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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Elon always has bigger plans and ability to execute on them then people seem to acknowledge.
how do you make a mockery of something whose only purpose is to manufacture consent for war profiteering?
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.
History should be a lesson here, it's almost Deja Vu with Twitter
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.
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.
Going back to the late 60s [1].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hemang-Desai-2/publicat...
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.
Excellent source for financial news though, I agree!
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?