Hacker News Reader

Comment by BostonEnginerd | Hacker News Reader

I think this is very weak on content:

"As if this wasn’t enough, his recommendation led to a staggering 1,100% rise in Signal’s stocks. Many more are following suit and giving their goodwill to Signal."

Signal isn't a publicly traded company, they have no stock. I would expect that the author would have figured out that the stock which went up after Elon's tweet wasn't the Signal Foundation, but an unrelated company.

View on HN

Or even further, why is people so obsessed about what Elon Musk thinks in the first place? Ok, he likes memes, rockets, Signal and Dogecoin. Let him, not sure why people are even listening to him outside of his domains anyways. People are taking a tweet like "Use Signal" to mean "reportedly quite upset at Whatsapp’s new terms of services and privacy policies and had called all his followers to switch to Signal" which are two vastly different sentiments, but somehow people are all eating this up...

Money makes people go crazy, chapter 2137.

It’s a Wikipedia rehash hastily slapped together, as the stock bit shows.

Deeper topics like how the funds are managed, used and grown are nowhere.

Seriously, the whole article is about Signal being run by a non-profit. I don't think the rest of it was horrible but a mistake like this makes it feel like it was written time of the market reporting bots that write all of the useless articles on stock news.

It's funny, but have you ever checked what does "non-profit" company actually mean in the US? You would be surprised as it has nothing with an inability of gaining income. I don't remember that fact by heart, but it was something like - until a company doesn't spend more than 50% in total on wages or any benefits for internal team including founders and investors (like salary, bonuses, benefits all kind, dividends etc.) you can have any income and still be eligible for non-profit status.

Yeah there definitely feels like having a "maximum compensation" for any individual involved with a non-profit should be considered. Lots of horror stories around about people abusing the system. That being said I'm pretty sure things are ironclad that you cannot sell stock in a non-profit.

To be fair it's not all the time the case. The fact that company is not publicly trade doesn't stop people, random investors, business angels, VC and others buy and sell its shares openly with some extra corporate limitations. The difference is only with a company valuation cap and how it was set. I guess that current investors of a Foundation are well aware of a current valuation. At least, for the tax purposes. So probably the author meant that rise in such a valuation that was somehow estimated.

The stock run up was in an unrelated company called signal. People were confused.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com