Dumbest of all, why did Musk even start this clown show of pretending to want to acquire Twitter in the first place?
Even after the drops in tech stocks, he has enough money to fund the takeover if he really wants it. Did he not even consider that possibility? Twitter having bots is not surprising to anyone even a tiny bit informed. Their public records and filings have this data. Did he not even read those?
> why did Musk even start this clown show of pretending to want to acquire Twitter in the first place?
To me it seems like griefer [0] behavior. The goal is to just duck with Twitter and derive joy from others pain.
Musk is a gamer and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s pretty common to see people who are bored or max level or whatever who just mess with other players like a cat does with a mouse. They expel more of their own energy to cause discomfort to their target. An example may be spending 10 gold pieces to make the target lose 1 gold piece.
It “doesn’t make sense” rationally until you take into account the value of the confusion, pain, negative experiences for the target as a sort of currency.
So it seems perfectly common for me to see Musk spend a few billion in fines or whatever to make life worse for Twitter.
One theory I’ve seen to explain why Musk wants to buy Twitter is to shut it down. If that’s the goal then it’s actually much cheaper not to pay $40B to acquire it and shut it down, but to do this sort of thing that seeds uncertainty so when he pulls out the stock price plummets and Twitter dies from an acceleration from it’s likely path.
That theory doesn't make any sense. He is borrowing so much money and looking for outside investors to help with funding in order to shut it down? Seriously... Not to mention he has close to 100MM followers on the platform, which he uses to market his other companies among other things.
It makes sense if he never intends to close the deal, just look like he’s closing.
Musk has lots of followers and was marketing snakeoil perfectly well before Twitter and will be fine after Twitter. I think Musk’s Twitter count is based on his activity, not the other way around. He’s not rich because of Twitter.
But it’s just a theory and there could be other reasons.
Could be that Twitter just had bad management and by cutting lots of staff and establishing a clear ToS they can plaster ads everywhere and let trump back on to drum up activity.
Who knows? It’s kind of boring to me and I try not to follow it, but it leaks into my feeds. I just noticed the behavior and it reminds me of encountering griefers in games I’ve played.
This makes a lot of sense to me. He's basically beaten the game. A lot of us, when we beat the game, go back and find all the secret bobbleheads in Fallout, maybe do an expansion that lets us build a cabin in the Skyrim game world somewhere, or play some "epilogue" story. Other people hit all the natural disaster buttons in SimCity and watch the world burn, or just go try to spend all their gold killing as many innocent gamers on the server as they can.
I think this Griefer theory explains a lot of the antisocial behavior we see out of executives and politicians who have beaten the game of life. We structure the game to make "Sociopath" the character class most likely to reach level 99 and win the game, and then we wonder why there are so many sociopaths using game-winning wealth to grief everyone else.
$1B is pretty pricey for being labeled a champion of free speech for a second. He could've gone on Fox and said something controversial and gotten just as much mileage. I'm tempted to believe he actually thought he could turn Twitter around, and then realized it was a fool's errand.
It's not just $1B, he can't back out of the full $40B deal or whatever it was except for a few very special corner cases, and only in those corner cases does he pay just $1B, as far as I understand.
Probably the number of traditional sheep pickup buyers who will buy it will be very low. But the non traditional ones.. it won’t be demand constrained.
> Electric cars are seen as a “left wing thing” now they won’t be.
You'd have to live very far away from any so-called "conservative car types" to believe this.
Currently, the conservative base is much more prone to thinking that electric cars are going to be _forced_ on them by a cabal who want to erase fossil fuels use from the earth.
Not saying they're correct, but your theory is just as baseless as theirs is.
And maybe the pro-oil and anti-green conservatives will now hate electric cars a bit less because Elon is one of them. Benefits Tesla and benefits Musk.
You don’t have to try and spend billions of dollars to become a fan of conservatives. All you have to do is publicly push back against leftist views. That’s all it takes to be conservative in our culture. In a Political
Science lens, Conservatives aren’t some homogeneous group who share the same politics. They are anyone who opposes the left. It’s a broad spectrum.
Musk is not fully trusted by either side. He says a lot of things that traditional conservatives (especially those who don’t buy into climate change) oppose.
The left ideology is the dominant force in pop culture, and those views are in vogue. He’s speaking out against some of those things and that’s getting him a lot of attention.
Doh! Forgot about that. In Australia foreign born citizens of Australia can stand for parliament (and hence qualify to be PM) as long as they’ve renounced any other citizenship (or right to another citizenship).
When Schwarzenegger was governor, many people said he would likely make a serious run for president if he was a natural born citizen. It was mostly used as a statement by people about what a good job they thought he was doing and how they wished he could legally run, not a real desire to amend the law.
You misunderstood the parent comment. They were saying if the law changed then the US presidential election (or frontrunners if they compete in the primaries) would be Arnold vs Elon.
Meanwhile, Elon could not run against Arnold for governor of California: Elon is not a citizen of California and Arnold has been disqualified from running again since 2011 due to term limits.
All US states have citizenship. It cannot be denied to any US citizen. Basically, it determines which state you get to vote in and what state you primarily owe income taxes on. In California it's automatic if you are a US citizen who primarily lives there for 3 months with no clear indicator you plan to move on. The process is similar, but the amount of time is variable, between the states.
It can get tricky and people (or states) can argue/sue about it because it can make a big difference in taxes. Elon became a citizen of Texas before he made all the money that resulted in his 11 billion dollar federal tax bill last year and in doing so probably saved himself 5 to 7 billion dollars that otherwise would have gone to California.
He could have done this with any number of pretenses that didn't require signing a binding legal agreement to buy Twitter.
Generally, this is far too complicated and involved to be any kind of effective scheme. He has professional managers and lawyers who could have easily come up with dozens of ways to sell tsla stock without this public legal morass.
The situation most likely is as it seems: He wanted to buy twitter for personal reasons and is in the process of doing so.
Could it be that he actually wanted to buy Twitter at a discount, but mis-calculated how much TSLA stock would drop? Maybe it was attractive at 10-20% of his net worth, but the price got too high.
This is my thinking, he didn’t anticipate the market would tank as bad as it did and now the math on the deal isn’t what it was before all the multiple compression both for Tesla and Twitter. People saying he wasn’t serious about it from the start are off the mark.
Exactly. Everyone is serious at one price and a tire kicker at another price.
Due to the market drop the dollar figure is now more expensive relatively speaking. I would not be surprised if some lawsuits fly back and forth and the deal winds up going through at a valuation that is similar in relative terms to the offer when it was made but different numerically.
I have no idea why Twitter would agree to that. It seems to me the more likely outcome is that Musk will use lawsuits as a disincentive to prevent Twitter from forcing him to go through with the deal, and he will back out at the cost of a massive penalty payment.
Both Twitter's value and the value of the stuff that underlies Musk's wealth has dropped.
So they could agree to a new lower price and Twitter shareholders would still make the same money relative to the recent value of the stock and Musk would take a similar ding relative to his net worth.
It's like if you agree with someone's heirs to buy something after the current owners croaks but the current owner takes long enough to croak that the market for that thing changes. The typical path forward is to re-adjust so the deal is just as fair for both parties as it used to be and get on with it. But because of the dollar figures involved here the parties will sue each other instead of exchanging emails/texts like normal people looking to buy and sell stuff do.
> So they could agree to a new lower price and Twitter shareholders would still make the same money relative to the recent value of the stock
What? So let's imagine I bought 10000 shares of TWTR in 2018 for $25. And now Musk wants to revise the offer down from 54.20 down to 34.20. Why should I accept a $200k smaller return, just to be more "fair to Elon" in terms of the effect on his net worth?
Or worse, what if I bought 10000 shares close to the peak? Why should I accept a $200k larger loss on the stock?
He made a contract to pay a certain price - it's in no way a wash to shareholders if he wants to pay less. He just made a bad deal. Nobody forced him to sign a contract to acquire Twitter at that price.
I am not a financial markets expert, but many who are seem to believe at least some of TSLA's drop is due to Elon's clowning around with Twitter. So it's a self inflicted wound (which he seems to be doing a lot of these days).
No, even then: You are still operating within the parameters of your contract with Amazon when you return something, the contract is not annulled, it is merely another clause in the same contract that gets triggered.
Consumer law gives you certain protection varying from place to place because it is impossible to verify what you buy online, but a bid on the stock of a public company is not an Amazon purchase and hence does not have the same kind of protections.
And in a way that is Elon's play: to claim that he put that bid in with important information being withheld by the company that would have had a material effect on the bid price. A reasonable person might take the position that Elon should have done his due diligence before making that bid.
I always love when these stunts are hitting reality, be that legal, regulation or physics. Because it always fun to watch them crumble. It just doesn't happen often enough, ignorance and endless (VC) money go a long in ignoring those limits without consequences.
Yes, that's a very good point. I once saw my little kingdom threatened by a funded start-up, fortunately they were really out of control and they didn't last long enough but in that time they burned through 30 million worth of funding and for a while it looked like we might lose the battle before they ran out of funding.
Situations like this are my main beef with VC funding, we reached a point where it is not the most innovative or the best idea / solution / business wins but the one that can burn through the most money.
WeWork failed at that, and even the slightest increase in intrest rates might doom thosr businesses. We will see so.
Good that you survived so, facing of against 30 million in funding isn't easy, regardless of how stupid that money is.
No, it definitely wasn't easy. What really helped is that we always remained financially very responsible during the whole run of that business, matching expenses to income with some room to build up a nest egg just in case. We weathered 3 major downturns including the .com bust which is one of the things I'm pretty proud of.
There are many places where the right to undo online purchasing contracts is not baked into the purchasing contracts, but based on the law of the land (e.g. Germany). U get the item, decide u don’t like, and undo the contract.
Speaking personally, for the last 3 months or so I've watched my retirement investments lose more than I made each month. I can't really pull out of the stock market unless I want to just eat a 9% inflationary loss. I suppose if I had the platform to talk one stock down to buy it while talking another up to sell it, I'd resort to games too.
Huh? I keep seeing people make this point, but the premise is defective. Investors clearly reacted negatively to Elon's Tesla stock sale, despite the Twitter 'excuse'. Furthermore, if Elon wanted to minimize Tesla sell pressure, his initial Twitter deal proposal wouldn't have been missing $21B of financing, which made investors think Elon would need to sell more stock in the future.
He could have justified the stock sale in plenty of other ways, including reallocating funds to his other companies, without forcing himself into a $44B deal.
And as much as he trash talks Warren Buffet, I think he was basically following his advice of “buy what you know.” He just got burned by amazingly bad market timing.
He obviously has insider knowledge of Tesla, a finger on the pulse of his market and saw warnings about world economic conditions. He predicted the stock was going to take a hit, probably needed some money for his other ventures and wanted to sell fewer shares at a higher price. That way he keeps more control of the company. Occam's razor says the simplest explanation is probably right.
What makes you think twitter shareholders would sell for less? If you made a 1B dollar investment in twitter ten years ago, what return would you look for? If you didn’t get it from the present offer what would you do? Would you lobby 5 other massive shareholders that twitter will be worth more in 6 years and there is no need to sell or would you sit on your hands and hope for the best?
TWTR stock has basically gone no where since the IPO in 2013. Look at the 10 year chart. It's in the same range as it was in late 2013, right after the IPO. (I am a Twitter stock holder.)
What stocks “do” on the stock market is not the subject. The subject is: what ROI do you expect as an investor? Not a short term speculator. But an an investor who allocated a portion of the portfolio to TWTR with a long term time horizon.
Repeated promises and claims which turn out false.
He is extremely arrogant and annoying. For example used "Pedo Guy" as insult at Twitter toward someone who committed crime of disagreeing with him, proceeded to claim that this does not mean "pedophile" in court.
And claimed that this person "married" 12 year old girl (actually, she was 32 years old).
Also, Musk has bunch of annoying fans.
(that is among some legitimate reasons, many hate him BECAUSE he is successful)
> dozen other things that will save humanity
That is really overstating it, and case of annoying fanboyism.
(personally I appreciate some achievements and see his role in that - without giving 100% credit to leader, confused why people praise some projects already, but see no reason to engage in fanboyism or Musk hate)
I didn’t know that at the time, as Elon had a better reputation then and I presumed that as a billionaire he would have access to interesting information. The fact that he was willing to double down on the claim suggested a source to his confidence.
Was that before or after he hired a PI to investigate said person to see if he could find any dirt to defame him further, after continuing to double down on the pedophile accusations, further calling him a child rapist, and marrying a 12 year old.
Throwing out grave insults because someone on the internet doesn't like your idea is a pretty good tell of the sort of character he is, even if it was 4 years ago.
Adding to the list of reasons to dislike him, there's him trying to get a lawyer who interviewed him for the SEC fired from his new unrelated job.
When asked when "full self-driving" would be available, he said
> 3 month maybe
THAT is an estimate, but then he continued
> 6 months definitely.
THAT is a promise.
It continues like that.
Also, as CEO of Tesla, and with his Twitter account listed as an official source of information, he cannot just willy-nilly make "estimates“ completely and utterly removed from reality. This is misleading investors and customers, for which he repeatedly got in trouble.
To put it politely the best possible interpretation of what you have said is that you are very confused and have poor reading comprehension, and because of this you are mistaken.
First, that is not at all what he was asked. The question is quoted right on the site you seem to think is so great.
Second, what he said did come true. The two levels of functionality did and do differ significantly, such as with summon and lane changes.
The other quotes on the site are even weaker sauce.
Not original commenter, but, so what if it's a while ago, from appearances it's not like his character has changed that much from being a major dickhead. He dismissed Covid as nothing because it would've been bad for his factories' output (he didn't say this but let's draw conclusions). Oh that's 2 years ago, also old news?
After he accused a random guy of being a pedophile because he saved a dozen kids, after he lied about making Tesla a private company, after he lied about Tesla accepting bitcoins as payment (just to speculate on BTC), it should be evident to everybody that Musk is not to be trusted. It wouldn’t surprise me if he pretended to buy Twitter to speculate on price changes with some weird derivatives.
In the US you only pay capital gains tax on stock when you sell.
So it can look like you made a big profit year after year if the stock you own goes up, and it looks like you didn’t pay any tax. But that money isn’t available to you until you sell, and that’s when the tax comes into effect.
This applies to everyone, and so it can look like a tax dodge, but it’s just the way things are accounted.
Actually, that stock appreciation value IS available to you. You can get a very low interest (sub 1%) loan using your stock as collateral. If you have enough stock (like the very wealthy), you can just keep doing this and paying off the interest with more loans.
Then, when you die, your estate can take advantage of the step up rule. Which means that instead of using the original value of the stock you bought as a basis to calculate your profits, the basis is "stepped up" to the value of your stock on the day you died. After which, your estate can sell the stock and pay no taxes and then pay off the loans you lived off of your whole life.
And that is exactly why companies with founders that own lots of shares are no longer paying out dividends and trying to make a profit. They simply put everything possible back into growing the stock price eternally. Because dividends are taxed. Stock appreciation, if you are rich enough, is not.
> Wow the one with the most money has to pay the most taxes? A wonder. Why is this the first time tho?
Because he didn't have money before; he had paper wealth. Some media pretends that they're the same to keep you clicking. Now he's sold, he pays tax on it, because he gained capital.
I dislike people who don't apply the same rules they apply to others to themselves such as Musk saying you have to be in the office 40+ hours per week when that isn't physically possible for him to do given how many companies he runs.
I also dislike those who get lots of help from others to become rich and powerful then use their power to stop others from getting the same help, which he has done.
HN users consider themselves consumers first and foremost. The investor, techno-utopian believer, fanboy of companies..they are all sides which are secondary to the consumer one . At least on HN.
Despite all the media frenzy and fanfare about mr.Musk, the American consumer received next to nothing from him in terms of quality of life. And it's not like he's a young crypto-bro still finding himself. Guy is 50, has been doing this for 30 years. When I say "doing this" I mean offloading overpriced equity onto bigger fools using lies, deception and cult of personality.
Teslas for example still account for less than 1% of total vehicles sold globally in FY21. And it has been a slow year...also mr. Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years now. Less than 1% in 20 years...it means that the consumer is getting nothing.
> Every single large car manufacturer was forced by Musk
Dude, business ain't politics.
You have to be the person signing off the quality of life if you want people to shake your hand and pat your shoulder.
Musk is signing off quality of life for essentially nobody (1% of total vehicles sold globally in FY21) and those who are on the receiving end, they already have plenty of quality of life given that Teslas are basically luxury vehicles.
Real quality of life for everybody is Microsoft being used everywhere ranging from Bel Air to subsaharan Africa, same for Google, Facebook, Amazon. Even financial companies, you can find an HSBC or a Barclays branch in Lagos or Accra or Abuja, just as you can find them in NYC or LA for God's sake.
Another type of quality of life is Pfizer/Moderna 4$ vaccine injected in the arms of everybody in the developed world within 24 months from the emergence of a new virus, and AstraZeneca 0.10$ vaccine taking care of the developing world and especially India when they were burning bodies in the streets.
> You seem to be very badly informed.
You seem very insulated in your bubble of wealth and internet echo-chambers. Numbers don't lie. Musk companies are defacto non-existent in the real world. They provide quality of life to essentially nobody, and in fact you basiclly don't see them anywhere outside of places where huge amount of wealth is concentrated.
Narrative and headlines is the only metric in which such companies dominate.
Because it’s in the interest of people who view themselves as aspiring elites to be anti-anti-establishment. Don’t let the term hacker fool you; it’s been culturally appropriated to mask the corporate ponzi scheme that is venture capitalism.
Musk knows Twitter has a lot of bots and that they're used for all sorts of purposes. Pro-Tesla bots have been around for over a decade. As is usual, he likes to control the narrative to only benefit whatever it is he's going on about at the moment.
He does not have enough money to fund the takeover. That's pretty obvious. If we would sell $42B worth of Tesla stock the stock would simply crash. There is no way for him to just get the money out of the markets, especially not right now when liquidity is already drying up.
He's going to end up having spent $1bn of his $140bn (in fees, if I understand it right) to have been a major news story for a few weeks. I could see that representing good value-for-money
I don't think Musk is exactly struggling to maintain a big media profile. This story might keep him in the headlines more but it's hardly making him look good. Rather I'd say it seriously damages his reputation as a serious player. He looks more interested in sounding off on twitter and messing around. Following this mess if he approached you with an offer to buy your business how seriously would you want to take him?
> if he approached you with an offer to buy your business how seriously would you want to take him
Not seriously, HOWEVER, I would now worry about him a lot more as a competitor or enemy as he's shown he's happy to blow what is -- to me -- an unthinkable amount of cash on whimsy and for the lulz.
He can't just choose to pay the $1bn to get out of it. It's basically a fine he'd have to pay if he is unable to complete the deal due to his financing falling through or a couple of other extremely unlikely things.
He is just trying to find a way to lower his offer because market conditions have changed that quickly and the original offer is a bad deal at this point.
This is all a side show and negotiation tactics. Really not bizarre at all. The original offer is at least 10 billion or so too much now.
It took less than two years for a Republican Congress to pass the 22nd amendment in 1947 from FDR's death. If the Republican's want Musk as a candidate they have time before 2024 if they immediately move to vote on the amendment and pass it to the states who will be holding legislative sessions next year.
I doubt it would happen, but I'm also not betting on it.
It wouldn't even be worth betting on because the odds of Republicans attempting to pass an amendment allowing foreign born citizens to be president is next to nil.
>On July 10, 2003, Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, took action against what he calls "an anachronism that is decidedly un-American." He introduced a bill that would allow a person who has been a U.S. citizen for 20 years and a resident for 14 years to run for president.
If you keep following that history, you will see how far the Republican party has strayed from the Republican party of 2003.
But I suppose if they were going to present a bill like that again today, the only possible circumstance I could imagine would be the same as in 2004, where a popular republican might want to run for president but isn't a natural born citizen. (this bill was introduced soon after Arnold Schwarzenegger won the governorship in CA.)
It's also just generally against Republican platform to suggest that the constitution is amendable and not some divine document we should chain ourselves to
There aren't any Republicans left, at least not in sufficient numbers to affect the course of events. There are only Trumpists. They could easily be persuaded to back such an amendment.
They may get the chance, too, if a few more state governorships end up in the GOP's hands.
Even after the drops in tech stocks, he has enough money to fund the takeover if he really wants it. Did he not even consider that possibility? Twitter having bots is not surprising to anyone even a tiny bit informed. Their public records and filings have this data. Did he not even read those?
The whole thing is just bizarre and stupid, yes.