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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

He made an offer in modest excess of the book value for a company that is probably overvalued to begin with. He knows this. The board knows this. Every investor with half a brain knows this.

It makes it impossible for the board to say no without having a good reason. They have a fiduciary duty to examine the offer and determine if it is best for shareholders to cash out at this price. And the answer to that is it probably is because Twitter has never had a good path to long term profitability.

So yes, he is having a laugh. I am sure if they agree he will find the money. He just doesn’t care. He sees a poorly run company that is making decisions against his freedom of speech ethos. It is an easy target.

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This freedom of speech angle is such a crock. How is the world richest man setting the rules of discourse on someone else's platform freedom?

It's akin to buying your way into the opinion section of every newspaper if not in magnitude, certainly in direction.

If he really cared about freedom, he'd just make a new platform with the $54B. But it's not about that. At best it's a laugh, at worst it's about control.

He believes in freedom of speech until someone tracks his jet, then he is more than ready to use his wealth to pressure them into silence.

How do you equate "freedom of speech" with "publishing Musk's physical location in real time" ?

In general we have laws against tracking individuals.

What he does seems legal but it doesn't make it good or ethical.

FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time. It's a legitimate security risk for those planes and people who use them. It's an abuse of the system.

The twitter account published the location of the plane using publicly available information. It could have also published the information of one of Virgin Atlantic's plane.

In fact it's not even Musk's plane, he just owns the company that owns the plane, Falcon Landing LLC. The twitter account didn't actually know if it was Elon Musk being flown or a bunch of burros being ferried back and forth between US states.

>FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time.

You're right, the FAA made the system open so that anybody could do this, not just this kid.

You can fight for freedom of speech while still wanting people to not say things/do things that you feel puts your personal life at risk.

Freedom of speech has to come with some caveats or its dangerous as it can be used as a weapon.

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