Elon has decided not to join our board
twitter.com
twitter.com
1. Parag is covering his own ass and making clear that the initial announcement was always contingent on a few things and not a done deal.
2. He is heavily implying that being a fiduciary of the company and having to act in its best interests (including, I imagine, not randomly criticizing it in public or promising non-existent features) was the deal breaker for Elon.
Elon's lived in a fantasy land for years thanks to the Tesla board and investors letting him do whatever he wants.
I doubt that's his intention though.
I wonder what you've achieved in your life that makes you think you're in a position to say anything about that man
I have valid opinions about politicians too ;)
One can legitimately acknowledge the good and bad in a person.
[0] https://stratechery.com/2022/musk-declines-twitter-board-sea...
To my ear, the most simple reading is (1) the board seat came with conditions (2) Elon didn't accept them.
Twitter management undoubtedly has unresolved tensions, tense status quos, factions...
As always with online forums, anyone hitched to the "free speech absolutist" wagon loses eventually. That clears the way for the other camps to gain influence.
Elon's stock purchase has already upended truces, created a rally within previously defeated camps and a circling of wagons within previously superior camps. These are probably where the conditions came from.
Great drama.
Then iirc the SEC put a restriction where his tweets about his companies had to be like, nominally vetted by an officer of the company or something, I don't remember the details. Anyway he basically just refused, but also afaik hasn't tweeted concrete financial lies since then either.
Matt Levine has argued pretty convincingly that musk's highly visible online unpredictability is a net asset for tesla, but contingent on specific circumstances and still carrying risks. It's not surprising at all that other companies would find those circumstances don't apply to them or the risks aren't worth it.
1 basis point, or 0.01%
Can you ELI5 this metaphor for me? I know it's something about when the pope dies but my knowledge of Catholicism is very limited.
Twitter GC also probably hated the idea of Elon as a Director, but it's not their place to stop it. Most they can do is take a page from Tesla GC and quit.
For Twitter this is serious; Elon could destroy Twitter.
Sell it again, and create (or buy) an alternative.
Just like Trump he has a personal brand big enough to jumpstart a social network, and unlike Trump (it seems) he could probably build it.
That appears to be an embarrassing failure, tho. And Musk's personal brand is much smaller than Trump's.
The world is larger than just the USA. Elon has an international following that probably outsizes what's left of Trumps crazy republicans.
However it seems like the problem is scaling / delivering in a technical sense.
I find that incredible given the momentum he had just after election and the fact that the project was valued at 3 b usd via a spac.
Also, the fact that as far as I know Trump still hasn't posted anything there is a major unforced error. If nothing else it was a way to get a direct line to him post Twitter ban.
There's another flip-side to this which is particularly important towards the more extreme end of the right wing - some people want to go where their enemies are. That Twitter allows you to jump right into the middle of a discussion and directly engage with or antagonise those who you dislike is a big draw. For those into reactionary politics, being siloed away in a little safe zone with people who agree with them isn't particularly gratifying.
edit: I agree with your comment btw, I just wanted to add a little something to it :D
But, again, this makes a Musk-specific social network look even more dubious; Musk hasn't been banned, just... kinda snubbed, if you squint hard enough, but arguably not even that?, and there isn't really a Musk-focused ideology in the same way as there's a Trump one.
(Also, the timing was arguably particularly unfortunate, in that the Soviets also called their major internal propaganda organ 'Truth', and, well, Russia is on peoples' minds now. Though I'm not sure how obvious this parallel was to Trump enthusiasts; it jumped out at me, but I'm not sure how well-known Pravda is in the US).
Twitter is driven mostly by the media and regular personalities.
Trump brand is toxic, and so very few luminaries will contribute.
Combine that with the fact that unregulated speech online immediately results in people calling for some guy they don't like to be lynched, literally, and you have a problem.
Even Trump's allies are all on Twitter, because that's where the audience is.
If Trump were a sharing guy, he could have given America's right wing luminaries each a small stake in it, and required them to put >50% of their content there.
And then talked about it like it was 'free speech' but secretly just have slightly more lose moderators.
Paradoxically a 'free speech' platform that benefits Trump would come out of the anarcho-socialist types. A Pirate Bay type thing I think is more likely to find themselves overrun by unpleasant people, and then maybe get acquired by Trump or something.
[0] - sort of, I've seen stuff mocking the alt-right getting taken down which is pretty funny
[0] - https://i.insider.com/6171b3c713a46d0012b3c7c9 - it's from this article, in case that link is ethereal https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-media-company-p...
I'm under the impression that Elon Musk personal brand is orders of magnitude bigger than Trump, measuring them with how much market cap was generated by both of them.
And, FWIW, neither Yesla nor Space X were created with his “personal brand”—its the other way around. The personal brand is good for some crypto coin manipulation and maybe 5hat boring thing I haven’t heard of on a while.
Then the second paragraph says that Elon declined to join the board and they believe it was also for the best.
From this we can deduce that the destination of the "the best path forward" was for him to leave the board ("the best").
Seems he already knew that much at least
There is some kind of irony in a communication platform offering a presser that contains so little information and so many words...particularly as the platform limits the number of characters that users can communicate.
Really earning that $30m/year. I would fuck up an important press release for half that price.
The irony of them sharing it as an image!
Anyway; I am not an expert, but being on the board of director of a company come with specific responsibilities, like an obligation not to trash talk the company in public forums.
From an external point of view it looks like Elon might prefer the stick to the carrot in relation to changing how twitter works.
Both Elon and the CEO know this but the board all but must offer a seat to the biggest shareholder. So the best thing happened for everyone, Elon was blessed with acceptance and the board did not gain a member prone to PR chaos.
The way I understand it, they believed it was best for twitter (since as a fiduciary he would 'have to act in the interests of the company)
Both are completely valid and do not contradict one another. And it's quite normal and acceptable to change your mind after you get more information.
I think Foo is true. Let's see! I think Foo is not true after seeing new facts.
The second paragraph applied to the time after they performed the background check.
Uh, oh, Spaghetti-Os!
If he doesn’t want to, that is also best. Whatever he wants is best because he is the biggest shareholder.
Elon I would imagine is way too busy with his other concerns to be distracted by a social media company, even though at the moment it does seem to carry an oversized amount of influence.
And Elon's brand is probably too randomly 'firecracker' for a company that's probably already attracting scrutiny from governments across the world due to the above mentioned outsized influence it has on discourse and opinion.
Sounds like he has the best of both worlds holding the stocks and staying out of the board.
There are definitely accessibility issues with using images as a text medium, mainly that the poster has to be aware of the accessibility issues and specifically choose to alleviate them. But that was done here.
We are at the stage where business critical market moving press releases are now made on twitter as an image by twitter’s ceo because twitter won’t support longer text, two days after twitter deployed an major update to alt text [1] .
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/07/twitter-alt-text-badge-ima...
It‘s not a slur (yet)
No offence was intended though (;
- to "retweet" without notifying the person and being linked to as a "quote tweet" on the OP
- to share a post in a controversial context where many people are blocked by the tweeter in question (if you're blocked by someone, you can't read their tweets)
- to share a post you expect will be deleted shortly
- to screengrab a couple of posts that make up necessary context and wouldn't make sense if retweeted on their own
To your point about people using screenreaders etc, it seems to me that it would be fairly trivial (cputime aside) to OCR tweets and automatically apply alt-text, but instead they rely on the uploader to enter it manually.
It amuses me more than it should that the CEO of Twitter has posted an image of text (from the iOS Notes app?) to get around the Twitter character limit.
but then again, i wouldn't put it past elon to do all the things that the SEC explicitly tells people not to do.
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-ba...
Elon has always been in hot waters with the SEC and should have all the attorneys in the world making sure all Is are doted and Ts crossed. I'd think we're in a reverse Hanlon's razor situation: don't assume incompetence when it can readily be assumed to be malice.
If he wants to join the board he needed to have filed correctly disclosing his acquisition of the shares earlier. To do otherwise is illegal and the SEC will surely take legal action. Filing now can't make everything OK, Elon can't go back in time and retroactively disclose the purchase.
I don't know about the regulatory guidelines which would or would not have barred Elon from exercising any sort of control in the board, but my sources from Twitter are telling me that folks were not happy about the prospect of Elon wanting to change Twitter to be in his image and it's likely this that the higher-ups communicated to Musk and told him to please back away (hence the 'I believe this is for the best' affirmation line from Agrawal himself).
The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?
He's still the largest shareholder and he has a lot of soft power to sway opinions in the public sphere.
That is weird, trolling doesn't seem like Elon's thing at all.
As an actual troll he hasn't really done much but post tired memes until buying a large stake in Twitter. Time will tell whether he's actually going to do anything interesting with this stake but based on track record I'm going with no.
Most of what qualifies him as a troll could be gleaned from a ten minute crash course in /b.
Or is it about making the most people the angriest?
It's like arguing about whether McDonald's is good food.
Some people think that suggesting an Edit button is telling.
"Here is the only imaginable use of an edit button. You post a tweet saying “I love puppies” with a picture of a cute puppy. A thousand people retweet your tweet; a thousand more quote-tweet it with comments like “what a good boi!” A week later, you edit the tweet to say “I think the Nazis got a bad rap,” with a picture of Hitler. Years later, a professor is denied tenure because someone digs through her old tweets to find that she called Hitler “a good boi.” This is absolutely the only purpose for the edit button, and oh man does accomplished Twitter troll Elon Musk know that. "
(Matthew Levine last week)
Limit the time the tweet is editable, and postpone publishing tweets until that timer has run out.
Or show a history of what the post has looked like.
The latter... perhaps, I guess? But then why bother? Are people so desperate to keep their internet points proxies by retweets and likes that they can't fathom reposting if there was an egregious error?
To me the whole exercise is one of malicious populism. It's an idea that appears liberty-generating on the surface and is used to gather a mob but has no real utility.
Maybe he'll use his influence to replace the board with people who are less politically polarized. Maybe his new board will re-write the charter so he can eventually become CEO.
I don't think this game is over.
He also says in the previous paragraph that they [had?] believed that having Musk on the board would "be the best path forward." It's sort of a Rorschach test. You could divine either opinion you wanted from the post.
> Employees raged on internal message boards, expressing fears Musk will sabotage their culture and make it hard to do their jobs
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/07/musk-tw...
At least he made the effort to include accessible alt-text. (Interestingly, the accessible text differs *slightly* from the picture-of-text version -- different draft revisions? Even social media CEO's don't seem comfortable with this workflow).
edit: here's a diff with highlighting: https://i.imgur.com/R9wf2H5.png
I'm relying on Verge's transcription of the screenshoted text,
https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/10/23019802/elon-musk-not-jo...
I'm so sorry to continue: please introduce some padding while you're at it; the text being so close to the window borders in stock emacs is so offputting. Signed with love, a recent emacs convert.
edit: I see word-wrapping now, thanks!
Yeah, my emacs config is a work in progress.
And so it shall remain
Hahaha Sisyphus had a similar problem
What an interesting mistake. There must have been three or four messages. I wonder if the CEO acted alone or as a part of a team.
Talk about “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Whoops. Time to bow out.
(Thank you for pointing out the mistake so gracefully. Have a good night.)
One problem with Twitter’s alt text is that it’s too short. I copy paste HN comments into alt text, but am almost always met with an error. In that situation I just link to the original comment, but the CEO couldn’t do that here.
Assuming Musk did take over Twitter, he wouldn't need to be much of a distraction. He could dictate a few rules (don't moderate Twitter, don't ban anyone, etc.) and then leave the company to function as it did before.
I think what he doesn't realize is that reducing moderation on Twitter would lead to a death spiral. Humans would find it less useful, and bots would find it more useful. No one wants to be on a platform that is 99% bots posting inflammatory political content.
> Here we analyze 14 million messages spreading 400 thousand articles on Twitter during ten months in 2016 and 2017. We find evidence that social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading articles from low-credibility sources. Bots amplify such content in the early spreading moments, before an article goes viral.
I would also be interested in finding more studies that relate to what percentage of scientific research Americans thoughtlessly write off as "fiction" and the corresponding media diets.
- Inability to be replicated, not even in principle.
- Using definitions of "bot" that captures verified humans like e.g. the POTUS.
- Ignoring false positives in the data set or not even trying to measure them at all.
- Using opaque ML models trained off an irrelevant data set which (when measured by outsiders) have 50%+ FP rates.
- Logic errors and difficulty reasoning about causality.
- Mis-statements about what their own data actually shows.
- Refusal to acknowledge or address any of these problems.
There's a paper that thoroughly debunks this field here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
and it's also available in talk form here:
https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
and if you're in a hurry I summarized the paper here:
https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
NB: Some of my own meta-research into these papers is cited in their paper and talk.
Edit: I took a quick look at the paper you linked and it has many of the same problems. Amongst other things it explicitly classifies satire as "digital misinformation". One of the authors is Flammini who is well known for writing nonsensical pseudo-scientific papers in this space, in fact, he's mentioned in the talk linked above.
What evidence do you have that Twitter is lying about this? Why would they harm their brand by saying that they're infested with bot networks when they actually aren't?
1. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/exclusive-twitter-pul...
Many governments have been rolling out SSO for their suite of digital service applications, I can totally imagine an "internet passport" type situation in the future, where a government issued SSO authorization can be used by social media companies.
For the record, I'm wholeheartedly against that kind of thing, but it's hardly beyond the pale for the companies in question I think.
Facebook already does this with driver's licenses in the US in some cases.
That definition of free speech isn't even alien to the US. Corporations' freedom of speech in this country is protected even when it includes paying other people to speak.
My bet is that engagement is down with all the moderation. This is not an endorsement of Trump, just an acknowledgement of what made Twitter huge/powerful in the first place.
Not really. One of the hard things about changing the course of a company is that you actually need people to do the things you want them to do. That means actually being hands on and checking things are getting done. Otherwise people will nod and agree in meetings and then just carry on as they were before. This is especially hard if people are resistant to the changes you want to make.
Taking over and issuing commands doesn't work unless people have nowhere else to go. If Elon tried that at Twitter there would probably be an exodus of engineering and ops people.
Dorsey chose not to ban Trump, and then he did. That was a huge change for Twitter, and it didn't seem to rock the boat at the company at all.
Twitter also didn't ban politicians at all for a long time. That was another major policy change that Musk could simply revert back.
This is (probably) a good example of why it's hard. Dorsey understood that banning Trump would have been problematic, so he didn't. He, and probably others, worked to change the company internally to be somewhere where they could do that. Rather than do it and then deal with the fallout he worked to steer the company to be more open to being to be somewhere without Trump. Then he could ban Trump without the fallout.
That's how you change a company. Buying a big chunk of it and then issuing decrees about how it works now is much less likely to work. No doubt Elon understands that completely, and has no intention of doing it. He'll work to move Twitter in the direction he wants, maybe with the help of others, until he can then claim to have changed it overnight or something. He's not silly.
If Twitter started doing no (or very little) moderation it would suddenly be in conflict with many laws around the globe including the EU and the US.
That did fly a few years ago but I doubt it does today.
Other shareholders might not be to thrilled about them being banned
That's obviously true for authoritarian countries like China but even in "the West" there are competing definitions of what constitutes free speech.
If you want to operate in those countries (at scale) you need to localize your moderation policies and therefore "take a stance". Cost of doing business globally.
- banning
- shadow-banning
- deleting offensive messages
- detaching off-topic threads
The only difference with HN is that their rules are different. Everything else is very similar to Twitter.
Most platforms fail miserably at removing the former and just automate the latter. Twitter could spend a small fraction of their current moderation budget and still be in compliance with US law.
Of course Twitter is free to leave those markets at any time but I don't think other shareholders besides Musk would appreciate that.
Even in America, some brands were not that interested appearing next to fringe/extreme (though legal) content. And advertisers are the real customers of Twitter and all social media after all.
Nobody wants bots, but those are not the question in moderation discussions.
That's very telling, Parag implicitly admits major changes coming up. There is a theory on Twitter that Elon will attempt an outright takeover.
The general public would be better off if Tesla and/or SpaceX actually accomplished their stated goals. What they’ve done is great but they’re not done and need leadership.
Twitter would be way worse off if he turned it into Gab or 4chan with an edit button. Both their product and their financials.
Musk himself is turning into a cringy Twitter troll. If a friend of mine were acting like that I’d tell them to put the phone down and go for a walk. The less he thinks about Twitter the better.
Current evidence suggests Musk is both capable of building industry defining electric car and space tech companies and incapable of "fixing" his own tweets to the extent that they stop getting him into trouble and losing him board seats.
Did you mean an optimist?
Who decides?
Because Twitter's decorum's track record is better? You must have missed an episode or two.
a sizeable investor is no different than us in that they have no non-public info
If Twitter is afraid of Musk interfering with things as they are, the best possible way to get Musk to buy the company (with what would be pocket change for him) would be to ban him.
Musk one step ahead.
I also find quite amusing the fact that Twitter's original 140 character limitation stemmed from compatibility with SMS gateways.
That part of Twitter is now all but obsolete, I assume. But we're left in a regressed state where people still communicate long-form text as if going through SMS ("threads").
I would say one of the first changes would be to re-instate Trump, which would bring back a huge amount of free marketing.
Here is a single account that by far generated the most brand awareness of Twitter than anything else. "Twitter" was mentioned in every news outlet every single day. And it drove engagement from both sides.
I think a lot of people can see the liberal bias hurting the company and were waiting for something like this. Just look at how many people are coming out from the wood work talking about free speech.
The funny thing is that here is a platform where you can choose who you listen to and who you don't by following and blocking, contrasted to all other news outlets who give you no filtering options, and force you to literally switch off the service if you don't want to hear from someone.
It makes no sense for Twitter to need to ban people.
Sounds like Elon wants some more stock.
WSJ source about the 14.9%: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-to-name-elon-musk-to-it...
> Mr. Musk’s board term is set for two years. So long as he remains a director, he can’t own more than 14.9% of the company’s stock, according to a securities filing. While neither Twitter nor Mr. Musk would give a reason for the cap, that means that Mr. Musk, for now, is precluded from taking over the company outright.
We believed the best path forward was having Elon as a fiduciary of Twitter where he, like all board members, must act in the best interests of our company and our shareholders.
The fact that Elon would have had to act in the best interest of Twitter and not his own might have been the deal breaker.
OTOH, I was preparing myself to read that Elon has forced Twitter to enable Trump's account, given Elon's dislike for Biden and his earlier tweets about "free speech". Perhaps that was the deal breaker which made Elon decide to double down, increase his stake and do a hostile takeover and appoint him the CEO.
I guess Twitter is in for some real fun over the next few months..
But, if he acquires a controlling stake he can vote his own board and go that route. Either ways I don’t see this ending well for Twitter - though may not happen in time for the midterm elections. 2024, who knows..
Today - [image] 'In all fairness your honor, my client was in "goblin mode"' https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513244730720616448
Yesterday: "Everyone who signs up for Twitter Blue (ie pays $3/month) should get an authentication checkmark" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512946176244473863
[poll] "Delete the w in twitter?" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1513045405029711878
[poll] "Convert Twitter SF HQ to homeless shelter since no one shows up anyway" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512966135423066116
[retweet] "Most of these “top” accounts tweet rarely and post very little content.
Is Twitter dying?" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1512785529712123906
I really feel like he did not like the terms for joining the board (eg not freaking tweeting about Twitter) and cancelled last minute out of a tamper tantrum
This guy has done great things, but jesus christ is he immature
This seems to be the #1 complaint about him. Honestly, so what? Since when is Twitter serious business? To take it a step further... why does life have to always be serious business? There's plenty enough of that as it is.
I think it's telling that people are up in arms and furious that Elon Musk might... bring back a little free speech and equal moderation to Twitter? I mean the threat isn't that the left is going to be censored more, it's that the right will be censored less equivalent to how the left is currently "censored" there. And that's what people are scared of, evidently. Excellent ideas, apparently, require strict censorship and moderation to propagate.
One of the number one complaints about our last President was the same thing: "he's immature". So finally, we got a super mature President who's in office currently. Along with super high inflation, super high gas prices, supply chain issues, and a Putin who evidently thinks he can get away with anything now.
"Immature" isn't always a bad thing.
Since the day of IPO...
We are talking about relatively expensive publicly traded company here. There should be some level of moderation with those people who can actually control and affect such company. Sure if you don't own single share do whatever you want, but once you have certain threshold of ownership, I expect certain level of professionalism.
As for the president, you give that position way too much credit (or, inversely, blame). They have no authority or control over gas prices, supply chain issues, or autocrats invading other countries. They’re not God; they’re just doing a job described in Article II of the Constitution. Republican or Democrat; it doesn’t matter.
They may not have direct control... but nobody is arguing the President literally said "supply chain issues, start existing!" or failed to say "gas prices, you better not rise!" while waiving his finger.
Presidents absolutely have indirect control over all of those things though, and more.
You don’t have to answer this question, but it’s a really useful thought exercise. Leadership is much harder than people often realize.
His Twitter account is actually listed as a source of material information in a 2013 10-K Tesla SEC filing -- so his Twitter account in particular is serious business. He paid a $20m fine to the SEC for making a fake announcement in 2018 that he'd take Tesla private at $FUNNY_NUMBER[1] and has been sued by several people (including JP Morgan[2]) due to the associated losses of his fake announcement.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/divisions/enforce/claims/tesla.htm [2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/15/jpmorgan-sues-tesla-for-162-...
"he, like all board members, has to act in the best interests of the company and all our shareholders, was the best path forward."
Obviously Elon Musk continually openly criticizing Twitter, from the perspective of some of the board members, is not in the best interest of Twitter. He would have to join under some obligations that would prevent him from speaking openly about his criticisms, and he'd probably be kicked from the board at some future point. This is why they say it's in the best interest of Twitter that he doesn't join. Musk joining would only result in some kind of scandal months down the line.
Note that the message says that Musk is not joining the board, rather than he's leaving it.
If he never joined, then the 90-day restriction of not acquiring more than 14.9% of Twitter may not apply, which could mean that a fight for how Twitter is controlled might be imminent.
The only thing I can think of is a slower exchange, where trades happen on the order of days, or better yet weeks or months, where this sort of thing becomes a wash.
I have no interest investing in hype speculative bubbles, I'd rather place medium to long term bets on industry players. Or maybe the solution is just to stop reading the news?
When I was about 21, I opened my first trading account. On E*Trade. Early days for online trading. I spent a lot of time researching stocks, but I was just a kid and was pretty unhip to the many ways things could be manipulated. Thank God there wasn't WSB at that point. So one night I'm sitting at a restaurant bar, waiting for food, and these two stock brokers are sitting next to me talking about a series of trades they were planning on a penny stock, a startup drug company. Natch, I listened in and they noticed and were happy to share their inside info with me. "It's $0.10, just make sure you unload it at $0.50. No more than a week." Great. I went home, looked at this thing, and put in an order for about a third of my savings. It was an OTC stock. Three days later, it shot up to $0.60 and I tried to sell it. And........ nothing happened. E*Trade was a no go. Couldn't make them execute it on the phone. The stock started to spiral. Next day, no sale. No market maker. No one buying. Stock collapsed to $0.05. I called my dad and told him about this wild ride and all he said was, "you got hustled by those guys at the bar." And incredibly, that had never occurred to me.
Take that level of innocence, multiply by a few million young investors on social media who think Elon is Jesus, and, well, market manipulation can scale up exponentially.
Partly. Always be skeptical on what is reported on the news, especially the mainstream media. Twitter is just an echo chamber of brainless parrots manipulating users for their clicks who believe everything on the platform, even with a silly verified checkmark.
I appreciate you setting the right tone with "Enforcement is what discourages manipulation."
The big question now is whether "distractions ahead" should be read in the boring way - "We know have this nutty shareholder who is going to publicly threaten to replace our office with a homeless shelter if our employees don't spend more time in the office" or in the more interesting way - "Elon Musk isn't on the board because that limits what he can do with the stock and he's planning to either increase his stake, sell it off to someone, or to perform other shenanigans to pressure twitter"
Anyways, the move , whether Elon intended or not at any given time to join the board, turned out to be beneficial for both him (more so than for) & Twitter. I don't think it can affect him negatively in any way, he already has a de facto much higher base culturally speaking than the "Twitter" army.
One of the things I noticed was that there was no signature on the agreement page. They just text typed it in.
You spend lots of money and can freely vote to make yourself whatever you want or even appoint other directors. Why would Elon just agree to limiting himself for no reason? He's the owner not them. Elliot management owned less and got a better deal than they offered elon.
He clearly doesn't have anyone around him who has the balls to tell him no, and that's never a good thing.
Facebook especially is hiring Russians in Malta and other such places for content moderation. My lastest Facebook account was banned because pictures of Simo Häyhä and other such Russo-phobic content.
But actually he wasn't a co-founder. He simply bought shares of Tesla 1 year after it was founded.
This is the red flag, so he failed the background check.
True story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.#Founding_(2003%E2%...
Not necessarily. It's as equally likely that he does not have any clearances and could not pass a background check, either with the government or the kind that Twitter's regulatory compliance people want.
In the case of companies that do work with the Department of Defense, it is not unusual for managers to have people who work for them who hold clearances but the managers themselves don't. Where I work, we operate a medical clinic in a federal facility and some of our staff have access to federal employee patient data. As a result, some of our physicians and nursing staff have a clearance as does one of our practice managers and some of our technical staff, but no one else does.
Also, remember that Musk has publicly consumed drugs that are illegal at the federal level and had some very visible run-ins with the SEC. Some federal investigators and companies would not have a problem with that, others very much would.
> He most likely has an active TS clearance and works with ITAR.
it's very unlikely (though not impossible for Elon, I guess) that someone could retain a TS clearance after smoking weed in a highly publicized video.
Oh, I think Twitter has done enough to itself to damage the company/brand as it is. Most people in the real world think the site is an absolute joke.
Musk can only bring good things to Twitter, and as a result, the world. The era of corporate censorship (in favor of their favorite side, of course) may finally be coming to an end!
The uncertainty isn’t going away for the wonderful balanced people running Twitter /s
The past few weeks?
The dude accused a rescue operations leader of being a pedophile after the leader said Musk's stupid giant box wouldn't fit through the passages in the cave. The one where people were having to take off their diving gear and push it through ahead of them because the passages in the caves were so tight.
Then there was a the "fuck California health code, I'm going to keep cranking out cars, who cares if my employees get sick and spread covid" thing a year or so ago.
Then there was the model 3 production meeting where people quit on the spot, to his face, because they were tired of being shouted at.
Etc.
Every time people re-tell this story, it gets more and more ridiculous.
He wasn't a "rescue operations leader", he was a hobby diver living in the area and acted was an advisor to the actual rescue team.
What got Musk (and others) riled up was not him saying that it wouldn't work, it was him telling Musk "to shove the submarine up his ass" (exact wording "stick his submarine where it hurts") live on a CNN TV interview.
> Then there was a the "fuck California health code, I'm going to keep cranking out cars, who cares if my employees get sick and spread covid" thing a year or so ago.
Except he didn't in fact say anything like that. California had already allowed the factory to open. It was the local alameda county officials preventing him from opening the factory (and other nearby counties had already opened) because they were being slow at approving Tesla's paperwork for how they would operate under Covid. Also other automotive factories elsewhere in the country with even worse Covid were already in operation.
> Then there was the model 3 production meeting where people quit on the spot, to his face, because they were tired of being shouted at.
And that didn't happen.
Can you elaborate on this? People are quitting/getting fired all the time at Tesla yet they seem to be firing on all cylinders.
Other companies have successfully introduced homeless shelters into their office space; it's not necessarily a wild or bad idea. There's probably an important distinction to make here in that the trolly poll was (likely) disingenuous, which is the real issue wrt representing the company, rather than the contents itself.
What do the employees have to do with it? The company serves the shareholders, not employees.
He’s basically doing the same thing as a terrible poll on a newspaper website and we’re supposed to be respectful of that?
This was a response to Bezos's tweet. Thanks to that tweet I learned that Amazon is already doing this in Seattle.
Companies are beholden to shareholders, by law. Such is the way of public companies without founder super voting shares.
I mean they are good friends and cite each other as inspiration.
Also, he's too strong minded.
A recap of his ideas:
* A limited edit button. * Move it to a paid service * No ads to avoid corp pressure to censor voices.
My guess - he'd be in a conflicted position if he ever wanted to start / do his own social network. And these changes are WAY outside of the comfort zone of FTC etc.
The collateral would be a huge portion of his Tesla stock, enough that a crash in TSLA could put the whole loan at risk.
Also, Musk may be able to find some co-investors (fellow billionaires, private equity, etc) who believe that Twitter would do better with a Musk-selected executive leadership team than with its current one, and so would be willing to support Musk in taking control.
(b) A social network full of only Elon Musk fans (maybe call it Government-Subsidized Emerald Mine) would be a pretty thin slice of humanity.
That would likely take his time away from other things he cares more about, such as Tesla and SpaceX. Whereas buying up Twitter stock – even buying 100% and taking it over completely – doesn't take up much of his time at all. Even a board seat would have only been a modest time commitment, far less than starting a new social media company from scratch would be.
> And these changes are WAY outside of the comfort zone of FTC etc.
Why would those changes be outside the FTC's "comfort zone"?
FTC's chief concerns are (1) consumer protection, (2) antitrust/competition. I don't see how the changes you mention would impact either.
I am also confused. Perhaps foregoign Ad-tech revenue would be against the supposed fiduciary duty?
Otherwise, you can always make some stuff up about it being a long-term strategy. But, fundamentally, making a bad call isn't a violation of fiduciary duty (unless there's documents saying you know it will tank beforehand and you do it anyway).
I'm not sure how the FTC would be involved here. My understanding is that the exchange between twitter and most of its users doesn't rise to the legal designation of "trade" (excluding twitter blue users, of course), unless the OP meant the FTC would get involved between Twitter and their advertisers.
What did he Invest in something/Tweet/Violate FTC/Profit from?
If you're referring to Tesla, you missed the part where he: Lead the delivery of a ridiculous amount of value to the company unrelated to any tweets.
Dogecoin and Bitcoin.
He pumped and dumped the former pretty directly. He pumped and dumped Bitcoin by saying that Tesla would start to accept it as payment, and then he said that the price was too volatile and they wouldn't actually do that anymore.
He pumped and dumped Bitcoin again later, but I forget the circumstances.
Did Elon profit from that? i.e. He bought at the bottom and sold at the top? Or did he lose along with everyone else in the "dump" phase?
Bitcoin: You don't have to trust anyone... except Elon.
That same quarter, Tesla reported almost $500 million in realized capital gains on BTC.
And Elon owns Tesla stock.
The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.
He lost $20 million personally for that. Also isn't he suing the SEC over that, claiming he did have funding secured, and claiming he only settled because he was worried about the court cases given he wanted to raise more money?
SEC regulation, not FTC.
It’s not just the hours of interviews but also the ability to see how his actions play out over time.
This is why I can state confidently that he doesn’t give a rats ass about money or profit (other than using that wealth towards making humanity multi-planetary species). If you feel that is a greedy goal, than so be it, but he is not interested in money for himself
Is that why he keeps lying on Twitter that SEC has had to go after him?
Maybe we’re a bit biased about Elon.
I would give you two pieces of advice.
The first is traditional investing wisdom: buy on rumors, sell on news. Why sell on news? To make money from people who did what you did. Once you hear about some news, it's almost always too late to make money on it.
The second piece of advice is not to trade on anything Elon Musk says or does.
Buy the rumour, sell the news. The time to 'buy' was two months ago. [0]
I am not trying to make a joke or seem edgy. Literally, what group of people is actually impacted by this by first or second order effects of…whatever the hell this story entails?
In other words, this is on the front page of hacker news. Why?!
I hate narcissists grabbing established tech for their own gain.
2. Musk being on the board or not, and his actions re. Twitter in general, will have consequences, especially given that he has unlimited money.
3. Up until recently, the liberal-left was cheering for tech platforms exercising their sovereignty and censoring power: “if you don’t like it, build your own Twitter”. They’re having to eat crow. This has major implications for the future of the political debate on regulations/anti-trust etc.
In the way the village cock fight was. Twitter is a convenient source of quotes for journalists. Beyond that it’s totally opt in.
Can you clarify why you think so? I think even of the small fraction of Americans that use it, most have no reach.
Twitter employees.
Twitter investors.
Twitter board members.
Elon fans.
Lots of people. Weird question. If you don't care, move on.
Edit: disregard all of that. He's South African, he couldn't run. Whew!
-Matt Levine
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
Elizabeth Holmes, Travis Kalanick
Not sure who else.
And let's be honest: if the world's richest man had dirt in his past that a mere "background check" would turn up, we'd clearly already know about it.
"And let's be honest: if the world's richest man had dirt in his past that a mere "background check" would turn up, we'd clearly already know about it. "
Exactly. I just find it laudable there's an established process to bring someone on the board and it involves a background check!
1. 10% is not enough to force the CEO to force the developers to implement obviously bad functionality. An edit button is a sensible thing, a button to delete the tweets of other people is obviously a bad thing. They aren't going to drop the 'w' from Twitter just because he says so. Get a grip on reality.
2. The suggestion of an edit button is a good idea, we're human and we make mistakes. The suggestion to put homeless people in Twitter's HQ is clearly a joke. Look at his other polls for context.
3. Elon Musk I believe could be fairly described as leaning right, in which case could really help to un-bias Twitter's heavily left demographic. This could be beneficial, i.e. bring back diversity of thought and opinion. Twitter is geared towards hot-takes, but that doesn't mean some important an interesting public debates don't happen in a handful of characters.
4. Twitter itself is somewhat irrelevant as a platform and its value is overstated, companies should stop using it to field product complaints and politicians should stop using it to engage voters. Most of your customer base are not there. If you're browsing it every day, you are in a _very_ small minority bubble. It doesn't represent the opinions or diversity of the world. Most Twitter users are American, young-ish and left leaning.
I love Elon. But he bought without activist intent, did a Twitter poll, accepted a Board seat, spoke—apparently for the first time in this sequence—to a lawyer, and then walked back. This is not how competent companies or civilisations are run.
Many of us don't watch it (I don't). Many that do don't really believe it... but we all know people who believe it and/or people who waste their time being mad about people who believe it. :P
https://www.newsweek.com/conservatives-elon-musk-reinstate-d...
How much does Dorsey still have?
If you're looking for a ship to jump to, this is the best ecosystem to empower. Twitter Employees, keep this thought in the back of your heads please.
> [Face with Hand Over Mouth emoji]
Elon will join our board
Elon will not join our board (You are here)
Elon appoints Donald Trump to the Twitter board.
You have no idea how much I hate this corporate speech of fried air and buttlickers
That being said, I agree, if only because it makes for boring reading and comes off as disingenuous.
Someone probably sat him down and explained that he doesn't hold a majority of voting shares at Twitter, and that the company and other investors wouldn't put up with his shit. With a 75% majority, the other shareholders could vote to nullify his shares and make them worthless.
This is unbelievable. Can you share a credible source?
:shockedpicachu: when Americans find out that corporate governance isn’t nearly as restrictive as democracy.
Even in facebooks case before they went public, they were sued for this and ultimately settled for $5.5 billion.
It would also probably mean Twitter shares crashing to 0 in the public markets, not exactly in the interest of the 75%
It's as if CEOs are dragged into a fiduciary court and forced to justify raising salaries, lowering prices or whatnot.
Irl, fiduciary duty is more about not stealing or cheating shareholders. There isn't a whole lot of legal activity where officers are sued for grey area fiduciary violations.
Musk could never put someone elses interests ahead of his own. Impossible.
Look at actual example/precedents of fiduciary duty vuilatuons. The real ones. Not the pseudo-legal theory.
The SEC would be extremely interested in such an attempt.
Twitter’s relatively new chief executive officer, Parag Agrawal: Welcome, Mr. Musk. We’re so glad that you are our biggest shareholder. We have prepared a presentation showing how we are executing on our strategy of being more technically nimble, building new products and growing revenue and active users. Here on slide 1 you can see—
Elon Musk: Make the font bigger when I tweet.
Agrawal: What?
Musk: I am your biggest shareholder, I want the font on my tweets to be bigger than the font on everyone else’s tweets.
Agrawal: That’s not really how we—
Musk: And I want 290 characters. Again, just for me.
Agrawal: …
Musk: And it should play a little sound when I tweet so everyone knows.
Agrawal: I just feel like we want to make a good product for all of our millions of users? I feel like that is going to improve profitability in the long run and, as our largest shareholder, you in particular stand to benefit from—
Musk: Oh I don’t care even a little bit about that, if your stock doubles that is rounding error on my net worth, I just love tweeting and want to meddle a bit to optimize it for my personal needs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-04/elon-m...
Wow. What a paragraph.
> I think in general if you went to a securities lawyer and said “I am going to buy 9% of a public company and then make public statements about how it should change its business, should I file a 13D or 13G,” the lawyer would say “hmm that sounds like activism, which is traditionally on 13D.” (Not legal advice!) But if you are Elon Musk you do not accept that sort of fuzzy reasoning.
Rules for thee, but definitely not Elon.