Elon Musk Says Twitter Deal 'Temporarily On Hold Over Spam' (theverge.com) 138
Third Position shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter is "temporarily on hold" after the social network reported that false or spam accounts comprised less than 5 percent of its 226 million monetizable daily active users. The Tesla CEO, who offered to buy twitter for $44 billion, tweeted a link to a May 2nd Reuters report on Twitter's filing, saying he wants to see the company's calculations.
"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted. However, in a follow-up tweet, he added that he's "still committed to [the] acquisition," suggesting that it'll proceed after Twitter provides satisfactory information on its numbers. Slashdot reader Excelcia shared a similar report from the BBC, which cited analysts speculating "he could be seeking to renegotiate the price or even walk away from the takeover."
"One analyst, as quoted in the story, suggests that 'Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market,'" writes Excelcia. "Shares have dropped another 10% since the announcement."
"Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users," Musk tweeted. However, in a follow-up tweet, he added that he's "still committed to [the] acquisition," suggesting that it'll proceed after Twitter provides satisfactory information on its numbers. Slashdot reader Excelcia shared a similar report from the BBC, which cited analysts speculating "he could be seeking to renegotiate the price or even walk away from the takeover."
"One analyst, as quoted in the story, suggests that 'Many will view this as Musk using this Twitter filing/spam accounts as a way to get out of this deal in a vastly changing market,'" writes Excelcia. "Shares have dropped another 10% since the announcement."
Win Win for Musk (Score:2)
So this will involve some sort of audit of the Twitter user base to resolve how bots distort the figures. If Twitter's figures are legitimate then Musk will acquire a large, audited user base. Otherwise, if a large fraction of the user base is really a bunch of spam bots etc. then Musk can either walk away due to misrepresentation or renegotiate terms, including price.
Well played.
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Nothing illegal about that, but it really looks more like a stock play then anything else.
The first half of your sentence does not match the second half. Lying for the purposes of stock manipulation could very well be illegal.
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TWTR is down almost 10% today because of this "announcement".
I really hope the SEC tears Musk a new one over this bullshit.
Ohhhhhhhhh (Score:5, Insightful)
So it is about money?
I thought this was about preserving a place for free speech...
It can't be about money (Score:2, Insightful)
If he's serious about buying it then this is about exercising power. Similar to how Randolf Herst started the War of 1812.
But it could jut be a troll. He could just be having fun with us.
It's also possible his financing fell though, as a lot of it was coming from crypto. Billionaires never spend their own money. You don't get rich by spending your own money, you get ri
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Similar to how Randolf Herst started the War of 1812
William Randolph Hearst was born in 1863. Maybe look into that again.
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So basically, he was either a vampire, a highlander, or a time lord?
Re: Ohhhhhhhhh (Score:2)
Interesting.
A proposal to actually prevent free speech in the legal sense.
(Note, I think moderation is good and Musk buying twitter is bad, I just don't think it's right for the government to stop it, I also think it'll fall apart if it's allowed to be what he wants anyway).
"Pretty Bird!" (Score:2)
https://media.gab.com/system/m... [gab.com]
due diligence and negotiation (Score:4, Insightful)
He would be remiss if he didn't do due diligence. Then possibly followed up by better negotiation for price.
I have to say though, it would be hilarious if Twitter turned out to be 90% spam accounts. All those followers of Donald Trump that he thought he had.
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To be a spam account, I'd think you need to actually tweet some things.
Your account is a ghost account. Goodbye.
He already knew all this (Score:2)
I don't think it's a good idea for one person to have as much power as he does. He can literally upend large segments of our lives and economy on a whim. Look at what Vladimir Putin has done. One old man dying of liver cancer has caused a death of tens of thousands and billions in property damage. We give too much power to too few people to make decisions about our lives.
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No, this gets into what Twiitter has been reporting to shareholders and affects valuation of business. It's not a matter of "everyone knows" this or that. Consequences of lying about it are dire for publicly traded company.
I call bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Either way it affects our lives. Do you like having one man have that much control over your life? Does that fill you with confidence and a sense of ease? From my part it makes me nervous to think that at any moment one guy could triggered that much damage.
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Either way it affects our lives. Do you like having one man have that much control over your life? Does that fill you with confidence and a sense of ease? From my part it makes me nervous to think that at any moment one guy could triggered that much damage.
As the old saying goes, if Caesar doesn't rule, someone else will. Given that reality, I'd prefer to be ruled by people like Musk than people like you.
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Tax the shit out of the super rich (Score:2)
The purpose of wealth redistribution isn't to make things "fair", it's to prevent crazy ass oligarchs from losing their minds and plunging us into a dark ages. We've literally got a bitter, angry dying old man in Russia sitting on 6000 nukes. Any time he feels like it he can end the human race. We had Mao over in China starve his populat
That's just a silly phrase (Score:2)
Just because you want to be ruled over doesn't mean the rest of us do. I'll take the consensus of my community over the whims of some random yahoo who's name was picked out of a hat by lady luck any day of the week.
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He's clearly trying to pull out. The only question is why? Is he trying to negotiate a better price because his financing fell through
He's trying to negotiate a better price because his net worth just got punched in the dick. The big automakers are about to eat Tesla's lunch and everyone knows it. The F150 Lightning is about to fucking destroy everyone and everything else. The vast majority of preorders are not just from new Ford customers, but also new Truck customers.
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If your life is Twitter, you have bigger problems than Musk owning it or not.
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To allow anything else risks Democracy itself.
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! That'll be Our Democracy, sir, Peace Be Upon It!
Complains the man .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Complains the man who admitted to using bots to push Tesla.
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Telsa isn't in the business of selling cars to bots. There's a difference between using a bot to push a message, and claiming a bot as a monetizable customer to a business.
Bots or not (Score:2)
Twitter has shitty user engagement numbers. The majority of users rarely or never tweet [pewresearch.org], and about 80% of the traffic is generated by only 10% of the userbase.
None of this information was a mystery when Musk made his offer. He's just miffed that the market went pear-shaped and is making excuses to go back to the negotiating table.
Personally, I'd rather have seen him dump his spare change into R&D on cheaper BEVs, but hey, it's his money and I guess the planet will just have to get by with a few more p
Just looking for excuses (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly. Everything is down, and suddenly Musk isn't as rich as he thought he was. And the deal was contingent on other people joining him on th
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The stock market is down so Musk is just being his usual asshole self looking for excuses why he shouldn't pay the money that he agreed to pay for a takeover. The exact same shit he does to push up or push down the price of a stock or cryptocurrency he has an interest in. The Twitter board should tell him to stump up the cash he agreed to or gtfo and pay the penalty.
If all he wanted was out, he just had to rescind his offer. Nothing had been finalised. It was essentially a verbal agreement, no contract was signed so he didn't even need an out clause.
"still committed to acquisition" (Score:2)
Did you people miss that? Anyway, if they go all in on "free speech" they have to disallow banning from the comments section. That's the only way to mitigate disinformation. Disinformation or even correct information intended to mislead must at least be fought with education. And yes, btw it is possible to lie with the truth depending on the IQ of the audience.
One example of how truth can spread lies if your audience is sufficiently low IQ'd: if you want to paint purple haired people as evil .. all you have
He never wanted the deal (Score:4, Interesting)
He just wanted to sell Tesla stock without causing it to tank.
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He didn't sell enough stock to cause the needle to even move let alone for the price to tank. The market cap changed by less than 1% on a stock that is almost universally seen as overpriced. $8.5bn only seems like a lot of money to normies like you and me.
A reminder: "temporarily on hold" is not a thing (Score:2)
Musk cannot unilaterally change the rules of the purchase agreement he already signed. If this impedes the sale, Twitter can very well sue over this - and would likely win.
Not that i think they would though, for a number of reasons. But this is nothing more than Musk playing smoke and mirrors in order to torpedo the shitty deal he cornered himself into.
possible fraud (Score:2)
Twitter had it's run (Score:2)
Time for it to sing it's swan song and make way for the replacements. I'm a bit surprised that it lasted as long as it did.
Re:Lower price is what he is after (Score:4, Informative)
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That's not how it works; Twitter asserted something about value of their business, and if it's not true then valuation is different.
Re: Lower price is what he is after (Score:2)
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Yeah, I think it's clear that for whatever reason Musk wants out. Maybe the valuation makes even less sense now. Between the time of the original offer and now, Nasdaq has dropped 10%, BTC dropped 25%., and Tesla down 20%. Unless he put in some sort of clauses around that...yeah, paying a 40% premium on Twitter in a bear market that is likely the front end of a recession...bad financial move. Minimally his funding 'partners' may have bailed, and again unless Musk did some diligence on that he might sole
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No, that is not how it works either. Per the purchase agreement Musk has already signed with Twitter he already reviewed those figures, which were part of Twitter's SEC filings for years now.
In essence, Musk should have to prove Twitter grossly lied on these, enough to have a Material Adverse Effect on the company's valuation at the time of the agreement. And yes, this is a legal term and no, it is not easy to do.
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Let's put it this way: in order for a MAE clam to actually have some legal legs, Musk needs to somehow prove Twitter lied obscenely on those figures. Like, by an order of magnitude.
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The really cool thing about social blade is that it shows massive systemic changes really, really obviously. All he has to do is show the massive six figure swings in people's followers and demand the information on those accounts and their history.
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That would be a losing proposition. I still recall when Twitter started aggressively pruning fake accounts and how a number of well known-figures there, mostly right-wing, started complaining about their followers count dropping.
Twitter's current usebase is ~230mil, so by their own account they have about 12mil fake accounts at any time. Try seven figures.
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Cost if Musk doesn't prove anything 1 billion+, cost for 20-40 auditors and forensic IT analysts to comb through the follower swings of the accounts in question and the raft of unbannings that miraculously occurred after Musk confirmed he was buying? Maybe high 8 figures at most. Chump change at the level the deal is at.
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You misunderstood my point. It's a losing proposition because there's no chance whatsoever anything like that would pop up.
That path ends up with Twitter suing Musk, and eventually winning for way more than $1bn.
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For fuck's sake, no. There're exactly two:
1) Musk and Twitter agreeing to cancel the deal, with a $1bn fee on either party, or,
2) A successful MAE claim against Twitter. For reference, no such claim has ever been accepted by a Delaware court.
Musk entered a legal contract to buy Twitter the second he signed. He cannot simply walk away from it.
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Wrong, you know nothing about the agreement, you haven't seen it nor know the major points. Quit making up shit. Again, it has several conditions that let Musk either walk or break with payment. Also, there are conditions for twitter too.
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Cool. Tell me two of them.
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Maybe making the offer and forcing an audit was the whole point of this exercise. I can't actually see what other use he'd have for it. Unless he was planning to launch Twitter to Mars, which wouldn't be the worst idea I've heard all day.
This is part of due diligence. (Score:2)
Then he should not have made the offer with out doing his due diligence.
This is the due diligence, and he has concerns. Seems pretty reasonable.
You can only do so much due diligence from outside the company. To complete a deal, you need access to records that a non-purchaser would not have access to.
Re:Lower price is what he is after (Score:4, Interesting)
saying only 5% of accounts are fake seems absurd
Monetizable accounts. It does specify in the summary.
This is obviously a ploy by Musk, but... I think it's less likely that he's trying to get a better price than it is that the whole thing was bogus in the first place. There's probably a penalty for pulling out in whatever agreement he made, but if he can claim that Twitter has been publicly dishonest about their fake accounts then he can weasel out of paying the penalty.
Re:Lower price is what he is after (Score:4, Informative)
He didn't get rich spending his own money he got rich using government contracts and subsidies. Heck if it wasn't for carbon credits from the other automotive manufacturers and the government program behind them Tesla would have long since gone tits up five times over. And SpaceX is basically NASA with about a 20% overhead going straight into that guy's pocket for no other reason than corruption
Re:Lower price is what he is after (Score:5, Informative)
I think that this Twitter deal is really stupid business-wise for Musk, but I take issue with a lot of:
He didn't get rich spending his own money he got rich using government contracts and subsidies. Heck if it wasn't for carbon credits from the other automotive manufacturers and the government program behind them Tesla would have long since gone tits up five times over. And SpaceX is basically NASA with about a 20% overhead going straight into that guy's pocket for no other reason than corruption
When you have a government contract, and the government pays you for services rendered, then it becomes your money. That's the way money works, it gets exchanged for goods and services. As far as subsidies go, his companies have not actually gotten a lot from government subsidies and, where they have gotten subsidies, it is generally where the government is promoting things that his companies have actually delivered. You can criticize subsidies as policy tools all you want, but it's hardly fair to say that, for example, if a state offers subsidies for a business to set up there and provide jobs and then a business does, that the business is somehow stealing by accepting the subsidies or something. Not if they deliver on their end of the bargain. Ditto for carbon credits. Questionable as a policy tool, but they do have a goal in mind and seem to have worked as intended with Tesla. As for your comparison with NASA, you've got it wrong. SpaceX is basically Boeing, but with the profit from NASA contracts going to Musk and his shareholders rather than to the executives and shareholders of Boeing. Once again, government contracts work by exchanging money for pre-arranged goods and services. That's what SpaceX has pretty consistently done, and at a much lower price than Boeing. It's hard to say if there is any actual corruption going on with SpaceX or not, but most of the evidence at least suggests that there was tons of it going on with old-school aerospace manufactures.
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Mod parent up, though I only found it on the search for "stupid".
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Yeah, I don't get this "Tesla would've gone bankrupt without carbon credits" argument.
Tesla was spending money on growth. They could spend that money because they knew they had money coming in, including from the carbon credits. If they didn't have the income from the carbon credits, they would've spent less. They would've grown slower as a result, sure, but they wouldn't have gone bankrupt.
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It didn't.
Arguable. There are plenty of valid criticisms of the kinds of incentives government provides to promote certain technologies, but they do seem to have worked to make electric car businesses obviously viable, which creates mind share for electric cars and shows what the pros of electric cars are and demonstrates that many of the supposedly show-stopping cons that people imagine are overblown.
It got vague promises of lower emissions and cleaner air that never materialized because what actually happened was instead of a whole bunch of electric cars leading the cleaner air GM and Ford used Tesla to offset their dirty vehicles they were selling at a high profit. We didn't even get better technology because Tesla focused exclusively on technology that would improve luxury cars and other high performance vehicles and not the kind of vehicles someone in the middle class could ever afford. So all the focus was on horsepower and acceleration and not on being a daily driver.
With electric cars, it's relatively cheap to provide horsepower and acceleration. There isn't much in the way of an e
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The question is why is he trying to get a better price? If you look at how the deal was structured he wasn't really spending his own money. Also a lot of that money was coming from one of the crypto Bros. It's extremely likely that the crashing crypto market has wiped out so much value that the funding isn't there anymore. And if it's one thing I know about billionaires it's that they talk a big game about spending their own money but they never do.
As collateral he was putting up large swaths of his business. If musk took over there's no way twitter would stay worth $44b, so his creditors could easily end up in possession of a large chunk of his businesses and be in a position to oust Musk.
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Who cares if the market is tanking? He promised and now twitters board should be 'fuck you, pay me'.
While nice in theory, are there not a lot of people that would go in and ask for a rebate or refund if they bought something and the day after it went on sale?
Seems reasonable to ask. But in this case, the delay is based on something that very substantially affects the core value of what he is buying, not just the market decided stock price.
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After signing a PURCHASE CONTRACT? No, i have not. Do you think Musk is shopping for socks here?!
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There's an interesting point to consider in there. Does it matter what percentage of twitter users are bots? If there are statistics on the value of Twitter users based on purchases per number of ad impressions, and 5% of those ad impressions are fake, then what does it matter if 50% are fake instead? The value per number of impressions is the same whether it's 5%-95% or 50%-/50%. As long as the actual proportion doesn't increase in favor of fake accounts, the value should stay the same.
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It matters for the company's valuation, whose sole source of income is selling ads.
If half of your users are bots, it suddenly becomes very hard to attract advertisers.
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It matters for the company's valuation, whose sole source of income is selling ads.
If half of your users are bots, it suddenly becomes very hard to attract advertisers.
I get that. What I was saying is that, if you're counting ad impressions, and some constant percentage of those are bots, and there's a relatively fixed number of purchases per ad impression, then it technically does not matter if 0%, 10%, or 50% of the impressions are bots. You still get a particular number of purchases per set number of ad impressions.
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Ah, fair enough.
Still, i imagine Twitter suddenly finding out they have 5x fake users than originally estimated would scare advertisers away to some degree. I understand Twitter is not really an appetizing ads platform to begin with these days.
Re: Lower price is what he is after (Score:2)
If there are statistics on the value of Twitter users based on purchases per number of ad impressions, and 5% of those ad impressions are fake,
Advertising is not such a hard science. The quality of data that even large advertisers obtain on the effectiveness of advertisement campaigns, is quite bad.
A suspicion that 50% ads are being "viewed" by bots may kill Twitter.
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After what just happened to the markets why should Elon pay as much as he had originally planned?
Wait, are you for real?
Re: Lower price is what he is after (Score:2)
Actually if the bot clicks on the ad, it tanks the value of Twitter ad clicks. Because advertisers are hoping a human being sees the ad, their ad content is not geared towards influencing/brainwashing bots. Bots rarely have any disposable income with discretionary spending allowance either, so ads to them are useless.
Re: Read the fine print (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Read the fine print (Score:4, Interesting)
Or he is angling for a break on the price.
I don't think he's angling for a break on the price. I think he's angling to back out of the deal altogether. The sticker shock finally caught up with him and he he's realizing that there's very little he can do to increase the value of company, which is probably past its all-time high in real dollars. Twitter was always a bad purchase for Musk. In the past, he's taken little companies and bought them, or a controlling interest, anyway, for literally thousands of times less than the Twitter deal and managed to grow them enormously. This time, he's paid a massive fortune up front, but does not really have anywhere to go with it. Twitter pretty much already does everything it's ever going to do. Cancelling some bans isn't going to do much. Laying off employees will probably just lower consumer satisfaction in the long run. The only thing he can really do with Twitter is branch them out into completely new products and, if he was planning that, he would have been better off creating a new company from scratch and pouring a fraction of the tens of billions he put into Twitter into marketing.
So, I'm pretty sure Musk has woken up from his drugged or drunken stupor (I'm being metaphorical here, but all the evidence is that it's quite possibly he did make this decision in a drugged stupor), noticed the wedding ring on his finger, then looked over at who is sharing his bed, and now he's made a frantic, but hushed call to his lawyer to look into annulments.
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
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Note he has no legal basis for a "counter". Musk is already bound by the purchase agreement he signed, at the price he proposed.
Anything can happen though, because even if Twitter has a very very solid legal base to sue if Musk refuses to pony up, i really doubt they'd bother.
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He can walk away for any reason if he pays the $1B divorce fee. He can also threaten to walk away for that sum as a sunk cost. The shareholders (and Board) have to decide if there is a better option.
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No, he can't. Both parties have to agree on the parting fee before that's even an option.
Not saying that such a thing could not happen, mind you, but this is not the 4D-chess move everyone here appears to believe it is.
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He might follow through because he's forced to by the agreements he has made. I don't think, at this point, that he actually wants to.
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The sticker shock finally caught up with him
You seem to be under the delusion that he is paying for it. He's not. He doesn't have $44bn laying around.
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If he wants a price break it seems like he will have to withdraw the offer, pay the penalty ($1B) to Twitter and make a new offer.
As it's been explained (on Twitter) the offer has been made for the price he offered and that's what the board has accepted. They have no reason to re-negotiate with him now. He might be able to quibble about the penalty but the board has no reason to not collect that penalty (and ironically giving Twitter $1B more in value for a new offer) and see what he comes back with. If
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Don't judge a Slashdot discussion by its FP cover thread? If so, I would judge this one rather harshly, eh?
But time for the obligatory old joke about intelligence and insanity versus luck of the Irish South Africans...
I had a flat tire the other day, so I pulled to the side of the road to change it. I was right in front of the insane asylum, and one of the inmates came over and stood on the other side of the fence watching. After I took off the lug nuts and put them in the hubcap, I tripped on the hubcap and they bounced into the storm drain. I stood there staring, but the lunatic, who turned out to be Elon Musk, said: "Just take one lug nut from the other three wheels. That will work well enough for now."
"Wow, that's a great idea. What are you doing in there?"
"I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid!"
Oh yeah. The luck part. Musk likes to gamble and so far he's been pretty lucky. But buying Twitter has almost nothing to do with making money. My own money, small is it is, would say that almost all of the accounts on Twitter are fake and the "monetizable" accounts need to be measured with inf
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That really is the question we are all asking though, is he buying Twitter purely on principle or is it at least (partially) financially driven.
I think this "re-looking" at the deal on his part shows it is financially driven otherwise why would he care? Abunch of users being bots shouldnt make any difference, you are buying the brand, the platform and the existing userbase no matter what, you can fix the spam problem just as you can fix the profitability problem. If he wants the platform and money doesnt m
Re: Read the fine print (Score:4, Insightful)
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All very true statements but thats just shows this is likely a financial issue and not a moral principle issue. He wants to save some money and is willing to walk away if he feels he isnt getting a good deal. If this was fully about principles he could easily be putting a fraction of that amount into a platform that operates exactly the way he wants.
Twitter has a pretty by-the-books board and ownership system, we could all be surprised but I don't see the metrics being so far off that it gives him an easy
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Twitter is where news and policy makers vocalize - tomorrow's news today. Look at the buyers going in with EM: Ellison, Qatar finance, Sequoia, Binance, Saudi investors, various VCs. I believe they intend to steer discussions of politics & policy to the right, even re-instate TFG on the platform. It's not a financial play, it's a politics play that they expect to affect their other investments.
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I don't disagee with that idea, I think anyone buying Twitter has some political or moral motive about it but I think they all want money out of it more than that otherwise this "on hold" makes not much sense. If the play is that big and long term then saving a few billion isn't really worth delaying the deal or even killing it. Twitter's current market cap right now is $31B and that's on a downswing. At most they save probably 10% purchase cost at most. Lot of risk for relatively small reward.
Don't get
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The question is, why spend tens of billions more than you have to? It's like you started filling out the paperwork to buy a new car, and then halfway through your daughter rings you to tell you that another dealership is selling the exact same new car for half the price? Wouldn't you try to start trying to back out of the deal, at least as a negotiating tactic?
Twitter's fair market value - absent Musk's deal - has collapsed since the deal was offered. Everyone knows this. Macros have crushed companies lik
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I want to acknowledge your thoughtful contributions and this seems to be your last one in the branch.
However I'm not fully convinced. Yes, I do agree that Musk's actions show that money is a factor, but there's also an expression that says "There's no such thing as bad publicity." And I continue to believe that Musk is completely willing to play head games, even though he sometimes plays those games quite badly.
What is Musk REALLY up to? I think we have no idea. But my new speculation is that Musk may be pl
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
Ok, but by making it a dichotomy about a financial vs principle issue, are you asking sincerity ? What if it was just a game, or something else altogether ?
Musk had no issue openly manipulating markets, or calling someone a pedo without evidence/reason.
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If you're talking about the go-private attempt, read the email chain [twitter.com] between Musk and the head of PIF. Musk absolutely believed he had a deal, and felt thrown under the bus by the Saudis.
And as for Unsworth, Musk's comment came after Unsworth - a guy he never met - unprompted - went on international television, lied about Musk getting kicked out of the dive site, and told him to shove his sub (which dive team lead Rick Stanton had explicitly asked for) up his arse - so it's hard to say that throwing around
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There's honestly only one thing that Musk has done that I think could be seen as legitimate "market manipulation", and that's re: this stupid Twitter buyout - the delay on reporting acquiring more than 5% of the company. I've seen no good explanation for how that happened - surely his people know better. Maybe it was a mistake, but that's the sort of "mistake" that simply should not happen, unless it were literally just Elon personally with an E-trade account snapping up shares and not understanding the con
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
Exactly, so this is a guy who cannot be trusted. Things he said turned out to be exactly false. Later worshipful people like Rei can be trusted to whitewash the lie.
1. Musk said funding secured, whereas funding didn't materialize. How to trust Musk ? Later you blame third parties from which funding was supposed to come, but Musk's word has already been devalued.
2. Musk called some guy pedo without evidence, neither by him not anybody else, neither at that time not later of the guy being pedo. How to trust M
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Perfect demonstration of #2. I didn't even attack you at all, and yet, I'm "worshipful", someone who "whitewashes lies", a "useful idiot", etc.
This is how people commonly behave on the internet. Responding to someone who out of the blue attacked you with libel and telling you to shove your charity up your arse with insults is basically daily practice on the internet. But an entirely different standard is applied to famous people like Musk. Responding to an attack with name-calling is fine for the average
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
I gave evidence of what I called you, in the exact same post on which I called you those things. Musk and his worshippers never gave evidence of that diver being pedo.
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
So after quickly clearing my name from the dirty allegation of showing similar to Musk's internet behaviour, coming to the original point.
1. You have a machine to determine what exactly someone "believes" ? Except oneself, no one really knows what one believes. So using your knowledge of Musk's belief in an argument is , in itself, also dishonest.
2. The "lie" in these matters is at least one of the 2 kinds :
A. Not knowing, yet declaring something, while knowing this declaration has material impact of people
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Wouldnt matter. And sight unseen is not analogous to this offer. He made an offer with contingencies, which is why there is a due diligence period. Sight unseen, he would already own it for the $44b. Recent revelations about material metrics being worse than stated gives him grounds for renegotiation. Memorandums of understanding and offers for buyout are lengthy documents that have all kinds of clauses. He could argue that Twitter misrepresented their enterprise value by overstating monetizable user counts, which is practically a given for backing out of or renegotiating (enterprise value is the base on which the offer is fundamentally made). No judge would deny that, unless his offer is literally the tweet (it is not).
Not really, with the majority being financed he'd need to get SEC approval. That could take months, then likely FCC and maybe FTC approval. You can't just buy a company, even a small one, like you would an old Toyota. Also, once you start paying big money that "all sales are final" thing completely goes out the window.
I think Musk has realised that whatever he was planning would never have worked or simply just wanted attention.
Re: (Score:2)
If he wants a price break it seems like he will have to withdraw the offer, pay the penalty ($1B) to Twitter and make a new offer.
Note that the $1bn payout has to be agreed by both parties; Twitter could just as easily sue him for way more than that.
Re: (Score:3)
Only if he can't show Twitter was dealing in bad faith and falsifying metrics. Obama losing 300k+ followers in one day? Tim Pool and Marjorie Green Taylor each gaining 100k+ followers in one day? Suddenly trending topics no longer being laser focused on the leftist causes du jour? Twitter tries to sue for that 1 billion Musk can easily force discovery for their code and every single log going back at least a year.
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
True but when we are talking a platform with hundreds of millions of users sudden moves of hundreds of thousands may not be on the level of fiduciary dishonesty. Cleaning out bots and the sudden new interest from the right wing when he announced the purchase easily explains both those to say nothing of the vagueness of the algorithm which is part of what's he's buying.
Maybe you're right and some bombshell comes out of this, this story has onion like layers, the next few weeks will interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
If he wants a price break it seems like he will have to withdraw the offer, pay the penalty ($1B) to Twitter and make a new offer.
As it's been explained (on Twitter) the offer has been made for the price he offered and that's what the board has accepted. They have no reason to re-negotiate with him now.
Deals like this aren't as simple as that. There are always contingencies. One of them is certainly that their public filings have been accurate. This is the sort of thing where lawyers really earn their money.
Re: Read the fine print (Score:2)
Absolutely but I think as an astute commentator below stated he's likely not negotiating the purchase price now but the exit price.