I'm 100% on Elon's side here. He should be allowed to kick the tires. I've been in an organization which went through something similar twice, in both cases, based on material misrepresentations.
In the first case, two organizations who should have known better invested tens of millions of dollars, with one effectively defrauding the other. In another case, a $3.5B organization bought an $800M organization, and the combined entity was worth less than $800M within a year.
Serious, when spending tens or hundreds of millions, do your due diligence. People and organizations lie all the time.
I'd be against Elon if he backed out of the transaction based on a material change. Failure to provide data? He's being perfectly reasonable.
This is wrong and if it's the same idea floating around Twitter based on page 17 of the 13D, it's definitely wrong. People are misinterpreting a reference to no longer being subject to seller's due diligence because financing has been secured, i.e. the buyer is qualified.
Waiving due diligence is a crazy dumb decision. The one lesson in my career is always do due diligence, whether you're making a $40B transaction, or negotiating stock options with a startup. People cheat. A lot.
I agree. I don’t know what his motivations were or are. This whole thing about not accounts is even more ridiculous when you consider that Musk was tweeting about not accounts in January. Elon Musk knee bots were a problem before he made an aggressive acquisition maneuver, and knowingly waived his rights.
But people keep telling me this guy is a genius. I guess I’m not smart to understand his level of thinking.
I tend to look at track records. Jobs started Apple, Pixar, and came back to fix Apple 2.0.
That's three unicorn-grade successes. Within those, he had similar streams of successes, like OS-X and the iPhone.
That's genius.
Two footnotes:
- I'm not sure genius is a good reason to worship someone or treat them as a hero; it's to me, it's more about what you do with that genius. For example, Hitler was a genius speaker, and Stalin was a genius administrator. Many geniuses I've met are not-nice people.
- Jobs had one major failure: NeXT. NeXT was still pretty brilliant, even if it didn't do well in the market.
I'm 100% on Elon's side here. He should be allowed to kick the tires. I've been in an organization which went through something similar twice, in both cases, based on material misrepresentations.
In the first case, two organizations who should have known better invested tens of millions of dollars, with one effectively defrauding the other. In another case, a $3.5B organization bought an $800M organization, and the combined entity was worth less than $800M within a year.
Serious, when spending tens or hundreds of millions, do your due diligence. People and organizations lie all the time.
I'd be against Elon if he backed out of the transaction based on a material change. Failure to provide data? He's being perfectly reasonable.