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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

>> This looks more like a hobby to me than a business decision. Hobbies are fine as long as they don’t distract from the job

If he’s taking the company private the future of the company should be irrelevant to you right? The only thing that matters is whether or not you think the price is fair.

>> Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium.

He believes the potential is predicated on taking it private and clearing house. The IPO price also seems irrelevant. Whether or not you think Twitter can exceed that price again is relevant.

Given it was at ~$70 last year he seems to be coming in too low for me as I think Twitter can get back to that point relatively quickly.

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It’s possible that the OP holds stock for reasons beyond the financial investment, and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way.

Telling someone what criteria they should use to make their own decisions is quite arrogant, and out of line.

If you want to use the stock price as your sole metric for deciding on accepting an offer, that’s up to you.

OP mentioned being worried changes Musk implements would effect revenue opportunities. They also mentioned the offer was poor because it didn’t match up to the IPO price. I think my assumption that the OP cares about this as a financial investment is fair.

The real arrogant move is jumping into a conversation to tell someone they are arrogant without any evidence to back it up.

For starters, GP's comment is absolutely not out of line, as explained in their sibling comment to this.

Second, a large amount of your comment history is just telling people how "out of line" their comments are. There is a downvote button for that. Stop spamming it. It is you who is out of line.

Please read the HN rules, they’re not long.

The downvote button is for low quality comments, not for disagreement. If you had been here for any significant length of time, you would know that.

It’s also a bit ironic when you say “stop spamming” from a sock puppet account you created specifically to reply to my comment, but you probably already knew that when you did it.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did not accuse them of astroturfing, shilling, being a bot, brigading, or being a foreign agent.

I said they were a sock puppet account created three minutes before leaving their one and only comment as a reply to my own. These claims are verifiable, and their behavior lowers the standard of discourse in this forum.

Just because their account was created for this comment, does not mean the comment itself is worth disregarding. Throwaway accounts exist for many reasons.

You can address their point and move on. Leveling accusations unrelated to the point lowers the standard of discourse too.

edit: to add to this, the claim that this is a sockpuppet is not a verifiable claim.

> and wants to see Twitter add value to society in some way.

Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.

If you define it purely as "produce a product that people enjoy using or find useful", then sure, it adds value.

But at a higher level, asking if it's a net positive on society as a whole, and I'd say Twitter will never succeed at that. Social media has caused a breakdown in political discourse where people no longer seek to understand, but instead seek to "win", and Twitter's short message limit completely eliminated any possibility of actual conversations in favor of 140-character[0] zingers that are nothing more than ridiculous straw men. Nuance is a thing of the past.

[0] I know it's 280 now, but for the longest time it was 140, and I'm not sure the difference really matters. It's still incredibly limiting.

I’m not convinced Twitter changed political discourse. It just lowered the price of a microphone to a point that I can get public-transit levels of discourse without leaving my home.

> Define "add value", because otherwise I'm laughing hard at this notion.

I have a NLP/linguistics hobby,and Twitter has been a fantastic gold mine for generating corpora for "low-resource[1]" languages. No other social network is as open as Twitter is to scraping such information, and I have no confidence this will be the case if it's taken private to "unlock value". Hell, I even planned to use a Twitter bot to generate parallel corpora (for translations) since Twitter provides easy and free access to native speakers of almost every language that is currently spoken on this planet.

I'm just a filthy casual, I bet there are hundreds (or thousands) of PhDs and papers that would not have been possible without Twitter; I have no doubt that Twitter adds value to society by virtue of its breadth and openness. Sadly, Twitter is also is detrimental to society, by virtue of its breadth and openness; but I know which side is easier to monetized.

1. https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/62868/high-l...

I agree with you, certainly, but you must see that a shareholder could believe that Twitter has this potential under current management but wouldn't under Musk, or under a different management but still not with Musk. Whether they are mistaken can only be determined by playing out the future.

> If he’s taking the company private the future of the company should be irrelevant to you right? The only thing that matters is whether or not you think the price is fair.

The future of the company is relevant to you if you care about Twitter and it's impact on the world.

Even if you're a shareholder, you can care about more than just money. Shares represent more than money - they also represent power.

Shareholders have the power to decide whether the wealthiest person in the world should take unsolicited control over what's arguably the most powerful communication platform in the world.

I agree with you that $54 is too low. Basically I don’t think his pitch matches his offered price, and I think the explanation is that he is trying to buy a hobby on sale.

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