Twitter re-examines Elon Musk’s bid, may be more receptive to a deal
wsj.com
wsj.com
What I find really interesting personally is that Twitter is a unique entity. It has practically failed to adapt over a decade. That is both good and bad. It has given it a very specific character and a very specific user base. We have seen over the years that it's very easy for social media companies to die rather than adapt. This has been shown in slow trends like people moving on from Facebook or all at once like at Digg. It's very easy to alienate users without attracting new ones. So it'll be very interesting to see what happens there.
Morgan Stanley only covers part of the total deal and Musk still needs to find a solid 21 billion from somewhere. That's probably doable for him but definitely not easy. I don't see it as "more or less certain" at least..
Is Musk’s reputation so bad that he, the owner of a car company that turned the car industry on its head (by proving that electric cars were possible) and pushed a massive paradigm shift in the lithium ion battery industry/market (maybe helped with the meteoric rise in demand mobile devices in the last decade as well, admittedly) not be able to find and convince a consortium of investors to put money towards the buy out?
Maybe I’m too stuck on thinking of this as like the purchase of a sports team…
The man has several SEC processes against him in progress and most of his wealth is locked in Tesla, so financially I’d say he’s not in a great position unless he offloads Tesla stock.
what would those investors get as collateral for this loan?
Musk has apparently already pledged some percentage of his Tesla holdings as collateral (i dont know how much, but i heard it's close to 50%).
If those investors take the other 50%, then i would imagine the holdings are over-pledged with no margin for safety. May be those investors would accept the terms, but i dunno.
The leading problem is that twitter is not profitable, so any loan for buying twitter requires an alternative source of income to service the interest.
Imagine staking 50% of Tesla against owning Twitter, which feels like it's on a slow but steady death spiral.
The pitch would seem to be "sure, you could buy into twitter a lot cheaper two weeks ago, but now I'm involved! How great is that?" You're right that it depends a lot on his reputation.
I’d also argue that it’s very easy for a social network to be so dedicated to adapting for growth that it loses character. For example, how every single app these days seems to have a “story” feature.
In fact, Twitter had one too: fleets. They were pushed by an activist investor and flopped horribly. Best case Musk is a wonderful steward for the company, worst case we see ideas like fleets and much worse and Twitter loses much of what makes it unique in the first place.
Same Twitter, just better.
A billionaire should not be able to do this in the first place.
If it's no secret, can you cite some sources?
Im curious why do you think a billionaire shouldn’t be able to buy a company?
I actually prefer it when several billionaires are “at odds” eg bezos vs musk. Rather than just silently agreeing and covering for each other as it has been for what feels like eternity.
Feel free to summarize the point if there's any.
Once liberalism stopped being purely oppositional and established some power, there became a division between people for whom the progress achieved to date was the end goal and the people who saw it as partial.
In places where the success of liberalism also ushered in pluralism (not the US), the latter group got different names depending on exactly what they saw the end goal as...
In the US, once the early progress of liberalism was the right edge of the Overton Window, use of “liberal” and “conservative” as evolving relative-to-center terms for the directions on the primary axis of political dispute became fairly common, though even that fell apart as a consistent thing when part of the local “liberal” coalition turned sharply right with neoliberalism, resulting in an evolving use of differentiating language within the former “liberal” umbrella.
Doesn't seem like the funding secured thing was an outright lie.
Therefore, "funding secured" was absolutely an outright lie, unless words don't have meaning anymore.
I still think what he’s done at SpaceX and Tesla is admirable, but after reading those emails I’m definitely a few percent less confident that there will still be a Tesla to service my Model 3 in the future.
You just called the most successful businessman in the world an 'utterly inept businessman'.
Literally the wealthiest person in the world and all achieved through business success!
Defined and successfully delivering on multiple new markets, with a string of serial successes.
And in all the successful cases he had massive contributions by others. He provided the money, which is huge in itself. The actual work eas done by others, and the fact the Musk fails to properly say so, and that his fanboys believe every single of his claims, truely makes him the Steve Jobs of 2020s we deserve.
Success is measured using market share not market cap or net worth of the CEO.
Tesla accounted for 1.3% of all cars sold in the world during 2021.
Stock price, net worth and number of synchopants getting on their knees are like a voting machine, market share is a weighting machine.
When you use the right metric it becomes crystal clear who are te guys setting records at the weighting machine.
It's the usual quiet ones: Buffett, Gates, Brin&Page, Tim Cook.
Not to mention the GOAT. Rockefeller left Standard Oil at #1 in market share and here we are in 2022 the companies which were under the umbrella of Standard Oil are still at #1.
And actually he's not a "businessman" at all. He's an engineer at heart. "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
> "Businessman" would require strong social skills, not something someone with aspergers has good ability at.
This exact nonsense is why the autistic community was so displeased when he made a big show of having "asperger's" (which in the US under DSM-V is just autism, btw). Can we please stop justifying toxic and reckless behavior with "oh but they're autistic" as if we're talking about naive children not grown adults?
Autistics tend to struggle with ambiguity and social cues, yes, but many of us are even more sensitive to social cues than allistics because we literally had to learn to pick up on this shit to survive. A lot of autistics report actually being hyper-empathetic to the point where it can be debilitating because it's hard to filter out the noise and determine which cues you're supposed to pick up on and which ones you're supposed to ignore.
Elon Musk is a dickhead AND autistic. He's not a dickhead because he's autistic. He's naive because he got extremely lucky (like all billionaires do, even if it's only winning the lottery of being born into wealthy families with ample of business opportunities) and overestimates his own intelligence (which isn't helped by his massive fanbase thinking he's the best thing since sliced bread because he bought and funded some companies developing tech he thought was cool), not because he's autistic.
You can just compare the current situation.
This time, he got letters from people with money saying he can have it, and on what basis. Now that we see it, isn't it obvious that is what "funding secured" means, even if we don't all know exactly how high finance works?
"Funding secured" wasn't a half-truth, it was an outright lie that sounded a little like a half truth. Very Trumpian.
Also, it's recently been reported that a judge declared the question of whether "funding secured" was a knowing lie closed, in the sense that the jury in related ongoing litigation will be told that it's not up to them to decide that point.
Musk has never admired to having made up the funding. He settled the dispute because it lead to problems with Tesla credit rating, banks didn't want an outstanding dispute with SEC.
He says he did have funding secured. He elaborated on the details in the recent TED talk.
Do you have any privileged information about the incident or are you just casually calling someone a liar based on third-hand news you read online?
So, no, informed people are not "casually" calling him a liar.
I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
>I sincerely doubt that. Judges don’t tend to talk that way, regardless of the case at hand.
GP is probably refering to this (in which case you are right, judge didn't use words like liar)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/judge-in-musk-tr...
"Judge in Musk trial will tell jury that “Funding secured” tweets were false"
and
"[T]hough 'jury instructions are often an ineffective remedy,' the Court finds that unlikely to be true for the instant case where the jury will be told that the Court has already found that the August 2018 tweets were false and made with the requisite scienter [knowledge of wrongdoing]," Chen wrote.
Even though there's a bunch of people (including Carmack) that claim that he's a great engineer, it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this. Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
> it's really hard to believe when he's put out stuff like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw?t=122
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8ZBJWo73E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zlnbs-NBUI
This is how Musk actually talks.
> Like, did he use up all of his thinking fuel on designing rockets that he didn't understand why the boring company's mission was a total non-starter?
He doesn't spend a lot of time working on the boring company to be frank. It's a small side project. He's doing it to see if it's possible.
Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?
It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.
Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.
The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.
Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.
BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.
You don’t have to imagine. It literally already happened once when he claimed he had funding secured to take Tesla private. As such, if you can’t imagine him not having funding secured this time, you’re severely lacking in imagination.
I don't think he's lying.
This is what Elon is saying and it sounds like a perfectly plausible scenario, under which you'd rather avoid the conflict and just shut up and sign and pay the fine.
That's how this discussion started: The SEC blackmailed Musk into signing a settlement or otherwise the SEC would block Tesla's accounts. Well, it's either that or Musk, in fact, did lie about the funding to take Tesla private. reasonable people believe the latter, other prefer option one. And then people still wonder were Tesla's evaluation comes from.
Musk has also said he is going to launch legal action on this. Because that's almost exactly what happened, and it is unfair. So you are correct, and this saga probably still has more to go.
What's funny is almost anyone on the planet couldn't go up against someone like the SEC, which is why they can get away with this. Good on Musk for doing it.
The banks didn't want a liability. The SEC disagreement was going to take too much time to resolve legitimately. If he didn't please the banks they wouldn't give him funding.
It is hard to look at the SEC’s most public actions in the last few years and not believe Musk here.
This time the plan seems to have better foundations.
Calling him a showman and conman is great way to posture superiority over the guy shooting rockets into space and hiring 100k+ people
We tolerate the characteristics because of the perceived value, but it would also be nice to highlight genuinely good people with significant accomplishments for being successful as well as kind.
What he has done that is bad and why people hate him:
- Called somebody something bad on twitter once.
- Twits dumb memes with dumb humor sometimes
- Twitted about cryptocurrencies. People claim this is market manipulation to enrich himself without any evidence.
- Twitter 'Funding secured'. People believe this is made up, however it was conclusively settled. And even if it was not fully secured, there is little question he could have found the money. So not sure why people are so angry about that.
That seems to be most of the criticism I read. If that is the worst thing, I don't know what people are so worked up about.
Some leftists are angry he doesn't support unions, but of course almost no rich person (and many non rich people don't either).
I assume you're talking about the time he called a diver (and actual hero) a pedophile. It went a bit further than that - he hired a private investigator who tried (and failed) to dig up dirt on the man.
He created a false narrative about what Musk and his team of engineers (literal rocket engineers) were doing. Musk and his engineers had coordinated with the actual rescue team and the Mini-Sub they build was according to specification from the diving team who suggested they were not sure if the youngest and smallest child could be rescued with the conventional method they were planning.
The media of course presented this as Musk comes in and advocates for his own method of saving everybody and the 'hero' was a guy who pushed himself into the cheap sensationalist media by attacking Musk. The sensationalist media of course simply ran with that and were just to happy to publish anything negative about Musk.
That was of course during a time when Tesla was having challenges scaling and the 'Musk is a total idiot' storyline was getting lots of clicks.
In all, sure, Musk did something stupid but he didn't start it. He had never said anything bad about either this guy or the diving team. He had in fact done the opposite and expressed that it was good that their alternative solution in the end wasn't required.
But I guess anybody who pushes himself into the media who to insult Musk must be a hero.
If you don't want to consider a man who was instrumental in saving the lives of 12 boys a hero that's fine, there are lots of other adjectives that I'm sure you can find and they're all far more flattering than the one Musk made of himself in that saga.
Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
> instrumental
There was a professional diving team that saved the children he was not himself doing it.
And even if he was pushing yourself into the media and making headlines by insulting somebody who tried to help is not really a good look. Specially because it was not constitutive (or respectful) critism. It was simply a guy who wanted attention and got it.
> Take a step back and think about what you're defending here. It's not a good look.
I'm not defending what Musk said. It was clearly a stupid thing to say.
But if the main critism of a guy who lead 2 important technology companies for decades is 'he got too angry at somebody who insulted him in the media' then that is a pretty lame reason to hate him so much.
It's his job as a diver, is it not?
This is exactly what Musk himself had said, can you please provide any sources for many paragraphs of unsubstantiated claims you just made? :)
If we can get a massively successful revolutionary business like SpaceX without someone like Steve Jobs I'd love it. But so far the sample size is small and there aren't any countering examples. History has thus far shown that you need people with strong personality and drive with some amount of lack of empathy in order to create massive shifts in the course of humanity.
Also, SpaceX isn't done.
"We love green businesses, wouldn't it be great if we had more electric cars and could kill oil?"
"We love science, especially rocket scientists!"
"Twitter can ban anyone they like, 1st amendment only applies to government, get your own Twitter if you don't like it!"
Waaaaait, not like thaaaaat!
Stop the hypocrisy.
As someone else pointed out, TWTR isn't a great purchase, either. Its ad revenue isn't great, so if he defaults on the loan, the lender is stuck with an asset they don't want.
Didn't he sell quite a lot of stock last year? Bear in mind he just keeps getting more of it as part of his compensation...
"Elon Musk unleashed a torrent of stock sales, options exercises, tax payment sales and gifted shares last year totaling nearly $22 billion.
Yet even after unloading so much Tesla stock, he still owns a larger share of the company than when he started, thanks to his compensation package.
Musk owns 172.6 million Tesla shares, or a 17% stake, which makes him its single largest individual shareholder."[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/15/elon-musk-unloaded-billions-...
I'm really not what you'd call a believer in Tesla - although had my first ever ride in a one (a model 3) recently, quite an eye-opening experience.
It's not as thought Tesla is the only company where the current valuation doesn't appear to make much sense looking at the numbers...
How so? I've had rides in Model S's before and it was totally... fine? What made the Model 3 experience so much better than a conventional car?
I do agree that the stock is way over-valued when looking only at the economic fundamentals, but when one balances out the “the Chinese have all this battery thing all figured out!” vs “we only have Tesla on our side!” then things are different (and, yes, I know that the “Tesla batteries” are not 100% made by Tesla right now).
How so ? It's a car company, there are dozen of them making equally good, if not better, cars. Autopilot is useless and electric cars are already there. You can credit them for the democratisation of EV but that's about it
The likes of Mercedes and VW are orders of magnitude behind, both when it comes to batteries and especially when it comes to software
Nothing about Tesla is strategic. SpaceX is different, sure. But with the exception of a yet-to-come lunar mission and astronaut trabsportation to the ISS the "West" got needed stuff into orbit just fine.
Certainly packaging Panasonic rolls into 2170s gives them a nice edge but it isn't exactly rocket science.
The Giga press is made by the Italian Idra Group. They have bought them out at the moment but anybody can start nabbing them for themselves if they got a spare $30m laying around.
Tesla is certainly "good at engineering", but their advantage is not really in original IP so much as organizational agility. Perhaps the incumbents are too bureaucratic to adapt but I wouldn't count them out just yet.
As for software, give me a break.
P.S. - I am actually a fan just not a fanboy.
> o much as organizational agility
That's why I insisted on the "better software" part, that's where much of their advantage comes from.
Maybe the Germans and the French can also source their batteries from the Chinese but they just haven't been able to put them to good use the way Tesla did (and does). For example right now Renault is selling a 20,000 euro EV (produced in China, of course) [1] which has atrocious autonomy, to say nothing of the fact that it feels very small. And that is supposed to be one of their main vehicles when it comes to targeting the EV mass-market, from one of the biggest car makers in the world. It's a complete joke.
I remember WeWork being a software company, not a commercial landlord.
That said, I agree that Tesla's software is significantly better than every competitor, but Autopilot is behind the other self-driving players, and I'd rather have dials than a touchscreen, anyway.
I am entirely skeptical he designed anything and considering the duds he's pretending are revolutionary (Boring, Hyperloop, Mars nonsense, Cybertruck, etc) but instead are failures it seems unlikely he could be so right about one thing and so wrong on others.
Trump is rich also
Definitely not a fan of his but hiring smart people and enabling them is an accomplishment.
As wealthy as he is, he didn’t inherit all of what he has today. He’s definitely done more than many people who come from wealth.
Not to sound “attacky” but that seems extremely naive.
Truthfully, he comes from wealth, but not close to the wealth he has today; his father owned half of an emerald mine for example.
He is quoted as saying (about his youth): "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe"
But yes, he absolutely comes from wealth. Just like most of them do.
If we were to translate 5% of the 2020 U.S. GDP today, that would be 5% of $20.807 trillion. Or about $1.404 trillion. So Bezos, with his $182.2 billion and Musk with his $264.6 billion, have A LONG way to go to catch up with Rockefeller.
Self-landing rockets
Underground tunnel systems
Brain-computer interfaces
OpenAI leading AI research
PayPal
Accomplished? Meh!
EVs are over a century old. SpaceX was recreating NASA research. Subways have been a thing for over a century; literally millions of people use them every day. Paypal's tech stack used Thiel's startup's technology; they jettisoned everything from Musk's stack and moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
Reading such an absurd and idiotic reductionist take on HN just makes me sad. I mostly speaks to you having absolutely zero knowlage about space technology and rocketry.
> moreover fired him for gross incompetence.
They fired him because he had a 10 year business plan to replace banks and become the main monetary system for all payments. A combination of being a bank, an online payment provider and Apple pay.
The other founders wanted to sell the company and make quick cash.
> Subways have been a thing for over a century;
Yeah such an asshole wanting to improve tunneling technology. Only assholes try to improve technology. We should just shoot anybody in the head who tries to improve on technology that is more then 10 years old.
I didn't say Elon Musk invented electric cars.
I'm saying he accomplished something in these fields.
If you want to pull him down among the rest of us, why don't you just point out that he's inhaling and exhaling in exactly the same way as everyone else?
In other news: honeybee tongue hairs repel water
Pssh, oil repelled water way before honey bees, they're not that special!
> EVs are over a century old.
But not an economic success and there was (and still is to be frank) no successful EV industry besides Tesla. A lot of fanfare with little results.
> SpaceX was recreating NASA research.
NASA and competitors dismissed any idea of landing rockets or even reusability in the first place. It was deemed a failed idea. This is why the SLS has been created by NASA as reusability was deemed a failure.
On the other items besides PayPal, they aren't successes yet so I'll reserve judgement.
On the whole "jettisoned" stuff there's a lot of conflicting reports on that and he wasn't fired.
Lines like that work better on a site where most of the people don't appreciate just how damned hard it is to build a business.
Even if you want to go with the idiotic 'he is not an engineer'-storyline to make yourself feel good, as a business man his credentials are literally unassailable.
To downplay business success as 'hired some smart people' is just ridiculous and utterly sad and depressing to read on a page that is hosted on 'ycombinator'. Get a grip and think before you write something.
Ever tried to count all the failed businesses that did the same?
The attrition rate of technological startups that match your description is insane. How many space startups from the early 2000s do even exist today?
Musk's companies have already revolutionized at least two hard-to-crack industries, aerospace and automotive, and are attempting more.
Your exercise in false equivalence is, well, an exercise in false equivalence.
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/tesla-s-mai...
"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Heartland America, you have just subsidized a bunch of millionaires living in California's most expensive coastal ZIP codes to the tune of $10,197 per car. I'm sure they are sending you a thank-you card."
It would be hilarious if it turns out that the government is interested in a private Twitter for "enhanced" data collection and analysis.
Mr and Mrs Heartland America should be more concerned about the subsidies for oil companies; what are those meant to accomplish exactly?
No, just the most famous braggart. Other people, i.e. actual experts and professionals, did all the actual work that he likes to lay claim to accomplishing.
“Elon Musk is a bullshitter who delivers. This breaks a lot of people's pattern-matching, in both directions.”
[1](https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1358760338724974594...)
The mainstream media takes on Musk and Twitter have certainly been something. For some reason, he's been coded as 'right wing' by many among the media set, and is getting the treatment that those coded that way get. The available evidence doesn't support that coding, and it all shouldn't matter anyway.
I Support The Current Thing
5 words that drive the Twitterati nuts because it encapsulates their whole online existence.
Quoting the excellent Matt Levine, the situation is more like the following: '''the answer to the question “might Elon Musk have made an offer to take a large public company private, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, without giving any real thought to where the money would come from?” is “absolutely yes, and he’s done it before.”'''
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/elon-musk-holding-compan...
Always be skeptical of what is widely reported on the news and don't blindly listen to what is being said by the brainless parrots on twitter re-tweeting everything that they think is 'going' to happen. Especially even if this deal goes through. As I said before. [1]
As always, not even the most upvoted or top comments are correct either. It's yet another bias projection.
Elon is already at the limits of his hours on a daily basis to devote to things with SpaceX, Boring Company, Tesla, etc.
Picture it this way, Twitter is your startup and Elon proposes to buy you out. Would you not question how much time we would devote as part of the buyout talks?
The article quotes a shareholder rallying behind Musk's offer as justifying his support for Mr Musk's personal involvement.
The article includes quotes from shareholders such as “He has an established track record at Tesla,” and “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.”
I'm not aware of a single instance where shareholders were excited by the prospects of the new owner delegating managent to a random unknown employee.
Twitter’s biggest moves since its inception aside from TOS/legal/anti-evil have been character count, ads, timeline algorithm, gifs/videos/polls, and connecting NFTs to your avatar. Nothing groundbreaking on the user side.
Musk could get kudos for simply hiring an intern to add an “edit button” as he’s already hinted at.
I look forward to seeing who Elon pickes to replace all board members and executives at twitter
I would assume he would smile and laugh just like the rest of us non-authoritarian left people (we are the majority) as the Left drives itself insane with non-sense like what you just claimed....
He doesn't need to spend much time with his companies to damage them.
Couple of questions spring to mind:
1. Can you define "damage"?
"Elon Musk poised to collect $23bn bonus as Tesla beats targets" [0]
"Tesla reported record revenue and profits for the first quarter of 2022 [..]"[1]
2. Would you say the current management of Twitter are doing a good job on behalf of their shareholders?
"Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates; revenue forecast light"[2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/21/elon-musk-s...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/04/20/elon-musk-...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-misses-ad-revenue...
You think Elon Musk created two of the most valuable companies in the world without being good at delegating?
I think pretty highly of him, but not that highly.
Aside from a supposed pedestrian tunnel in Texas and that Tesla demonstration tunnel in Las Vegas, Boring Company has delivered 0 tunnels. Pretty sure it was started for meme potential only.
Oh, and the “flamethrower”
But it could also be another Theranos.
I’ll leave the guessing to other people.
How much time he can spend is a much bigger question if he’s being hired to run the joint.
I doubt that he plans to run Tw himself. Tw’s problem is that it is run by ideologues. To remove the ideologues is the main goal of this entire move. That step alone would probably double the value of the company.
In my experience, in terms of moderation, it's mostly run on autopilot. Humans, if they're involved at all, have very little time for individual decisions and how often someone is reported seems to be the most important metric for their decision.
If they accept the deal at the proposed price, then the board will definitely get sued by the ones who bought TWTR at a higher valuation. If they refuse the deal, then the board will definitely get sued by people who bought TWTR at a lower valuation. No matter what they'll do, there's going to be _someone_ who's going to sue them.
Wasn't the only "censorship" twitter has done simply against harmful misinformation and hate speech? What exactly is twitter censoring that's outside of those two?
I haven't used HN long enough to know why I can reply to some posts but not others, so sorry for this top level
The Hunter Biden laptop story.
This story was broken by the right-leaning New York Post. Twitter banned its sharing in the weeks before the election, claiming it to be misinformation (with the implication that the leaking of its contents was part of a Russian plot).
~2 years later (when its relevance is greatly diminished) both the Washington Post [1] and the New York Times [2] have confirmed the major aspects of this story.
This was a coordinated censorship campaign, and a free speech platform would have allowed it to get the the sunlight it deserved.
Now, does it appear the NY Post's coverage was slanted and, in some areas, inaccurate? Yes. But that is where the rest of the media (including and especially Twitter) should have stepped in to perform its function in an open society: producing more and better speech.
Now, there are about a million other things that are probably obtained illegally talked about on twitter, but even so, obtaining and posting someone's tax returns online is actually illegal, and it was also for a presidential candidate, so it really should have qualified under the same rules to be censored if Twitter was consistent. Yet that was never blocked on Twitter.
that's the problem. These days anything you don't agree with can be considered harmful misinformation and hate speech. A year ago, doubting the almost 100% efficiency of masks or vaccines was "harmful, dangerous and may result in deaths", these days it's "common sense and valid skepticism".
I mean, jesus, just read the replies from any political post by damn near anyone who is slightly Twitter famous.
It's absolute trash heaped upon burning trash heaped upon dog shit.
It seems rather narcissistic to think that deleting your account would be of any consequence or inflict punishment on anyone. To put it bluntly, someone farting in their own car on the highway (and potentially soiling themselves, getting distracted, and causing a chain-reaction accident) has a greater potential impact to future events than whatever irrelevant drivel you (or I, or anyone) posts on Twitter.
For better or worse, Twitter has become the de-facto town square. The clones have tried and failed because the momentum to move sufficient numbers en masse just isn't there. Do you honestly believe that Musk is such an unpleasant figure that hoards of people would suddenly leave the platform? Where would they go? A digital Jonestown?
[1] https://news.yahoo.com/joe-rogan-says-gained-2-122749909.htm...
It's also as idiotic as all the people who were rage-tweeting their airline a week ago, upon suspension of the mask policy in the US, threatening to take their business elsewhere, only to have every major airline follow suit in the span of 6 hours.
I hope they enjoyed their bus ride, otherwise they'd have to just sit there and take it. I suppose getting your pilot's license isn't out of the question. It might be easier than building your own Twitter.
I can promise you, no matter what he does, people/sites you follow will likely extol how terrible the platform has gotten with disinformation/hate speech, even if he does nothing. How will you protect against that negativity bias? Do you have an objective way to know whether it's gotten worse or not, or are you going to rely on anecdotes from the sources you follow?
Fighting bots seems to me the opposite of 'allow disinformation'.
Also, are we currently blocking people for pushing disinformation? Did I miss something?
Also I've lost count of how much of last year's 'disinformation' became this year's 'that totally happened'.
Interviewer: You've described yourself, Elon, as a free speech absolutist, but does that mean that there's literally nothing that people can't say and it's okay?
Musk: Well, I think obviously Twitter or any forum is bound by the laws of the country that it operates in. So obviously there are some limitations on free speech in the US, and, of course, Twitter would have to abide by those rules. [...] No, I think, like I said, in my view Twitter should match the laws of the country
Quite a struggle for an international website, where the majority of users are outside of the US, to just say "we should follow the laws of countries" as if there's one single internationally compatible law for that.
https://theconversation.com/amp/if-elon-musk-succeeds-in-his...
We can't have that.
If you have to put a real, verified name behind these posts, at least that can cut into the massive bot armies spreading disinformation and the massive foreign spending that goes into amplifying all of it.
Then you would have the benefits of a free speech platform while preventing it from becoming a psunami of noise.
You have to stand behind what you say, because your real name is on it. True, we do have politicians and others trying to spin destructive narratives and spread falsehoods, but it is their right in the United States to do so, as long as it does not run awfoul of existing laws.
Anonymity is very valuable, especially for some of societies' most vulnerable, who should have a place on social media.
I’m in the “fortunate” position to not have strong feelings about Musk either way. I may delete my Twitter account if he takes the company private, but that will be more of protest against billionaires owning platforms that I think should be non-profit organisations because of their public impact. That being said, I’m not sure how that is even relevant to most people here on HN as my “protest” is not really matter.
I think Twitter might be opening itself up to a competitor if Musk does something stupid with it. But Twitter is probably already pretty open to disruption as it is exactly for the reason big money sees wasted potential in it. “Owning” the space for public discourse is sort of twitters thing, but it’s much less good at it than LinkedIn is at owning corporate discourse as an example.
But it all sort of depends on what Musk does with it, doesn’t it? Maybe he will make it better.
Twitter can be a pretty hostile place if you’re not a white straight man, can’t see Musk making it any betters for those people who are currently harrassed fir being women, queer or colored
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
I've never seen that. I've been a Twitter user since 2009.
Whoa, where are you getting that?
I feel that 'assume good faith' has its limits since those who comment in bad faith have no restrictions while others are forced to respond as though nothing is wrong. So sometimes I feel the need to respond a bit more aggressively, maybe that's not in the goals of the site though.
FTFY.
> Am I the only one? Would his acquisition spell the beginning of the end for Twitter?
And for all Twitter blue checks to go where? Tik Tok?
That would make Twitter the only big tech company with free speech as a core issue.
Nowadays even small tech like DuckDuckGo is actively cherry picking which propaganda to display.
I am assuming that Elon is not this much of a dumbass - what am I missing here?
No it wouldn't. Literally tons of people would do it and plenty of competitors have tried or are trying.
Per the value of the userbase and the cost of switching: well look at some of the competitors I mentioned, the ones Joe Rogan and others flock too when they get a temporary Twitter ban, do they not return immediately after their ban is lifted?
The cost of code and marketing can't beat Twitter's network effect. Getting Elon, Joe, and plenty of other personalities to move also is no guarantee that even a slight portion of the userbase switches.
I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. If it's just about speech, why can't such a platform co-exist with Twitter? Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
No? It is entirely possible to imagine consequential features that are uncompelling: Actively hostile features.
>I also think its odd to mix altruistic ideas like free speech platforms with profitable network effects. Why does it need to overtake Twitter?
What is the value in Twitter over the "free speech" clones if Twitters audience doesn't have value? Does Twitter have such unique features that couldn't be replicated much cheaper than the buy price?
I really feel like a lot of you guys vastly overestimate the impact of Twitter on The Real World. Elon Musk included.
Musk doesn't have a strong ability to deceive. He doesn't have strong interpersonal skills given his mental affliction. You should take what he says at face value other than when he's making an obvious joke and lots of things make a lot more sense.
Lewis' trilemma as always applies. He either a great deceiver, completely believes what he says but is beyond his ability, or actually will do what he says.
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-226
Musk has a trend of doing this with investments. It's purely speculative but I think it is reasonable to suggest based on Musk's previous actions I do not think he is serious about buying Twitter.
Also there's recent news that Musk was forced to settle despite believing that he would have won the case because bankers were holding Tesla hostage.
This is what makes Musk appealing. He doesn't care about the money. He cares about the future. Money is a means to an ends. As he's stated, the company only needs to make enough money to continue to grow. It doesn't need to be profitable above $0 after R&D.