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Comment by jeffwass | Hacker News Reader

The HN title is quite a misleading alteration of the actual title.

There's no mention that the startup "refused" the buyout, and it was unclear why the negotiations fell apart.

The actual article is simply titled "Tesla offered $325 million for Salton Sea startup".

And here's a quote from the article giving a different picture : "The person with knowledge of the negotiations told a slightly different story, saying Musk shut down all discussions after seeing the $2.5 billion valuation from Jefferies. According to that source, Musk abruptly ended all negotiations after reviewing the valuation, never giving Simbol the chance to present a counteroffer to his proposed $325 million purchase price."

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Definitely seems like there was some creative liberty in the submission title.

I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.

For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.

Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.

Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.

Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.

In the UK at least, under case law (Hyde v Wrench, 1840), if you give a counter offer it legally voids the original offer. So if you offer to buy something for £1m and the seller responds that they will sell it to you for £2m, the original £1m offer is legally terminated - so in the UK, legally speaking, this would count as a refusal.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how this translates over to US law, but I'd be interested to find out.

That's an interesting question about US case law, but my guess is that the negotiations had lots of clauses like "this supercedes any prior offer" and in this case things are a bit cut and dry, legally speaking. That's why we have lawyers, after all.

I remember learning that this was how things work in the US, too.

I'm not sure I understand this comment. If they wanted $2 billion for the company, doesn't it mean that they refused the $300 million offer? Sounds to me like they wanted at least a billion dollars for what was essentially an IP acquisition.

I think whoever did their valuation, highly overvalued them. There's no way it would be worth that much unless they already had their own lithium mine or something. It's almost like those Shark Tank entrepreneurs that come and say "but our startup could be worth 20x as much in 10 years..so that's that's our valuation".

They just had the company valued; they didn't ask for that sum. Musk saw the valuation and ended negotiations. So no $2B offer was tendered; no refusal occurred.

We've changed the title from "Palm Springs lithium mining company refused $300m buyout from Tesla,now bankrupt" back to that of the article.

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