Twitter takeover battle: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey turn up pressure on board

The problem with censorship and I've posted this on HN plenty of times: Today it's the voice of those you disagree with, tomorrow it's your voice.

However, when a politician, or a political group, seeks to communicate, it should _not_ be done on that same infrastructure. There are all sorts of negative implications of real First Amendment protections for speech "in the commons". If, for example, the government owned twitter, it would have to support and allow Neo Nazis, the KKK, cult leaders, and all sorts of other corrosive participants to have access. Private entities have greater leeway.

So, if you are saying the government and officials in their official capacity must communicate via some protocol (RSS, ActivityPub, printed letterhead, etc.) that can be shared and accessed equally by other platforms or tools, I'm on board.

But if you are arguing that Twitter should somehow be nationalized, I think that way lies dragons.

That's the situation we are in, that's the situation governments find themselves in. Due to network effects it's very difficult to get people out of these platforms so what should be done about it?

It is particularly interesting because twitter is so diverse, I think my point is mainly that there are no efforts put into turning making these things happen. And why would they be? The status quo works out very well for those in power.

If you added up all the advertising money spent and all the payments to “influencers” and all the money spent on bot farms and fake accounts, you could approach a measure of that influence’s value.

One answer is something people here love to hate, and yet it’s proven to work well for this exact scenario.

It also solves in my mind a few other problems with social network startups. You see before it was almost entirely luck and timing, there didn’t exist many so if you had something unique and the collective unconscious was ready for something new you’d get lucky launching twttr at SXSW.

To beat Twitter or do something similar but different you’re back to the classic catch-22 of social networks, the users drives the value, but you need users. Startups like to give away a few hundred bucks to early adopters, but that just isn’t an incentive anymore.

What is an incentive, and has been proven without a doubt as one as of late, is giving away micro equity. Users will flock to your platform if they get a chance in the upside.

So it solves the catch-22, and it solves the long term ownership alignment problem.

It also attracts scammers, but that shouldn’t have ruined the whole deal for everyone. Unfortunately it did thanks mostly to the SEC.

This isn't how I recall the start of twitter. Since the transmission medium was sms/text messages, the character limit was due to what many characters could be sent in a single sms.

Twitter was seen as a genius application that allowed for sending group sms.

What it grew into, while stubbornly retaining the character limit baffled many people...

In a way, I'm questioning more the IPO than anything else; I think taking the company private after an IPO is a mistake and having it as shareholder owner company is also a mistake due to the size and influence of the platform right now.

I think as a platform grows there are many different ways that ownership can be distributed, no one thinks that a mom and pop shop needs to be socialised, but look at the size and influence of twitter (or facebook, or others). Do you really think people will stop innovating because they can't retain ownership of platforms with hundreds of millions of users? Any platform that gets to this size has already produced billions of dollars for their original owners! I think that's a cynical way of viewing the world, I mean, if anything there are tons of platforms out there that are built from the ground up with openness in mind.

I think you're not approaching things correctly when you say socialization is the flipside of a corporate bailout. The founders and owners of the platform are obviously entitled to compensation for their effort, but I believe there is a point where we can say "okay these people have done good enough!". I mean, big companies buy out smaller companies all the time; why do you think it would be so wrong for a state, or several states to buy out companies and then rework the ownership model of them? Maybe my original comment made it seem as though I was arguing for a state to simply take over. That is not what I'm saying, I'm saying, we need new ownership models. Lots of states around the world, for example, give benefits to people forming coops; but obviously with Twitter, it's a huge platform that already exists so what should be done about it?

Do you really believe that once you’ve made one thing at one point in time, you should be entitled to everything that follows from it, no matter the effect your subsequent a actually have?

I'm not making a claim of the veracity of this statement, but wouldn't a system that made this false be the best system?

Why don't we have a strong epithet like this for the right?

(also, I can't imagine anyone more privileged than Musk)

Well, that's I think one of the most interesting problems in political philosophy. And people have been discussing it since, well, forever! From Plato's republic to Machiavelli's The Prince.

In truth, I don't have an answer on exactly how is it that we can reach good decisions; but what I'm saying is that because there are so many different actors with different priorities it seems problematic for some of them to rule over everyone else. What are the decisions of the board prioritising? Probably share-price, and this comes with a whole set of baggage.

Is share-price really the parameter we should be optimising? I think many would say no, and in fact, I think when Elon Musk says he wants to take twitter private he might want the platform to go elsewhere; but what I question is that, is taking the company private really the most optimal way to ensure the platform heads in the right way? If you've got a good king, sure, you might have a good kingdom; but is this a sustainable way of structuring power? It doesn't seem as though it is, given that most countries in the world have transitioned from monarchies to more decentralized decision making structures.

Why is it that a platform like twitter is fine with a monarchic power structure but not our own states? I think in a way, I see twitter much closer to a state than I see it close to a small business that sells honey in the farm market. And so I think we ought to push for state-like, power structures. And in reality, I would like it for twitter to push it way further, to experiment and to improve on collective decision making! I don't think current states are as good as they could be.

>What we need is more competition. How we do that? Not really sure. Though I think nationalism is a good start.

The companies don't want the kind of competition you're proposing though. All these companies spend massive amounts of money in loss-leading markets just so they become the ubiquitous platform of choice in all markets. Also, given that we don't have a world-government - what exactly are you proposing?

If Twitter goes down, you think someone is going to say "oh no, you shouldn't have bought all the stocks"?

Well, probably, because people will say anything.

Sometimes they pass questions on to the shareholders of the funds, which everyone ignores.

https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/c...

Just because the interest of the company’s owners is small does not mean the interests aren’t aligned. In other words, magnitude != direction.

The board of Twitter has maximal power, but minimal interest. The owners of Twitter have minimal power and minimal interest too, relative to their other holdings, but maximal interest relative to the board.

Its shareholders, come on, that's an easy one :^)

And what are the chances that a large publicly held company has board members who own just that company's stock??

What I am trying to understand is that – do the shareholders want these people to have cultural power?

The biggest example of this I see is when I search for info about student loan cancellation or suspension. One particular website, which is known for paywalls and usually has some sort of "X free articles" popup, hosts what amounts to an editorial column by some guy, who always seems to have articles on the topic, but barely provides any kind of real information.

Of course, there are link callouts to other articles on that site, written by the same guy, which look like they'll be informative. They're usually not. They still eat up one of those "X free articles" slots and try to bombard you with ads, however!

maybe i think climate activist shareholders in energy companies are hostile / bad actors. Can i selectively dilute them out?

Also, can the shareholders then sue the company (successfully? :)) for decreasing the price? ("everything is securities fraud" after all.)

Remember Musk wasn't ever threatening a hostile takeover anyway. He knows it won't work. He was making an offer to the board to induce them to bless the sale. And the board responded with the poison pill, essentially as a way of saying "no". This is the way this kind of negotiation works.

And from the opposite perspective, arguments like "the board isn't performing its fiduciary duty by accepting Musk's offer" are likewise silly. The board is elected by the shareholders (the actual bureaucracy and process for this varies between corporations, I know nothing about Twitter). The level of oversight needed to ensure fiduciary fidelity is already there. No court is going to view a board trying to oppose a hostile takeover as a breach of fiduciary duty, that's ridiculous.

Can you please elaborate on this? How can it be avoided?

IANAL, but this is actually theft - Minority shareholders have rights if a company is liquidated, and the courts are smart enough to recognize "Reorganize all assets under a new company owned only by the majority shareholder" as being that liquidation. As far as I'm aware, States Attorney General are the ones to prosecute this crime, so file a complaint there.

A few hours ago he tweeted out an article that celebrates Musk as a great person for growing shareholder value: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1516057871108165637

> The Tesla CEO’s track record proves he’s a pre-eminent builder of businesses and maximizer of shareholder value.

That's not the article you'd tweet to support altruistic intentions, is it?

> He's got the $40 billion to spare

He really doesn't though, which is part of why I think this is all a big joke. The vast majority of his fortune is tied up in his ownership of several companies. The Tesla shares are the most liquid, but he's already borrowing a lot against them.

Is he really going to sell a large portion of his SpaceX or Tesla ownership to fund a Twitter lark? I doubt it.

No institutional investor is going to commit billions of dollars to an investment that is explicitly not about making money. The only way he raises third party money for the purchase is if those investors understand that Elon is lying.

> Musk isn't worried about losing the money, which means he can act out of principles rather than fear.

Musk talks a lot about pursuing projects out of principle rather than for profit, while his actions have lead to becoming the richest person in the world. Color me jaded, but I don't think one becomes the richest person in the world without trying really hard to make money. Disguising it as magnanimous behavior only helps.

Isn't it literally enabling free speech?

The audience, or in other words the public, always catch up and move to the next dominant platform. This is one reason why I think arguments about network effects are one to be taken with a grain of salt. The public will go wherever the content is. Twitter's audience is not going to remain as valuable as it previously was (ahem, mismanagement may be one reason for this).

Twitter’s format is fundamentally archaic.

My guess is both Elon and Jack will start to promote Bluesky with BTC at it's core for registration and ID purposes and prevent spam bots while offering a better alternative,

I called the mining collaboration between Tesla and Block/CASH last year during the price drop when Elon pulled BTC payment at Tesla; this makes sense they've both been on the receiving end of hostile take overs of their own companies and are heavily invested in BTC and have a strong view on how social media platforms have been going--Jack way more than Elon, Tesla and SpaceX but still a large holdings and stand to gain a lot from it.

I've never done social media, assuming HN doesn't count, and to be honest I'd consider playing with something like Bluesky if they move forward with it as I anticipate it will: if nothing else to see how the mechanics work.

It's a common situation someone with good external credentials get parachuted into a role that they're ultimately not fit for, drove initiatives that only wasted resources, and left behind a mess that others had to clean up. All while they're hailed as Jesus's second coming.

I don't know how Fei Fei Li performed, and don't want to pass judgment on that matter. Just if that was indeed the case, I could understand the frustration. Companies would rather spend 10 million poaching someone useless and let them spend 100 million on something useless, than to invest the same in existing good engineers and scientists that continue to deliver. Even worse is to keep watching those people failing upwards. This is more commonly a stereotype for MBA executives, but is often also true for academics that get significant appointments outside a research institution without the experience of managing a business project.