legal proceedings due to one party unilaterally offering to settle on the eve of trial, especially not if the offer is contingent on such court action. For the court to even delay proceedings this close to trial, both parties must approach the court requesting such a delay. And while this happens the overwhelming majority of the time when a settlement is being worked out, Musk is not a trustworthy counterparty and his prior behavior in this specific case works against him here. Twitter might be willing to delay the start of trial by a few days, but that's the best Musk will get unless he actually goes through with the acqusition.
There's no realistic possibility of the court terminating the proceedings before a deal closes unless Twitter withdraws its lawsuit. And they're not going to do that until the acquisition goes through, because if Musk pulls the rug out from under them again, they'd have to file a new lawsuit. That new lawsuit would be starting back at square one, and likely wouldn't be completed in time before the original offer expired.
People have been saying a bunch of stuff like this on Twitter, but Twitter's current lawyers aren't stupid, and Musk playing like Lucy with the football is about the most obvious legal risk you can imagine. Whatever happens next, it's unlikely Musk is going to be able to use it to stall the Chancery Court. The best bet here is that Musk is simply going to end up owning Twitter.
Yeah, I seem to recall that before all this legal drama started the story was that Musk was buying Twitter to turn it into a platform for free speech. Assuming he hasn't changed his mind about that, the news cycle here is only just beginning.
Though on the positive side, I think I'll personally find a debate about free speech to be way more interesting than the current celebrity drama legal fight over contract law.
> Though on the positive side, I think I'll personally find a debate about free speech
Twitter will be forced to prioritize short-term profit to recoup Musk's losses and rage-porn style engagement content will be the easiest (and likely only) way they can do it.
Twitter is about to become a private company. They won't be "forced" to do anything their new owner doesn't want them to. They won't even have to be profitable at all if that isn't what Musk wants.
More accurately - the media can't stay away from Elon. He's not out there doing PR circuits with this drama. A single tweet generates literally hundreds of articles.
There is a differencw between what he posted here and getting on Twitter during every crisis to say you're going to personally solve it with a submarine, guarantee a fix to the Flint water situation, etc. One is obviously seeking media attention and positive PR.
It isn't worth engaging with someone as soon as they mention submarine, ventilators, Flint, or the other various dumb talking points these people love. They're beyond help and don't care about reality, they just love calling the richest person on the planet an idiot.
How do you possibly look at Elon's incredibly irrational behavior and think he will lessen the insanity? What you mean is he will fire the people that you don't like.
I meant Musk's behavior generally. Trying to pawn off an employee in a suit as a robot, the DOGE pump and dumping, joking about taking tesla private at $420 a share, calling that guy a pedo to his massive twitter following, creating the fake hyperloop project just to attempt to knee cap high speed rail, etc
As for the fake user saga, my take is that it is a transparently weak reason to try to walk back from the deal. I think the real story was that after he lost some financial leverage with the crypto downturn he is no longer able to finance the deal without making significant tradeoffs and decided to walk it back. Everyone who knows the internet well (and Elon lives online 24/7) knows that all social media networks have lots of bots so it's impossible for me to think that this is some surprise to him.
I don't even think he cared much about the fake numbers in terms of the deal. I think he cares about them as a Twitter users.
He made a bet on the company that he clearly always and still does want. Then the price tanked so he made a gamble and used whatever he could to support his side.
From a purely business perspective it's not that big of a deal to risk some emails/messages leaking in discovery in exchange for a few billion dollars. And ultimately he gets what he wants regardless since it's as much a hobby as a business (like owning a sports team that loses money).
I'm looking forward to at least the potential for a mainstream social media site to be funded by something else than ads and "engagement".
Musk might be crazy and disagreeable, but his craziness is the only possibility for something like this to happen. Whether it'll work is anyone's guess, but at least we might have an attempt.
If Apple, the richest computer hardware company on earth, is giving in to the lure of ads, I doubt Twitter will be in any rush to separate itself from ads.
Musk makes decisions that are often suboptimal when it comes to business and profit, so that's the way out.
I also have the feeling that he's bought this thing to stroke his own ego and have better control over his soapbox rather than a business purpose, therefore absolute profitability may not be his priority.
Furthermore, if he does this bet and it ends up proving that an ad-less business model makes more money in the long run, it may push the rest of the market out of the local maximum it's currently in and make them explore non-advertising monetization strategies.
Musk is a sociopathic pathological liar who's also conservative, the first thing he's likely to do is unban Trump, Along with all the other far right nutcases.
Not because he necessarily likes Trump but because its the most controversial thing he could do and his new Republican fan base will love him for it.
There is no version of reality in which Twitter owned by Musk is better in any sense.
> the first thing he's likely to do is unban Trump, Along with all the other far right nutcases.
How is Trump far right? Has he ever advocated for a white ethnostate, rallied against Jews, gypsies and black people? Worn a swastika? Supported Hitler?
Please don't use words when you don't know the meaning of them. Trump is right wing (and fairly left of the right wing, he's socially liberal in many ways). He is not far right.
> Musk is a sociopathic pathological liar who's also conservative
What has Musk lied about? On what basis are you diagnosing him as a sociopath? How is Musk lowercase-c conservative?
Your entire post is full of severe assertions with no supporting arguments.
I mean in the version of reality where I think Trump, Jordan Peterson, or anyone else should have a voice that sounds better in pretty much every sense.
Maybe. I think it’s quite possible Elon will just hand the CEO position back over to Jack and let him create the social media network he meant to create in the first place before he lost control.
I really miss that internet. I thought everyone else did too. I feel like I’ve stood in the same place as people have started to just decide they don’t believe in free speech when it’s not convenient?
Silicon Valley used to have such a great sense of optimism and principled approach towards individualism. Highly inspiring and optimistic. Today, I can’t even say I like Steve Jobs without getting labeled something.
This is the problem. Blaming it on people being programmable instead of looking at real issues of rust belt dwindling into starvation, shipping manufacturing overseas and letting our cities crumble into infrastructure rot.
But, yeah, still blame it on the programmability of the people. I guess, this is the testament to programmability of people to not look at real politik and sweep things under the rug.
We went from individual rights to mushy paper straws in less than 10 years. That's how far we've stooped.
> This is the problem. Blaming it on people being programmable instead of looking at real issues of rust belt dwindling into starvation, shipping manufacturing overseas and letting our cities crumble into infrastructure rot.
> But, yeah, still blame it on the programmability of the people.
Yes indeed, because the people affected by those problems tend to vote for the side that, to a much more severe degree than its counterpart, doesn’t have any real vision for solving them, but instead makes its base feel good with populistic propaganda.
You’re basically just saying there are real issues that people care about. Yeah, absolutely. That doesn’t mean that we aren’t also being manipulated and that it’s not something worth trying to solve.
We went from individual rights to mushy paper straws in less than 10 years. That's how far we've stooped.
No, the Republicans went from a party that believed in free trade, free minds, freedom of conscience, and individual rights to a captive personality cult beholden to a New York real estate hustler who failed at selling steaks, booze, and gambling to Americans but who was strangely successful at selling real estate to Russians, and who promised to stack the courts with unqualified theocrats.
Damn, you’re right. Just shows how bad things have gotten. SV used to be quite libertarian. John Carmack and John Romero wouldn’t fit in today’s SV culture. Surprising because I assume intellectuals wouldn’t fall for woke culture and they’d reject it out right. Instead, SV intellectuals have embraced it hard and fast; and chief proponents of it.
Being principled for free speech sounds just awful. I don’t know how we’ll survive all these crazy libertarians not moderating discussion to support a very narrow San Francisco-centric worldview.
So, by credit card, wire or cheque, which are valid even for billions of dollars. Morale: Don’t ever write plenty of zeroes as a joke expecting a signal that it can’t possibly be taken seriously. In the same fashion: Once you propose a price for a house in France, you are committed to buy. A bit like this guy who has to buy Twitter now.
I was very surprised indeed that my little bank accounts used to manage hundreds of euros were also suitable to manage millions, one I sold shares in a startup. I thought I would be called by a full chain of managers and have to present 3D fingerprints of my eyes, then be called by various countries’ TRACFIN and IRS where I used to live. In reality, the French IRS guy told me my declaration was very simple and unsurprising.
During the 08 financial crisis, Mitsubishi wrote a $9 billion CHECK to close an investment in Morgan Stanley over a holiday weekend. The concern was that MS's stock would nosedive if the deal wasn't done before the market opened. The check was apparently enough to legally close the deal on a weekend when it wasn't possible to wire funds.
Ultimately it is just numbers on two systems if he already has the liquid cash [1], it shouldn't matter how big the numbers are, the transaction workflow is more or less the same. In the Revlon transfer Citibank screwed up that $900M only had 3 people working on the actual execution and verification.
While it is lot of one person to control individually, and even sizeable for a company to operate daily it is not that much in the grand scheme of things. These days some companies have cash balances that size, famously Apple had more than $200+ Billion in short term assets at one point.
Big banks regularly deal with billions of dollars transferred around everyday. Market makers and central bankers etc do these numbers frequently without blinking twice.
[1] His bankers who are already underwriting the loans can also easily loan him the rest against Tesla stock.
I feel the demand for a left-only discussion platform is limited - it's not that the coastal US employees of Twitter make rules re: 'misgendering' because that's what the market wants, it's because they believe stopping 'misgendering' is morally correct.
I agree that the employees do things for themselves and their own feelings rather than considering the market. But I also don't think you need to be a massive scale to make a successful alternative.
This is really an absurd fantasy. People would not have pressured tech companies to censor for years if there was any market demand for more censored platforms. People know how to use the block button, and the only reason they demand censorship is to prevent other people from seeing something that offends them, which an alternative to twitter doesn't solve.
Can it really get any worse than it already is? On the same note, has Elon actually stated a single concrete change that he would make? I think the reality is that for the vast majority of users, Twitter won't change a bit.
Maybe not concrete but this feels like a clear policy preference:
Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022
A Twitter that agrees with "obviously incredibly inappropriate" here would be a significant change.
Elon musk has complained that Twitter is trying to stop disinformation and label propaganda. He thinks that fighting for truth is anti-free speech. So yes, it can get worse
That's a gross mischaracterisation. Twitter isn't trying to stop misinformation: it's labelling anything that doesn't agree with certain viewpoints as misinformation and trying to stop that.
Should post your mastodon name in your profile, cause he's bought it. Are we all gonna switch, are your favorite people who are on twitter also gonna switch? It's pretty decent, but I have a feeling the network effect is pretty strong. I just asked to open a mastodon account so we'll see.
I've heard second-hand that this whole drama has been a huge drag on folks working there. The way it was phrased to me is Musk's handling of this whole thing has made their work feel like it's all a joke. So, I don't know, but I would guess it's at least not going to be a positive thing for retention or hiring.
Fewer than you think, I expect. But who knows! To be honest, even though I expect to be closing my Twitter account after this, I'm not sad to see a shake-up in this space.
I am curious too. Putting aside Musk's... "immature behavior", there's many people that have talked about how horrible it is to work at places like SpaceX because of rough working conditions. And that's a field where people can feel passionate about doing something great for mankind.
Lots of people can get passionate about working for a free speech platform, I know I would. However, it's another question if Elon will deliver on that promise.
I responded to the parent comment if you’re interested in my reasoning.
You could be right though about the working conditions, I worked with some Tesla business analysts to do some software integration with them and it didn’t go super great. They wouldn’t communicate for m awhile, then they’d yell and screaming at us for not doing something they hadn’t asked us to do, seemed pretty bad. So you might be right! It’s possible I’d hate it.
I would say there is still a pool of non SV engineers that twitter could give a large raise and still be cheaper than its existing employees. Also there are people who like to work for “household names” because of the prestige who haven’t heard about working conditions at Tesla/spaceX.
I’ve watched as the internet changed from this wondrous bastion of free speech into curated gardens acceptable to advertisers.
Just the other day Facebook flagged me for hate speech because I used some analogy that wasn’t at all hate speech or advocating for violence. Satirical in nature, but I’m sure I used some flag words like “Nazi” and “Hitler”.
We’ve all been slowly trained by an algorithm to make sure we don’t say the no no words, and more keep appearing. So you end up with people in Wall Street Bets saying they’re all “highly regarded” because they’ll get in trouble if they say what they used to say.
As I’ve gotten older instead of feeling like an adult I’m feeling more and more like a child being nannied by all these services.
If I worked at Twitter and Musk does precisely what he says, ensures you can say anything you can legally say in the US on Twitter, I feel like I’d be doing some good in the world to work for the company.
> I’ve watched as the internet changed from this wondrous bastion of free speech into curated gardens acceptable to advertisers.
How do you respond to Musk's idea of requiring people to sign up to Twitter with their real name and/or ID? That seems to me that it would have an absolutely massive chilling effect on free speech and I cannot understand how free speech warriors would be behind that at all.
I am not a free speech absolutist but even I recognise the need for anonymous free speech on a service like Twitter. You'd cheerfully go and work in service of that goal?
He's not going to do any of what you think he's going to do. You're putting him on some sort of free speech pedestal when that's not how he acts or treats people, especially those at his company or those that he particularly dislikes. He's a billionaire using his billions of dollars to try and control social media in a way that's favorable to him and he's not above singling out people who dare speak out against him like in the diver scenario.
There's probably a non-zero number of employees who would be excited to build something new, versus their current work at Twitter (assuming Musk follows through with making big changes). What those new things are and how they're managed will be more important than who owns the company IMO.
This is normal because it will still take time for the deal to close and I'm sure you can find something more secure to get 4% now which is why you see this gap. It will close the closer we get to the closing date but this can still take quite some time and you might be better off putting your money in other investments.
You don't know when the deal will close, it could be weeks but it could also be months. The risk is not knowing how long it will take.
If you feel confident that the deal will close soon you can put your money in now and get a guaranteed 4% return. It's up to your own analysis of the risk/reward situation.
It's not 100% of course, but when you account for the time-value of money the implied odds are extremely high. Honestly it's quite a bit higher than I would expect. Given that this is Elon Musk here, the odds of him trying some sleezy angle or just changing his mind again in a week or two are decently high. Not that those would necessarily stop the deal, but it would continue down the long drawn out and messy road it's on.
It would be practically impossible to drive the price up to 60 dollars. The only way you can do that is credibly prove you're willing to buy the entirety of Twitter for more than $54.20 per share, because if you do anything less than successfully buy a controlling stake, and force the board to renege on the deal (which they legally might not be able to do, but Elon might be happy to allow to happen), then whatever share you bought would then be sold to Elon for $54.20 due to the already agreed legally binding contract.
Well the point is that there is a binding contract that Elon Musk will take ownership of Twitter paying 54.20 per share. That's been agreed and approved by everyone. So you can come into the market today and pay $54.21 per share if you want - people will be willing to sell you their shares for that amount, since they know that there's already a binding contract for Musk to buy at $54.20. So if you buy at 54.21 you will take a loss of 1 cent per share when the deal closes. Theoretically everyone will be willing to sell to you for $54.21 since they know there's a legally binding contract that these shares are going to be sold for 54.20 soon. So you would have to buy up a ridiculous amount of shares to push the value beyond that.
The problem is that it's not as simple as he seemed to think. His statements about transparency were naive - he is apparently unaware of the reasons for which moderation teams don't explicitly state all of their bases for action.
Not sure why you would ask as I assume this is fairly common knowledge on HN. Most platforms don’t reveal the specifics of their anti-spam or fraud guidelines because that would serve as a guide on how to evade detection.
That's a terrible analogy. Language evolves and so the ways to hurt people with language evolves, so there is no singular limit to set.
If you don't agree that people can be hurt with language, than you don't agree with content moderation in the first place so your objection is meaningless... those who don't agree that people can be hurt with language arguing about content moderation is like those who hate all cheese arguing over what we should put on the cheese plate.
Did you reply to the wrong comment? It doesn't make any sense.
I never said I disagree that language can be hurtful, and I never disagreed with content moderation (Both things, I have never said, you're putting words in my mouth).
All I'm saying is that guidelines and rules should be clear instead of hidden from public view cause then that leads to arbitrary enforcement, and clear bias.
The argument that making it public will make people "workaround it" is terrible, because thats the whole point of the rules. "Heres what you can do and can't do, if what you do doesn't violate the current rules, but shouldn't be done, then the rules need to be revised".
So what should we do about it? Let another oligarch buy it and operate it?
Why not nationalize it? Then at least the US constitution would apply, your first amendment rights would be protected, and it would truly be a public space.
Nobody ever gives up power willingly, especially not the tyrants. It's going to be 2023 or 2025 before anything like that happens, unless the supreme court hears a surprisingly prescient case but that's unlikely before 2025 anyway.
> It's going to be 2023 or 2025 before anything like that happens,
Not necessarily. There is already a texas social media law, that does part of what the anti-censorship crowd wants. The appeals court upheld the law, and the supreme court has not struck it down yet.
That law, in 1 state alone, could have a huge effect on social media pretty soon, already.
Nationalization might work but if it were 1950-1970's US Gov. Our government used to be so badass. I have no trust in the current government's abilities and specifically the current administration. They tried to form a misinformation department which was already a disaster: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/08/24/following-hsac-recommend...
Responding to the comment below:
> Nationalize the news? We can be just like Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela!
All of Europe has public service. Actually most of the world does, not just authoritarian countries. Even the US has NPR, PBS and (god forbid) VOA. I'm not saying it's not all propaganda, but it's definitely not the kind you're thinking about (in most countries anyway.)
Twitter makes $5B in revenue with -$0.5B in income. Musk would need to turn it into a profit machine to recoup some of his investment.
Per the annual report 2019[1] Twitter spent
- $1.8B in Cost of Revenue
- $1.2B in R&D
- $1.1B in Sales/Marketing
- $0.58B in Administration
- $0.76B in Litigation
Unlike other tech companies, it looks like a private Twitter can be profitable.
Elon could even do layoffs and move staff to cheaper locations like Europe. Salaries in States are much higher than they are in London/Ireland, for example[2].
A lot of people will gladly take a "pay cut" to work fully remote or in a location they actually want to be.
I will always be of the opinion that massive corporate campuses for tech companies are some of the most wasteful expenditures... but I'm also not the CEO of a massive tech company, lol.
Well, maybe not directly, if given the proposition... but through agency, many do. I mean, someone has to be working the remote jobs to have such popularity.
Agree. Twitter should absolutely be able to make money with competent management. It vastly underperforms for the space is occupies. Musk overpaid, but going private and getting good management should get it to return something.
This is fascinating and exciting to me, to be honest. Like a lot of people around here I'm sure, I've spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter's influence on our society and I can't say it's positive. The degree to which politicians all now depend on it unquestioningly bothers me a lot. The way our adversaries use it to subvert us is worrying. What it does to people's health isn't good.
Musk is the one billionaire that I honestly believe thinks of humanity's best interests in the big picture, long term. He's clearly identified Twitter and social media in general as a challenge to be wrestled with. Just really glad about it tbh.
> Musk is the one billionaire that I honestly believe thinks of humanity's best interests in the big picture, long term.
I could believe that he thinks he's that billionaire. However, his competence leaves something to be desired. Just yesterday, he had a peace proposal for the current Russo-Ukrainian war that boils down to "give Russia everything it wants" on the basis that that's what the eventual peace is going to be, the fact that the Russian military and milblogger sphere is in full-blown panic over Ukrainian successes in Lyman and near Kherson. Or take this case, where Musk and his attorneys have completely shot their credibility with the judge--in a case where there will be no jury, only the judge ruling on the merits.
In short, Musk does seem to have the tech-bro attitude of "I always know what the right answer is, and everyone who tries to tell me otherwise is an idiot." That is not the kind of person I want working towards humanity's best interests.
In terms of what you can buy with your money, Elon has them all beat. Any reasonable person would take Elon money in 2022 versus Rockefeller money in early 1900s. And Rockefeller's net worth was around 3% of US GDP, which is around $600 billion today - an amount that Elon will almost assuredly pass in his lifetime.
I also weight "success" with how much is inherited. Elon obviously inherited a ton, but Augustus literally inherited the most powerful state on the planet.
One of Elon's most visible projects (Hyperloop) is literally public transit.
One of Elon's most visible projects (Hyperloop) is literally public transit.
Elon does not actively work on the Hyperloop, and critics have argued it may even be a red herring that he put out there deliberately to distract from more realistic and well-proven high speed rail technology. What Elon (or at least the Boring Company) did work on, though, is the 'Vegas Loop', a sad joke of a project.
So the new narratibe, after all of Musks attics, is now of the billionaire pursuing humanities best that, human as we all are, had to be nudged to do that as well by honoring his acquisition of Twitter. I already how Musk would get out of it with his hero status intact, I guess I just got my answer, or at least a potential one.
What are you talking about, "new narrative"? We're not all narrative-driven bots, you know. I've been reading about Elon Musk since before anyone else I knew had even heard of him and have always admired his endeavours.
>The way our adversaries use it to subvert us is worrying.
Musk was basically repeating Kremlin propaganda a day ago on Twitter itself. If we're going to hand a platform to unaccountable billionaires maybe not to the one who is mentally unstable, is heavily invested in and praises autocratic adversaries for their working conditions and randomly accuses people of pedophilia.
Musk himself is probably the most prominent mental health victim of that site and if anything he should have logged out of his account instead of buying the thing
It you mean is that he will destroy Twitter, then I probably agree. Otherwise, the way he fools around social networks will not do anything good for humanity.
I agree that Twitter is awful, and I agree that there's no better man to absolutely drive it into the ground and pound it into irrelevance and bankruptcy than Elon Musk.
You don't need to worry about the activist employees. You need to worry about the engineers who have been keeping Twitter running barely using their 10 years of knowledge about all the idiosyncrasies of Twitter's tech stack and are about to be paid out all their stock comp in 1 go, giving them absolutely no reason to stay at a company that has been absolutely dragged through the mud for the last 6 months.
Elon Musk is at a street fair, walks into a booth with some knitting for sale. He picks up a scarf with a $60 price tag.
"I would pay $44 for this, but my wallet is in my wife's purse. Can we shake on the deal, then I'll find her so I can pay you?"
Elon and the knitter shake hands. As soon as she turns away, he drops the scarf to the ground, unzips his pants, starts urinating onto the scarf and shouting.
"You failed to disclose that this scarf is now soaked in pee, so I lower my offer to $20. HEY, patrons in this booth! Beware, these garments may contain urine! Okay, I changed my mind. I don't want to buy it anymore."
An hour later, police arrive to find Elon getting ice cream with his kid or whatever. "Mr. Musk, can you step over here with us?"
"Look, is this about the scarf? I said I would pay $44, and hey! I found my wife, got my wallet out of her purse. That's all this was about. Now, will $44 please make you go away?"
I got the impression (from people more wonkish than me) that he attempted to beat up Twitter's valuation / stock price in order to negotiate a discount, and when that failed, the bot prevalence accusations (true or not) were a pretext to back out of a purchase that he doesn't want to make for other reasons.
From there I took a few liberties for a laugh, apologies if it didn't land.
To be honest that is his money. Unlike his comment on Ukraine which is NOT his country, he has to make good and there is a court. Not his commentary on Ukraine.
Today's Money Stuff was fantastic; I'm glad this news broke before it could disrupt the natural Money Stuff. Funny note: Levine's plan was to take tomorrow off. :)
I thought the same, today was super interesting. I expect that poor Matt will interrupt his day off for a special edition of "Oh Elon" tomorrow though.
At this point Matt Levine trying to take off only to show up the next day with the note "my boss Elon Musk made me come back to work today" is one of the best recurring jokes in Money Stuff.
This is as official as it gets that Elon Musk is commiting to buy Twitter for the $54.20 original price, and I'm still confused why no other submissions about the news have made it to the HN front page.
He’s really not though. His claims aren’t of a moral nature. They’re pragmatical in terms of what could lead to peace and possibly avoid nuclear warfare that more or less could lead to the end of civilization.
If Russia wasn’t a threat, I’m 100% sure he would say that the rest of the world should help in reclaiming Crimea. So I don’t think he’s saying that Crimea belongs to Russia at all.
No one else was ever claiming the things he said, aside from Russia. The timing of it was especially egregious, as Ukraine made a *HUGE* advancement over the frontlines this past weekend.
Pro-russian propaganda coming in exactly as Russia's front line collapses? What? The timing and speech pattern here (ie: the Kremlin-style argument of "Khrushchev’s mistake") suggests _direct_ Russian influence.
No one else was saying things like that. No one speaks like that, not here in USA at least.
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If Elon Musk said this when Ukraine was losing, then maybe you'd have a point. But Elon Musk decided to say this when Ukraine was __WINNING__ on the battlefield.
The idea that pushing for peace is Russian propaganda is itself propaganda. I can't believe how effective the war machine still is, even with Iraq and Afghanistan still fresh in memory.
This will go down in history just as Lindbergh's pro-Hitler cowardice did.
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EDIT: Wow. You completely changed your post wholesale with your edit.
Elon Musk isn't "pushing for peace". Elon Musk is pushing for Crimea to be part of Russia. Its the same bit as when Lindbergh publicly stated to not help Poland or France in WW2 in the "name of peace".
If anyone cares that much who is right, I suggest going yourself to Crimea and talk to people, and find out what they want, and not what Washington or Kremlin, or Elon Musk wants.
But to be honest, the majority of people would not do, and will just continue to throw talking point all over the internet, with projection of perspective under influence of information bubble they live in. What is the point of all this chatter ?
I'm on Ukraine's side and I don't read that in Elon's tweet.
I think he sees it as a compromise that has a chance of being accepted by both parties. He's allowed his opinions. He isn't saying we should give it to them ala Chamberlain.
> He isn't saying we should give it to them ala Chamberlain.
No, its worse than that. Elon Musk has adopted the language of the Russian side entirely with that tweet. "Khrushchev’s mistake" is not a Western talking point from any legitimate person. It is exclusively a Russian idea and Russian concept.
It'd be as if some Western official started defending Hitler's Lebensraum. There are words and meanings that specific sides use. Elon used an incredibly wrong one yesterday.
This isn't "Chamberlain" level of mistake. This is closer to Nazi sympathizer or German-American Bund level kind of talking here if you want a WW2 era example.
The specific phrasing and use of language was enough of a tipoff from yesterday's tweets. But its one of those things: understanding the Russian side is good and fine and all, but the minute you start spreading their propaganda, yeah... people are going to get pissed, ya know?
> "Khrushchev’s mistake". This is a Russian / Kremlin talking point.
> It'd be as if some Western official started defending Hitler's Lebensraum
If you were proposing a compromise Hitler would accept then saying the phrase "and this provides them the 'Lebensraum' he needs to save face..." would be reasonable. Proposing a compromise that would be an out for Putin does require offering him something that Russia wants. Fwiw many libs were talking off-ramps and such early in the war.
For the record, I think they should fight, but I can understand that other people disagree and think a brokered-peace is necessary.
> the minute you start spreading their propaganda, yeah... people are going to get pissed, ya know?
Well, "using their talking points". But that's fair.
Why are we talking about compromises when Ukraine is winning?
At a minimum, wait for Ukraine to suffer a setback before asking them to compromise. Ukraine's victories on the battlefield today, and yesterday, only make Musk's words ever more ridiculous.
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This isn't someone hoping for peace when the Nazis were advancing. This is more akin to someone asking for Peace with Hitler *AFTER* the Normandy landing.
The people I mention proposing similar early in the war were also saying it when Ukraine was doing well and Russia was not. All the current problems were already visible.
I agree that they shouldn't stop fighting. I simply don't mind that other people feel differently and will even change their minds at times.
> This is more akin to someone asking for Peace with Hitler AFTER the Normandy landing
Most negotiated peace treaties seem to come after one side realizes it will eventually lose so that's how it would have happened.
> At a minimum, wait for Ukraine to suffer a setback before asking them to compromise
I'm not a professional diplomat but that does not seem right, if they did want to negotiate it's generally good to do so from a position of apparent strength.
I recommend reading the Wikipedia pages on Crimea and the Crimean referendum.
While the referendum might have been illegitimate, it would probably have still been a "join Russia" landslide if conducted properly. Unlike Russia's "referendums" in the past month.
Crimea has historically belonged to Russia since it was first conquered, and even from the 90s to 2014, Russia had a large military presence there. But Musk was not speaking of who has a moral right to possess it, but of what realistic outcomes are. Do you foresee any path by which Ukraine could get Crimea back other than a coup in Moscow and Putin's replacement by more pliable leadership?
> “Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).”
> -- Elon Musk, October 3rd 2022
This... isn't a normal argument. This is literally Kremlin propaganda. Wholesale lifted. The question we should be asking is: why is Elon Musk echoing Kremlin propaganda and signing his name and reputation under it?
If it was a mistake, then so be it. But Elon Musk needs to come to terms with the severity of this mistake here.
100%. If we’ve learned no other lessons from the last few years, one really should be how stunningly effective the Russians can be in getting their framing/worldview in front of powerful-yet-pliable Western figures.
Close. The US paid upwards of $2 million to SpaceX to provide the devices (~$1,500 / unit). The idea of them being a donation was typical marketing from Musk.
> The report found that the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, paid $1,500 apiece for 1,333 terminals, adding up to around $2 million.
> According to space reporter Joey Roulette, SpaceX donated 3,667 terminals to Ukraine, or around $10 million worth, after also factoring in the three months of data it provided with the terminals.
I specifically said it may be true. He has a public and indisputable history of exaggerating and lying about a whole bunch of stuff, though, so he is not a reliable source for much.
I'm accusing him of lying in the past, yes. He certainly exaggerates way more than he lies, but to say he hasn't lied publicly means you have your blinders on.
https://elonmusk.today/ has a looootttt of exaggerations that ended up being completely incorrect. It also has plenty of outright lies.
Just from scrolling a bit you can find plenty of indisputable lies:
Scrolling through the list, though, you can't help but know that Elon knows at least some of his exaggerations are bullshit, which would turn them into a lie. For example: https://twitter.com/brenttoderian/status/1557224539267817472 turns what seemed to be an exaggeration of a product being ready into a straight up lie.
Does knowingly miscategorizing facts count as a lie? Because I'm not convinced Elon is stupid enough to know that Twitter was not lying about bot numbers.
If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?
> If $80m turns out to be $10m, is that a lie or an exaggeration?
Yes, that would be considered a lie, or at least a gross exaggeration.
But we can do the math using publically available information - assuming its correct. According to this article ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl... ) (which honestly feels like a click bait hit piece), as of Apr 8, there were 5000 terminals in the country. It says SpaceX paid for 3670 of those (so about 2/3), plus internet service for all.
As of May, there were 10k terminals (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/02/ukraine-official-150000-usin...). Who knows how many there are now - 4 months later. So at $1500 a pop of what it costs to manufacture, plus probably same, if not more, to fly it to Poland, then transport it via land to Ukraine - the numbers add up. Add to that work being done to overcome Russian attempts at jamming (https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-russia-ramp...). Add things that we are not aware of. I can see how costs can pile up.
Great, that's $15m-$30m (if you accept that it's somehow $1500/unit to ship??). Only $50m-65m left to account for!
And once again (and again and again...), I'm not claiming the $80m number is a lie. You just can't take that number as fact when the only source is his twitter.
I have no idea how you get from that tweet to selling 10% of their bitcoin holdings without saying he lied. It's not like there was a massive time frame between the two.
And you picked one out of a ton of lies to attempt to refute. What about my other examples?
are these actually lies?
i know tesla stopped accepting bitcoin but it doesn't seem surprising to operate nodes when they did accept it. companies change policies all the time so i wouldn't call this a lie unless they never did it all. is that public information?
"almost all" possessions is pretty vague. perhaps this is false but it's not obvious at face value and wouldn't be malicious. it seems mostly a question of semantics (does renting = owning? do we mean houses and cars or clothes and silverware?). if someone tweets "i'm selling all my shit" are they lying?
break pads never needing to be replaced is obviously not 100% true since some percentage of every part will inevitably break, but if pads without defects outlive the rest of the car, i don't see how you could disagree with this statement. teslas are barely old enough to evaluate this statement and doubly so for cars produced in 2018.
i don't follow this stuff nearly closely enough to know if these are lies and it's not clear to me the information needed to evaluate those tweets is publicly available or even exists. i don't dispute he's made misleading statements and exaggerated but i'm not convinced it's obvious he's lying or that not seeing it means you have blinders on.
Basically anyone who doesn't have a motivation to twist the truth? Like the US government who can actually provide hard proof that they paid for the hardware? Why would we believe Elon in this case?
But there isn't proof that he is lying - you deciding whether he lied or not is your judgement call. If you may recall, the initial shipment of Starlinks were sent in response to request by Mykhailo Fedorov - Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation. Before US govt got involved. So I would tend to take Musk at his word.
Donating terminals at a claimed value of 5x retail is suspiciously close to the amount that would neutralize out of pocket costs after taxing into account the corresponding tax deduction, and enabling data services on said terminals is very, very close to a zero-marginal-cost transaction.
It is? Giving up all captured areas except for Crimea (given that a UN lead referendum would result in the other regions staying in Ukraine)? That sounds like a pretty big failure to me.
Russia would NEVER give the residents the ability to actually vote him off the island. The entirety of the win is the immediate PR win he handed them by implying
- That the remaining residents even have the legal/moral right to have such an election.
- That such an election could possibly be morally conducted with armed men camped on your land and the unburied dead scattered on the landscape without the specter of intimidation.
- That such results would be valid given it would be conducted after the Russians drove off or tortured and murdered half the population that didn't agree
- That anyone could possible trust the Russians to conduct it no matter what oversight was provided
- That they would respect the results if they went their way
It re-contextualizes the discussion from an immoral war criminal is slaughtering his neighbor, raping and pillaging their lands, attempting to erase their identity and attempting to cover his tracks with sham elections to somehow the sham elections are a path to peace between warring neighbors if only we conducted them more fairly.
They cannot possibly be conducted fairly and Musk's statement was literally the most stupid and offensive thing he has ever said in his life.
He's basically the Joker at this point. No apparent rhyme or reason to his actions, and no overarching goal. Just chaos.
You hate to see it. Or at least, I do. I had an immense amount of respect for Musk based on his work at Tesla and SpaceX, and that respect has basically evaporated now. It's as if he's no longer the same guy at all.
bought and paid for with dads conflict emeralds all with the stated goal of a million slaves on Mars... We're nearing the end of neo fascism with the hilarious route of Russia in Ukraine but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
It's pretty galling for Elon to tout how charitable he is for allowing the US government to buy a large number of Starlink terminals at full price to send to Ukraine.
Honestly. It honestly seems to me people want to tear down the man who noticed the elephant in the room.
I'm 100% "pro-Ukraine", what Putin is doing is ridiculous and there's literally no justification.
I have been absolutely trashed for pointing out some of the stories coming out of this war are just completely fake, though. Like the "Ghost of Kyiv" thing. I asked if there was any proof and just got instantly accused of supporting a "war-criminal."
Not a fan of an environment where people will straw man you if you venture out of the "pre-defined opinion limits."
I'm not an expert in this at all either... so forgive my ignorance but isn't there a very real risk of insane levels of carnage if the war ramps up to control over Crimea? What is stopping this from becoming a nuclear war?
I know we can't just fold to the demands of every insane dictator... but I think its totally appropriate to ask what the chances of nuclear war (or a war resulting in millions dead) and if we're ok risking that for Crimea. You can do that without even a neuron of support for Russia.
Elon isn't calling out the elephant in the room he's entering a very crowded public pool where a fight is taking place while the other children look on and taking a very large smelly shit. The threat of nuclear war is very real however his solution is extremely stupid and only serves to provide some PR for a monster.
If you notice how Musk handled the children stuck in a cave its a familiar pattern. Every time there is a crisis he chokes and says something stupid. He reverts to form.
If we also can't fold to the demand of every insane dictator we also can't do so for every insane dictator with nukes either or they will in short order run the world because there are several to choose from incumbent and incipient. We can only build a future worth having by being willing to stand up and take the risk and call their bluff even at the risk of everything we hold dear.
Men of small courage and lesser souls would deserve the terrible world their children would inherit.
What do you mean by "if the war ramps up to control over Crimea"? How can the war ramp up to that? It could potentially ramp down to that, and then we're back in the situation of 2014 - february 2022.
Giving bullies what they want leads to them wanting more. See the monstrous failure of Chamberlain's appeasement policy in the early stages of WW II.
By that I mean a more intense war with a higher risk of going nuclear, over Crimea specifically.
I'm not a fan of giving in to the demand of bullies either... but what bullies have the ability to trigger the end of the world as we know it?
But sure... this is all based on the idea that simply surrendering Crimea would cause this to stop, which isn't guaranteed. Russia has shown it doesn't care to keep promises.
Yes, losing Crimea is not an acceptable option for Putin and there are clear indications he will escalate the conflict if that happens - cyber, chemical, nuclear. With Nordstream blown there are few off-ramps for this conflict. Very worrisome.
If this is true, I think its perfectly reasonable for the world to speculate if Crimea is worth starting a nuclear war over. (and again, this can be done 100% without supporting anything Russia/Putin)
You actually don't get to decide for other men if their homes are worth fighting for. Your opinion is irrelevant. Why don't you ask them if its worth fighting for?
You are allowed in the sense that police won't come to your door with bracelets. The court of public opinion has and will always be open 24/7 ready to sentence you to your fellow citizens contempt.
In this case the contempt is well deserved. One doesn't just "throw stuff out to get the discussion started" regarding an ongoing genocidal rampage complete with rape and torture camps. It's in poor taste. Nobody cares what Elon wants because except interjecting himself uselessly into international politics he is irrelevant.
The part where he repeats Russian propaganda points.
Like when he says they should do "elections under UN supervision". In a region which just experienced mass deportation of it's habitants and mass migration of native russians, by force, in the last months.
Also, he absolutely glosses over the fact that Russia blatantly broke the Budapest Memorandum. How can you trust them at all ?
You’re not giving Musk enough credit. Do you think taking these things into account wasn’t part of his proposal? What do you think he would answer if he got a direct question about this part?
He literally revised his poll when he did get direct questions about it, because he obviously hadn't thought any of it through. Absolutely blows my mind how many little fanboys he has that will perform incredible feats of mental gymnastics just to lickspittle themselves at his feet.
Why would I give the fellow who hired a private investigator to smear and destroy a hero rescuing children because said hero wouldn't support his moronic submarine proposal the benefit of the doubt?
How about the guy who is being sued to buy twitter way over face value because he decides the disposition of billions by tweet?
The man is a fool who buys and takes credit for better men's work who got his start with apartheid money. He doesn't deserve credit or your hero worship.
"Khrushchev’s mistake" is a uniquely russian narrative.
No western historian would ever use this, you can only get this from russian propaganda sources like "Moskovskiy Komsomolets" or from someone who's influenced by it.
I wonder where did Musk get this from. And what other memes of russian's version of history he got.
No war with Russia is bad for the likes of Halliburton and Raytheon, they are really struggling since they are accustomed to constant profits since 9/11, as matter of pure coincidence the US media conglomerates are also big fans of war and someone with a submarine is blowing up pipelines and ratcheting up tensions.
If you paid any attention in 2001 you've heard this song before.
Then if you really want to make those contractors sad let the embers of WWIII never catch flame because they were snuffed out by a few bombs instead of being smothered by 10s of thousands of our dead.
Take over more land....where? Every other country on his western border is already in NATO, which will absolutely trigger an overwhelming US response, and given how his military is vastly underperforming expectations in Ukraine, even Russia's kleptocrat leadership knows they wouldn't stand a chance in such scenarios.
Wake me up when he gets to US shores, Europe can defend themselves. We already lost a generation of lives and treasure in the middle east, America needs to rest for a while.
My grandfather bled on a beach where his fellows wet the sand with their life so lesser men can wake from their comfortable rest and yawn for more leisure. We gave our word and pledged our strength to defend our allies. We shall not break our world and tarnish our honor so that they can rest from the grievous burden of turning on their tv to watch what other men do in their stead.
Great start for peace, the assumption that nothing said by Russia is true, and their future behavior will always be bad. You have no inside line, and no particular insight, what makes you so sure of what Russia thinks, what Russia wants, and what Russia will do, and casually disregards anything that Russia says and any of Russia's stated concerns?
Why does everyone speculate about the inner states of Putin and the Russian administration as if they know more than what they're told?
Unless there is some reason to believe that Russia has taken a complete 180 on election integrity I am going to assume that past behavior will continue.
so let me get this straight, when elon musk says the elections they had now cannot be trusted, and calls for new elections with UN observers, so that the result should be trustworthy, he is really just trying to legitimize the "elections" they already held?
I can see I need a few words with my english teacher
Perhaps we as a society will learn that Twitter is not, and should not be, how we measure how society feels. Twitter is without doubt a net-negative on society and I'd be glad to see Musk drive it to the ground.
The amount of "journalism" from previously well-respected institutions that can be summed up as "some people on Twitter didn't like thing, here are there tweets" is shocking.
I'd prefer they focus on content and not who it's from. Like effectively banning threats and people who make them.
Currently you can threaten to kill certain people and groups of people and your tweets remain up but you can be permanently banned for refusing to participate in someone else's identity.
If anyone else does not trust Elon Musk like me, I've made a Twitter alternative. You can import your tweet history from Twitter and .. not give Elon Musk your data.
Hypothesis: with the wavering of Credit Suisse and other big banks, and the bond market more generally, Elon Musk thinks that by agreeing to buy, he moves the onus onto the banks who agreed to finance the deal. If they cannot, in the current climate, sell the buyout bonds that they are contractually obligated to, he may still get to walk away` without the legal trouble. Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-lbo-revives-12-5-1831...
"...bankers may struggle to sell the risky Twitter buyout debt just as credit markets begin to crack."
Look's like you're being downvoted but no one is bothering to explain why.
Based on other comments in this thread, your hypothesis (while interesting) might fall short. Apparently there is a legal stipulation that if bank financing falls through, Musk is personally on the hook to make up the difference.
If the stipulation is in place, Musk can't use the bank's failure to finance as a scapegoat for the deal falling through. He can't walk away from the deal paying a 1 billion dollar penalty, he will have to buy Twitter at the original agreed upon price.
That being said, if your hypothesis is valid and the deal falls apart due to lack of financing -- buying some put options on Twitter right now could prove to be an extremely profitable move.
No, the banks are committed. They can sell the debt to others, but if that fails, they just have to finance it themselves.
Musk actually can get out of the deal if he doesn't have the financing. But he has the financing, because the banks signed commitment letters. These commitment letters are valid until the beginning of next year. That's why he tried to drag out the lawsuit in the hope, that deadline might be passed.
Selling the Twitter debt is the banks’ problem. They’ve already committed to fund debt financing off their own balance sheets (absent certain circumstances that don’t exist here).
It’s not a happy day for the banks, and they may yet try to walk, but they will absolutely have legal exposure if they do. When Musk started getting second thoughts, Grimes (the Morgan Stanley Grimes, not the surrogate Grimes) started distancing himself from that aspect of this clown show right away.
a) The banks may well be able to sell these bonds, just with a higher yield.
b) Maybe there are some clients out there with lotsa cash (Buffet, Bezos, Gates) who would love to have Elon owe them tens of billions of dollars at 10% yield.
If the whole thing goes tits up, then the bondholders own Twitter, not Elon.
Larry: Keep these texts out of discovery! Elon: So, the billion investment is off? Larry: Done! Elon: Sorry Twitter, but financing is no go cuz u made em mad. Here is a billion. KthxBi.
If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team, that would be a very big deal, not only undercutting a big part of Musk's current case (which he was set to lose anyways) but also falsifying several statements made both to the Delaware court and also to Congress(?!).
I wonder also if the appearance, performative as it is, that Musk is choosing to buy Twitter rather than being forced to buy Twitter is helpful for financing. He's more or less obligated to purchase Twitter, but there's no rule preventing him from offsetting the expense with a syndicate of co-investors; that syndicate might be easier to put together if he can shift the narrative.