Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Part of it is that Musk doesn't have $43B in cash, he'd have to raise it or borrow it. He's worth more than that but it isn't liquid; as an officer of Tesla there are some restrictions on when he can trade. Another part is that many doubt whether Musk is serious or if he is playing games again, like the last time "420" appeared in a financial announcement from him.
This is only true if the there is no uncertainty.
If you think the value without the takeover is $30, and it is trading at 48, and buyout is $54, that means the market thinks it 75% likely.
downside -$18, upside +$6 = 75% likely
In other words, the market is wildly optimistic.
Estimating probability from price action is something you can do, but not like you did it.
If a buyout is certain, then the demand for free money is 100%, and demand for a sure loser is 0% of potential buyers. Hence the share price would quickly converge to a buyout price in that situation.
Elon should really focus on his unfulfilled promises to folks he already took money from, not playing immature games to keep himself on the front page. I don't know what drugs he did with his ex-girlfriend, but they don't appear to have had a positive effect on his well being.
They are also assuming an existing shareholder would only do this if they believe the future private Twitter would be a more profitable endeavor for them, which Musk's comments really shouldn't inspire confidence in.
GP is implying that since Musk is relying on this in order to finance it since he doesn't have 43B in cash.
If this is a plausible scenario, and I don't know that it isn't, do you think it's what he means or is trying to express?
Because it seems to me that the way he says he'll keep the shareholders, it's intended to communicate to his countless groupies that they will somehow still be able to own Tesla in their Robinhood accounts. Which would be nonsense, right?
Currently, Twitter userbase is ripe for monetization.
Essentially, the holders believe that past performance is not reflective of possible future performance. The shorts and sellers and non buyers believe that us the case or that there are more efficient allocations of their money.
> Or Musk could borrow more against his Tesla stake. Tesla’s own policies prohibit Musk from borrowing more than 25% of the value of his shares, which is barely enough to buy Twitter, even ignoring the fact that he has already used at least some of that capacity. Of course he’s in charge of Tesla and its board is famously deferential to him, so I guess he could change those policies, but that still requires finding a bank to lend him $40 billion against his Tesla stake to finance this lark. Tesla’s stock has quadrupled since mid-2020; if it fell back to mid-2020 levels — say because its charismatic attention-seeking CEO found a new toy — then the loan would be underwater, and selling out of a gigantic Tesla margin loan does not seem like a lot of fun for a bank.
I'm sure he could manage to finance this just fine.
This is a lot of money, even for Musk.
I don't see this deal happening. He can't afford it (without exposing himself to unnecessary risk). If it does go through in the ways described here, he's an idiot ... and I don't believe that, despite my personal opinions about him.
This deal likely won't haooen, but due to the poison pill, not due to the risk.
But in any case, my point was merely exactly what I wrote: he does not need to raise anywhere near the full amount, because he can utilize the shares he buy as part of the collateral.
A lot of the stuff he claims that actually works has teams of people supporting him. Those weren’t one man efforts like this.
I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here.
I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation.
On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain.
He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain.
His 14 April announcement[2] of his offer to purchase Twitter was likely intended to boost the price further before the expected poison pill would justify him divesting everything as he stated he would do in the SEC filing[3], thus netting an even bigger gain.
It didn’t boost as he expected, but the value has remained higher than it started at. He will still make half a billion and his actions, this time, are hard to sue, since he did not lie on anything but intent, which is impossible to prove.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/04/twitter-shares-soar-more-tha...
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1514564966564651008
[3]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465...
You mean a $779m gain
These paper profits are hard for him to realise, since he has to sell 9.2% of Twitter's stock without the price falling. Given the current price depends on his claimed intent to takeover, the market will react swiftly to any evidence that he is in fact reducing his stake.
Does it? Others have argued there has been no effective "pricing in" of this "intent", due to...nobody thinking it'll happen.
I'm not sure what it is about some societies that like to make a single person out to be an idol. We see it in team sports, scientists who work in large teams, businesses where CEOs are deemed several thousand times more of a factor than other workers, medicine where doctors are placed on pedestals. I guess people like a hero, and the alternative explanation, that hundreds of hard working and bright people came together to make something happen, is less compelling.
This rings so true for Elon Musk fanboys. I also like the full quote, "Small minds talk about people. Average minds talk about events. Great minds talk about ideas."
Just look at his totally fully autonomous autopilot(TM), coming ~2014~ ~2016~ ~2017~ ~2018~ ~in 6 months~ any day now this time I swear.
What charade?
Also he often publicly thanks, congratulates and credits the Tesla and SpaceX teams. Here's a sample:
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40elonmusk%20%22team%22...
As you can see yourself, he's saying "great job team!" not "great job me!".
I just don't get all these olympic level contortions around denying the achievements of an immigrant who made good on the American dream, and has done more for climate change than literally anyone. This is to be celebrated and embraced!
Why does it matter where he came from?
I realize he’s white, so it doesn’t count, but it should.
You asked about things he had said/promoted, or something like that, which I listed in the first sentence of my response, care to respond to them?
Which is why so many people are threatened by Elon's success and project their own insecurity onto him. Unresolved personal insecurity and envy are a potent combination. I promise this is unhelpful and it's better to resolve one's own insecurity than to spend time projecting it.
Except it is known that he didn’t. There is no need to speculate on the facts.
Elon Musk is far more successful than anyone else who started with his financial resources. He has outperformed everyone in his wealth bracket. There’s no need to pretend he was abandoned by his family and came to the US destitute.
There are internet rumors vs what he, his mom and brother say about him showering at the YMCA and only being able to afford one computer when starting Zip2.
That's why I said "may have", because his mom and brother aren't non-bias sources, and nor are insecure people on the Internet who want to explain away why they have achieved little despite having relatively the same or more privilege. The latter project this discomfort the most aggressively.
https://www.investopedia.com.cach3.com/university/elon-musk-...
"After two years at Queen's University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub."
Realize that most people born to well off parents don't do shit. If insecurity needs an outlet, maybe redirect it to the rich kids of Instagram, not the guy who is helping solve climate change and get us back into space.
I was commenting on the appeal to the "American Dream(tm)".
Though if you want to follow it to the root if he was born black in the townships he likely would not have amounted to much, no matter how hard he worked it is unlikely he would have ever made it out of the country.
Nothing has changed. It is still as it has always been.
The US space program and the Moon landings can be traced directly back to Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun and his work at Peenemünde, utilizing slave labor to build rockets for Nazi Germany.
"More people died building the V-2 rockets than were killed by it as a weapon"
The course of history was shaped by Von Braun being terrified of the Soviets and choosing to surrender to Americans.
Some people see this sort of historical note as extremely relevant to everything today, and some don't. I see nobody trying to bridge that gap.
The traditional american dream is about social upwards mobility from rags to riches, about a promise that all that is needed to become wealthy is hard work, determination, a bit of ingenuity and puritan virtues. In its classic version it often features an immigrant family who comes to america with nothing but worn out clothes, works hard jobs and long hours to create a livelihood, overcomes hardships and struggles so their kids can get an education and better jobs. It often also calls out oppression, poverty and war in the old world as reasons for migration and to further highlight the ideals of liberal society in america.
The modern version ignored the generational aspect and instead focused on individuals becoming millionaires. Entertainment loves extremes, the lower the start and higher the end, the better. The quicker the journey, the better. And this became accelerated to the absurd. Be poor, wash dishes, millionaire. Since this is so very unlikely, and real people who fit it, like Rockefeller, became so unpresentable, media turned more and more towards fictitious comedies. Yet this version is still very dominant in culture, because it calls out a truth: when asked what the american dream is, many will say it is about becoming very rich. That is, what the modern american dreams of.
Now in contemporary media we see a return to the original idea, but with twist lampshading its problems. Migration is no longer a central topic, america no longer the beacon of hope for the tired, poor, huddled masses. Instead we see a focus on the disenfranchised and marginalized within american society. The post-modern MTV generations version of the american dream is B-Rabbit living in a trailer park with his alcoholic mom, making it as a rapper despite his peers attacking him for having the wrong skin color. It plays the core straight about making it with hard work and being virtuous, but it doesn't only look at materialism and individualism, as it also expects society to hold its promise of being liberal. The postmodern loves to play with dualities and reversing structures.
Lastly the post-modern satire version instead picks up the part that got dropped, the dream of becoming very rich. It teasers a protagonist from an african minority and reveals a wealthy and well educated white man from south africa. It shows upwards social movement from upper class to ultra rich, subverting the idealistic to instead highlight the reality that those who start well have more opportunities to venture and do even better. It holds up "being born rich" like Diogenes holds a plucked chicken, and calls out "behold: the american dream"
Is that how some people conceive of the "American dream"? I don't know, but I think it's the easiest to find factual evidence of happening over a long period of time.
-- a idk probably 10th generation American living on the East Coast.
Neither your modest scenario nor becoming a millionaire are specific to the US. And neither can possibly happen for all Americans.
So if that's really what the American dream is defined as, I think it inherently defines the US as a failure.
What a sensationalist claim! What is the carbon offset of one rocket launch? If Elon stopped focusing on Mars, and instead bought every coal plant to then shutter and replace them (could be done for under 40b), then maybe. Until then, the few percentage of market share for EVs does not justify this claim. You also have to assume that every purchaser of a Tesla would have bought a gas car instead, which is seemingly not a safe assumption. So, citation needed! Maybe if elon purchased a train system and made public transit exceptional and widely used could a person start to make this claim. I thunk the sad reality is that elon is bored and us focused in sci fi that is more possible 500 to 100p years in the future (ie mars), at the expense of actually solving present day problems. Any regulation reducing coal emissions has an out-sized impact compared to a few percentage of emissions from non-commercial transport, the claim "more than anyone else" seems hyperbolic and just flat out wrong
1) It's not a Trumpian charade because many of the things he says actually work out. He'd already be done otherwise.
That's what makes it so interesting. I suggest he would buy Twitter if he could - and - he benefits from the free PR either way.
Yes, it's a bit cynical of him, but the PR is worth it, and, it's not like he's playing with election outcomes, or starting wars.
2) We know he's not 'doing it himself' and I suggest his Eng. knowledge is way overstated, at the same time he is very 'detail / hands on / insightful at that level' and with the big vision stuff he gets people motivated. I disagree with almost everything he says publicly and loathe is fanboys, but he still deserves enormous credit.
A few when ago when Microsoft announced it was buying LinkedIn, the shares were trading around $10-$15 less than the announced acquisition price for months. I wouldn't put too much weight into any sort of imputed probability from the price.
It's absolutely fair to impute a rough probability of deal closure from the stock price. The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.
Sometimes the market doesn't think a deal has a 100% chance of closing (like MSFT and LinkedIn) and it still closes. There were valid antitrust concerns circling that deal, e.g. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/298573-salesforce-rais...
> The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.
If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable.
Usually, these folks have better experience/skills/knowledge about M&A, antitrust, etc than the market average. In other words, the market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.
> If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable > The market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.
No, the market's implied probability could be right, on average, across all deals...and the top merger arb funds could absolutely still be profitable by selecting deals when they think the market is mispricing the probability (for the reasons you mention: better experience, knowledge, etc.)
It's like the sports betting market: you can roughly impute a team's win probability from the (opening) betting line...and even if that's right on average, the top gamblers are still profitable.
And, of course, sometimes things with a say, 40% chance of happening do happen...so that doesn't mean the market was "wrong" about the chance (i.e. your LinkedIn mispricing exmaple).
But sounds like we're in full agreement you can't look at the implied probability from the market price and draw some conclusion about it definitely happening, or definitely not happening (e.g. the market not taking it seriously).
Another point however, about the market voting that the Musk takeover won't happen - we can only speculate as to why they predict it won't happen.
It doesn't necessarily mean they think he can't line up the financing. It could just mean they don't think the board will accept his offer.
Again, you might be right that Twitter's price was over-inflated in 2021, but "it was worth more" is certainly a non-cultural/political reason to push back on the offer - even if they're wrong about Twitter's long-term value.
So why not take the offer (which is 20% higher than the current market price for the stock) and put the received cashed into other tech stocks? Is Twitter uniquely/excessively down compared to other tech stocks, and due for a bigger rebound?
The only way this makes sense is if there is a bigger offer incoming OR if the Twitter board has a plan to make twitter much more successful in the near term and succeeds at that plan.
Taxation is only a concern for folks who have big unrealized gains and lack harvestable unrealized losses.
At that point, they'll need a good lawyer to explain why Twitter chose to omit that information from their SEC filings.
If Twitter was worth more, it'd be worth more.
With that logic, you should put a huge chunk of your savings into Twitter to benefit from the insight, as it's currently trading at 39% below its 52-week high.
As legitimate as it is to believe that the stock price will never again reach $54.
Then it should be priced for discounted future cash flow and value.
The stock price today represents what investors think the future value might be. The speculation that the dip will bounce back is built into today's price.
The reduced price over the high represents the perceived risk that it won't return.
Musk values the stock higher than the mean investor.
If you bought a $100k home which then dipped to $80k during Covid, would you accept an unsolicited bid of $90k?
It's reasonable for some people to take the bid, since you could arguably buy another comparable house for $80k and pocket the $10k difference, but I think a lot of other people would reasonably choose not to.
(I'm not totally sure if this logic scales to board rooms / billions of dollars, but curious to hear thoughts.)
I own several stocks that have dropped in the last few months. If someone offered me a 20% premium to sell them today, I would do so in a heartbeat. I would even do so if it meant the company would go private and I couldn't buy that stock again.
I have not bought TWTR.
In that case I would be terrified as a board member, I've basically lost about $15bn of shareholder value for my shareholders.
> We are in a downturn affecting the entire tech industry Some companies are down more than others, and some are doing fine. Twitter revenue is largely driven by ads and they are likely also going to be hit by Apple's privacy changes like all other ad based businesses. Meta (Facebook) has already said they expect ~$10 billion revenue hit from the changes. It's feasible to think that Twitter revenue for the year may actually drop and the stock price may not recover to the 2021 levels any time soon.
That's cute but the past is gone. Twitter is clearly going downhill, both with their product and with their management (good thing they got rid of Dorsey, but perhaps that was too little too late), the stock just follows on that. If anything, people like Musk are the ones who still attract interest to the platform.
>Twitter can bring more value to shareholders with or without Elon
Twitter is on a very dangerous spot right now, their MAUs peaked long ago as young people go to other platforms, and overall, everyone is a bit of tired of the kind of discourse that predominates there, for instance, Trump was banned and I STILL find out everything about him because the people there (left and right-wing) are absolutely obsessed with him.
Honestly, Twitter is the one social media platform that I wouldn't really mind if it just disappeared. At least Facebook has some family members in there and some pictures from my earlier years. Twitter brings nothing of value to my life and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like that.
Trump is mainstream. MSM covers him, as do Reddit and Facebook posters.
This bear market is returning to reality and paying the price for those profits.
Wow, that's great news for Velodyne Lidar -- currently trading around $2 and was $28 less than 2 years ago. (Why bother with paltry 2x return on Twitter when you could get a 14x return?)
As an outsider, I'm personally intrigued by the prospect. There are two things he's mentioned that I think could be very beneficial (outside of freedom of expression) to society:
1. Transparency - open sourced algorithms for what shows when and transparency about moderation decisions
2. Reduced short-term financial incentives - Given it'd be bank-rolled by someone with a lot of money and private, they wouldn't need to play the gray area game of increasing advertising & data sharing that other sites do.
The issue is that managerial class of America, both in private and public sector, are in bed with each other. The government cannot suppress free speech using the frontdoor, but these social media companies (Meta, Twitter) as well as Big Tech machinery (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon) act as a proxy for supressing political speech through opaque algorithms and straight up censorship.
We, liberals, used to be exceptionally devoted to free speech. Just look up ACLU's cases from the 90's and prior. We were against the establishment. Against the managerial class crushing labor. Against the fucking 3 letter agencies.
Now, my own party wants to turn America into an authoritarian censorship dystopia. It's hard to stand by that.
You could start by lobbying to force tech companies over a certain size to disclose reasons for users or content being removed from the platform. The legislation would have to have teeth, naturally.
Btw, I've never seen my comment go from 6 votes to 0 in a matter of 30 mins. Insane.
Sad truth is, the moment an advocacy group and a political party become too close, the advocacy group ceases to be effective. This has nothing to do with Democrats in particular; cozying up to the Republicans is no different (e.g. the NRA).
I'm heartened by the emergence of organisations like FIRE that are picking up the baton for free speech in some of the contexts where the ACLU has completely dropped the ball, but still feel a pang of sadness at the hollowing out of the old, bad-ass ACLU.
> FIRE
What's going to be its immunity against the pests that took over ACLU/NRA?
The same happens with the other team.
It's disappointing but predictable.
> problem with Musk’s offer is that it is pretty low. Musk points out that $54.20 “represents a 54% premium” over where he started investing in Twitter, and a 38% premium over where the stock was before he announced his position. But Twitter was in the $60s in October, and a lot of its big long-term holders seem unlikely to be sellers at $54.20. “‘No board in America is going to take that number,’ said Jefferies analyst Brent Thill.”
Against the bid coming from him:
- He famously pretended he was going to take Tesla private and got in trouble because he was pretending. Takeover offers usually don’t have that history I guess.
- He doesn’t have financing, not even pretend financing like when he said he was going to take Tesla private
Power. One side wants to have a safe garden where all their thoughts are heard with the other side silenced.
You’re categorically changing the profile of the stock. This has a chilling effect on large investors, including but not limited just to Musk, right?
Vanguard, for example, has just had its range of further investment limited arbitrarily. Isn’t that bad for all stockholders, to know that large stakeholders will not drive the price up if they somehow gain substantial belief in the company?
The risk portfolio of Vanguard just went up considerably because in the case that they fully lose faith in the board, they no longer have the option of installing a friendly board, they must simply liquidate their holdings. This, in turn, makes them more skeptical of further smaller (non-takeover) investment because it’s more to liquidate and more risk.
Who does this benefit besides the board? I guess I understand that the board is not beholden to the interests of all shareholders equally, and I’m not suggesting that this doesn’t benefit some shareholders, but where does the line start?
One of my favorite books: "Small giants, companies that choose to be great instead of big"
Note that I'm all for companies having much more legal responsibility to other stakeholders, not just shareholders, but that is somewhat irrelevant for a discussion of whether the board could be successfully sued over adopting this decision.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-e...
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
For a real alternative to succeed, solid backers focused on dethroning tw are needed to inspire confidence and stability, then we all need to jump at about the same time to get the momentum going and bounce out of the twatterverse.
As it stands now, there is no real competition.
That's exactly the point - there is no reason to believe this would change if Musk created his own social network.
Most rejected the overall concept. The amt of users that stil want something similar but not Twitter AND who will be appeased by whatever alt Twitter is made is an even smaller number.
He wouldn't bother because it'd be a failure. Twitter's tech stack isn't worth 40 billion, Musk could clone twitter for less than $500m, but just having a platform doesn't accomplish much, the overwhelming majority of twitter users have no reason to leave twitter.
The world is littered with the expensive corpses of failed software.
Google's product lacked purpose. It died because of a lack of vision and leadership and product mistakes (real names).
It died prematurely. Google treated the product like a pilot a network threw on the first week of September. It had solid numbers and given time it could have found itself if it found a backer in leadership.
But if France put a bid on twitter, they would be forced to entertain the offer.
And existing investors all have the option to cash out today for just 17% less than Musk's final offer.
a: You're dreaming.
b: You're absolutely expecting a quick short-term gain.
To put this in perspective, 20x in 5 years is an 82% CAGR. And five years is far short of the length of an economic cycle. Traditionally, "long term investing" meant across at least one whole business cycle.
Vote with your dollars: buy shares at a price higher than Elon's. Borrow if you must. If you are not ready to take that risk, then maybe your expectations are more wishful thinking than anything real.
People with more complicated positions should consider covariance and factor in uncertainty. But if you’re a shareholder in a single stock and estimate that it’s overvalued by a significant margin, the rational choice is to sell your position, invest in a low risk, highly liquid asset, and rebuy.
The historical price is irrelevant as well. Looking at the historical price is the same sort of thinking that leads to "throwing good money after bad".
They do not have an offer that will maximize shareholder value - they have an offer that will increase it.
Words have meaning and concepts have definitions. They are not arbitrary of flexible for the sake of making the argument you want.
The BOD's responsibility is to the company, a public company's responsibility is to the shareholders - this difference matters.
Cornell's legal information institute provides a nice and cited set of definitions (albeit in legalese) - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
you have a company that is worth $1mil and we only imagine that it can be worth $100mil (based on the size of the market we are addressing). someone comes and offers $200mil but we know he will shut the company down (i.e. liquidate all its assets, or even simply the desire to destroy the company).
While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
so if Musk is willing to offer more than shareholders expect to see in the forseable future, why does it matter what will happen to the company after that? their interest in the company ends when their shares are purchased.
That is your assertion/opinion (yes, shared by many, sure). But it's not the only opinion in this case, and so I don't think the analogy holds.
Sure, I could see in the abstract times where an offer it just unavoidably good, and so it would not be in the best interest of shareholders to take it. But in this specific instance, there is a lot to be said on both sides of the offer (taking vs. rejecting it).
I would also argue that, depending on the purpose and goals of the company, knowing that a person intends to shut it down would be a reason to value existing (in order to continue carrying out their purpose) over money.
This isn't an argument for the poison pill clause, but is an answer to the following quoted question. It is funny to see this motivation of most existing shareholders ignored in order to bring into being analogous motivations of another. Especially when Musk's offer for Twitter has been in order to change it promote certain values, but conspicuously, better profits has not been one of those touted values.
> While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
I will sabotage my own argument somewhat though and say that I believe the economic motive dominates over time and is almost always (in macro and micro) the primary force.
It depends on what the interests of the shareholders actually is. Monetary only, or are there other considerations they care about?
I assume the boards of such companies have had private discussions with the majority shareholders to find out exactly what their priorities are, and then acted accordingly.
Is a board allowed to consider anything but?
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/comment/cw9t52d...
There's an easily searchable index of B-Corps: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp
It's moving there but I don't think it's there quite yet according to case law. The board motivations at present still have to tie back to maximizing value for shareholders.
I could offer them $150 a share tomorrow, contingent on financing and would get laughed out of the room.
My point is that the number on the offer is not an objective and singular measure of whether this is a good deal for Twitter. Who is making the offer clearly matters as well to how serious it is.
If the offer is rejected and Elon continues to attempt to gain control of the company, that would be an attempt at a hostile takeover.
A more typical way of doing this would be to make a proposal directly to the board first. The fact that Elon did it in public means he's trying to pressure the board (via the shareholders) into taking an action they wouldn't otherwise want to take which makes it hostile.
You could then try for a hostile takeover by buying up as much as you can on the open market and possibly to try to get one or two smaller shareholders to sell their shares to get you more than 51% (and in some cases more than 66% aka a supermajority) to be able to call the shots.
If you borrow from somewhere else it’s just a buyout.
>> A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loans, along with the assets of the acquiring company.
Note how the second sentence says that the assets of the purchased company can be part of the arrangement, but the “L” in LBO means the buyer’s borrowing, however they accomplish that.
The "poison pill" defense is very old. I'm not going to defend or attack it; it is what it is.
I WILL observe that, once a stock is "in play" it usually gets acquired, or at least gets a bunch of new board members.
But just offering a 50% premium might not be enough. They'll need to pay taxes on the realized gains and they'll need to find other places to put their money.
If Twitter isn’t a business to make money to them, what is it, and who is it for?
Perhaps the board believes the value of the shares over the next year or two is substantially higher than Musk's offer, such that they should reject the buyout so that shareholders can reap that gain.
A platform that makes money and has free speech would be wonderful. Maybe he can steal Rogan from Spotify too.
The speech is made in public and should be adjudicated in public. Today’s Twitter hides its moderation policies and decisions. Even though they are a private company (albeit publicly traded and the effective public square), this is wrong.
As a quick example, [1] lists some categories of tweets which they will delete. Twitter seems to have overreached with category 2:
> Claims that specific groups or people (or other demographically-identifiable identity) are more or less prone to be infected or to develop adverse symptoms on the basis of their membership in that group;
This is nonsense. Your risk increases with your age. Your risk increases with your BMI. Men are at higher risk than women. Those working in customer-facing roles are at higher risk than those who can work from home. Each of those statements are apparently banned on twitter.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misin...
The example that people use, would be any speech that legal within the US.
If it is illegal, then most anti-censorship advocates are still fine with it being banned. But generally speaking, the best case scenario for them would be all legal speech in the US.
Instead this is how I’d moderate twitter, when a court orders a tweet to be banned or a judge rules that a user should be banned that is when the moderation team would step in.
I’d also make it easier for people to filter content themselves. So if there’s POVs they don’t want to ever see they don’t have to see it.
Essentially this would reverse 99% of the mod teams decisions.
Take the case of Megan Murphy, a woman who is in a lawsuit against Twitter. Rules were added to Twitter that were used as a justification for her ban retroactively:
How many people were banned or blocked by Twitter for COVID misinformation, when it turned out that those spreading “misinformation” were actually the CDC, WHO, and government institutions, and when said institutions blatantly lied to the public about masking, vaccines, lab leak theory, and lockdowns, Twitter did absolutely nothing, except punish the people who criticized said institutions.
If one disagrees with liberal establishment rhetoric on gender issues, you also get banned very quickly. There are a bunch of these consensus political issues that are off limits for debate.
Just look at Facebook. It's widely seen as "boomer garbage" that's only used as a least-common-denominator resort for communication by the target group these days, and conspiracy crap groups and peddlers of propaganda are a huge part of the reason.
Platforms and societies that fail to maintain some basic social order all eventually disintegrate into chaos.
Like is this a we need a speech dictator even people I disagree with is better than chaos point of view?
Or is this a my point of view should be enforced on everyone and platforms should not be allowed to publish things I disagree with point of view?
If Trump was on the mod team of a platform, I simply wouldn't use that platform.
No one needs to use Twitter. Most people's life wouldn't change the slightest bit if Twitter disappeared tomorrow. There's no serious argument that the platform has a monopoly on anything.
The bulk of the holders of stock in most public companies are institutional investors that don't need to pay taxes on the realized gains.
The private analogy is a professional gambler. You don't pay taxes for winnings on each bet. You pay taxes on what you have cashed out at the end of the year.
Tax on individual sales is only a thing for individuals.
Elaborate
I don’t understand how any board can implement a “poison pill”, not just Twitter but Netflix and others, and not be found working against the interest of shareholders. Can anyone help me understand?Correct. Hence the term poison pill. Now nobody else will be interested in buying them either and Elon selling out will tank the stock. As a reminder their stock steadily dropped all the way to $14 after the initial IPO pop and they've been losing money since before Covid.
Woke means broke I guess. I think his plan B will be to start a competitor. I'm very tempted to heavily short as soon as he walks away definitively.
As to your question of, won't the other shareholders get mad at the board and potentially sue them - I think the board is drinking their own koolaid.
And they were profitable when you exclude their once off litigation expense.
Not sure about your definition of circling the drain but Twitter definitely isn't.
That sentence alone means you weren't even discussing this in good faith.
It's very well possible that the Twitter board believes that they can achieve higher value for the shareholders than what Elon offered. It's also very well possible that after talking to Elon through private conversations that you were not part of, they fundamentally disagree with his value and the direction he wants to take the company.
>I think his plan B will be to start a competitor.
Hey, maybe he would buy Parler, that would sure get him all the attention he desperately craves for. /s but maybe not.
Is that what good faith means now? Being religiously part of Camp A or B?
The balance sheet speaks for itself. Incidentally Parler or his potential Twitter clone will also end up a toxic internet community. Who cares? I personally wouldn't use either one.
Certainly with Twitter already doing a great job losing money and alienating most people (almost nobody actually tweets and usage is falling) an alternative would split the user base and accelerate their demise and the inane concept of web micro-forums being worth tens of billions of dollars. Companies will simply decide advertising on Parler/Twitter is not worth the hassle.
No. But you immediately made this into a Camp A vs. Camp B problem when in reality there could be a million different reasons for the Twitter board to not want to get acquired means you weren't trying to discuss this specific situation, you were looking to turn this into a debate on "wokeness". That's why I said you weren't discussing in good faith.
>The balance sheet speaks for itself.
Does it? Elon has seen the same balance sheet and he thinks the true value of the company is higher than what it is now as well. So obviously he thinks Twitter has the potential to achieve much higher value through implementing XYZ. The board agrees too but just disagree on what that XYZ is.
Up to you to take him at his word however he has stated otherwise.
"It's important to the function of democracy, it's important to the function of the united states as a free country and on many other countries and actually to help freedom in the world more broadly than the US.
You know I think this there's the risk, civilizational risk, uh is decreased if twitter, the more we can increase the trust of twitter as a public platform and so I do think this will be somewhat painful and I'm not sure that I will actually be able to to acquire it.
I mean I could technically afford it um what I'm saying is this is not a way to sort of make money you know..
It's just that I think, my strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization"
Jesus I know it's Friday but some of you guys start drinking early man.
Why out of everything that he could invest in would he bother with twitter specifically? Whatever his intentions are it seems plausible that this isn't about money.
I get that you don't like him but this attitude of "I am right, you are wrong, and if you disagree you are drunk" is.. not a good look.
It's very plausible that this isn't about money, and I never said it's about money. However it's far more plausible that this is about a narcissist buying media and social influence and he wants to be able to shape public discourse that paints him in a positive light. He really cares what people thinks of him.
All of that would seem far more likely (and suits his past track record) than him doing this to "save democracy".
> Elon has seen the same balance sheet and he thinks the true value of the company is higher than what it is now as well.
Also I'm pretty sure a narcissist is exactly the sort of person to genuinely think he is saving democracy by buying a website.
Do you know him personally? Are you a trained psychiatrist? Narcissistic personality disorder can be a serious affliction, tell him I hope he gets the help he needs and that I wish him the best.
I personally just want to know what will happen to the stock.
He is already an influencer and owning a social network where he gets to set his own rules would be the best way to ensure his influence increases further.
Free speech on social media is an oxymoron. SM is designed to give you power in proportion to the number of connections you hold. Its a popularity contest of twisted, faked, carefully crafted viral thought - most real, true and meaningful things get lost in the sea of professional influencers.
You will find more real free speech with a single visit of a subreddit than you will within a week of being on social media.
have you seen the matrix? they powered a cluster the size of the planet using humans for batteries! this is the same scale problem, that and pedophilia.
Yes, but one version of XYZ (the board's) has been tried while the other (Elon's) has not. Elon's plan might lead to even worse results than the board's, but he doesn't think it would, hence his optimism if they adopt his plan.
a) Revenue increased 37% y/y.
b) User count growing at 2% y/y.
c) Profit of $273m in 2021 when you exclude once-off litigation expense.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
The once-off litigation expense might soon be recuring in 2022, after this move. The former was a shareholder class action lawsuit, and the latter will most likely be the same.
So even if the lawsuit is recurring (neither of us know) they are still managing to reign in their losses.
By any definition the company is heading in the right direction.
(Sorry, unable to resist.)
>that my communication-medium
Twitter is first and foremost a publishing platform, you should not rely on it as a private communication medium. None of the chat apps I know censor stuff, so use them instead.
Use Twitter for public communication if you want, but since it's in the public domain you can't complain too much if there is content moderation.
Sure I can complain. When it's the defacto public forum any administrative conversation-tweaking is pure poison to our society.
And also, yes, there is an implicit promise that the conversation between you and me is not getting fucked with by an invisible rat in the middle. So when I smell one of those rats, heck yes I'll complain. That's objectively ratty.
The phone company does a pretty good job of it, and we have regulations that force them to be mostly "neutral".
Those regulations have worked out quite well. Perhaps it time to expand our existing, and working regulations to other platforms, given that they work so well on existing platforms.
The various messenger apps are closer analogs to phone companies and they have no or very light content moderation.
So they could be extended to other things, and the world would also not collapse if that happened.
Who would believe that? They’ve had years to prove it and as they stock market has doubled in value their stock has been cut in half.
Share holders should sue. It’s time to trick their world and either drive the stock price to a few bucks or force then board to do their fiduciary responsibility and sell the company.
It’s a great offer.
Their board can believe all they want. But they're failing, miserably. Elon isn't perfect, but at least he doesn't have a demonstrated history of driving his companies' value into the basement, like Twitter's leadership does. This move by their board serves no-one but them; it doesn't serve Twitter's users, it doesn't serve their customers (advertisers), it doesn't even serve the vast majority of shareholders (which will be evidenced by an unprecedented sell-off on Monday).
Goldman advised them to block the purchase, because $52/share was too high, while simultaneously holding a $30 sell benchmark on TWTR. Its not even ironic that this is where Twitter's stock is going; its what they predicted, and then caused. The idiots in the room are the Twitter board, who actually believed the advice was given in good faith.
How are SolarCity and Boring doing these days ?
Oh sh*t i don't follow him and didn't care about those votes ... should I write a bot to make my voice heard? Is that how it goes? (Or in other words: such a vote has no statistical significance aside from pleasing Musk's ego or whatever is driving him and his need for attention)
This makes me wary of your post. You could have easily fact checked this and you would have seen that this is incorrect. It's up 37% compared to the year before that. [0] I checked the last 3 years and the growth has been positive during all 3 years. [1]
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/reven...
Their stock price was over $70 in the trailing 12 months.
Even with Elon's offer they are still worth 10 NFL teams combined.
I can find zero credible evidence to support your position. Please short the stock :)
b) Twitter's stock price is now $45, peaked at $77 only last year and is profitable. Not sure where you get this ridiculous idea the company is unsellable.
c) There are plenty of free speech competitors to Twitter. None are even remotely successful. Because as Reddit also showed far more people want a moderated experience more than those that don't. And Twitter is a business first and foremost.
d) Musk is offering shareholders a premium as the stock is today. But as I mentioned even just last year it was significantly higher. And so I can't imagine shareholders would have an issue about them turning it down if they believed Twitter was still continuing to head in the right direction as it is now.
That's not the right way to think about it. Anything that scares off ambitious, optimistic activists from buying big stakes, will then suppress the stock value in general, which hurts all shareholders, including the smaller ones.
More broadly, going public is a tradeoff. You potentially give up control to outsiders, in return for greater share value (and the cash infusion). Moves like this go the opposite direction: decrease the potential for outside control, and with it, the upward pressure on the stock's value.
I hope it isnt: I think that starting a top down, meaning "look I built this, everyone move over from twitter", competitor has a very low probability of success, regardless of who starts it. There is too much of an attack surface, there will be too much drama on real Twitter about it, early adopters will be gun nuts or some other out group and that will be how they get characterized, etc etc.
The real chance at a competitor would be something that grew organically, that people wanted to move to because it offered something valuable before it reaches scale. This is how actual businesses start. The top down approach is how massive flops happen.
Incidentally, the same holds true for the Facebook metaverse and imo suggests it will certainly fail
I hold some shares of TWTR, and would continue. For the lulz.
There's too much drama on real twitter about it anyway. They might be stupid enough to ban him too soon, and if they keep on doing that nobody will want to use it. A lot of the top users haven't tweeted in over a year.
So let's say you put in a shareholder rights plan that allows all current shareholders to buy 10 new, discounted shares whenever a new shareholder reaches 20% ownership and for every share they buy from then on. That effectively dilutes that one owner without anyone else, and if they continue to buy it makes all the other shareholders much more money.
That's not always legal, but it would help the interests of shareholders.
Except the guy at 19.9% trying to move up. Considering he has already invested quite a lot of money on the company, shouldn't the board also work for him ?
Why should he be treated differently and his share give him different "rights" than others people share ?
So imagine a company taking $100 million in debt, giving all that out as a dividend then the stock price tanking through quick sales. Poison pill keeps the company going and avoids that fate.
Second, could Elon swoop in at that point?
Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.
Seriously, do you think funds playing with the kind of money to buy 15% of twitter often make careless purchases?
>Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.
Such an arrangement would make Elon the beneficial owner of your shares.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-28/barcla...
$15bn is tiny, presumably we’re talking about big ETFs like SPY here.
And anyway, you’re pretty much agreeing with me. It’s absolutely possible for a big fund to make a huge and hilariously stupid mistake, but this twitter poison pill does not meaningfully affect the chances of that happening.
In a world where you can shoot yourself in the foot in a million ways, it is utterly pointless to speculate about this one extraordinarily unlikely situation.
I think we're in agreement that this Twitter thing isn't worth the attention, but we are far from agreeing that large financial institutions are inherently competent because they're large.
There's a race condition between the poison pill being instated and the ETF updating their strategy. I wonder if a board could maliciously take advantage of that somehow.
I don’t see anyone making that argument.
Speculating on an ETF “accidentally” acquiring more than 15% of Twitter implies a whole different level of incompetence than a big ETF ever fucking up big.
- You
Thanks for explaining why that won't work.
Presumably, if Elon has a few rich friends, they could use their own money, vote as a block, and the board would still be screwed.
I wonder what other schemes would work. B corp, maybe?
But that’s just playing along with the spirit of the rules, not a loophole.
No, but an ETF has a defined investment strategy, and if enough money comes into the ETF, it could potentially trigger this.
The stated investment goal isn't "buy the S&P", it's "match the price of the S&P".
Such an agreement would be reached incredibly quickly, there would be no need for stopgap measures.
From the article:
> Under the new structure, if any person or group acquires beneficial ownership of at least 15% of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval
ETFs are a different concept, but a good index fund will be structured as an ETF, and it looks like this thread is using "ETF" to mean "index fund"? If so, then the answer to your question is an unambiguous yes.
For example in the case of SPY, that would go against their stated investment objective.
They also clearly state
> the Trust may fail to own certain Index Securities at any particular time, the Trust generally will be substantially invested in Index Securities
The poison pill just requires prior approval from the board, which they would happily grant in this kind of a case.
You might want to speak with a lawyer who is familiar with inchoate crime.
What you publicly proposed to Elon is a crime, since you intend to conceal beneficial ownership of shares.
Oh so Mr. Musk incidentally wired you billions of dollars before the share purchase?
(Assembly into blocs of financing, dpeech as the action of capital allocation)
Honestly I'd lose faith in the U.S. in it's entirety if it was the case that the answer to your question was even remotely "yes".
Keep in mind, I lump in people's behavior with normative restrictions of the First Amendment. If the Government can't do it, and the Government is us, we shouldn't be doing it. So businesses doing it because business doesn't hold for me either. Especially if it happens as a method of indirection to work around literal interpretation.
So if there is a restriction on shareholder coordination, I don't see how our legal system in this case can be taken seriously as anything but a tool utilized by those in positions of influence capable of more tightly coupling to other people of influence.
Saying “the government is the people” is much like saying “the shareholders are the managers of the company”: yes, that’s true in an oblique, ideal sense, but you’re going to run into trouble if you start trying to literally substitute the one for the other in random sentences.
If you admit that he is the beneficial owner and you are just an intermediary, then the poison pill provision is not skirted.
It's not a crime to publicly finance someone else's stock purchases, or even to publicly solicit others to finance your stock purchases (it's not "solicitation" in the inchoate sense, since the inducement is not towards a crime).
Not really.
Setting aside the other issues, first and foremost this is obviously a joke. Prosecution would have to establish mens rea for this to rise to a criminal act. Do you think anyone could prove true intent for these events to unfold, based on this comment?
Promising voting rights doesn't change beneficial ownership. Twitter would have precedent, however, to find "conscious parallelism" and thus "a de facto control bloc" between the commenter and Musk, and thus bundle them for purposes of the poison pill's activation [1].
Still, not a crime. Civil dispute under corporate law.
[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/unpacking-wolf-packs
The Yale Law article you cite is just about groups of investors working together, which is within their rights.
The fund needs to report their holdings. Not all companies have a poison pill provision. Not all companies that do have a poison pill will activate it. In the case of an ETF there's usually a discussion between the portfolio manager and the company. They know where they stand. Plus it's not really in a passive fund mandate to go activist.
the people who run the US/world who depend on censorship to maintain their power
Mechanically, it's not much different than an issue of new shares. From Twitter's announcement:
>> each right will entitle its holder [...] to purchase, at the then-current exercise price, additional shares of common stock having a then-current market value of twice the exercise price of the right.
There's no obvious breach of fiduciary duty through this plan. Existing (non-Musk) investors get new shares, but Twitter also raises capital at the current market price.
That opinion would also be consistent with how "fiduciary duty" is interpreted by US regulators: companies are not required to perform any particular action that might reasonably be in the interests of shareholders; they must merely show that the company's actions were intended to be in the best interests of the shareholders.
The stock is toast regardless after this.
If it goes private. As always, Matt Levine says it better than I can:
"...the financing seems to be made up of cobwebs and phlogiston. But also Musk has joked about taking companies private before, and he generally changes his mind a lot. (He agreed to join Twitter’s board last week! And then changed his mind four days later!) If you are a well-advised professional public company board, it is just catastrophic to imagine that you might say 'okay Elon $54.20 it is' and then he’d say 'ha no I was kidding, psych!' That would be crippling for a public company. Also that is basically what he did to Twitter’s board last weekend!"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-e...
No. If you’re at a table negotiating a break-up penalty, you’ve already crossed the Rubicon. You have indicated that the price was at the very least worth considering.
If that buyer then walks before agreeing to the break-up penalty, the damage has been done. Board seats have been lost for less.
So, it can go either way and can be argued either way.
People need to stop saying this. It's nonsense. Or maybe keep saying it so we know your clueless about how anything works that your commenting on
Why? (Honest question.)
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
> Unfortunately, Haplo has its limits. Since we try to pull every single Tweet ID in a conversation every time a conversation is loaded in real-time, this is potentially an unbounded amount of data. We’ve found that if our platform tries to load more than a certain number of entries from our cache at once, our cache request latency will spike, and we begin to time-out on a significant fraction of read requests. Because of this, there is a limit of thousands of Tweets per conversation tree in this cache.
even just showing an ad is a ton work has a bunch of services involved
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
Other stuff that I think explains the complexity
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
there's no single algorithm, its a bunch of parts coming together from hundreds of engineers and multiple services.
That... makes absolutely no sense. The interest of the current average shareholder ends when they sell their stock. There is no point in time at which both (1) the current average shareholder owns more than zero shares, and (2) Musk has a controlling interest. So it's impossible for those two things to conflict.
If you were a member of Twitters board, would it be in the interest of the current average shareholder to sell their shares at well above the market price?
That definitionally depends on whether you, as that hypothetical board member, believe that Twitter has the potential to reach a share price higher than $54.20 if it stays public.
Also, remember there is nothing that binds the board of a company to solely consider potential shareholder value in the actions they take. There's a widespread belief that "fiduciary duty" overrides all other concerns, but from a regulatory/legal standpoint, that's simply not so. The board obviously needs to take it into account, but if they believe a merger or takeover is not in the best interest of the company, they don't have to take it.
Don't like the bid, fine, say no -- but don't prevent your peers from selling out.
But all that is irrelevant because he wants to take the company private- no shareholders. The impact to shareholders is the massive bailout he would give them on their shares.
If they cared about shareholders best interests they would bring it to vote.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but even at the time, it seemed like the company was prioritizing long-term growth, whereas if they were taken over by Carl Icahn, they'd certainly not be.
As an individual and index shareholder I’d love for Musk to take it away at a premium, I have zero faith management will do anything positive.
This is to prevent say a majority shareholder and/or group of employees from raiding the business of its value.
So a case for a poison pill might be well made to prevent a person from taking a controlling stake to then expose the company’s IP (code base) because they have some agenda, or prevent them running the company into the ground by causing a flight of talent, or by breaking some success formula.
It sounds like your interpretation Vanguard's risk profile / likelihood and their interpretation differ. And given that I trust Vanguard's assessment.
Frankly, if I were an institutional investor, I'd probably prefer the poison pill than have Twitter become a toy subject to Elon Musk's random political fight.
Wasn't he all in on Doge coin, except he wasn't, and all in on bitcoin but then not fully, then some other random alt coin, oh and then he's back in on Doge again and how to improve it.
It sounds like sound fiduciary duty to not let your company be subject to those whims.
Or they could benefit because they believe the new owners would be bad for the business.
As I understand vanguards structure, they have no beneficial ownership of any company and therefore never trigger the poison pill.
> Who does this benefit besides the board?
This benefits anyone who is concerned that a rich person will buy 50%+1 of a company and use their equity to make decisions they are opposed to. Now if a rich person accumulate 20%, the other shareholders can dilute that rich person. That means the rich person has to convince other shareholders that decision is correct.
As a Twitter shareholder myself, the board is making a big mistake.
As a legal matter, I don't understand how a board could sell shares to other shareholders at a lower price than to the entity wanting to buy shares to gain control.
History should be a lesson here, it's almost Deja Vu with Twitter
Even if you think Twitter stock will go up 20% next year, you'd want to take this offer. If you think it will go up 50% next year, you might still take the offer because of the risk:reward ratio.
Technical Analysis is madness, but there is method to it.
https://www.upi.com/amp/Archives/1984/06/11/Walt-Disney-Prod...
Elon is arguing that Twitter is mismanaged. He already probably pushed them on the edit button, even though they claimed he didn't. If he's right — and Goldman Sachs seems to agree — he could have an easier go of it next year.
Anyone who thinks this is manifestly true should read this take from an ex-CEO of Reddit:
https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
tl;dr: managing human interaction in any environment with limited accountability is a lot harder than it looks
Also, there's the question of by what metrics one would argue it's mismanaged. Revenue and engagement trends? Profitability trends?
> It is because at Certain Times, given Certain Circumstances, humans will Behave Badly when confronted with Certain Ideas, and if you are The Main Platform Where That Idea is Being Discussed, you cannot do NOTHING, because otherwise humans will continue behaving badly.
To paraphrase: "Ideas are dangerous, people cannot be trusted to argue on the internet because it leads to violence, therefore people have to be censored, even if the things they're saying are true".
First, the idea that lab-leak theory was related to violence against East Asians is highly, highly dubious. Second, again and again, I see people arguing that we have to dispense with our ideals because they are Too Dangerous. At some point you have to realize that these people are just cowards.
We don’t have to dispense with the ideal. But that’s what it is, an ideal. We have to remain pragmatic.
More precisely: ideas are powerful, which means they can be dangerous.
Anyone who doesn't understand that is actually a deeper enemy of discourse than a platform owner who says their forum is not a venue for topic X or opinion Y.
Some stop here at a dichotomy: "you want to ban ideas, I will be oppressed!" or "I must literally be allowed to put my words in your speech vehicle and be given full access to its audience without any abrogation of that privilege or I am being oppressed!"
Others start to understand what the legal system has with both weapons and speech: perhaps there are some activities or forms it takes that need nuanced consideration. Time, place, manner, associated behavior, fire in a crowded theater, threats, etc. You will find these considerations where people actually take speech seriously.
> Ideas are dangerous, people cannot be trusted to argue on the internet because it leads to violence
You seem to be merely summarizing with scorn here rather than actually addressing the situations where this happens.
It's not hard to find stories where distorted worldviews oriented around agentive threats regarding the pandemic have led to people threatening and even assaulting health professionals. I know some of these people.
You probably know families or acquaintances that have banned certain topics from dinner gatherings because they lead to heated conversations or even violence. It's not that they believe no one should ever talk about them. It's that they understand what Wong is talking about here: there's problem behavior and carving out a domain where the related topic isn't carried is one way of fixing it.
And when it's your house that people are yelling or coming to blows at, I'll bet you try the same solution.
Arguing on "the internet" is a freedom that has never been threatened by limitation that Twitter and Reddit have put in place. What's at stake with Twitter and Reddit is what Wong describes well here: they're stewards of the platform where this is taking place, they get to see the effects. They feel an obligation to do something about it.
And you know what? Their right to do so as stewards of the platform is also a freedom of speech right. And it's every bit as important as an individual's right to spout off about whatever it is they want.
The freedoms to watch more strictly are those where the state or other entities impose violence or loss of physical freedom as a consequence for touching a topic. Twitter and Reddit battles are about people's sense of privilege.
This actually isn't hard. Ban racial slurs, "doxxing," calls to genocide, and low effort provocations. Don't ban ideas because you're convinced they are wrong or dangerous.
Hey everyone, look here! We have the answer to the thorny issue of what governs free speech in clear black and white. Twitter, facebook, reddit execs, take note!
But my rate is quite high.
Not what I said. If you care about speech, try to be careful about parsing, interpreting, and summarizing it. If something still doesn't make sense, try asking questions.
> More precisely: ideas are powerful, which means they can be dangerous.
> Anyone who doesn't understand that is actually a deeper enemy of discourse than a platform owner who says their forum is not a venue for topic X or opinion Y.
In order to have REAL FREE SPEECH (which you call DISCOURSE) we have to CENSOR BAD OPINIONS.
No. Stop playing whack-a-mole with "bad ideas". "X idea leads to Y bad thing" is almost always wrong, the world is chaotic, no one knows the result of a tweet, and people who claim to are just looking for excuse to shut down debates they're afraid to have.
news.ycombinator.com does this right -- moderators rarely moderate based on the message or idea in a post and their opinion about its truth-value. Rather, posts are moderated for being provocative, overly rude, including slurs, low effort, and so on.
Not all of those things deserve the same level of reaction, but they are a disservice to useful conversation and should be moderated/downvoted accordingly.
I agree that HN does it correctly, so I wonder where our disconnect is.
How about lies like the Earth revolves around the Sun?
Moderation's place is at the end agent. Period. I.e. it is the responsibility of people and end users to be aware of the actual physical world we share with others. To distort it is to do injustice to everyone.
I assure you. The poisoning of reality for "people's own good" leads to slippery slopes, and complete dysfunction and fraying around the edges which will always start targeted against undesirables, then be weaponized against everyone else by whomever happens to be in a position of power.
Either accept the world unfiltered, or don't try. Half efforts are doomed to abuse.
You added that part in yourself. You seem to be ignoring the concepts of disinformation, trolling, and bad faith actors.
I don't care about trolling, it's just a neologism for "making a joke" or "taking the piss". "Bad faith" and "disinformation" are words used by people who want to shut down certain debates.
> My most immediate takeaway from this novella of a thread is that Twitter is way overdue for long form tweets!
It also loses its luster on a bit of reflection -- this particular novella was in fact published on Twitter, and obviously got plenty of attention, including from Musk, so it's not exactly clear that Twitter's an unacceptable venue for novellas. Also, there's other long-form platforms that don't seem to have competed well with Twitter so far.
But maybe someone could pull off making such a thing work. Which is why personally what I'd like to see Musk do is take the assets he was going to use to purchase Twitter and build another platform, one with the features and values he's envisioning from the ground up. He might have the juice to pull it off, and it would help diversify the media landscape and discourse culture rather than just being a tug-of-war.
I think the fairer critique of modern Twitter is that it prioritizes the needs of media personalities and PR firms over ordinary users, not that it isn't "free" enough. I am blandly optimistic about the prospects of things being shaken up at Twitter, and for who Elon is, it could easily be someone much worse.
This sounds like an opportunity to diversify the media (and discourse) landscape with a different product.
The market has been so weird recently that stock splits - which according to previous theoretical belief do not create shareholder value - have in fact increased the share price for extended periods. So issuing stock for whatever reason (high price, poison pill) could be seen as shareholder maximizing.
One could say diluting the stock so that a particular personality cannot buy the whole company could be shareholder maximizing as it would entrench ESG held values -- emboldening new shareholders to purchase the stock (saving the stock price).
And point of information, by diluting rather than selling already owned shares, control is not ceded to the potential acquirer -- unless the potential acquirer doesn't care about the poison pill and will pay the premium for the new issue as well.
This is quite fun to watch.
Excellent source for financial news though, I agree!
You're right that theoretically, they shouldn't create value, but I think even back to the 80s and 90s it's been shown that companies that go through a split tend to out perform the market for years after the split. The main reason isn't that the split creates value, but rather that companies who go though a stock split are usually successful and already on a trajectory to beat the market, split or not.
That being said, holding before the announcement performed the best.
There's a bit of time travel / survivor bias with this one. A company that has not beaten the market is much less likely to split its stock. In other words, if I know nothing other than that a company is splitting its stock, I can reasonably guess that it's shown good returns in recent history.
Going back to the late 60s [1].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hemang-Desai-2/publicat...
From Twitter's 2021 10K:
"FY 2021 Highlights Total revenue was $5.08 billion, an increase of 37%, compared to 2020."
2021 net losses were $221M, which is a big improvement on $1.135B in 2020.
Honestly seems like things are really shaping up @ Twitter.
Elon always has bigger plans and ability to execute on them then people seem to acknowledge.
I don't find the assertion that billionaires inherently lack integrity a compelling argument. In the spirit of honest inquiry, do you know of any reason specific to Elon that I should not take him at his word?
There’s a pretty significant area of scholarly research in business and entrepreneurship that criticizes “mythicization” of successful individuals.
What those scholars argue, basically, is that media as well as business researchers take the words of successful people as inherently true and important. The result in, say research on entrepreneurs, is that what successful entrepreneurs think is meaningful is reported as de facto true and important. The critique is not of them saying it - it’s of others accepting it as valid based on the heuristic that successful people must be right. It’s a critique of the resulting research for not being objectively defensible, but instead just reinforcing societal norms as reality.
In my comment, my criticism isn’t of musk it’s of others. Believe me, musk, you, me, everyone tells stories about our selves and our beliefs from our own perspectives. It’s how other evaluate and use those stories as objective rather than subjective that can be problematic.
C.f,, the other comment replies I got
But it would certainly be interesting to watch.
Like all things, it depends how you count. The problem I see vis a vis Twitter is it's private company and a public utility at the same time.
Personally, I think Musk would run it more fairly.
how do you make a mockery of something whose only purpose is to manufacture consent for war profiteering?
Of course, some hide it more assiduously than others. I don't mind Musk boasting. He earned it. It's more refreshing than the fake modesty of others.
A CEO friend of mind once called me up all worried because someone called him arrogant. I told him of course you're arrogant. He was shocked. I laughed, and told him to look at his accomplishments - who but an arrogant person would ever have even attempted those things!
[1] like calling someone a paedophile without any evidence.
This is the toxicity that has younger people rightfully angry at how the system works, and how it is "rigged". People just haven't had the info bandwidth previously to even contemplate these problems.
So no. WalterBright should absolutely do with his shares as he wilt, as should everyone else. Frankly, I wish institutional investment was deconstructed to at least get people coordinating with each other from the ground up to accept what it is their institution's manager was actually perpetuating.
They give a financial stability to places that need them.
One of the reasons Twitter is stable is because of those types of investors and is not subject to the whims of individual shareholders.
No corporate leadership wants to be subject to the whims of the stock market if they can avoid it. Twitters board and its institutional investors the firewall against such things.
Which companies are these?
Put another way, Musk may be willing to pay a lot more than a 25% premium for Twitter (he already said he doesn't care about price). Without this poison pill, Musk can force a takeover by accumulating shares. With this poison pill, the board has leverage to maximize his final offer.
really think Musk knew this ahead of time...but what's his end goal i can't figure out. is it to profit off his purchase? because if he wanted to acquire 51% this is the worst way to do it (creating a hostile board who can at will issue infinite amount of shares)
1. The Twitter board of directors has become a status thing. It's like a country club. They don't have real skin in the game; they don't own much stock. They're not aligned with the shareholders. It's about status and cultural power.
2. Why should we believe that the company will become more valuable when the stock price is where it was way back in December 2013? Compare to how the S&P or Tesla did during this period. Twitter has languished for a long time.
3. They should put it to shareholder vote.
4. One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.
5. The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.
They don't have L4 self-driving they just made a contrived railway system for their cars. The second the car is out of the hardcoded route it's not a self driving car anymore.
So what you're saying is that at least the car is self-driving sometimes, whereas the Teslas never are. That's your pro-Tesla argument?
You can get in and drive around in a Waymo taxi with no driver and yet Tesla fans are still claiming it's not self-driving, while Tesla is. Hilarious.
There are also reasons beyond capability for the cars being limited to an area. One is legislative, they literally are not allowed to offer service outside a given area. Another is maintenance, the cars need to be within range for their team in case of emergencies or accident. The cars have been tested in many cities outside those two cities, but offering a user-facing service has a lot more barriers.
I think you underestimate how hard the problem is or you don’t fully understand how it works. The scale at which Twitter operates makes it near impossible to take down spam in real time. You don’t think Twitter is working on it, but they are. What you see is a much smaller percentage of the actual spam generated, and the reason you see it is because users are creative on circumventing all the preventive actions they take.
What’s the false positive rate, and is that why people complain they’re being banned or shadow banned?
(Definitions of shadow ban vary: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2018/Setting-t...)
It's been tweeted by multiple security people at various Twitter engineers already and raised in lots of ways. They know and don't care. Meantime, real people lose their money - otherwise nobody would waste their time to post the scam.
You offer users a list of filters they can choose to activate, so they only see content according to the filters they enabled.
There would be filters against spam, filters against opinions other than your own, etc.
If all Google and Facebook couldn't solve it, why could a Tesla engineer of all people...
Also, you're really understating how good Tesla self-drive is. It's not full self-drive but it's a real achievement.
I never claimed Tesla self-driving wasn't an achievement, but clearly they underestimated how hard that would be themselves, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd do the same for content moderation.
If you spend 5 seconds on YouTube and Facebook and compare that to Twitter, you'll see a massive difference.
The spam bots on Twitter are incredibly unsophisticated. It's literally bots with the same profile picture and name as the person they're trying to spam.
On the other hand, YouTube spam bots are actually incredibly sophisticated. They're using GPT-3 or some language model to generate text and reply to each other. Like, sometimes I'll read a comment and not be sure if it was a spam bot or not.
Twitter is leagues behind w/ their spam filters.
How good is it?
I do long road trips and feel less exhausted than I would otherwise.
I know there was one instance when an engineer using an internal build got fired for vlogging it (which is not at all unusual, Apple would also fire you for showing off an internal build).
Quantity != Quality. Just because McDonalds serves billions of people doesn't magically make it good food.
Something tells me Elon would have different goals that should be less of a moving target and easier to accomplish. Less subjective target like "hate speech" and more objective target like true threats of violence, illegal activity, actual bot detection not "people who disagree are bots", etc
Spam is a dramatically easier problem, and has many more mechanism to suppress it both legally and technologically.
Because the guy who invited me sort of sprung the talk on me I had no slides or anything, so it became a collection of vague thoughts + discussions with their team (vague because I didn't want to discuss any trade secrets). One thing that became very clear was that they weren't thinking about bots a whole lot compared to the Google abuse teams, because they'd been re-tasked at some point to consider abuse as primarily meaning "humans being mean to each other". A significant amount of their effort was going on this instead, although there is really little overlap in technologies or skills needed between problems.
This was pre-2016 so the whole Russian-social-bots-gave-us-trump hysteria hadn't started yet, instead Twitter was being declared toxic just due to the behaviour of its users. Thus the term bot still meant actual spam bots. Since then various groups, primarily in academia but activist employees too, realized that because deleting bot accounts was uncontroversial they could try and delete their political enemies by re-classifying them as "bots". For example this Twitter developer in 2019:
https://reclaimthenet.org/project-veritas-twitter-hidden-cam...
“Just go to a random Trump tweet, and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like guns, God, Murica, and with the American flag and, like, the cross. Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”
Clearly any abuse team that uses a definition of bot like that won't be able to focus on the work of actually detecting and fighting spam bots. If Musk bought Twitter and re-focused their abuse teams on classical spam fighting work it'd almost certainly help, given that Twitter didn't seem to be keeping the ever-shifting overloads of the "abuse" clear in their org structure.
Incidentally, trying to find the above quote on Google is a waste of time. Search "project veritas twitter for sure they are bots" on Google and the links are almost all irrelevant. DuckDuckGo/Bing gets it right on the first result, no surprise. I don't believe for one second that's a result of incompetence on the part of the Google web search teams.
Hahah wow this is so out of touch. Communities each have their own way of speaking (famously /r/wallstreetbets has its own grammar, emoji, and lingo, but this applies to every community).
Sidenote this is why minorities speaking with each other sometimes get misclassified (even by humans!) as spam.
That's not to say there aren't overlapping skill sets, but the AI tech involved is quite distinct (although there is overlap, I believe some of the latest perception research is trying to adapt transformers from NLP to replace CNNs). Many of my colleagues are AI/ML engineers working on the self driving problems (perception, prediction, planning) and they're all super smart, but they'd still take a while to get up to speed in another area.
I have no idea why a serious business would hire a non-NLP specialised engineer to solve content moderation (they'd maybe hire someone who was interested in changing sub-field, but not to build out the backbone of their teams).
Heck, you could even just limit the number of hashtags in a single tweet (say, 2) and fix 95% of Twitter's spam problem without harming legitimate users in any way
2) I am not an ML engineer, but still a software engineer and in my opinion the problem of self driving cars is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the problem of Internet spam. Maybe even three orders of magnitude.
3) We actually know that the problem of spam is successfuly solved by Google. When was the last time you saw a spam message in Gmail? I am seeing them in my inbox approximately once a month. There are about 8 messages in my spam folder per day, so it is about 0.4% false negatives. This is a great result.
4) Social networks are not interested in fighting spam. It just will make their metrics worse. All they need is to keep it at moderately acceptable level, so users won't flee in bunches.
Yet people talking about hunter biden’s laptop in October 2020 had their accounts deleted immediately.
Twitter is very good at content moderation when it threatens the manufactured narrative of the global elite which they serve. And then completely incompetent otherwise.
I don’t buy the line that the problem is too complex because I see selective competence.
It wouldn't require _Machine Learning_, the kind of filtering approach you've just described would absolutely constitute AI.
It's almost never the case that spam issues on popular social networks can be alleviated with some easy fixes, because obviously if they could they would already have done that. Twitter is a very weird exception.
The problem would be more surmountable at that point
It's hard to take any of the rest of this seriously after that "detail".
If they're obviously talking out of their arse on one point then it definitely suggests they're talking out of their arse on the rest of it.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?s=21&t=...
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733?s=21&t=...
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1485588476057825290?s=21&t=...
and
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1473752736537657349...
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1399028630190239746...
I know how hard it is to deploy features at scale, especially at a world-class company like Twitter. But if Twitter were to retain me as a consultant, I’d happily bet you any sum of your choosing that I’d make a pretty big dent in the crypto spam within a few months of full-time effort.
"Either (a) Twitter is terribly bad at detecting spam or (b) there's something about Twitter that makes detecting spam difficult or (c) they don't care.
Based on my experience detecting spam, I'd guess (c)."
"Twitter engineering: If you're going to do such a bad job of catching spam, how about at least giving us a one-click way to report a tweet as spam and block the account, like email providers do? It may even help you get better at filtering, since more reports = more signal."
I appreciate your gesture, but I don’t mind the downvotes. Bold claims warrant skepticism. And talking about votes makes the conversation less interesting for the audience.
But you’re right to point out that the problem isn’t nearly as intractable as it seems. There are many ways to deter crypto spammers.
Think of it this way: suppose Twitter’s stock price was inversely proportional to the amount of crypto spam (without accidentally removing genuine tweets). Does anyone believe the stock price would go down?
It’s why I suspect Twitter simply hasn’t made it a priority.
Also see reddit, with most small Reddits being spam/porn. These are in many ways Potemkin websites. The emperor is naked.
Twitter, on the other hand, is pretty sensitive to false positives, and the vernacular is so unique that naive Bayesian filtering would destroy a lot of communities with their own vocabularies and languages. If messages start arbitrarily dropping on it, its users won't stick around.
Sure, you could absolutely knock out spam. It wouldn't be that hard. Because fighting spam isn't the hard part. It's dodging the problem of firing on innocent people that the spam is using as body shields that's the hard part.
They already get incredible volumes of criticism for what little false positives they already have. Imagine if it was normal to be put in a time-out box by a Bayesian filter that wasn't tailored for your community!
Combating spam is something that has very few possible upsides for twitter, and a catastrophic failure case. Right now, spam mostly tends to effect larger accounts, who are going to stay on the platform anyway, because it's where the people are. What little spam small accounts see is manageable, and they won't leave because of it because it's so insignificant. If suddenly they couldn't send messages to others at random and without warning? Why would they stick around, then?
Where people will go doesn't really matter, because there are a billion places they can, and there's not always a clear migration path. Sometimes, a social platform just dies, and its communities form a diaspora on different platforms, without any "clear" successor (like what happened to Orkut), or just stop doing the whole social media thing (many Google+ contributors no longer post online anywhere).
Instead, I'll mention two platforms some of my friends like, to avoid taking the cost of a ruined platform myself:
sqwok.im: This one is the most microblog-like of the two, but it's also the least conventional. The quality varies; the front page only looks good every once in a while.
tildes.net: This one is invite-only, which helps mitigate the masses jumping in somewhat, and is run by a former reddit administrator. The existing community isn't great, but it's good. Friendly enough people.
Could you do that while also making sure no false positives happen? Elon is making claims that he wants to make Twitter a platform where people are truly free to say what they want, so any spam that gets removed that isn't spam would be seen in a very poor light.
Eliminating spam when you're happy to have a few other things end up in the spam folder by mistake is relatively simple. Likewise, eliminating most of the spam but letting some through because it looks real is also quite easy. Eliminating only spam and nothing else is significantly harder.
I doubt any of them can speak with much weight on AI. That hardly means they can't make serious points about censorship, or corporate finance.
The fact that they specified it being an AI Tesla engineer is super cringe Tesla-bro stuff and the fact that the commenter would say something like that hurts their credibility in making the other fairly extreme claims.
Isn't this Gell-Mann Amnesia in full effect?
"Sure, they are speaking nonsense about AI, but I bet they have great ideas about corporate finance!"
I don't know why people think is the problem.
They regularly ban bot and spam accounts. This is not an issue.
The issue is malicious/ignorant human actors and malicious state level actors.
Tesla AI engineers can't even get past L3. There's no chance they would be able to create an AI solution that can fight state level resources or massive amounts of humans gossiping and spread misinformation.
It feels a little silly to act like the guy trying to spend billions of dollars to get his way represents anything more than an intra-elite conflict.
At this point we can say these are mission focused moves. This is about free speech in the public square.
Pushing for less censorship isn't "his way" -
- I see you've edited to "intra-elite" conflict. So is basically every problem in society then given that governance is handled by few. Not sure what the point is here, just feels like a hollow dismissal.
I'm still confused about what "less censorship" could mean, he seems pretty clear on it.
And what governance happens public or private that "we" all agree on?
Right now "we" don't agree on how Twitter operates currently. A couple dozen people do. I'm not understanding your point here.
Beyond that, the idea of a totally unfettered Twitter is not really desirable. Such forums fill up with porn, gore, racism, and various other forms of shock content nobody actually wants on their feeds.
For instance, if you decide that you want a Twitter feed that excludes porn, gore, racism, and other objectionable content, then you absolutely should be able to exclude those (I'd reckon that that'd be a very sensible default). If I want to go observe the crazy bigoted things that fringe groups are spewing, or if I want to use Twitter just as an endless feed of porn, then that doesn't affect your ability to not see those things.
Likewise, I've not heard Musk propose banning any of his critics or opposing viewpoints (though I don't really follow his actions, so it's possible I've just missed them).
What an embarrassingly dishonest characterization of the problem. Nobody sane is arguing that "criticism is censorship".
The problem with Twitter is that they are censoring popular narratives critical of the ruling elite. If you can't distinguish between the concept of banning accounts and posts vs not doing so, and allowing criticism, you are simply too misinformed or low IQ to have any worthwhile input.
(Though I defend to the death your right to babble incoherently)
Is that so? Why do the same people who claim they’re all about free speech get all wound up about “cancel culture” then? There are clearly rules in their head about who should actually have the right to say whatever they want. I quite confident that I am not “low-IQ.”
"Cancel culture" very clearly had crowds of people demanding someone lose money/access to a job/platform.
Perhaps we're just in different bubbles that don't overlap.
Cancel culture is NEET busybodies making it their day job to hunt for le problematique like bounty hunters (paid in retweets) organizing mobs to campaign to ruin people's lives (for great justice!) Yes, it's free speech! Yes, it's free association! Yes, it has precedents, you savvy insightful geniuses! Most things do, we call that history, and it's full of terrible things we should probably stop doing.
But this modern manifestation of a thing that has precedents and conservatives do too sometimes also has interesting features that are probably worth talking about on their own terms. I repeat: Cancel culture is NEET busybodies making it their day job to hunt for le problematique like bounty hunters, organizing mobs to campaign to ruin people's lives. It's legal, they have every right, and it's shitty, shitty behavior. Please stop denying it's a thing, or alternately trying to whatabout it to death.
On the cancel culture front, I don't agree. It actually refers to an incredibly broad segment of actions which almost nobody actually has much of a consistent line on. Often simply criticizing or refusing to patronize someone's business is called "canceling." Even if we narrowly refer to people losing their jobs, nobody actually believes there are NO circumstances whatsoever where losing your job might be an appropriate response to something you said. If you're a special ed teacher and post on Facebook that people with intellectual disabilities are less than human, one could reasonably doubt that you have any business having charge of special ed kids. If you want a more conservative flavored example, you could probably find conservatives endorsing cops losing their job if they bragged about not enforcing immigration laws. Or if you want an extremely uncontroversial example, you must at least believe it's appropriate not to VOTE for someone because you didn't like what they said. I don't think it's an accident. I think this term is so slippery and amorphous precisely because it obscures the hypocrisy at work.
Either way, with billions involved, i have no say in whatever happens (because I don't have billions), but musk gives me higher hope than disney.
Basically, I have nothing to lose, only to gain.
Put down the Elon kool-aid , it has poisoned your mind.
Quick takeaways:
- The frequent pejorative use of the term 'elites' as a catchall for literally anyone they disagree with is hilarious. Their explanation of Musk being the iconoclastic 'anti-elite elite' sounds like Ayn Rand fan-fic written by a 14 year old who just read the Wikipedia plot summary for Atlas Shrugged. - What does 'inverting history' even mean? It seems to be another example from Glenn Greenwald's vast and vitriolic argot. (I'm sure Glenn Greenwald is another commendable 'anti-elite elite'). - Paraphrasing: "journalists 20 years ago would have been defending the first amendment!" -> this is not about the first amendment. The first amendment protects your ability to speak freely from government imposed restriction or suppression. Ironically, twenty years ago the press/journalists and even government officials were experiencing one George Bush's sweeping censorship efforts (https://www.americanprogress.org/article/think-again-the-bus...).
Anyway, the hosts wistfully allude to the past, with references to society's 'public square' and people having the ability to say whatever they wanted with no repercussions. This is nonsense. Broadly, you can absolutely say whatever you want online — it's easier than ever.
That doesn't mean:
1) Twitter is required to provide a platform for you to abuse and harass people, or spout opinions they deem to be offensive, damaging, or misleading. That's their choice. 2) Free speech has never been consequence-free. To quote Michael Hobbes: "Voicing your opinion in public has always carried the risk of being shamed or shunned."
Finally, I will concede that twitter has suffered from poor growth, and a change in leadership could be a good thing for the company. But the board also has a responsibility to protect minority shareholders from people exactly like Elon. Their resistance to his efforts may have nothing to do with the vague, insulting and unsubstantiated allegations you and the podcast hosts make (It's a 'country club', board members are only acting against musk to protect their 'status', etc). Rather, they may quite reasonably believe that a vainglorious egomaniac who has been repeatedly sanctioned by the SEC may, in fact, not be the ideal owner of a social media company.
Ps.
> 4. One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.
Do you really, seriously think this is true? It comes across as deliberately inflammatory, and you and I both know it's not true.
This is an argument in favour of a more liberal model is it not? Just not a centralized system that takes a dictatorial role in socially isolating people for having bad ideas. The analogy would make more sense if there was a benevolent gatekeeper blocking you from coming back into the public square (or even all big public squares) because you said something controversial.
Otherwise cultural free speech people want ideas to be openly challenged, not efficiently silenced by the system.
Harassing people is something I think most people agree crosses a line, in the same ways it’s a criminal act. But even here Twitter does a poor job at that by taking a very broad interpretation, for example it punishes people for publicly disagreeing with someone while also being popular, because their fans decided to brigade a person, then banning the parent for ‘causing it’ (without ever directly encouraging or supporting such a thing).
There’s a hundred ways to do this better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit without throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Trying to accuse every person who wants a very limited scope for wanting Ayn Rand style anarchy is disingenuous.
Otherwise I’m not a fan of “All in” pod’s analysis.
This was covered towards the beginning of the podcast. Legally, the role[1] of the board in this situation is to get the best stock price, and not about the future fate of the business.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revlon,_Inc._v._MacAndrews_%....
(HN is truncating the final . in the link)
Not every speech is equal. If you are living in a Weimar-Republic scenario, yes, free speech can be repressive and I can see why people will call for censorship. Personally, I think censorship and speech taboos just keep a lid on certain problems instead of solving them.
The problem with this is that it always ends up as “censorship is ok, as long as it’s for opinions I disagree with”.
And with your Weimar-republic scenario, if the implied claim is that more censorship would have stopped either the radicalisation or rise of Adolf Hitler, I think that’s very simplistic and highly suspect.
Problem? KPIs are through the roof!
Fascists and authoritarians took advantage of freedom of speech to gain power, the censorship came after they seized power. Hitler promoted himself through his right to speak at his trials, and through his book Mein Kampf, things the Weimer Republic could have absolutely chosen to censor. Karl Popper made a rather infamous observation of the "Paradox of tolerance" where tolerating the intolerant could result in more intolerance, if the intolerant happened to be Hitler in Nazi Germany.
I find the biggest objection to this entire line of thought is that censors always consider themselves to be the ones resisting the next Nazi Germany rather than being Nazi Germany themselves. Anybody who openly censors others is more likely than the general person in the population to be some sort of totalitarian authoritarian, so trusting them with power so they can stop some sort of Nazi uprising is foolish. It's the same kind of issue as "Bombing for peace", pretty much 100% of the people who have ever bombed people have said they were doing it for the sake of peace.
This all being said, I don't think giving Musk 100% of twitter and the effective absolute power to censor others on the platform is a good idea.
If Twitter is a monopoly, apply anti-trust laws to it and break it up. If Twitter isn't a monopoly, then they should every right to decide what their service does, as long as it's within the law. If you don't like the current laws, change them.
I am totally, 100% opposed to privately owned companies being forced to carry speech that they don't want to carry. That itself is a violation of the free speech of people that operate businesses.
This a comment written by someone who is clearly not an engineer dealing with high-scale backends, and is definitely not an AI engineer.
At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?
When the printing press was invented ther was a backlash against it, because free speech was endangering existing power structures.
Nowadays we have it the other way around, powerful players use the accelerated chaos of social media to avoid any real discourse from forming — it is just very easy to manipulate just enough into your direction to hide behind "differing opinions" if you have a ton of resources — just like boulevard media has been for the past decades. Censorship and media control is one strategy to reduce the chaos by decelerating the spread of the most outrageous unfounded claims. Of course there can be such a thing as too much censorship (e.g. look to China and Russia), but this would be state censorship.
A billionaire does not want to buy a social media plattform because he cares about free speech — if that was the case he would have nothing about his workers discussing unions, post youtube videos he does not like or journalist writing negative things about him and still being able to buy a Tesla car.
I am not sure there is much wisdom in assuming we can have a world wide instant public microblogging platform without any moderation at all. Anyone who ever operated any public web platform knows the quality of the discourse falls drasticly if there is not at least some level of content moderation.
> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.
You are heavily overexpecting what the technology can do. Differenciating satire from a threat with sufficient accuracy is not something machine learning ("AI") could do right now.
Usenet, for several decades already. Good NNTP servers had nearly perfect spam filtering and the trolls were handled individually by each user in killfiles.
If Google had kept the simple original web interface from around 2004 we might not have had all these issues. GPT-3 spam is hard to detect, but can be handled by killfiles.
Of course the real goal of Twitter is to do user profiles and possibly log private messages, for which Usenet isn't suitable. I wonder who on earth would send a sensitive "private" message on Twitter.
Most modern problems with social media started emerging when the general public started using it.
Specialist communities like IRC channels, Hacker News, certain subreddits or webforums still work quite well, because let's face it: It is not the general public there.
And even in specialist communities there is a certain degree of moderation needed in order to keep it in order.
In the offline worlds individuals for which (reasonable) moderation is needed are kept in check by society (either through social pressure or physical force).
Very seldom they are the beginning of societal changes but usually they are just unpleasant (e.g. "I hope you and your loved ones get murdered because...") people which most others avoid if they can.
I'm very sure I would leave any platform where their kind is allowed to run wild and so would many of my family and friends.
Facebook is a very good example: Most people are boring and nice enough. Those who are not (ranging from annoying to vile) spoil the fun for everybody else.
People leave (in part) because they don't want constant conflict and not every opinion is worth to be heard.
Translation: "AI is a magic spell! I can take someone who's been working on vision recognition, and they alone could wish all our bots and spams away, with the magic of AI."
> The elites
Oh, god, here comes the libertarian spiel...
> but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.
Translation: "I want the right to tell any lie I please without consequences. I want the right to be able to scream at people on the Internet and keep my account. If I can't call someone racist names on the Internet, it's because you're all Fascists and authoritarians!"
Yes. Gaslighting crystalized. We are now to believe free speech is bad. Authoritarians know auguring against logic is hard.
Setting all the discussion of what free speech should be, aside, I don't see people making the point that Twitter's huge success as a social media platform may actually relate to their moderation policies. Twitter was found to be more resistant to fake news than other social media sites. I don't know whether this relates to the public nature of tweets or their moderation.
Twitter's moderation policy may exactly be the reason the platform has done so well, and rather than clamouring for Twitter to change, I'd suggest that we allow the free market to allow another platform with different a moderation approach to compete.
The US legal system is kind of based around this adversarial situation imo.
Wikipedia of Shareholder's Rights Plan is skimp in details as well.
Everything I hear ostensibly appears to be "That should be illegal, makes zero sense". So with no good information out there, it seems like no one is an expert at this and making up bullshit.
If you've ever wondered why corporations have authorized and issued shares, there you go. Increasing the authorized share count requires a shareholder vote. Issuing shares under that cap does not. When shareholders increase the number of authorized shares, they are delegating that decision making to the Board.
It wasn't always like this. But as finance sped up, particularly towards the end of the 19th century, a railroad company which had to hold a shareholder vote to raise emergency equity because their free banking deposits in Nevada went bust would find itself systematically outmaneuvered by the ones who had pre-approval to plug the hole. As a result, most corporations now authorize the maximum number of shares reasonably possible, in almost all cases only moderated by some states' franchise taxes varying by number of shares.
If I issue more stocks for a meme stock at the height of it's popularity it will likely go up in price for reasons completely disconnected from the balance sheets and future revenue.
Conversely, if I recently started the process for bankruptcy and issue more stocks to cover the liabilities on my balance sheet, the stock could very well decrease disproportionately to the number of issued stocks.
Stocks at the end of the day are based on the market's perception of the stock's worth. The market is not a single rational actor, rather numerous small irrational actors and a few very large highly rational actors. Obviously there is a spectrum in between, but the ratio of buyers on a given end of the spectrum will influence the behavior of a stock to either align or diverge from the fundamentals of the company, and not always in the way you would intuitively expect.
Imagine there are 1000 shares and Elon got 150 of them, bought at $50 so he owns 15%. If the board now sells 1000 new shares to people who aren't Elon, he now only owns 7.5%.
It's not that you resell to the board
So it’s a question of balance. Twitter can raise the fundamental value of Twitter a little bit but there’s no way they can raise it too much without driving the price down and then just having more shares available at lower prices, so like you could just buy 2 shares and spend the same amount of money.
When the board triggers this clause, they may sell shares to existing shareholders at a discount. These are new shares. Companies have every right to sell shares outside of the exchange they’re listed on… and they do that all the time, through employee grants or options, for example.
When raising funds they generally sell new shares on the exchange, because that’s the highest price they can obtain for the share.. but they don’t have to do that.
And yes, in case you didn’t know, companies can sell as many shares as they want.
But it can sell shares to some and not others [1]. (This was a landmark decision [2].)
[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme-court/1985/493...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unocal_Corp._v._Mesa_Petroleum....
Having the board ignore a large shareholder would be one thing. Shares give votes, and terms don't turn over every day, and we don't kick out politicians as soon as the polls turn sour on them. Fine. But if a shareholder has enough shares to change the board composition (or just threatens to) the incumbents can just unilaterally decide that the challenger owns a smaller fraction of the company than they bought on the open market? Maybe it's not technically self-dealing, but it's bad.
A company cannot issue unlimited shares without concern for existing shareholders - taken to the extreme, doing so reduces the value of all holdings to zero.
For example, if Elon goes to 16% ownership why doesn’t the board just distribute new shares to existing owners pro-rata to the point where Elon is back to 15%?
All of this seems pretty sketchy to me. I don’t see how the board is legally allowed to do this.
Now, you may argue that it is in the best interest of the shareholders to allow the hostile takeover to go through, but it appears that the strict mechanics of the poison pill do not immediately hurt shareholders.
There are many varieties of poison pills [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moran_v._Household_Internation....
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unocal_Corp._v._Mesa_Petroleum....
We've suspended your Twitter account for violating Twitter's rules against attempted hostile takeovers of Twitter.
Your account will remain suspended until you withdraw your bid to purchase a majority stake in Twitter. After you withdraw your bid, your account will remain suspended for a period of 1 week. Further attempts to interfere with the ownership or policies of Twitter will result in permanent suspension.
And he wins if he doesn't because his offer is bringing a lot of unwanted attention to the people who control Twitter.
And it exposes people who are anti-free speach. A position that is now politically acceptable but will collapse under scrutiny and attention.
Previous media ownership rules would have prevented Twitter from existing at its current scale. This was explicitly to prevent too much editorial control from becoming too concentrated.
Regardless of whether Musk buys Twitter, the long term trend is likely to continue, at least until one party decides to stop it. (Consolidation was largely driven by rule changes made by the Regan, Bush, Clinton and second Bush administration. Other factors have accelerated it since.) E
Edit: I have a hard time having much sympathy for conservatives on this particular issue, since some rule changes were timed to allow conservative talk show networks to buy up large swaths of the US market, and also wre designed to allow Fox News to exist as a "entertainment" (obviously biased news) network. Having said that, liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda have the same root cause.
It's telling that the proposed "solution" to Twitter having censors is to let Elon Musk be the censor instead. The only thing that has worked in the past is decentralization of the news industry, but no one is calling for Twitter to be broken up. I guess both sides want it to exist so they can control it.
*sigh*
The notional value is at best the NPV of future profit streams. However Twitter's track record on profits are dismal so the claim is dubious legally.
You can’t just multiply the current price and expect everyone to be willing to sell for that amount.
I think the board is right to reject the offer. Twitter could be worth more. Twitter in Elon’s control would be a more valuable company.
If I were a shareholder, I’d want them to reject 52.40. Maybe not 92.40. The ideal outcome would be if Elon gets 51% control and I got to remain a shareholder.
Heck, Tiktok could add a timeline just like twitter and decimate them since Gen Z and millenials (26 and younger) are basically there. Facebook is old school and will start slowing down going forward. IG is for business since the appeal (sharing photos with friends) has been lost. Snap has its niche and Gab, Gettir, etc... are catering to the right.
People like controversy and that's the main reason twitter is relevant. Left and Right like to expose each other. That's the main reason alt-tech is not mainstream.
for example at market close of $45.08, the market is betting there is a $45.08/$54.20 = 83% chance that this transaction goes through.
there are certainly individual stockholders who are buying because they like his involvement, but that is tiny compared to people buying and selling a very near-term bet
This assumes the price without the transactions goes to $0.00!
> The social media company’s shares were little changed at $45.81 in New York on Thursday, a sign there’s skepticism that one of the platform’s most outspoken users will succeed in his takeover attempt. -- Bloomberg
So while the news of a major stakeholder with the power to join the board and affect how things are run did cause a significant blip in Twitter's stock price, the attempt to buy it outright doesn't seem to have affected things much. Even if we (incorrectly) assumed that all of the rise from ~$40 to ~$45 is associated with the possibility of Musk paying $54 a share, that suggests the market assigns only a ~36% chance of the deal going through.
Musk’s recent stock purchase and discussion about joining the board made the price jump significantly. You’re right that there’s no obvious reason that his involvement should change Twitter’s value, but the market appears to think otherwise. If he walks away, at a minimum, I would expect that the stock price will drop to what it was before he started playing around.
But if he walks away, I believe he’ll also do something to make the stock drop more. For instance, he’ll stop Tweeting, which should have a measurable impact on the number of people actually using Twitter regularly.
There are that many people whose engagement depends entirely upon whether Elon Musk is actively tweeting? I don't use Twitter much, but that seems pretty amazing if true.
He will start something to compete against Twitter.
Twitter will be stuck with their current management and cultural problems.
(By “nobody” I mean both nearly 0% of users and only people who will not be missed on Twitter)
Gettr seems to be making positive inroads on the conservative/libertarian population, particularly those for whom twitter is not an option due to previous banning/shadow-banning, and de-boosting.
As I expect there to be consolidation between truth social, gettr, parler, and others, think this will only get stronger.
Part of this is also that younger populations are preferring tiktok to Twitter imo.
Twitter won’t be destroyed by someone making a slightly different Twitter clone, it’ll be destroyed by something that re-imagines entirely in a way that also supplants it, and it’ll probably come from someone we don’t know yet.
Pop culture places MySpace somewhere contemporary with the rotary phone, but there were undoubtedly people who heard of and used The Facebook first.
Meanwhile any number of near-exact replicas of it exist with a different flavor: freer speech, paid service, decentralized, specifically for particular political affiliations to name a few. None of them have made a dent.
I don’t claim to know exactly what it takes to successfully achieve this but one or even several content / creator verticals won’t cut it IMO.
If the board acted against the usual shareholder interest (to make money) by turning down an offer 54% above premium, would it not be easy to claim that the board is not in it to make the average investor money on $TWTR?
Therefore, wouldn't the value of $TWTR as an investment be far far less than companies who do make it their primary goal?
That's not to even mention the 9% of Elon's stock that he claimed he would now sell.
In reality though, the shareholders are a giant mob of people with wildly varying views about Twitter’s place in society, its true value as an asset, its ability to achieve its true value, and just generally what the best way to “make the most money for the shareholders” is. So I don’t think it’s an open-and-shut case that the board betrayed the shareholders. It’s probably a muddy case that’ll play out in court over months or years.
Does management want to maximize the value of Twitter? Er, no. Management wants to maximize some combination of their compensation, their agency controlling a company, and their social capital controlling a social media platform. Maximization of shareholders' value is a legal objective to which management must pay legal lip service, but it is not in any way shape or form the interest of management, save insofar as management compensation is related to share price.
If management cared about shareholder value, it would not have induced the board to enact this poison bill nonsense.
Shareholders can appoint, remove or replace directors, or even the entire board.
But at the end of the day, if the board thinks that Twitter may be worth more long term than what Musk is proposing to buy it for, then it’s perfectly reasonable to argue that it’s in the shareholder’s interests not to sell it.
2. The market observes a very capable businessman, after discussion with management, deems it incompetent and value-destructive.
3. Said businessman, with a track record of remarkable success in a variety of ventures and demonstrated skill with social media, may launch a competitor service.
All three of these are bad signals for Twitter's future cash flows.
This was an epic debacle. Musk invested 4 BILLION dollars in an asset of questionable value, because "free speech". If he times it right he could come out ahead financially. But in general this was a pointless distraction and public fiasco that served no one.
I have no idea what he was doing or what his goals were. It looks like he was upset that people he liked were getting banned by twitter and was afraid that he'd run afoul of their rules himself, so he tried to buy the company. And despite being one of the richest humans to ever live, he failed at that.
This is just a head scratcher and a massive L. I don't see another way to view it.
he wants to see the first amendment function with autistic precision. he wants to remove any messy personalization because it interferes with that purity. he wants fully transparent moderation and proof of fairness. he doesn't like the idea that one organization has such control and he likely wants to turn the company into a dao. he's searching for a problem to apply cryptocurrency technologies to.
what i think he doesn't get are the messy realities of the real world. we're already on the cusp of world war iii, can we chill for just a few minutes?
I might also settle for a really quality sci-fi novel in which this takes place.
Somebody writes a unlock euqivalent and maintains ban lists. Everyone subscribes, because otherwise it's full of ads, spam, and edgy 14 year olds repeating slurs like it's Xbox live.
You can't go back home.
it's not some mirror that reflects who we really are, it's the chaos that comes from navigating entirely new paradigms of attention games and connectedness at scales we haven't yet evolved for.
The fact of the matter is that such a system absolutely would not scale. USENET crumbled under the weight of early 90s AOL subscribers; imagine even a fraction of today's Facebook or Twitter users moving to a similarly open system. It would be absolutely unusable chaos.
The thing is, these systems are not "the whole psyche of humankind projected into public view". That's far, far too generous for it. What usually happens is that the loudest extremists scream over everyone else, sock-puppet support for each other, create an echo chamber, and then proclaim that everyone who doesn't think like them isn't a real human being. The vast majority of people do not actually interact with the system.
[0] Technically speaking it was some extra overlay software on top of Freenet. I don't remember the name.
The sender anonymity part could just be having every node act as part of a mixnet- wait until you receive X messages and/or Y time has elapsed, shuffle messages, send them out to randomly chosen nodes, repeat this for 3 hops and then your message is propagated.
I've wanted to make something like this for ages since 4chan has gone so downhill. Perhaps it should happen then. It would probably be easier to adopt than something as complex as Freenet FMS for sure.
how could it be abused by trolls? both local and nation state funded?
the human condition sucks sometimes, but wow, that's pretty dark.
you could also consider, you know, actions that make your life or the lives of others better. it's likely a more rewarding endeavor.
> What problem would it solve
Well, we could have a bunch of discussion boards again, ones that aren't at the permanent whims of profiteers or atrocious moderation. And strong anonymity even against global passive adversaries. Clearly there is a case for it, I know a lot of people who would find lots of joy in such a thing!
sum[user_i in users](opinion(user_i)•engagement(user_i))
It's the second factor that causes all of the problems. But much like fast-food companies get a large fraction of their revenue from a small fraction of their customers, social media companies have trouble disempowering highly engaged users when functioning as a profit-oriented business.
It's interesting to consider what would happen with a "less moderated" messageboard where an individual's daily engagement is capped (supposing you solve the multiple account problem). It doesn't seem likely that we'll see that any time soon, though.
Brilliant!
Can’t help but wonder if over time – having the ability to peek into our collective psyche – this would trigger a significant divergence from the present evolutionary trajectory of our unexamined collective mind; maybe for the better, maybe for the worse.
It would be like any other lightly-moderated or unmoderated spaces we've seen before: the wildest days of 4chan, etc.
It would quickly be dominated by niche individuals and clumps of people who are good at attracting attention because they yell the loudest, are the most outrageous, tell the most compelling lies, etc.
In my opinion the fundamental needs of humans being meant is part of the social machine. Not rich people getting to whine.
I really wish we'd stop defining social media broadly as a first amendment issue. Elon Musk has the right to speak his mind without fear of government reprisal, he doesn't have a constitutional right to broadcast his asinine opinions to millions of people.
Like, you can probably imagine at least one person you know acting this way if they discovered a genie.
What has he done to deserve that label?
But since you want an actual link, here: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=elon+musk+douchebag&ia=web
And regardless of that, it is still a massive asshole move to call someone a pedophile because they told you to shut up. Those two insults couldn't be more different in severity and social implications.
My main point was that saying "nuh uh" isn't a substantive rebuttal to a claim, especially when there's a pretty solid wealth of evidence in both directions (Musk has been a real turd to some people, specifically unionizers or laborers in his domain as well as that one anti-submarine guy who he leveraged his wealth to slander as a paedophile, but has helmed pioneering work in battery tech, propulsion, and non-government viable (!) approaches to lots of technological hurdles).
So, given the context of him being a known polarizing figure, "what has he done to deserve 'asshole':(" is not a substantive comment. LMGTFY is appropriate here, if anywhere?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593
his defense being....
> Mr Musk told the court this week the phrase "pedo guy" was common in South Africa, where he grew up.
This has been my thought for a while. Dudes is a character, playing a part.
Would it be illegal for him to launch a Twitter competitor, take 40 million followers with him, and sell all of his Twitter shares on the same day?
Perhaps that is the strategy? A 1-2-3 punch to launch his own network.
I agree.
This is the same man that at one point tried to say that he was the founder of Tesla.
Saying things that I agree with doesn't mean that I should inherently be in favor of said person doing X, Y, or Z.
Just look at the conditions in any society without free speech and you'll find your answer.
More abstractly, free speech is required for free thought. Without free thought, we're all thought prisoners to whomever controls the information we received. Musk's contention with Twitter is that they have been positioning themselves as that entity.
And two, how?
I think there are probably other factors at play too. His ego, of course. And also the general desire, also evident among VCs like Andreesen, to discipline the Silicon Valley workforce and remind the uppity code-monkeys who's really in charge.
To step through this... So we have someone with a net worth near 300 billion dollars that is going to go through all this trouble to:
-Unblock one user
-Which will then trigger an American political party to like him
-This political party will then make it less likely the SEC will bother him, potentially saving him tens of millions of dollars (or 0.01% of his current net worth) in some hypothetical scenario
What a theory! This same political party and twitter user was in power when the SEC fined him+Tesla $40 million in 2018. How do you make sense of that with your theory?
If politics was his main driver, why wouldn't he just use his wealth to directly incentivize politicians?
And why when Trump and the Republican party was in power in 2018, did they allow Musk+Tesla to be fined if there is such a tight relationship along 'anti-regulation' lines between the SEC and the President/political party in power?
And again, if he cares about political influence, why go through all this trouble and why not just directly incentivize politicians?
I think this is probably only one factor at play here, and who really knows to what degree, but it's certainly more of a factor than marketing pablum about Elon being a futurist deeply concerned with the optimal future of humanity or whatever.
Would the fact that Tesla mostly just donates to Democrats alter anything [1]?
Or that Elon Musk makes more personal donations to Democratic politicians [2]?
I'm guessing not. I'm guessing you'll ignore this and see that he and his companies donated some money to Republicans (even though he gives more to Democrats) and that therefore means he's a diehard Republican who is driven to look out for the party.
Have a nice day!
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/totals?cycle=A&id=D00005751...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=elon+m...
Elon Musk, who:
-Is CEO of an electric car company and produces solar panels to help mitigate climate change
-Donates mostly to Democrats personally and through his companies
-Did not donate to Donald Trump, and said "I feel a bit stronger that he is probably not the right guy. He doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States."
-Was fined by the SEC when Trump & the Republican party were in power in 2018
-In June 2017, announced that he would be leaving Trump's business advisory council in protest of the president's pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement. "Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,"
-Has a net worth of nearly 300 billion dollars
-------------------------------------------------
Wants to buy Twitter for $43 billion, because:
-It'll curry favor from Trump and the Republican party
-And if elected, Trump/the Republican party will make it so the SEC is easier on him (even though they were in power when he did get fined before)
-In a hypothetical scenario where he would get fined, this preferential treatment could save him 0.01% of his net worth
You are right, I am very confused, and this has to be the end of the thread for me. I do like probing conspiratorial thinking, but I think we've reached a dead-end. I bid you adieu.
Given that this is your second attempt at quitting the thread with a pre-emptory sign off, I would like to apologize for agitating you so much with my idle speculation here, and I sincerely hope you're able to make this attempt stick.
In fact free speech is in direct contradiction to other rights, and these have to be balanced against each other for society to function.
Take the right to privacy, for example. My right to privacy necessarily entails restricting your right to disseminate information about me.
Or the rights to life and bodily autonomy - the prohibition on inciting violence is a restriction of free speech.
He's heavily invested in AI and machine learning, could he be interested in twitter's data?
I would be more interested in him implementing certain features like a journalistic credibility score for outlets and individuals. Base it on number of retractions, mistakes, and outright lies. Surely a score like that might put certain fake news propagators in line.
This is something he pitched before although as a standalone website. Integrating into twitter seems more useful.
Which then raises the issue of who scores the scorer. You already have people throwing fits because the garbage they post gets labeled as misleading or not true. So how would this be any different besides you liking the person in charge of the scoring?
It's very possible that his AI investments have yielded developments that we can't imagine. But it's hard to see the value of twitter's data over that of, say, the internet cache that gpt-3 uses.
I have no idea what the plan b he alluded to is.
Reliably parsing and interpreting new, potentially unreliable data is part of that whole AI-complete thing.
Maybe Twitter was always doomed because it was just fad. But the idea Musk alone can save it is absurd.
Have you looked at some crazy behaviours from Musk?
Like how he teased SEC. How he tried to falsely accuse British diver as a child rapist.
Not to mention, the price isn't that good. There were people who bought at 70 a few months ago.
Offering at 44 is kinda meh.
If musk offered 1000 per share, then the lawsuit may have had some weight.
Let's be specific, "pedo guy". And that was an insult in response to an equally profane insult from the other guy. Two wrongs don't make a right, but he apologized and people who have said equally bad or worse things also occupy high places...
Weeks later someone talked to musk about it, and he replied "Bet ya signed dollar it's true".
Elon also hired private investigator to dig dirt on the diver but found nothing.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/15/elon-musk-tweets-hell-bet-...
Musk also emailed BuzzFeed reporter suggesting that the diver was a child rapist. Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-cant-...
Some of my friends even said that musk was this confident, maybe musk knew something we didn't.
His excuse in court saying that "pedo guy" is just a common insult in Africa. Nobody in Africa uses this term.
The BuzzFeed email wasn't included in court because it wasn't public communication. Okay, dude, great justice system.
Please stop simping for musk. This person tried to destroy innocent lives with false pedophile accusation.
What it emphasises is the need for self-moderation especially when your state of mind is in fight mode. The mistake here is Elon's stream of consciousness doesn't stay off of twitter for his own determent. That is not an inherently malicious thing. People get into arguments all the time and say stupid regrettable things in the moment. Playing out on the internet--especially with a big power dynamic at play no doubt is bad. But let's not forget we're not robots here--hence we're not sending people to jail after arguments.
He sent email to BuzzFeed report trying to get them to write about the child rapist.
He hired PI to dig dirt on the diver.
This is not a response to an insult.
Musk intended to destroy the diver's life with a false child rapist accusation.
Nah, he didn't apologize. He said in court that insisting somebody is a pedo is a common playground insult in Africa.
> he didn't apologize > He said in court that insisting somebody is a pedo is a common playground insult in Africa.
Apologizing and making this clarification are not mutually exclusive things.
Except that Elon hired a PI to do that way before he got sued.
Also, if child rapist is a common insult (this is elon's main defense in court), why would he need to dig up dirt on the diver?
Because Elon wanted to figure out if the diver had some history related to sexual assault.
> Yes Elon is known for manic states, it's not a new detail.
Are you implying it is okay for Elon to make false child rapist accusation?
I have no idea how his general trait is relevant with this specific event.
> Apologizing and making this clarification are not mutually exclusive things.
Nobody said they were mutually exclusive.
I am saying that he didn't apologize.
> And a jury decided, unanimously after viewing the totality of the case
First of all because BuzzFeed email wasn't included in the case
Second the diver had to prove damage, which was hard to do.
This is like Donald trump never commits sexual assault because he is not convicted.
Stepping back, are you normally calling your friends and families child rapists as a fun insult? Are those normal insults to you?
> Are you implying it is okay for Elon to make false child rapist accusation?
People say much worse than "pedo guy" in arguments, although this is subjective. In a response to another insult, I'll mark "Sorry pedo guy..." as an informal childish remark, not a sober threat with the intent to harm someone.
> Nobody said they were mutually exclusive. > I am saying that he didn't apologize.
I don't understand what you're saying here. This means he can apologize for and also clarify the context behind the insult. So far, his last words on the topic in sworn statements are that he didn't mean the comments to be a statement of fact and apologized.
> Second the diver had to prove damage, which was hard to do.
They had to prove if a reasonable person would take the statement as a fact of matter. Whatever dirt he dug up with an investigator is something that happened after the fact, and private comments he made digging in are self-inflicted collateral damage, not preceding the comments in question.
> I have no idea how his general trait is relevant with this specific event.
The totality of the case also needs to mention the context that he was trying to help, on his own dime, children who were trapped underground. It doesn't make his comments right, but taking statements at face value lacks human context.
Twitter Adopts Limited Duration Shareholder Rights Plan - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042187 - April 2022 (208 comments)
You're basically replicating the US Courts Legal System, except those on trial pay 0% taxes. Not viable.
Keep thinking though, we need a hero of an idea to make forward progress on the question of what strategy is best for US-based public companies, and what their role is in showing the world what the gold standard for "freedom of speech" online looks like.
EDIT: Arguably, much of what I am suggesting can be automated cheaply.
A publicly traded company cannot solve this problem but a private company might be able to.
1. According to Elon, who now insists the tweet was true.
> Today on Twitter, as on most social media, justice works in a roughly Stalinist style. The normal penalty is permanent execution. There is no transparent explanation for why an account is executed, before or after the execution. It has simply “violated the Twitter rules.” The public rules are extremely abstract and could theoretically justify almost any execution. The private rulebook by which the secret police, or “Ministry of Trust and Safety,” operates, is of course as secret as everything about the secret police.
> Of course, it is easy to observe that a two-day-old spam account does not deserve a six-month trial, with lawyers, before getting the bullet it needs in the back of the neck. Due process in this context must not be a clone of the IRL judicial system, which is more broken than anyone can possibly imagine.
> And there is a simple solution to the problem of scaling due process: *scale the level of due process to the size of the account*. An account with a million (real) followers might well deserve a six-week public trial, perhaps even with some kind of counsel. The spammer with 20 followers? Any cop can shoot him, as at present, and leave the body by the side of the road as a warning to others.
> There is a use for online Stalinist justice—it is only an injustice when it is disproportional to the user’s investment in the service. When Twitter is your career and any cop can just shoot you, an eerie atmosphere of terror pervades everything.
Billions is a great show by the way.
My whole point is, Musk made a series of public actions that made a stir. One action had the board make a knee-jerk decision that seems somewhat logical. He's jabbing with his left and the Twitter board seems to have hopped to their left and he's maybe going to uppercut, right hook, maybe go for a knee or do nothing at all and get hammered on martinis or mojitos or whatever a rich super villian likes to drink.
This is all a public side show for some greater end down the road or Musk made a drunk filing with the SEC. I dont know... well, all I do know is what's publicly available is pure propaganda to sway the public towards some greater play by someone who's going to profit off of this. I'm done with my poop now, find someone smarter to figure it out.
In my experience, the more someone talks about "social justice", the less they have to contribute to any actual production.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/elon-mu...
When are blogs on your own domain name going to come back full circle?
Ever since AOL people seem to want to give single corporations all their power in walled gardens.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/buyout-firm-thoma-bravo-a...
However I believe the current model of social media being funded by "engagement" has peaked, is hard to grow in a world already saturated by advertising, and is at risk from privacy & pro-consumer legislation slowly being enacted around the world.
I just don't see a future in the current model, yet the social media industry seems to be stuck in this local maximum without an easy way out. A hostile takeover of a large existing player by a risk-taker is the "kick in the butt" that the industry needs. It may go well, it may go wrong, but IMO it's at least worth a try.
Yeah, as mentioned, Elon is a god, but in my humble opinion, his talents are in engineering (and Twitter just seem like a problem an engineer wouldn't even want to solve).
I don’t think claiming that because social spaces involve legal decisions, that he’s out of his element.
Backup 2: Continue making Twitter polls that potentially steer/force the current management's hand into the changes he wants to see implemented regardless.
Also the idea of having potentially millions of activist investors in the same company is kind of unsettling but interesting at the same time.
Then they could replace the board, repeal the shareholder rights plan, and the friends would pay back Musk's debt in Twitter shares.
This is such an obvious loophole, surely there is a legal provision against it?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-adopts-limi...
https://nypost.com/2022/04/15/elon-musk-considers-bringing-i...
I thought @jack would be for Elon taking over and that's why he stepped aside a few months ago.
> a limited duration shareholder rights plan, often called a “poison pill,”
> Under the new structure, if any person or group acquires beneficial ownership of at least 15% of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval, other shareholders will be allowed to purchase additional shares at a discount [until] April 14, 2023.
You'd also have to buy in large volumes on the public markets as well, so that'll bid up the price,providing a rationale for the board to reject the offer as undervalued.
And we know that for him to buy up enough shares to override the poison pill vote, he has to act much faster than he did the first time around. But the markets would be aware that he's looking to buy a much bigger stake, so existing holders can set whatever price they want.
Elon would do an infinitely better job than the current leadership, and I struggle to understand the mindset of those who say otherwise. I suspect they’re either ignorant or acting in bad faith.
It's more like an insurance policy, it doesn't mean they're not going to sell if the offer is attractive enough.
Or say “Anyone with the last name of Musk now owns type D share with 1/100th ownership value”.
Poison pills seems pretty close to doing just that.
“Even before Friday, Twitter had bylaws that "could have the effect of rendering more difficult, delaying, or preventing an acquisition deemed undesirable by our board of directors," the company said in a February 2022 SEC filing. That includes "a classified board of directors whose members serve staggered three-year terms," and the ability to "authoriz[e] 'blank check' preferred stock, which could be issued by our board of directors without stockholder approval and may contain voting, liquidation, dividend and other rights superior to our common stock."
Sounds like the board can do pretty much anything they want with Twitter’s stock. I find it incredible that a regulated public company can issue abitrary shares with any terms they want.
They made these rules before Friday. but it also sounds like they could have made them today if they wanted to.
TWITTER biggest shareholders:
1. Vanguard 10.3%
2. Elon Musk 9.2%
3. Morgan Stanley 8.4%
4. BlackRock 6.5%
5. State Street Corp 4.5%
?. Jack Dorsey 2.25%
1. Elon Musk 17%
2. Susquehanna Securities 6.5%
3. Capital World Investors 4.9%
?. Kimbal Musk 0.07%
Musk owns 48%-54% of outstanding stock
and 78% of voting rights
1. Jack Dorsey 12.7%
2. Morgan Stanley 6.8%
3. Vanguard 6.3%If he did own it, I wonder if he would unban Donald Trump?
I don't care about Musk or Twitter but I'm glad that somebody made a good joke out of this debacle.
Management. Hey, it's important. They're people-persons.
You also hit diminishing returns with new features and user growth, but when you have hundreds of ~~billions~~ millions of users, even marginal engagement gains can multiply out to something big, so you have a lot of teams working on features that might move the needle a bit.
There are also more regulatory hurdles as you grow, so some of the staff just support that.
That gets us 300 tech people to run the service.
That is for engineering, those numbers are roughly what I saw at Google for these kinds of things. Then Google typically has 1 non tech person per tech person, so add in at least as many people again. Then since Googles customer support and community management is hardly world famous for being good, rather it is infamous for being bad, you probably want even more non tech people than that. But still, do you really need 8000 people for it?
You ought to sign up and see it for yourself. Meta & Google's Business Platform is similar if not more powerful.
After this revelation, 8000 people entirely makes sense.
So, it's got lots of categories you can target. But...what evidence or guarantees are there of accuracy of the targeting?
I must say, it has been a very positive ad experience – receive compliments, 10% retweets, and had several long form conversations with strangers on Twitter messages. Really fun.
As a founder, engineer, and designer myself. I cannot fathom what 100+ designers do all day for an app like Twitter. They have to be working on so much overlap, and busy work.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/06/twitter-acquihires-creativ...
I imagine their content review platform, trust & safety tools, etc all have some designers working on them
First, it's a complex product. Just for the user-facing side of things, there are four big codebases: back-end, iPhone, Android, and Web. The back-end stuff is very large, generally for good reason, and sometimes not. A lot of those good reasons relate to performance; with over 100m people using it every day, getting the right tweets to the right people is challenging, especially given that some people have over 100m followers and many users will follow a lot of accounts (I follow over 3300, for example).
But the user-facing side is only part of it. A big way the site makes money is ads. This is in some ways a more complex problem than the user side of things. If you'd like to see, try buying an ad on Twitter. They also have a division that does data products, including a variety of APIs, and another group that has other products for businesses, like tooling for the customer support interactions that people expect to handle on Twitter.
I of course can't forget their SRE folks, who keep all of the machinery humming and make sure all the software is doing what it's supposed to. There a quite a lot of people doing infrastructural work making tools and products that you never hear about and I probably can't list. There's also a good developer tooling group that helps keep the developers above working smoothly. And let's not forget their internal IT group,
Adjacent to engineering are a lot of really sharp product and design people, as well as a design research crew that understands the many ways people use Twitter and examine how it works for them.
We then must turn to people who handle the social side of this. When I worked there, that included a significant staff doing policy work, trust and safety enforcement, and handling darker things like CSAM and terrorism issues. There were also a bunch of people fighting the banal spammers.
And let's not forget the ML people! That alone was a few hundred people doing research, creating and improving models, and applying them to many of the things I mentioned above.
And at last we come to the kind of things that pretty much any large company needs: finance, legal, marketing, government relations, sales, computer security, physical security, admin, management, and the like.
If you ever wonder this in the future about any company, I suggest you look at their jobs site [2], which is always a good way to get an idea of what goes on at a company.
How are so many people morally outraged by some complex measure they're trying to authoritatively distill and are just so wrong about, and didn't even bother to google?
About 60% of this thread can be summed up as
"I'm going to pass this alphanumeric value to this variable."
"But it's an integer"
"No it's not."
People like to pretend.
He even ran the (now famous) poll: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344
…what if they board believes they are maximizing shareholder value in the medium or long term? What if they sincerely believe Musk would be a fickle CEO, and would make changes to the platform that would harm ad growth?