Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold | Hacker News Reader

Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold

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650 pointspalebluedot1,180 comments

I strongly feel that the spammers thing is smoke and mirrors.

The deal at $54.20 was maybe OK for him a month ago (it was great for Twitter because nobody else was interested at that price). Since then, Twitter reported disappointing numbers for the past quarter, and the entire market took a nose dive, with tech hit especially hard.

TWTR stock price was in the mid-30s before Musk's offer. Without the offer, and with the disappointing numbers, and with the recent market development, one could reasonably assume that the stock would be below 30 today.

Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

You always need to pay much more on payouts than the current stock price. There is no chance he could buy it for $30bn. Unless history and future predictions suggests that there is no chance for stock to grow in foreseeable future.

Feels like you'd have to offer substantially more premium, or more breakup fee, or (probably) both, if you've intentionally broken your last deal and then you turn around and propose another.

Now that's premium starting from a lower base, but...

Also, it does feel a little "manipulation"-y to tank the price on news of you yourself trashing your deal, then taking advantage of that to make the same deal but cheaper?

Of course any analysis is assuming Elon actually means it and didn't just tweet this as a joke or on a whim.

> Also, it does feel a little "manipulation"-y to tank the price on news of you yourself trashing your deal, then taking advantage of that to make the same deal but cheaper?

Elon Musk's past behavior has shown him to be extremely comfortable with this tactic.

>Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

Perhaps because the board and shareholders will be far more inclined to reject an offer from Musk after he feigned buying it one time and backed out?

> Perhaps because the board and shareholders will be far more inclined to reject an offer from Musk after he feigned buying it one time and backed out?

He didn't feign anything. On the contrary, he's proved that he was dead serious about it.

All he'd be doing would be renegotiating the price, which is something that any reasonable person would do when the circumstances change so drastically (assuming, of course, that a renegotiation would be possible).

Don't think for a second that Twitter would walk away from Musks's offer if someone were to offer $60 a share.

> Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

That's not really how the break fee works. There's a specific performance clause that allows Twitter to force Musk to go through with the deal as long as he has the money (which, shockingly, seems to have come through). They'd only give up on that and take the break fee if the deal was truly over and they were prepared to say no to a lower offer.

Interesting. Is this deal public somewhere? Does it include any clauses relating to Twitter misrepresenting of their userbase?

Yes, it is public though I don't have a link. To the best of my knowledge, Twitter is accountable to the SEC if they materially misrepresented any numbers about their business. I don't think the deal has any specific language about that.

https://www.bamsec.com/filing/119312522120461/2?cik=1418091

4.6

I looked it up and the news seems to be reporting what you said, but it is not true. Section 9.9 of the agreement is contingent on a bunch of conditions being met, after which the deal is forced through if it is also funded. For some reason the media misreported it out of context. The break fee is paid by either Twitter or Elon, depending on who cancels the deal.

I admittedly haven't checked the full agreement, but if that is the case, then the angle over the less than 5% spammers/bots makes even more sense, if that number was indeed part of the agreement.

1) That number was not part of the agreement 2) What is part of the agreement is that Musk waived his right to due diligence 3) That number is part of Twitter’s usual investor disclosure, but with a caveat that it may be wrong; besides, Musk may only break the deal if any incorrect disclosure constitutes a “Material Adverse Event” which in Delaware law means he must prove it affects the value of the company by at least 40%, which this obviously does not

If bots are over 15% of Twitter it might effect value by 40% due to network amplification effects.

If you look at the reps and warranties - section 4.6 probably gives musk an out if the 5% is materially off.

> We currently estimate that false or spam accounts represent less than 5% of our MAUs. However, this estimate is based on an internal review of a sample of accounts and we apply significant judgment in making this determination.

Here's the actual quote from Twitter's IPO. 0% chance Musk is convincing a judge this statement is "materially off" given the amount of disclaimers attached.

Similar statements in more recent fillings have all come with similar disclaimers to the best of my knowledge.

Yep, agreed. It doesn't seem like he has much of a shot. The only way it seems possible is if they knew it was materially off, there are internal docs with analysis showing something like 10%, and they just lied and put some language around it to give them wiggle room.

That's maybe a 20% chance?

You should definitely read Matt Levine's coverage of the fiasco.

Quote from his newsletter:

> That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out that “spam/fake accounts” represent more than 5% of Twitter users. We discussed this last month, when Twitter admitted in a securities filing that it had (slightly) overestimated its daily active users for years. The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong — and this 5% number is in its securities filings — but only if the inaccuracy would have a “Material Adverse Effect” on the company. (See Sections 4.6(a) and 7.2(b).) That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware courts have almost never found an MAE. An MAE has to be something that would “substantially threaten the overall earnings potential of the target in a durationally-significant manner,” the courts have said; there is a rule of thumb that an MAE requires a 40% decrease in long-term profitability. If it turned out that 6% or 20% or 50% of Twitter accounts are bots, that will be embarrassing and might even reduce Twitter’s future advertising revenue, but will it be an MAE?

There isn't a way for him to exit the deal – Twitter can compel him to go through with it based on the contract. The main question remains though: Will Twitter go through the arduous and potentially ruinous process of forcing him to honour his obligations? Is this a negotiating tactic on his behalf (Is he trying to get a better deal)? If he does want out, will Twitter compromise and take a settlement (they could ask for way more than oft-discussed $1B exit fee)?

This is Musk being Musk, and personally I hope if he does try to back out or renegotiate, he gets punished severely.

Matt's understanding of M&A is... a little shallow. An MAE or MAC is about something changing between the time of the deal being signed and actually closing.

There doesn't need to be an MAE or MAC for a deal to fall through if a representation the target makes is false. In this specific case Musk can walk if any of the reps & warranties are false (or any of the covenants are breached).

When Musk started selling his TSLA shares to buy Twitter, TSLA fell by like $200 or like 20%.

It was becoming obvious that to buy Twitter, TSLA value would have to decline severely. IIRC, Musk only got around to selling $8 Billion pretax before quitting.

Musk thought he could afford Twitter. He sells some TSLA and the market collapses, and he suddenly decides against it.

Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Musk doesn't have the cash for the deal anymore (maybe he never had the cash for the deal). I guess Musk is looking at the $1 Billion ejection clause now and trying to weasel around it.

But at this rate, it looks like Musk owes Twitter $1 billion cash for this broke deal.

It will be hard to know how much TSLA's current value is due to this vs. how much is the current climate of the whole market.

Does it matter?

Under the original plan, Musk needs to sell approximately $20 billion more of TSLA stock before the original deal could be accomplished.

What do you think will happen to TSLA share price if Musk did that?

It's a hard job to find $40+ billion dollars. You gotta sell assets, and when you sell those assets, they fall in price significantly.

I think the parent was suggesting, without being so blunt, that TSLA is undervalued and grabbing some of those shares while they're cheap is his strategy.

And, of course, the counterstrategy is to wait until next Wednesday, when the price of TSLA moves upward, then sell and catch the falling knife when other institutional buyers ease off the stock price.

To be clear, I hold no shares of TSLA because you can get hurt trying to catch falling knives.

This is the pretty good point to all the "richest person" "net worth XX Billion" lists and calculations.

Most if not all of these people can't liquidate even close to their "net worth"

Which is why it's not at all unexpected that the Twitter board after some hand-wringing jumped on the deal because even at a "loss" someone who offers to turn your illiquid assets into cash without tanking the value of those assets is literally the dream exit.

Makes one wonder if they simply called his bluff.

Except the Twitter board had almost no shares between them (Jack being the only exception). I recall reading that none of them even tweet, but that's neither here nor there.

That said, it's clearly a good deal for their shareholders for this very reason, and the board should act in the interests of their shareholders.

> I recall reading that none of them even tweet

Good drug dealers don't get high on their own supply.

Drug dealers are just middlemen though. Would you really trust the chemist that has never tried their own goods and has an overall disdain for drug usage.

Kind of stretching the analogy, but you hopefully get my point.

> Most if not all of these people can't liquidate even close to their "net worth"

I think that's broadly true, though some of the older ones might be able to. Bill Gates, for example, has diversified his wealth out of Microsoft (and he doesn't control the company these days, anyway). I don't think the market would punish Berk or AutoNation, for example, nearly as hard as they've punished Tesla for Elon cutting his ownership stake.

It's not punishment. Stock price * shares != actual value of the company. As more shares go onto market, demand naturally decreases as supply satiates existing demand, thus causing the price to decrease. I'm sure this is covered in some basic economics course that I never took.

And yet we treat the market cap as the actual value of the company. Also, sometimes the actual value can be more—for instance if a buyer comes along who wants all of your company, to take it private.

It would be interesting if there were some way to calculate something like the "cash net worth" of individuals. Work out what they could actually reasonably expect to get if they liquidated all their assets. Obviously it would be a pretty rough estimate, but you'd definitely see some reshuffling of the richest people lists.

Call it what you will, I don't think it's just the economics of putting more shares on the market. When the CEO dumps ownership, he is signaling a lack of confidence.

What did Bill Gates signal when he diverted his Microsoft stock into the Bill Gates Foundation back when he was forced to step down as CEO after the antitrust lawsuit?

Not all sales are equal. Here you have a guy who essentially arrived at the end of the road and brought Microsoft where only Standard Oil arrived before.

Both had extinguished all their natural competitiors and had to be essentially stopped by the US Federal Govt.

Stark contrast with the CEO of a luxury automaker who inflated a financial bubble to enrich himself who is now selling to buy a social media platform.

The evidence against this is that tsla stock has gone up since musk said the deal was "on hold". This may be because the market expects him to not have to increase supply by selling more shares, but he's already trying to arrange outside funding to limit what he has to sell.

It could be that confidence in musk and his brand is having more of an impact on share price than supply and demand. He's behaving erratically and is clearly distracted from running tesla by this twitter fiasco. I'm not sure what weighs more on the minds of institutional investors.

If you can get several tens of millions of dollars, liquid, on fairly short notice, there's almost nothing you can't buy on a whim. You may as well have infinite money. It doesn't matter that you can't liquidate another 90-99% of your net worth easily. You borrow $60m for that second yacht, then pay it off as soon as the tax situation looks favorable for realizing some gains. No big deal. Live like (er, better than) a king, pay taxes like a pauper. It's the American way.

Larger sums are only really useful for making big-splash investments. Like this. As far as personal spending goes, it's no obstacle, so it doesn't matter that they can't easily turn their entire net worth into a literal billions-of-dollars balance in a checking account.

> there's almost nothing you can't buy on a whim

Twitter, you can't buy Twitter on a whim.

Right, big-splash, chest-thumping investments are about the only thing that might be a problem. Not ordinary purchases. But that's not so much buying something, in the ordinary sense, as shifting investment strategy.

Aka, you can't buy anything on a whim.

At least one reason it matters is the gigantic numbers poison public discussion of wealth. People commonly claim things like Musk can single-handedly end world hunger because he has enough net worth to buy everyone food for the next 20 years. That isn't true if there is no way for him to liquidate enough of that worth without destroying the worth in the process. What these people actually can do is give away equity shares to the poor, but you can't buy food with equity shares. Or, in Bezos case, since he owns Whole Foods, I guess he can just give away food.

Didn't he end up not helping at all after previously committing billions to it?

I feel like he's not obligated to do anything, but ignoring his commitment makes him a worse person, and there are probably amounts greater than zero which do not encounter the issue you describe

No, not at all. They didn’t actually detail how they’d spend it.

It seems to me like they did, they came up with a plan and everything.

Are we sure Elon isn't just claiming that he forever wants more detail, like a sealioning troll, because in actuality he wants the money for himself more, and never actually intended to make the donations he committed to? Occam's razor would suggest that is actually the case.

I mean, if we was serious about it, after he received the plan, did he ask for more detail on any of the items he didn't understand?

The so-called “plan”: https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...

It doesn’t say how they’ll spend the money aside from allocations here and there, and it wouldn’t solve world hunger.

>the so-called "plan"

it's actually just a plan, not a 'so-called "plan"', whatever that means

>It doesn’t say how they’ll spend the money aside from allocations

the way the money will be spent, is by allocating money to the items that it will be spent on, which are detailed in the plan.

that seems good enough to start for me, but where did Elon ask for more info than that? I asked this in the previous post, but very conspicuously got no answer.

surely he didn't just _forget_ about _billions of dollars he committed to donate to charity?_

That's true but wealth at that level is essentially relative anyway.

There's little you can do as a billionaire that you couldn't do as a hundred-millionaire when it comes to simply buying things for liquid cash. You can buy all the houses, boats, private islands, etc. that you want.

The only meaningful difference in wealth at that scale is buying fundamentally scarce things: specific real estate and private islands, favors from politicians, private time with other powerful people. For all of those, you are competing with other wealthy people to win them, so it's relative wealth that matters.

I agree with your point in general, but I think you'd need to scale the two example numbers each up by an order of magnitude. A hundred-millionaire is definitely rich, but can't buy all the houses, boats, private islands, etc. that they want. A single property or a yacht can easily cost well into the tens of millions. Plus if you're living in a $10M+ home, your annual expenses are presumably significant, so you'd want to keep a fair amount to live off of.

It's probably ridiculous to most to think of hundred-millionaires being financially constrained, but I do think there's a material difference in the buying power of $100M and $1B without getting into unique goods.

I would be more inclined to believe this if every other similar company wasn't also taking a 20%+ hit right now.

To further compound the problem, a significant chunk of Musk’s financing for the deal relies on leveraging (some of) his TSLA for a $12b or so loan. The loan mechanics require TSLA to maintain $740 or higher. When the deal was announced, it was $1,026. It has closed below $740 for the past two days currently at $728.

Yeah, I don't remember all the details.

IIRC, Musk makes Twitter a 100% cash offer. Twitter accepts, but writes the deal such that if either side pulls out of the deal, then a $1 billion penalty will be applied.

Musk goes to the banks and secures a $20 billion-ish loan, putting TSLA as collateral.

Musk starts to sell TSLA for the other $20 billion of cash. Stock tanks as a result, only ~$8 billion sold on public filing documents.

Musk runs around looking for another $12 billion for the last week or so.

And now we have today where it looks like he is failing his side of the deal. If Musk lost the $20 billion-ish from the banks due to TSLA being too low, it makes sense for him to give up.

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All that is going on right now is Musk trying to blame Twitter for the failed deal, so that he avoids the $1 billion penalty written into the contract.

I am curious if his inability to raise money for the acquisition is a strong signal of the sliding value of social media. Facebook and Twitter seem to be on a streak of trying to pivot, Reddit is in private equity. Musk is fairly well-connected, so if he's unable to get other rich people to invest, their speculative value (at the height of their value) may be vanishing.

The value of internet forums and discussions is roughly the value of the advertisements hosted on those platforms.

The value of ads drops during a recession, and things are looking more-and-more bearish this year.

It's a signal of a) market situation b) faith in musk c) valuation of the deal d) other terms.

It's completely nuts for 'one guy' to spend $40B on something, too much possibility for self delusion.

Musk should have had Private Equity lined up before the offer as part of a consortium. They would have called out his bullshit.

It's really, really telling that he did not.

Imagine Musk having to sit a table with 'mere bankers' telling him he doesn't know what he is talking about.

It's easy to be full of bluster when you're sitting on top of zillions in inflated valuation.

> They would have called out his bullshit.

Had you posted under any other topic relating to Musk before today, you would have had replies here claiming "Musk is highly intelligent and helped create at least 3, multi-billion dollar companies, with 2 more in the pipeline (neuralink and boring). How dare you question his genius".

Since there aren't, I'm using this comment as a reminder against confirmation bias.

He is all of those things. But he's also full of shit.

Those two thing can be true at the same time.

I follow many VC Twitter accounts and it seems to me, even the 'nice' ones are giant turds when it comes to any kind of social or communitarian understanding of the world.

But they understand startups very well.

It's common among successful people, I think, to be really great in their core competency, to have fairly astute understanding of other things and yet be completely glib at the same time, and lack the self awareness to recognize it, supported by the fact that 'nobody challenges them' on anything.

> strong signal of the sliding value of social media

It's not sensible to make ANY assertions with the market as it is today.

No, that is outdated information. He's been working on financing without leveraging his shares with one of the banks.

And that is outdated information, as we clearly see that Musk is now thinking of pulling out of the deal entirely.

When Elon Musk's networth is almost entirely tied up in TSLA shares, when the price of those shares declines by 20%+, it changes plans. Banks are less likely to take Elon Musk's collateral (almost certainly TSLA shares), Musk himself loses a chunk of networth and loses an ability to raise dollars, etc. etc.

Yesterday when he started running into trouble with the margin loan, the headline was that he was in talks to secure different financing. That doesn’t make my info outdated.

He has enough partner investors that he doesn't need the margin loan

Yeah, this looks like a way out of the deal.

TSLA has a problem with its stock. It's way overpriced for the size of the company. For Tesla, the company, to grow into its stock price, it has to make more cars than Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, and the rest of the top 12 car companies put together. Toyota alone makes 5x as many cars as Tesla.

Which means TSLA is a meme stock. And the bottom is falling out of meme stocks.

> For Tesla, the company, to grow into its stock price, it has to make more cars than Toyota, GM, Ford, Volkswagen, and the rest of the top 12 car companies put together.

You’re right that Tesla is valued on future performance but this part is just factually wrong. They will need ultimately to make more profits than those companies combined, but the number of cars is not that important. Apple has a ~25% share of the phone market but makes most of the profit.

> They will need ultimately to make more profits than those companies combined, but the number of cars is not that important

That climbs pretty linearly with car sales. There's only so much margin you can make with a vehicle in any market. Apple manages to have higher profit at lower sales because selling a phone for $1000 that cost $200 is possible since millions of people can afford $1000.

Selling a $100k car that cost $20k is a much bigger margin than maybe Toyota has, but there are very few people who can afford $100k cars. Eventually you need volume. Apple itself has huge volume, they are outsold by around 20-30% against Samsung, not by 5000%.

Yes, automakers can push the "more car per car" thing. Luxury cars don't really cost that much more to make than low-end cars, and the profit margins are much better. But the market for high-price cars is limited, and there are too many companies in it already. The volume is in the low-priced cars.

No. Tesla literally has sold for years the right to a software only $10k upgrade. Who cares if that’s crazy or not they’ve done it.

And they have vertically integrated, after automakers spent decades spinning out. Much more value capture.

And they have secured better rights to raw materials (lithium).

These sorts of discussions start to seem nitpicky when you're talking about the sheer magnitude by which they're overvalued. Whether they have to make more _profits_ or _cars_ than every other car company combined doesn't really matter because it's so ridiculous.

Truly, it’s not. Many industries have single companies making the majority of profits. It’s really not uncommon.

Can you say "margin call". His tune has changed - he realizes he cannot do it with Tesla stock. Bringing in other investors now. They will want a return on their investment other than "freedom of speech" if you believe the BS he used for a reason in the first place. There are some things even the riches man on the planet cannot have.

TSLA does make way more EVs than anyone else. They are valued on their potential as the clear leader going forward.

Every step of the way some armchair comes up and concludes that Elon is broke and this deal won't go through.

Why wouldn't he put up more Tesla as collateral? How do you know he can't get more financing? How much BTC, Doge and eth does he have? No one knows how rich this man is, people need to stop acting like they do.

> Why wouldn't he put up more Tesla as collateral?

Because he didn't. If Elon Musk had easy access to Tesla-as-collateral, he would have put more of it up as collateral.

> How do you know he can't get more financing?

Because he's cutting himself out of the deal. That suggests he has run out of options to get money.

Besides, surprise +50 BPS from the Fed just made it incredibly more difficult to get financing from the banks, and -20% to TSLA's stock price in the past couple of weeks compounds upon this fact, and makes it more difficult to use TSLA-shares as collateral.

> How much BTC, Doge and eth does he have?

Whatever amount he has, it is worth about 25% less than two weeks ago.

--------

EDIT: I mean, maybe Musk has the money and is just trolling all of us? Which sounds on-brand for him frankly. I don't know why he'd want to do that, but he's not exactly a "stable" figure.

> If Elon Musk had easy access to Tesla-as-collateral, he would have put more of it up as collateral

Just because he doesn't put up more, doesn't mean he doesn't have access to more. You shouldn't use more collateral than necessary.

I tought Elon is much smarter thatn that, he could have purchased twitter with TSLA stocks in an exchange deal without dumping them on the market.

That would mean Tesla would acquire Twitter, not Musk personally. I have a hard time believing that wouldn't have hurt the Tesla stock.

Well if his only goal was to get Trump back on the platform, perhaps it's better he loses 1bn and fail instead of 42b and Trump back on? - and even if he loses the billion, Trump might still get back on.

I strongly doubt that this was his goal.

The $1b is not a simple breakup fee. He can't just say, "I've changed my mind, here's $1b, the deal is off." It's not a $1b option to walk away.

The merger contract provides the option to pay $1b to walk away under only limited circumstances: either the acquisition is blocked by a government, or Musk fails to get financing for the deal. The latter can't really be easily faked: if he said 'sorry, I thought I had the money, but I checked my couch cushions and it turns out I don't,' and paid the $1b to walk away, Twitter would sue and this assertion that his financing broke down would be tested by the courts.

In fact, out of those limited allowances to pay the $1b and walk away, Musk is bound by the contract to 'specific performance'. That is, he's bound to actually do it. Pay the $54.20.

A good M&A analysis of the situation is below.

https://yetanothervalueblog.substack.com/p/quick-twtr-though...

Yeah, I didn't realize this since I guess I've only paid attention to the surface-level facts.

But digging deeper, the "people in the know" are now pointing out that this $1 Billion escape clause is actually very restrictive and unlikely to be invoked. Musk might be forced into buying Twitter at the previously negotiated $54.20 price.

But there's also the question: will Twitter's board really go to court to force Musk to buy it at $54.20? There's also the question of politics here. Even if Twitter's board is in the legal-right to do so, forcing Musk to become the new owner is bad politics.

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There's also the possibility of the Twitter Board's incompetence. Maybe they don't realize the advantageous position they're in and give up before testing Musk in court?

> But there's also the question: will Twitter's board really go to court to force Musk to buy it at $54.20? There's also the question of politics here. Even if Twitter's board is in the legal-right to do so, forcing Musk to become the new owner is bad politics.

Is there some kind of politics more important for corporate decision making than claiming the $20bn or so you're entitled to by contract?

> Is there some kind of politics more important for corporate decision making than claiming the $20bn or so you're entitled to by contract?

Corporate politics are politics like any other. They're very complicated.

https://www.engadget.com/musk-twitter-lawsuit-florida-pensio...

> Is there some kind of politics more important for corporate decision making than claiming the $20bn or so you're entitled to by contract?

Sure. It's the principle-agent problem. Twitter as a whole might make more money under scenario A, but the people who make that choice on Twitter's behalf might make more money under scenario B.

Of course, that's short term thinking if you're a C-level executive. Because scenario A gets you more money at your next job. But if you're thinking about retiring, it could work.

I really don’t understand this comment. You think the Twitter legal team are so dumb to not have negotiated an agreement in their own favour?

I don't mean to be snarky but we're talking about the same company that shut down Vine and let TikTok happen. Their decision making has been baffling.

You're making a category error. The legal team is not the product team.

And Tesla has recalled nearly half a million cars mfg between 2017-20[0]. That's a solid percentage of all the cars they've manufactured during that time. I shudder to ask what you think of its leadership.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/30/tesla-recalls-475000-model-3...

What? How is Tesla's car quality relevant to this conversation? You're really stretching here.

> I really don’t understand this comment. You think the Twitter legal team are so dumb to not have negotiated an agreement in their own favour?

Oh, the agreement is absolutely in Twitter's favor if Musk pulls out of the deal.

But that doesn't mean *suing Musk* to complete the deal is actually their best move. As usual, the best move is probably some kind of plea-agreement (or starting to sue to get into the position of a plea-bargain), where the details are figured out.

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There's really no "political benefit" to forcing Elon Musk to become the new owner of Twitter. There's a lot of room for creativity here. Maybe Twitter manages to extract a $2 billion concession or $5 billion concession from Musk (rather than the limited $1 Billion in the deal, since that only applies to very restrictive terms)

Or maybe Twitter just bans Elon Musk from their platform for wanton trolling and collects the $1 Billion. Who knows?

Just because Twitter's Board is legally allowed to do X, doesn't mean that they will do X. They will use X to threaten Musk into doing Y (and Y is what they really want). I'm not sitting in Twitter's Board of Directors right now, I don't know what their "Plan Y" is. But I have reason to believe that X (ie: forcing Musk to buy Twitter at $54.20) isn't in their best interest.

How about the obvious fact that Twitter is not currently worth $54.20/share? It's probably worth half of that if it weren't for the offer, given this week's climate. Surely it's at least partly their responsibility to negotiate the best financial outcome for the shareholders.

> How about the obvious fact that Twitter is not currently worth $54.20/share?

Shame on Musk for writing $54.20 into the contract then.

Just because the value of something changed after you wrote the contract doesn't mean that you can break the contract unilaterally. Musk could have gotten around this with an all-stock deal (ex: I'll give the Twitter board 100,000 shares of TSLA or whatever), or other ways to write the contract without setting a particular dollar amount.

But Musk wrote $54.20 and signed it.

And the contract even says the Twitter Board can force Elon Musk to buy Twitter and finish the deal at $54.20. So they made it crystal clear to Musk (and his lawyers) that the $54.20 price points stays, no matter how Twitter's price changes over the next weeks.

But 54.20 ends in 420, which means weed. Musk loves to memelord.

I think offering a direct swap for his TSLA shares at 20:1 would have been a smart move. It would have cost him like 5% of TSLA, which is a lot but still would have left him with the same % that Bezos has of AMZN

TSLA is way over valued at the moment. That would be a big risk compared to cash in hand.

To accept it, yes. But it avoids the macroeconomic questions and would have been a good idea for Musk to offer

If they did that they would get sued by their own investors.

Not if the board negotiates a lump sum settlement for breaking the contract instead. That's free money for Twitter shareholders.

I don't think people are aware that the Twitter Board knew they were calling his bluff and are going to make him pay one way or another.

I mostly agree with this

That is indeed the big question. The court case would go on for a long time, and in the meantime they'd be in this weird limbo and the business would suffer.

What we're really seeing here is: can a very rich person completely flout a contract, ignore legal obligations he signed, and abuse the legal system to the point that contracts are basically unenforceable against him? Sure, he has no case, and there is no real conventional legal way to wiggle out of this, but that's not really the question, is it?

As Matt Levine said in his column today, a merger arb told him that "if you're reading the contract, you've already lost."

In all likelihood, it seems the most probable outcome is a modest adjustment of purchase price to further "secure the deal" (whatever that means). But Musk is a bit crazy, so while that's the most likely outcome, it's hard to say it with much confidence.

One particularly tricky nuance of contract law is that their must be someone with legal standing who wants the contract to be enforced. If Musk doesn't think he can put the funds together without damaging businesses he cares about more than owning Twitter, then he can pretty much just invoke the $B walk away if he wants to. The Twitter CEO and board were pretty clear they did not think Musk's acquisition was in the best interests of the Company, but they were legally obligated to consider an accept a fair offer of acquisition because it would be in the best interests of the share holders.

Suddenly getting $1B without having to accept Musk as the new owner is beneficial to the share holders, and crucially tying up the company in a years long lawsuit to force Musk to acquire Twitter would be expensive, and until the contract is either completed or dissolved Twitter's fund raising options are greatly limited. Suing Musk for wanting out would not be a sound financial move and could even result in Twitter becoming insolvent. Their stock price could crash, their funds to continue the lawsuit exhausted, and most likely under those circumstances Musk would win and immediately turn around and buy Twitter for a far lower price.

With that said, the only real question here is what will Musk do under the circumstances? Funding the acquisition could cause his other businesses to suffer or even fail. SpaceX is particularly vulnerable, and it wouldn't take much to end the Borring Company if Musk's finances are in a dangerous position. If he just walks away he's out $1B, assuming they'll allow it. That can't be a super attractive option. Most likely he's going to exhaust every avenue in an attempt to raise the cash without putting his other businesses at risk. But there's a clock on that, and he could end up owing Twitter a shit load if he stalls for too long.

>One particularly tricky nuance of contract law is that their must be someone with legal standing who wants the contract to be enforced

> but they were legally obligated to consider an accept a fair offer of acquisition because it would be in the best interests of the share holders.

Musk buying the company at 30% over market value seems like it would absolutely be in the best interest of the shareholders as well

> Suing Musk for wanting out would not be a sound financial move and could even result in Twitter becoming insolvent

Why not? This seems like an easy case and a huge win for shareholders. I feel like shareholders could sue Twitter into insolvency if they didn't pursue Musk for massive reparations if he flouted the contract

> There's also the possibility of the Twitter Board's incompetence

This has been repeated at nauseaum .

Just because you don't know their names and aren't shitposting on social media they are not incompetent.

They managed to screw Musk over, they basically looked at macroeconomics, regrouped after the initial no and sold Twitter to Musk at the very top of a 13 year old bubble in the making.

If you look at Musk carrer each and every time he sold onto bigger fools. Compaq, Ebay and of course all the equity raises of his overvalued businesses.

Twitter board managed to screw him over and demonstrate that only idiots don't change their minds, all in one swoop.

They have the upper hand now.

If everything goes as it should this would be like Trump election loss. Meaning a defeat that makes it so that you don't hear from a guy for a long time. A severe wound and an existential threat to the ego.

We can only hope.

The poster suggested the possibility that they're incompetent to create a counterfactual, not that they are.

Oddly however, the other counterfactual of Musk being incompetent did not come up. This is after all, a person that paid the SEC $40m and has to have a company lawyer review what he tweets about Tesla.

It would not have made sense to discuss Musk's competence in context because Musk doesn't have autonomy over how Twitter chooses to respond to this.

He has autonomy into buying the absolute top of the 13 year bubble. Locking the purchase price at t minus 4/6 months. In 4/6 months when the acquisition is completed the S&P could be at 3210 and he'd have paid 54.20/share.

Or even sub 3000 if inflation becomes deeply entrenched in the economy.

If it gives him a cover story to sell $TSLA shares when that company is valued more than the next ten automakers put together, he’s at least getting a bit diversification and is winning on that side while losing on the Twitter side.

This. I'm surprised it's not talked about more.

yeah TSLA has to be feeling like a big of a golden cage at this point. 20 more years of making cars? sounds exciting

Musk's competence has to do with "this" being a thing at all. He started it!

> digging deeper, the "people in the know" are now pointing out that this $1 Billion escape clause is actually very restrictive and unlikely to be invoked. Musk might be forced into buying Twitter at the previously negotiated $54.20 price.

Matt Levine had a pretty different take, pointing out that if Elon Musk suddenly appears to be unwilling to buy Twitter, his financing might see that and - suddenly, but perfectly legitimately - evaporate, which would be a valid reason for Musk to walk away.

It really is true that lending someone a lot of money to make an investment they aren't interested in is a much worse financial move than lending the same money to the same person to make an investment they are interested in.

There is a best efforts covenant. They are in every merger agreement. Musk can't do this without being sued.

Look at Section 6.3

I mean, if that's true it just goes one step back. Then his action breaking the contract would be to express equivalence or hostility towards the transaction.

> Matt Levine had a pretty different take, pointing out that if Elon Musk suddenly appears to be unwilling to buy Twitter, his financing might see that and - suddenly, but perfectly legitimately - evaporate, which would be a valid reason for Musk to walk away.

That was awhile ago. Since then, the funding agreements have been made public, and Matt's most recent take is that the funding basically can't disappear unless Musk can kill the deal via another route.

> There's also the possibility of the Twitter Board's incompetence. Maybe they don't realize the advantageous position they're in and give up before testing Musk in court?

Yeah. Wealthy individuals advised by the best experts can't figure out what is good for them. Only if they would have someone in their orbit who knows how to read hacker news comments. </sarcasm>

You have a hilarious amount of confidence about the competency of America's oligarchs. Elon is a financial scammer, his money all comes from government subsidies.

He ain't as smart as you think he is.

I'm pretty sure the comment came from the other direction - that Twitter's board/CEO wasn't so inept they needed to be advised by HN.

Just like Boeing, Lockheed, GM, etc.

Those companies don't have people worshipping them like they're a collective of geniuses. Musk's companies certainly aren't any worse than those companies - but they're no better either, and he's no Messiah.

> he's no Messiah.

Saying that on HN is just cruel: you know full well you have exactly the niche in your grip that simultaneously wants to exclaim.. the behavioural tendency of the child that he is, and bears the feeling 'no no, not here'...

Have you seen him give the everyday astronaut guy the boca chic tour? Yeah, he's pretty damn smart.

If you mean he has poor financial judgement, that's something else - but there are billions of reasons why you might be mistaken.

> He ain't as smart as you think he is.

My comment didn’t say anything about Elon. Please read it again.

One thing to consider is that if he can show that something potentially material like the fake account percentage was incorrect, then that may offer him an out.

Musk can claim that he relied on these numbers when making the offer. "Material misrepresentation" is the term he'd use and it just might work. There's an implied good faith in every contract, so irrespective of how "strict" the terms are, Twitter may have difficulty enforcing the agreement in this scenario.

That is, Twitter would have had to literally disclose that these numbers were unreliable, and have Musk agree under those terms in order to not have a fight on their hands.

Why would Musk have to pay if the government blocks the deal? It's not like it's an out - he's legally prohibited at that point.

Because he signed the agreement.

The lawyers came up with the terms and contingencies. Once signed, you're expected to hold up your end of the deal. I'm sure the lawyers have experience with court-cases / whatnot and have the precise court-cases which led to this style of agreement... but that doesn't matter anymore.

Musk agreed to it, so it must be upheld in that manner.

ATT had to pay T-Mobile when their deal fell through due to the government. Look at this way Twitter just made a whole bunch of business decisions based somewhat/mostly on Musk's takeover. If he pulls out, Twitter will be hurt financially. Or suppose it was a hostile takeover by a competitor - they could fein a takeover - hurt their competitor - then walk away.

I don't think he did. Section 8.3 deals with the termination fee and it doesn't list 8.1(b)(i) as a reason it gets paid. 8.1(b)(i) is the government blocking.

Because if he didn't think the government would approve the deal, he shouldn't have made the offer in the first place. By making the offer he is creating a massive amount of distraction and uncertainty for the company-to-be-acquired, and if in the end the deal is voided because the government blocks it, then the company-to-be-acquired need to be compensated for all the wasted time and effort that went into a failed deal.

This is very common in large acquisitions and mergers. Remember, Must didn't have to include the $1B walk-away fee. But if he didn't, then the board may have been much less likely to accept the offer.

mediaman’s comment (and the article they linked) says that the government blocking the deal is one of the limited circumstances in which Musk wouldn’t have to pay.

I may have been unclear. He wouldn't have to buy Twitter if the government prevented it, but he would be required to pay $1b. Outside of those circumstances, he is contractually forced to buy Twitter.

The government issue and the money issue are basically the two scenarios in which Musk would be unable (not just unwilling) to complete the transaction. So that's where he has to pay the fee. Otherwise, he can't change his mind.

No, I think you were clear, and I wasn't. :) I understood that it was more "he won't be on the hook to buy Twitter if the government prevented it but there's still a kill fee," but bungled describing it.

(I know "kill fee" isn't the right term, but that's what we'd call the equivalent in publishing!)

Because the contract says that

Twitter would have to be run by people that don't want the $1B payout and for Elon to just fuck off. News flash, they current executives and even the founder do not want Musk to acquire Twitter. Everyone with the legal responsibility to sue Musk for taking that way out have no interest in doing so. The $1B walk away clause requires musk to pay because being in a position to be acquired negatively impacts their ability to raises funds. They're even under a hiring freeze, and the reason is probably due to a combination of uncertainty around the deal and partly because they can't due things like sell additional stock or bonds, and their ability to acquire new lines of credit are greatly reduced until the acquisition contract either completes or is dissolved.

Presumably a class action lawsuit of TSLA shareholders might force him to buy their shares at 54.20. Which, hilariously, might then get diluted by the poison pill.

> Everyone with the legal responsibility to sue Musk for taking that way out have no interest in doing so

They wouldn't be suing him to make the courts force him to buy them.

They would be suing him for damages - loss to Twitter's reputation and stock market value as a result of Musk's shenanigans.

Which would be....very tough to prove, but I wouldn't say they DON'T have a case.

They'd probably have a duty to try.

This is incorrect. The contract says that they can indeed to legally force him to go through with the deal and price that he agreed to. If it turns out to be more than twice the current valuation of twitter, they should do this. But they probably won't

Keep in mind there's the very real possibility of twitter just negotiating for a $2 billion (random number between $1 billion and $44 billion) break up fee to use a different reason

This is the agreement:

PDF: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e437...

I don't see mention of the number of Twitter users and investigation on fake accounts. I guess that falls under the misrepresentation of accounting section. It looks like a fairly standard acquisition/merger contract.

The mention of the 1 Billion penalty is however pretty easy to find.

It seems like he only needed to put up $4bn of his own money. The rest of the financing was leveraged with loans. And some investors would also keep their shares (like the Saudis)

I'm pretty sure "funding secured" in this case.

It would be utterly, glibly and completely insane for Musk, or anyone, to buy Twitter outright with their own money.

Musk should be in for several billion, surely, but the rest of the money should have come fro Private Equity / Buyout partners.

I assumed that this was the case, not just him putting up Tesla stock as collateral.

>TSLA fell by like $200 or like 20%

Everything is down this year - TSLA isn't down as much as Ford in 2022... I'm not sure twitter had tons to do with TSLA stock being down.

i mean...that's one way to get the next round of VC funding (or equivalents...)!

Damage to Twitter is terminal even if Musk walks

The board and execs consented to a takeover by an ideological adversary...the company culture is smashed and will never return

If he walks, the stock craters and employees know the board is no longer invested in the future...if the deal goes through, employees will have to March to Elon's beat or be fired. Either way...bye Twitter

plus they just fired 2 high level employees yesterday.

This sounds like some kind of ancient samurai lore wrapped in traditions of sacrifice and nobility.....instead of a business deal happening in the United States of America.

"Consented to takeover by an ideological adversary" -- why, because Trump is banned? Is Musk going to try to bluff Facebook with an offer too?

What if the deal fails? How will Musk ever live down the dishonor?

Twitter would pocket a billion dollars - ~5x its net cash flow for last year - why on earth would it sell for _less_ when it can invest that cash in just about anything? He'd be buying the company years of runway to build... whatever it wants - at that point I'd invest in twitter as soon as Musk's check cleared.

This isn't a renegotiation, this is him paying points on his mortgage for a lower rate - but where the points paid go towards the previous owners either way.

The offered price to buy Twitter is ~220 times its net annual cash flow? Something about that does not compute.

Without this deal TWTR could easily be $15-$20 right now.

I am not a lawyer, let alone a securities lawyer, but from what I have seen over the years, I suspect that if he just backed out but did not renegotiate, or did not do so with a plausibly-acceptable offer, he would likely be sued by Twitter stockholders claiming his actions had done harm to Twitter's valuation - a claim which can at least be made even though the market is falling broadly. If that puts pressure on him to renegotiate, that pressure would seem to strengthen the Twitter board's hand in seeking a considerable premium over whatever the then-current valuation of Twitter will be.

It is not clear to me that the personal cost to Musk would be less than what he initially expected it to be, measured in units of Tesla stock, though I agree it could be less than if he completes the current deal.

As for the spammers thing, Musk waived an extensive due-diligence investigation, and now he is complaining about issues that should have been covered by that investigation.

> Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

I just assumed this is his plan here? He manipulates the market with his shenanigans and trash talking, lowers the price of Twitter by a massive amount, then buys it for a bargain.

He breaks, says his independent investigation says 5-30% of Twitter is bots. Price tanks even further than natural market would dictate. Buy at a much lower price.

There is no way the bot share is so low among active users? When I look at replies to some celeb tweet there are so many obvious bots.

And yet you've probably never seen my tweets, because I'm generally not replying to celebs' tweets. Bots (owners) are trying harder than most people to maximise their visibility before getting banned, so it's expected that you would notice a higher proportion than they actually represent. That's not to say I have any reason to think the bot share isn't higher, just I don't think it's possible for any single person to judge anywhere near accurately considering the huge scale of Twitter and that therefore any one of us users is only seeing a tiny, tiny fraction of the accounts/tweets being posted.

Conditional probabilities. Celeb replies is the most likely place you'll find bots.

Maybe consider where you're looking is more likely to attract bot replies? It's like an NFT discord you're more likely to see spam for eventual rugs because they're hunting people already proven to be likely to invest in stupid NFTs. Step off celebrity twitter and there's a lot less bot activity because it's less profitable to spam there.

I'm dying to know how they're defining "bots" for this purpose and whether it's specifically defined in the agreement. I suspect a (perhaps feigned) argument over the scope of the definition will be the deal's undoing.

He specifically said this is his final offer and he does not want to do back and forth to negotiate the deal. Then why would he do it now? It would look like he is not keeping his word/promise by not respecting his "final offer". He should just admit that he paid too much for the deal and just pay up and move on.

Yeah and he's said for half a decade now full self driving was coming next year. Never believe a Musk timeline.

Did Hindenburg call it a few days ago? :

> As a result of these developments, we believe that if Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter disappeared tomorrow, Twitter’s equity would fall by 50% from current levels. Consequently, we see a significant risk that the deal gets repriced lower.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

Musk didn't really think this through before he acted.

A great way to spend a billion!

Does it stipulate that the billion has to be in cash? What if he trades rides to the ISS for the board members? If it doesn't have to be in cash, then it could cost Musk less than the number of the contract.??

That's some out of the box thinking there. Have you considered working for Musk as his M&A strategist? Just tweet at him until he hires or blocks you.

Not sure if you're serious, but no, he can't pull crap like that and neither can anyone else who signs a contract specifying a penalty in dollars. Rides to the ISS aren't dollars.

Of course I'm not serious. If the board accepted payout equivalents for themselves and not the remaining stock holders, they would not be upholding their fiduciary duties. Oh, and then you know, accepting of bribes and what not.

I'm sure he could pump some shitcoin with a tweet and defray that expense with his winnings.

Is this legal? It seems like such a devious exploit.

1. Announce buyout (priced at a premium, of course) is "on hold"

2. Stock drops due to bad news

3. Re-negotiate for lower buyout after manipulating the stock to a lower price

No, that's not legal. Trying to back out of this deal because market fluctuations caused the company to be worth less than he wanted would be very, very much against his contract.

He can only back out is Twitter's securities filings are so wrong that profit projections are more than 40% off (MAE standard) or he was unable to secure financing. Spambots being a bit higher than projected is not enough to break the contract, especially given that Musk waived due diligence and that the Twitter filings have always said that the bot number is an estimate. Elon Musk's lawyers are probably more than a bit panicked right now.

Being one of Musk's lawyers sounds like possibly one of the most stressful jobs in the world!

Doubt it. They have a client who makes things difficult, but that's nothing compared to the stress of being in a job where a wrong decision costs lives.

So Tesla's lawyers probably aren't doing great either.

I think you underestimate the human ability to feel stress. I recently heard about a video game developer/director having a stroke due to stress from extended crunch. A video game! No lives at stake there. Heck, you should have seen how stressed I was in grad school ... I was nearly suicidal on occasion. But absolutely nothing substantial hinged on the work I was doing.

Man it sounds like guaranteed lifetime employment.

If everything is on fire, all day, every day, then nothing is on fire.

Coupled with decreased life expectancy due to hypertension, risk of stroke/aneurysm.

Sounds like it. There seems to be two paths due to the due diligence not being done by Musk.

1. Accept the 1bn backout and accept that Musk will look like a fool.

2. Sell enough Tesla stock to finance the deal, while risking a total meltdown of the Tesla stock price.

The lawyers are most likely trying to devise a third option, but it's very hard to see how that can play out.

It's probably with this highly evident fact: https://bird.trom.tf/elonmusk/status/1524909413462573058#m

The break fee is not an option, it's a penalty. Twitter can sue him to force the deal to go through unless it's off for a specific reason.

Musk is worth 2-3x Twitter. I'm guessing he can afford better lawyers to win this case. He also has much more at stake.

Better lawyers isn't a fool proof trump card you can use to just get out of anything. This isn't like Trump stiffing contractors on a job site where he has all the money and the contractors are (relatively speaking) penniless.

I mena, he’s obviously rich as hell, but the imaginary la la land of his reported net work isn’t real. When it comes to actually forking over real money he can’t afford to buy twitter

It's more likely Musk never intended to go through with it but got caught up in his own bravado. Now reality is coming in hard. He was going to lose a lot on this deal.

>>Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users

He is asking for proof that spam and fake accounts are less than 5% of total users. He obviously believes the number is much higher[1]. This does not seem to be a deal killer - he is just calling their bluff[2]. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. We will see. Interesting times!

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fa...

This does not seem to be a deal killer - he is just calling their bluff

What does he gain by calling their bluff?

Maybe negotiating tactic?

Parhaps a lower price?

Getting out of the deal after the recent stock slump? Without the $1B penalty fee?

Reduction in price.

I'm always amazed when that kind of question pops up. Because it shows how knowledge of basic business practices is less circulated.

If you're selling me a house and saying it's one size but in practice it's another you bet I'm taking it up with you! I can be happy to buy it as is (depending on the case) but this says a lot about the seller.

If you signed a deal to buy a house without checking the size it's on you.

Yes, that's why most large deals allow for due diligence before the deal effectively closes

If you’re waiting until after signing a deal to do basic due diligence, especially on supposedly material information that didn’t even exist at the time you made your offer - Twitter reported the 5% figure in May, Elon made his offer in April - it is, 100%, unambiguously, on you.

Has Twitter ever provided that kind of info to anyone?

Why wouldn't they wait until money is already on the table? I just don't see how they would have benefited by disclosing real numbers beforehand.

It's far more likely no one could have done due diligence outside of the executives and top engineers at Twitter.

None of that matters, because Elon can’t claim to be mislead by a figure that didn’t exist when he made his offer. Whatever he expected it to be has nothing to do with twitter saying it is 5% in May.

I dont think its fair to expect Elon, or anyone, to have done due diligence beforehand in a situation when it would have been impossible to collect the relevant info without some shady tactics. Unless you mean his team should have employed shady tactics to gather that info.?

Sure he may be employing this as a stalling tactic, but there’s no obligation for him to treat the Twitter folks with kid glove either. This is what high stakes negotiations are about.

Well, maybe, except there's a few problems with that;

- Buying Twitter is a bit different to buying a house. The offer price for shares is set, and (as far as I know) Elon can't move it without withdrawing and reoffering, which incurs all sorts of fun legal issues and penalties.

- If it's due diligence and Elon actually might withdraw from the deal then fair enough, but then it's not a bluff.

- If it's a bluff, and Elon still intends to buy, telling the world there are actually more spam/bots than the Twitter reported devalues the company. It doesn't seem like a great move as an investor.

If he's buying the whole thing it doesn't matter what other investors think it's worth.

But it does matter what percentage of users advertisers believe are bots.

One of his goal was to get rid of spams bots and fake accounts. If you go that far to buy something because you think you can make it better by fixing an issue, you don't do it because that issue only represents 5% of it...

I remember when he said he was going to do that, a good proportions of comments were about how he will slash a most of his Twitter followers by doing so. Did Elon himself thought there were less bots than what the majority of people believed?

It feels absurd for this to come up at this stage in a deal.

Why? What is the deal and what stage is it up to?

Agreed. This sort of issue has been public knowledge about Twitter for a long time. This sounds to me like an excuse to delay or get out with plausible deniability.

While this is true it would be a huge deal if Twitter lied about it on paper.

That 5% number is cited in Twitter’s s1 from 2013.

It came out recently they have/had been misreporting (overly) user numbers, so this external pressure which they're now forced to deal arguably won't allow any hidden manipulation to stay hidden.

So it may be a question of just how dishonest Twitter has been, which could/should result in shareholders suing them as well.

They are quite transparent the number could be much higher

Public knowledge? Where are the authoritative, due-diligence-level public statements on the topic of fake Twitter accounts?

Elon himself was ranting for months about Bots and "real ID" on Twitter, and he did not bother to include due diligence before manipulating the market with a bogus offer?

Public knowledge != authoritative, due-diligence-level public statement

But he did know it was a problem [1], so it's at least a bit shifty that now he pretends he suddenly says that it is a deal breaker. I suppose a court would have to decide if he has a right to back out or not without repercussions.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354

He didn't suddenly say it's a deal breaker, or anything of the sort.

Sounds like the excuse Edward Snowden's detractors used that everything he revealed was already known so he wasn't helpful. But having actual proof instead of easily dismissed rumors or "conspiracy theories" is important.

Or perhaps it is linked to the firing of executives, that seemed to puzzle people.

OMG. I'm astonished that people still can't see through his lies and BS.

It took me about 3 seconds to realize that after the stock market crashed, Elon wanted to get a better price. The 5% stuff is just a random excuse.

Also, his collateral for the buyout is Tesla stock, which took a 20% dip. If people believed he would truly buy at $54, they would let the deal go through and make bank. The fact that they are still selling down to $34 means that everyone is seeing through Elon's bullshit.

Or, alternatively, Twitter is a shit show behind the scenes and Musk is seeing red flags in diligence.

There isn't formal due diligence, he's already made the offer. He doesn't (legally) have access to any information that he didn't have access to weeks ago.

Of course there is formal due diligence. He basically gave them a term sheet and now they've opened their books. That's why he can walk away and pay $1 billion if he doesn't like what he sees.

What due diligence occurs when buying a public company? We already have access to the company’s financial filings.

So you are saying TWTR reported fraudulent financials?

That isn’t how acquisitions works. What Elon and Twitter have done is effectively sign an LOI. Now they do actual diligence to close the deal, or walk away and pay the breakup fee.

So what is the evidence in support of that hypothesis?

The pattern of behavior by Elon seems pretty strong support for the alternative.

The only support I see for this position is the assumption that musk is smarter than everyone else.

In support of what hypothesis? Musk is in diligence. To walk away without any cause he would have to pay $1,000,000,000. He doesn’t have to say why he’s decided to walk away, but he has a billion reasons not to walk without cause.

Twitter’s financials and business strategy are shit show in front of the scenes.

> his collateral for the buyout is Tesla stock

That may have been part of the original plan, but:

"Elon Musk is in talks to raise enough equity and preferred financing for his proposed buyout of Twitter to eliminate the need for any margin loan linked to his Tesla shares, according to people with knowledge of the matter. "[0]

[0] https://fortune.com/2022/05/12/elon-musk-avoid-tesla-margin-...

I'm pretty sure he never intended to buy it to begin with. He was just using it as a convenient excuse to sell some TSLA

$1billion is a lot just to sell some TSLA stock.

Even if you think he'll have to pay that which from this tweet it seems he's going to try to dodge, he got to sell a lot of stock without anyone thinking he has any doubts on Tesla, which would cost a lot more than 1 billion

He sold at the peak, near $900.

Given that the stock is near $700 right now, it's looking like a good deal.

He sold billions last year without the excuse of buying Twitter.

He needs an excuse to get people buying his stock, to support the stock price as he sells.

Back then it was a Twitter poll to sell shares IIRC. Musk makes a big deal out of everything to lead his followers around

That was to pay his taxes supposedly, so he still had an excuse. People might worry if he's just diversifying for its own sake

If he didn't sell the stocks then he wouldn't have to pay any tax on unrealized gains. According to him, he sold the stocks so they he would pay taxes in response to criticism of not paying his "fair share" in taxes.

Wrong.

Musk's stock options became fully vested and matured. That forced a tax event on him last year.

If this is true, he’s absolutely a pathological liar.

Yeah. He lied. Again.

Yeah, he had to pay an 11 BILLION dollar tax bill to California and the IRS, for stock options issued in 2012. It was reported as the largest federal tax bill in history.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizahaverstock/2021/12/15/elon...

More like attempting to pump TWTR before he sold his holdings there.

Twitter board called his bluff and now he's trying to weasel out of it.

Not everyone is interested enough in the US stock market to keep an eye on it. I haven’t even heard about a stock market crash before you mentioned it.

Then why would you comment in a thread about a stock sale if you're obviously uninterested about the market?

I use Twitter every day so I’m curious about the future of the platform.

And when I saw your comment implying you’re astonished about people not getting it, I meant to offer you, in good faith, one anecdotal data point in order to make you feel a little less puzzled.

> OMG. I'm astonished...

Why is wanting a better price such an issue? "The 5% stuff" is like when information surfaces about a faulty or inaccurate odometer reading on the used car you're about to buy. If tampered with, let's negotiate a new price.

The 5% figure was certainly known by Elon before making the deal

Known because someone said "5%" or known because someone proved it was 5%?

Either. Caveat emptor. You don't get to question the ingredients of food in your stomach.

It's not in my stomach, it's food I'm thinking about buying.

In the context of the Twitter transaction, the purchase agreement was already made.

yes, but no.

This is unethical negotiating. If you make a bid, you better look beforehand, what you're bidding on. If your bidding has an effect on someone, you better be careful with it.

> This is unethical negotiating.

It's only unethical negotiating if the Twitter board hasn't put out inflated DAU numbers. Maybe the sudden firing of Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck has raised some new suspicions about this question in Musk's mind?

> If you make a bid, you better look beforehand, what you're bidding on.

Well, looks like he did, but now questions whether what he was shown was actually truthful, no?

> If your bidding has an effect on someone, you better be careful with it.

So there are two times two possibilities: Musk genuinely has doubts about the DAU metric he hasn't had before in the force or he hasn't. Similarly there are two possibilities about the accuracy of the DAU metrics: they are within an excusable distance of the truth or they aren't. Assuming they aren't, regardless of Musk's true motives, why would Twitter deserve to be shielded from the fallout?

It's a red herring, and now you're arguing about fish.

Musk made a serious, legally binding offer to buy with no contingencies for users (human, cyborg, bot, or otherwise). Now he wants out so he's using this bad faith argument to weasel out of the $1B escape clause.

Twitter has zero responsibility for needing to report which accounts are completely human or not human. Even if he genuinely cared about bots, Musk still screwed up by not doing due diligence before the offer.

You mean to tell me there are some unscrupulous people out there who want to pay less money for things rather than more? The horror!

Lies and BS?

If you could save a few billion wouldn't you?

It's a negotiation, and with the markets turning, he's got all the cards.

The cost of reneging is only 1bn, and the company would probably lose half it's market cap if the deal fell through

IIRC, the breakup fee if the deal does not go through is $1B. Given the massive dive in the market, that’s peanuts compared to the drop in the “fair” price.

He doesn't want a better price, he wants to get out of a serious case of buyers remorse. The play has so far gone like:

- "I'm going to buy twitter", buys a bunch of shares, has to report it

- Board says "No", adopts poison pill

- "Fine, I'll make you let me buy you" submits a contingent but binding offer to the board.

- Board says, well, our duty is to the shareholders, you're offering a big premium, we accept, here's a bunch of terms to keep you from backing out without paying them something.

- "Ha Ha!" shouts Elon, "I've proven I can buy anything now!"

- Yes, yes, say the banks as they bind him and his companies stock to the tender offer, you can buy that, we just want TSLA stock, that's fine.

- Stock market looks at the situation and says "wat", down-values TSLA because their CEO is spending his time buying... a social media platform?

- Musk starts to see the writing on the wall and realizes if he can't make twitter substantially more valuable in the short term, he's on the hook for a large chunk of his personal wealth (which hurts) but also a large chunk of his company (which hurts the ego) and starts to suffer buyers remorse.

- "Ha ha" says the board, you can get out any time you'd like, we'd just like our 10-digit check.

- looks for an escape clause - maybe you committed securities fraud Mr. Twitter? Check again for me would you?

I mean, broad strokes, this has been the saga in front of us - rich man wants to do something silly, gets told no, gets more determined, and fights tooth and nail, and finally, regrets his decision.

So now, _either_ he was short-sighted and wanted to buy a company he'd failed to do due diligence on and is trying to get out of the purchase that way, OR he has heap big buyers remorse, pays a billion and gets out of it that way, or he becomes the proud partial owner of a social media company with limited network effects. Who knows, but he had already staked up 7% or so beforehand - so 3B give or take, didn't back down looking into their numbers then, and only _after_ ponying up another 35B did he think, you know, maybe this is a bad idea.

But I just got an air popper, so please, let the show go on.

You skipped out the original dogecoin-esq pump and dump that got the ball rolling in the first place.

That makes the story too large to fit in the margin here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Details please!

Here's a fun and somewhat believable conspiracy theory:

What if there's internal data indicating that it's closer to, like, 30%?

In that case, a buyout offer conditional on a DAU audit is certain to expose that data, and that's checkmate for TWTR.

Musk can then either buy it at a massive discount, or use the enormous amount of free press to launch a competitor with mandatory device attestation.

What is the objection to this hypothesis? It's not even a conspiracy theory, it's that the board has misrepresented the DAU, and in turn, the value of the company.

To adapt an adage - Musk has already established what the company is, now he's just negotiating the price.

It doesn't matter what twitter has internally, they have no fiscal duty to report what percentage of users are or are not fully human driven.

It's the buyer's responsibility to undergo due diligence before making serious, legally-binding offers. Musk is very clearly scraping for excuses now that he has buyer's remorse.

> or use the enormous amount of free press to launch a competitor with mandatory device attestation.

That's what I think he's actually trying to do, as part of his "master plan part III". Twitter is only valuable because of users - but they are not worth this incredible premium. He's seen how attempts at launching 'free speech' platforms have gone.

He can easily build a competitor for a fraction of the deal's price. He can easily outspend any company. But that doesn't guarantee users - eyeball time is a limited resource. However, if he torpedoes twitter, he can get a bunch of users from the wreckage.

And, you know, profit from some nice pump and dump in the meantime.

> What if there's internal data indicating that it's closer to, like, 30%?

Pretty sure users would notice if 1/3 of all tweets are computer-generated.

They do notice. And people use the block button and call everyone NPCs

> I'm astonished that people still can't see through his lies and BS.

Almost everything people believe about Musk is lies and BS. Do you have anything to back up what you're saying? Otherwise you're just adding more lies and BS on to the pile.

Yes he just wants an excuse to exit the deal because Tesla’s stock is tanking.

>He is asking for proof that spam and fake accounts are less than 5% of total users.

Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase, you'd think the world's smartest man would have had his team do this due diligence?

Instead, he mad an offer on a whim and put the deal together in a couple days. Brilliant.

Unless the contract had a clause requiring this to be demonstrated if requested. In which case it's a good way to get out of it at to he last moment: activate the clause and put Twitter in trouble if they disprove their own statements.

Noob question, but wouldn't it be fraud if the number is higher than they're saying?

The contract explicitly states the number could be much higher than their estimate, so although IANAL, I doubt it.

Fraud isn't about the contract, it's about if someone lies to obtain money. Saying the stats are x when they're y because x sounds better seems like standard fraud to me.

No. It would only be fraud if they knew the methodology was likely to be extremely flawed and there are receipts with executives saying “let’s choose this because of X nefarious reason.”

Twitter being wrong about the number, or using a methodology Elon doesn’t like, isn’t enough.

he knows it’s higher than 5%, everyone does

> the world's smartest man

Did you mean the richest? Or do you actually think he's the smartest?

I think it’s sarcasm

Aah thanks, I'm not the best at getting sarcasm lol

> Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase, you'd think the world's smartest man would have had his team do this due diligence?

How would he get access to that data beforehand?

… the company would provide it to their legal team under NDA since it’s material to the deal. Ya know, as part of due diligence. There’s a whole lucrative branch of corporate law (mergers and acquisitions) for this.

Isn't this what's happening right now?

No Elon waved due diligence and bought it as is.

it's what he should have done before signing the deal he signed

> Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase

I guess that would be a function of how much Twitter had told everyone their percentage was. Improving Twitter’s 5% bot problem is different than improving it with 30% bots.

But, since we consider him the smartest man, he might actually be playing a game. He knew they would lie, or were for years, and put a clause in the contract about it and they fell into a trap.

Not sure who gets to pay the contract breakup $1B fee? It may be Twitter. That would be embarrassing. But then, they shouldn’t have been telling lies, if it turns out to be the case.

> and put a clause in the contract about it and they fell into a trap.

What a genius ... oh shit, there isnt a secret bot trap in the contract.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000119312...

Let me guess, just searched for the word "bot" and didn't find it. Well, I guess they are off the hook then...

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. GP made a decent effort to try to find this clause, couldn't, and you're effectively claiming they're full of it because it's gotta be in there.

A more hacker-newsy way to approach this would be to either find the clause yourself (and earn your upvotes the hard way), or perhaps admit your baseless speculation was, indeed, baseless.

It's rather silly to assume the clause would be written that narrowly. I replied above with what would likely be a relevant clause, which covers any and all information supplied by Twitter.

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Of course. But what's so extraordinary that a contract would have a clause about misrepresentation or providing false information in a purchase deal like this.

> A more hacker-newsy way to approach this would be to either find the clause yourself (and earn your upvotes the hard way).

Thanks, been here for 10+ years I am ok not harvesting upvotes. Maybe some other time. But ok, it's Friday, let's do a bit more search than just Ctrl+F "bot".

Twitter's 10-Q https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/0001...

(From page 5)

EX-2.1 AGREEMENT AND PLAN OF MERGER https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000119312...

> [...] none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed [...] contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.

(Section 4.6.a)

> The consolidated financial statements (including all related notes) of the Company included in the Company SEC Documents fairly present in all material respects the consolidated financial position of the Company [...]

(Section 4.6.b)

> None of the information supplied or to be supplied by or on behalf of the Company or any of its Subsidiaries expressly for inclusion or incorporation by reference in the proxy statement relating to the matters to be submitted to the Company’s stockholders [...] [shall] contain any untrue statement of material fact or omit to state any material fact required to be stated therein ...

(Section 4.7)

> GP made a decent effort to try to find this clause

If Ctrl+F "bot" counts for a "decent effort", I don't know, I guess...

You can't just quote a part of a contract and specifically cut out the legal caveats that exists to avoid the risk of being considered material misrepresentation. The correct quote is:

> We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter.

> In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated

It may hinge on them saying they "applied significant judgment" vs due diligence showing they knew they had much higher numbers. There is a difference to "we did our best to calculate it but we could have made a mistake" vs "we calculated, got a high number but purposefully put in a low number".

Elon didn't do any non-public due diligence of Twitter

Exactly. I think he may be reconsidering that, though it's probably too late. The whole thing is very baffling.

I actually think it's probably pretty simple underneath the facade - Musk offered to buy Twitter for a lot of money. The market tanked and Musk doesn't want to pay that price any more. He thinks he can strong-arm Twitter and either not go through with the purchase or force them to accept a lower price. The law does not support this, but Musk has a history of being unbothered by the law and there are examples (not Musk) where this tactic has worked to reduce the purchase price by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Everything else is just window dressing.

You're just wrong. This is what happens when you try to play lawyer on the internet.

You can crtl-f for "Specific Performance" and "Material Adverse Effect" in this thread for explanations of exactly how and why you're wrong

> You can crtl-f for "Specific Performance" and "Material Adverse Effect" in this thread for explanations of exactly how and why you're wrong

I assume you meant ctrl-f? So I did and still don't see it. Mind explaining a bit?

> You're just wrong. This is what happens when you try to play lawyer on the internet.

Worse things have happened, surely. Not trying to find any supporting statements, then there are replies of "You didn't even try". Then providing some support and it's "how dare you, you're not even a lawyer".

Of course they didn't write it that specifically. That would be extraordinarily silly. One writes the clause to be as general as possible, while also covering the primary concern. Witness, page 25:

> Section 4.7 Information Supplied. None of the information supplied or to be supplied by or on behalf of the Company or any of its Subsidiaries expressly for inclusion or incorporation by reference in the proxy statement relating to the matters to be submitted to the Company’s stockholders at the Company Stockholders’ Meeting (such proxy statement and any amendments or supplements thereto, the “Proxy Statement”) shall, at the time the Proxy Statement is first mailed to the Company’s stockholders and at the time of the Company Stockholders’ Meeting to be held in connection with the Merger, contain any untrue statement of material fact or omit to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading at such applicable time, except that no representation or warranty is made by the Company with respect to statements made therein based on information supplied, or required to be supplied, by Parent or its Representatives in writing expressly for inclusion therein. The Proxy Statement will comply as to form in all material respects with the provisions of the Securities Act and the Exchange Act, and the rules and regulations promulgated thereunder.

What percentage spam accounts would qualify as untrue statement of material fact?

Any percentage that was not calculated using a methodology? As HillRat said:

* As long as they used _a_ methodology,

* and that methodology spat out 5%,

* and there's no material information to indicate that anyone thought the methodology was inaccurate or otherwise wrong,

Then there's probably nothing actionable there.

The SEC filing clause (4.6(a)) is probably more germane than the proxy materials when it comes to bot calculations, and page 5 of the last Twitter 10-K covers their methodology. One can argue with their calculation method, but they're clear about how they're doing it and, as long as nothing comes to light documenting that they internally believe their bot rates to be higher than what their filing shows, they're in material compliance with the contract. There's no due-dil out for Musk in this, only a material misrepresentation penalty that Twitter is highly, highly unlikely to fall afoul of.

Oh I 100% agree with you on the chances that this means anything. There would have to be some evidence that they just made up a number, or invented a methodology that they knew would drastically undercount, or some-such. Just running a different methodology that returns a bigger number is not sufficient to break these clauses.

I don't think I am alone when I say I can't remotely fathom what the F Musk wants out of this whole "buy twitter" ordeal.

Do people really think this was all a game to snag a $1B fee, publicly cause havoc and possibly precipitate the sinking of Twitter? Is that really what the world's richest man wants to drop everything to work on?

Seems like A LOT to go through for someone who has several very absorbing day jobs: Tesla + SpaceX + the micronauts rocket-tube thing + neuralink + ???

Is this mania?

People also said Trump didn't really want to be president, so it wasn't going to happen. Don't underestimate what people say they're going to do. It's usually better to take them at their word unless you have evidence otherwise.

Definitely mania. And being surrounded by “yes men” and a legion of fans pushing you forward. Until it comes time to produce the $billions and suddenly everyone is doing their due diligence and likes/retweets aren’t worth a damn.

He also had the bad luck to do this at the same time the bottom fell out of tech and people started questioning whether buying TSLA shares at $1000 was the best marginal use of their money.

Also interest rates going up significantly, making financing much more expensive.

> would have had his team do this due diligence?

What makes you think he didn't? So his team has a number, their team has a number.

The numbers diverge wildly.

> Instead, he mad an offer on a whim and put the deal together in a couple days. Brilliant.

Do you think smart people don't make decisions quickly?

That is interesting.

If this guy’s such a genius why didn’t he ask for proof sooner? He’s looking for any excuse to pull the plug.

By what criteria can you determine an account is spam/fake?

That seems like a difficult thing to determine.

Solving to detect the signal and solving to resolve the problem is the same solution... Paradoxical engineering.

> We will see. Interesting times!

I'm sorry, but what a worthless thing to say. I can't stand it when pundits say this.

The irony of this comment..

> He obviously believes the number is much higher[1]

That reference - "If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!" - does not assert your claim.

He's not entitled to such proof. It isn't a condition of the purchase agreement.

His choices are: pay the original price, or pay the $1 billion cancellation fee. There might be a third choice: Twitter could offer to renegotiate, but they aren't obliged to. They could take the $1 billion instead.

You can estimate yourself from the comfort of your own home how many accounts are spam. Just make a list of 100 random accounts. Truly random, not just "followers of X" or whatever. Then manually look each of them and classify as spam or not. There's your percentage.

If you want more accuracy, hire some people from say Amazon's Mechanical Turk and do 1000. 10k.

I used this exact method a decade ago (thanks statistics 101) to estimate and got 10% with a minuscule margin of error. That was a decade ago though.

Some data here: https://botsentinel.com/

Elon already signed. There is literally no such thing as "putting it on hold." See Matt Levine's latest column, he can't even back out if it turns out there are more than 5% spam/fake accounts. [1] He's playing games because he's the richest man in the world and if you try to hold him accountable he will make your life hell. He's really shown his true colors these last few years, absolutely no respect for him anymore.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

I came to the exact same conclusion. He's turning into Gru, with his own little army of sad minions.

There's a lot of talk about how Elon is weaseling out of this. That may be true but you should know something about acquisitions. Typically there is a termination or breakup fee that one side has to pay for walking away or if the deal falls through. AT&T paid billions for the failed takeover of T-Mobile [1], for example.

The Musk Twitter deal has a $1 billion termination fee [2] on both sides. Now it's unclear on what conditions would trigger this exactly. In Twitter's case, it at least includes accepting another offer. On Musk's end, it includes if financing falls through.

So here's the $1 billion question: what happens if (as Musk might argue) Twitter made material misrepresentations about their business, specifically to do with how many users they actually have? This might be an out for Musk or it might not.

Personally I've long thought there are a huge number of fake Twitter accounts and Twitter is actively disincentivized from ever finding out if that's true or not. Put another way: they like their big numbers for active accounts, DAU and MAU.

But if Twitter is found to be materially misrepresenting those numbers, they have way more serious problems than if the Musk deal falls through. They've then opened themselves up to litigation by the SEC and investors that they materially misled investors.

Things could actually get really ugly for Twitter here regardless of what happens with the Musk deal.

If you think about it, this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter. Make a buyout offer, get access to the books, prove they're lying about DAU/MAU, walk away with no termination fee paid, watch the executive team get sued into oblivion and the company tanks.

[1]: https://money.cnn.com/2011/11/24/technology/att_t-mobile_bre...

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/elon-musks-twitter-deal-in...

I am curious how they prove either of the arguments about fake accounts precisely. What is the definition of fake account and how to prove them? If they can prove some self-evident cases, it could be just the tip of the iceberg.

It seems like there are 4 categories of Twitter users:

1. Blue checks

2. People who are “obviously” people (PII listed)

3. “Anonymous people”. I see a lot of theses, people with the name “iluvcrypt0” and an emoji of a Pokémon.

4. “Obvious” bots.

From looking at thread responses on twitter I think group 3 is probably the biggest, On the Luna thread someone posted to a link of posts that were implying they lost all their money due to Luna crashing, and it was a lot of group 3 posters. but of course each of these categories has a certain percentage likelihood that they are a bot. Im sure there are a few blue checks that slipped through and there are probably a few “obvious bots” who manually post.

The question is really the makeup of group 3. How many people who seem like anonymous users are actually bots, and can they prove that (when of course Twitter is incentivized to err low)

Also, either way, group 3 doesnt seem like they are contributing to the marketplace of ideas, they seem more like trolls/shit posters.

What about people who were banned and called Russian bots for their political opinions — Do they count as real people or bots?

> What about _people_

I think you answered your own question, if you’re using the word “people” then they’re not bots.

Category 2 if they used PII, category 3 if they didn’t.

An account that is shared between bots and humans is likely. More of a "bot augmentation". Eg a script that runs during certain hours or to handle high volume during certain periods.

Then it's almost a question of "how botty" the account in question is.

If this is true, where’s the proof of a conspiracy? This is similar to the thing about phones listening to conversations and then some app shows a relevant ad: where’s the conspiracy?

What you outline above implies something like an affiliate/recruiting program to find accounts to “co-house” your bot within. Especially with the implication that they operate on behalf of USian political parties.

I think we're probably using the word "bots" to include "human-based mass creation and use of twitter accounts". Like if I make 100 twitter accounts to promote <thing>, they count as "bots" here, even if I did it all by hand. If we're not, we should be.

Given that, I'm not sure there is much "bot augmentation" on otherwise human twitter accounts. It would be strange to do that if you were only using one account.

I think there's another category:

5. Users with plausible names and a profile photo of a person that are bots

I don't remember the study but when there were studies coming out of believed Russian-controlled accounts supposedly amplifying misinformation, all the examples I saw were in category 5.

And this category is the most deceptive. Nobody cares what a Twitter egg says. People care about supposedly grassroots outrage / support / etc. from supposedly legitimate people.

Yeah, I wasn't sure whether to include this as a false positive in category 2 or it's own category but yes your point stands.

I think there are many more categories. I am on Twitter with a pseudonym, and while it is not bot-looking, it is obviously not a real name. At first glance I may or may not be a bot run by somebody else. I can be Googled easily and you will find some PII there, such as my employer, but it would take some checking that you can't scale.

I am definitely between 2 and 3 in the above classification, and so are many of my contacts I would say.

[edit: can't* scale]

Also, if they already know there is X amount of bots, why don't they just...ummm...delete those accounts already?

There's no reason to go through every single account to find the true number of bots. At the scale of Twitter they could just randomly sample a set of accounts, run detailed analysis on them, and statistically extrapolate onto the entire userbase with confidence bounds.

>But if Twitter is found to be misrepresenting those numbers, they have way more serious problems than if the Musk deal falls through. They've then opened themselves up to litigation by the SEC and investors that they materially misled investors.

Well, yeah, this goes for every single public company (including Tesla).

> this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter

Interesting idea, albeit very high risk, however what's the motivation? Say he's right, sure he walks away with $1B minus his legal fees. But if he looses, he own Twitter... but wanted to "mortally wound" it.

Not sure he needs to do something high risk like this for the potential of $1B, and based on how much he uses Twitter I'm not sure he wants to take it down.

To be clear, I'm not even suggesting this is what Musk is doing. It's just an interesting thought I had about what someone could do.

But as for motivation for someone doing this, people have egos and when they have this much money, it essentially costs them nothing to exact revenge for no other reason than a bruised ego. Musk in parituclar is notoriously thin-skinned.

Remember when those boys in Thailand were being rescued from a cave following a flooding? Musk offered a submarine. One of the rescuers said something dismissive about it. Musk responded by calling him a "pedo guy" and then won the defemation suit by lying and saying it was South African slang, not an unfounded allegation the guy was a pedophile [1].

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

Where does the article support your claim that he was lying?

That article doesn't.

However,

https://theoutline.com/post/7951/elon-musk-pedo-guy-south-af...

https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-pedo-guy-really-...

https://slate.com/technology/2019/12/elon-musk-trial-pedo-gu...

https://www.iol.co.za/saturday-star/news/elon-musks-pedo-guy...

Worth noting that, even if it was common 'slang', the meaning hasn't changed one bit from what we attribute to those words today.

I was always under the impression that Elon was making a (poor?) joke about the sex tourism stereotype of bald Britons living in and around Thailand specifically.

Not every cunning idea has to be thought up in advance, and not every aspect of it needs to be devised by one person.

Perhaps some of Musk’s advisors dreamed up this strategy on realizing the dangers of “plan A” or even after the decision to back out was made.

I don't know how well this would hold up in arbitration, but he has repeatedly cited the existence of bots as a reason for buying and fixing twitter.

> If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

April 21 900K likes

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354

4% of users could be very vocal and annoying bots...

Musk can take care of %4 but if its at %6 free speech is not salvageable?

For the right price maybe, for the wrong price no.

> If you think about it, this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter. Make a buyout offer, get access to the books, prove they're lying about DAU/MAU, walk away with no termination fee paid, watch the executive team get sued into oblivion and the company tanks

That's true, but what does Elon gain from destroying Twitter?

I'd argue that Twitter actually was (and still is) a big part in building his cult of personality. Sure, it has its problems, but I honestly believe that he thinks he can improve Twitter.

I remember a few weeks ago when the deal was first announced. A bunch of folks reported that conservative accounts were gaining followers while liberal accounts were loosing followers. The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.

This led to the theory that Twitter might have way more fake accounts then it's leading us on to believe. There was some speculation that the "Less than 5% figure" would come to bite them in due diligence so they were panicking and dumping bot accounts. Now this...

I'm not saying these two events are related, but there does seem to be something fishy going on. My gut says it will come out in the next few days that Twitter has something like %10-15 of their accounts being bots rather than the initial "Less than 5%" figure.

>The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.

Is there a link to this analysis?

Imagine if the old law of 1% applied here. That is on the internet, 99% of all content is generated by 1% of the users.

Now if we include "users" as "content" (bots, ai, scripts), we have a very brooding fringe theory similar to "dead internet theory."

In my experience... it's pretty obvious and prolific how much automation is in Twitter. It's basically a public cyber-war; you have state actors and non state-actors using military grade propaganda tools for 'reality framing' between military interests, government interests, and corporate interests.

Interestingly after just digging into this a bit more it seems that when considering this principle in multiple studies measured since the 2000s, the most successful predictor for this power law is if the internet property is a form of community. Specifically in those cases there was a strong 1-9-90% rule in effect.

1% of the users were responsible for all generated content in terms of creation. 9% were responsible for editing if they had the privilege to edit. Perhaps “replying” would fit in this segment. 90% lurkers.

This is a stronger version of the Pareto principle. It’s interesting metaphysically and perhaps physically when considering musical theory, intervals, and how boundary conditions seem to work pretty consistently despite seemingly unrelated things.

I digress though, back to my earlier point. It seems if these laws hold up then there is a strong potential that much of the users who are active are in fact “avatars of creation.”

It’s certainly been mentioned that the internet has felt like this over the recent years by more fringe echo chambers. However given the backdrop of progress, it certainly gives more credit to the idea of a more nuanced form of the dead internet theory reminiscent of “society of the spectacle.” What is the said progress I allude to? Well, “NLP” of course. The most amount of progress in machine learning and AI is specifically within language models. Given that the availability of building such automation tools to conduct memetic warfare doesn’t even require sophisticated language models, (manpower, shills, some creative spam) one may have to wonder for how long oneself may have been talking to themselves on the internet? In a way it forms an “imaginary great firewall” for every user. Interacting with avatars built on your predictors, with seemingly no truth vector for the utility function and it’s behavior modification goal (alignment functions). Weird. I think we are past the smoke alarm stage. The evidence of ability and active training is self-evident since 2016 on 4chan and elsewhere.

1 billion to just to say "nah I actually don't want to do this". 1 billion for, after all is said and done, nothing to actually materially change. Does that sound supremely fucked up to anyone else? All that fucking money...and it just goes to whomever bank is financing this because nothing happened?

What a massively fucked world we live in.

Absolutely not. Imagine I want to buy your house for, let's say, 200k$ and sign the contract. So need to quickly find a replacement, move out, clear the legal stuff and probably miss work. Then, at the last moment, I back out. Don't you think 5k$ would be appropriate for all the now useless work and money spent on your side?

It's the same number with Twitter, just scaled up to the actual offer.

I mean a lot has happened because of it. It's been a top news story across fields. It's affected Tesla stock. It's affected public perception of Musk. It has caused deeper analysis of the financial viability of Twitter. It has allowed new parties to get closer looks at Twitter's books. It may have left to the ousting of several Twitter execs. It has normalized a return of Trump to the medium.

I interpreted this comment as not saying a $1 billion penalty is necessarily inappropriate for this particular deal, but it’s a waste of money in general to pay $1B to achieve nothing when that money could have been put to better use or donated to charity.

I don’t think you could easily prove Twitter is materially misrepresenting the number of bot/spam accounts. Presumably, it is just an estimate based on some combination of assumptions and statistical analysis. You might be able to create a significantly higher estimate, but that seems different than proving material misrepresentation.

It's rampant tin-foil hat speculation, but the ordering of events may not be what we've seen.

Yesterday the big story was that two higher-ups in Twitter were fired unexpectedly, one of whom was on paternity leave at the time. Some amount of shake-up is normal in these kind of conditions, but that doesn't rule out something more. Today Elon's pushing back, suggesting the 5% bot rate may be inaccurately low. It's possible the events are related, some misrepresentation was found while investigating the figures, and that's why the firings happened yesterday.

If that happened, it'd be in Elon's interest to draw attention to it and that the deal is "on hold," as Twitter will be on the hook for that $1 billion breakup fee unless they can renegotiate terms favorable to Elon. And even if the deal dropped completely, now Twitter implicitly will be on the hook for misrepresenting to existing investors the percentage of bots for however long they've been doing it.

I guess we'll see. The truth will probably be more boring.

Bots probably seem like they make a bigger part of Twitter's population b/c they will simply tweet more than the median user. I imagine that the majority, and perhaps the vast majority of Twitter users are mostly passive users, ie: they mostly consume tweets and seldom actually tweet themselves. In other words, high D/MAU, ~5% bots, but bot tweet volume makes up 30+% of actual tweet volume.

Well this certainly makes what Parag did make sense. The market conditions have essentially dictated that Musk is now massively overpaying for twitter, and he's doing it from a weak position with the value of Tesla dropping. It would be insane for him to close at this price, and the other people who bought in to finance it will also be very hard to keep on board. So Musk needs to walk away at this price. The question is whether he can either find an out that doesn't involve paying the break up fee, or bully Twitter's board to accept a lower price. Given how Parag is behaving I think that's unlikely.

It's important to remember though, if Musk walks away and then comes back with another offer it's going to be extremely hard to convince of a new deal, since Musk no longer has any credibility.

The other thing to consider is that no one else wanted to buy Twitter for $45Bn. But let's say Musk walks away and Twitter drops back to where it should be at around $25 per share. Now you could easily see someone coming in and picking it up for $35-40 per share.

I think that's why he's hunting for the less than 5 % spam accounts. If that isn't accurate I bet you it allows them out of the breakup fee.

Also probably difficult for Musk to go in at a lower price if the deal falls apart. Best and most likely only route forward for twitter ownership by Musk is probably board agreeing to a lower price but prices are sticky in peoples mind so might be tough times ahead.

>If that isn't accurate I bet you it allows them out of the breakup fee.

Not really. There's nothing in the deal contingent on this and Twitter has no fiscal or regulatory responsibility to report which accounts are fully human or not human. Having APIs and allowing bots shows that Twitter is open about having bot accounts.

This is correct. [This article][1] ([archive link][2]) goes through some of the contract law stuff, and they speak to this:

* The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong — and this 5% number is in its securities filings — but only if the inaccuracy would have a "Material Adverse Effect" (MAE) on the company.

An MAE is apparently a high standard and courts [almost never find an MAE][2]

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

[2]: https://archive.ph/NFWVp

[3]: https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2018/10/delaware-chance...

The article does also go on to say however that Musk will probably do whatever he wants without concern for the law, and without substantive repercussions. He can walk away from the deal just because he wants to, because he will be more aggressive in court than Twitter, and it wouldn't be advantageous of Twitter to go after him.

True, but Levine talks about that wrgt going against the SEC. Twitter is a billion dollar corporation with a signed IOU from Musk and a duty to go after it.

It's not the same as what Musk has pulled in the past, but will still be interesting to see how it plays out regardless.

To further expand on Parag: he might’ve fired his political enemies who expressed support for Elon.

Or at least that’s my theory. What was yours?

My theory is that he is actually just acting like the deal won't close. The plans they put in place after the activist shareholder have largely failed and now the market conditions are way worse. So he's going to bring in some new people and make a big pivot to some other revenue streams. I don't know what that is yet, but I think that'll emerge over the next 6-12 months.

Yeah this is the main question in my head Im curious to see how it plays out. Assuming Musk comes back at a lower price that may be shrewd negotiating, but once he buys they’re out right? Taking a 20% haircut on your investment seems like something a lot of people may not swallow, especially if they think the market will turn around and trust Parag. Heck, there stock was like at 65 a year ago.

I doubt the Twitter acquisition by Musk will go through, regardless of stated reasons.

China is the second biggest market after the US for Tesla sales—meaning CCP wields the power to decimate Musk’s wealth, which Tesla stock is the main source of. Musk knows Tesla’s position in China is fragile (like that of any Western company), and the Chinese government knows he knows that; it seems unlikely they will pass on newly found leverage when it comes to influencing discourse on Western social media.

By owning Twitter, Musk risks having to choose between his image as free speech maximalist and a large part of Tesla’s sales. From the outside, he doesn’t strike me as someone willing to sacrifice either. (He could implement some mechanism that gives CCP direct or indirect influence over Twitter without the public finding out, but that seems a bit far-fetched.)

So far there seems to be no mainstream Western social platform that stands to lose anything by ignoring CCP’s censors. We don’t see YouTube videos, Facebook posts or tweets taken down due to requests from Chinese government. Revenue from China is not a factor for any of their mother companies. I think that’s a good status quo to maintain.

I can't imagine any state, where this "deal" was anything other than a "I'm a bigger man than you" kind of thing. Probably fueled by some mind altering substances. All fine and dandy as long as its like a billionaire throwing a $100 bill at a bum, but when it turns out that it could sink his ship, or at least put him in serious financial trouble and threaten things he actually cares about, then he needs to find a way to get out of it.

I've been sorta a musk fan because he was willing to risk everything to pull off things that no one else was willing to take a risk on. OTOH, its patently obvious that he isn't some kind of genius, more like a gambler who managed a winning streak and somehow thinks its because they have a lucky charm. Maybe his biggest strength is that he is such a fine bullshitter he can detect it in others a mile away.

>Maybe his biggest strength is that he is such a fine bullshitter he can detect it in others a mile away.

Bullshitters who succeed have a strong tendency to start smelling their own farts and drinking their own koolaid

Why do people think they have a better idea of his abilities and contributions than those who know him personally?

John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

Wouldn't it be better to ask people who have quit Elon's ventures rather than people that rely on him for employment or those that rely on his services? Seems heavily biased.

Is John Carmack reliant on Elon? He works for Facebook on Oculus, and I'm not turning up any search results of either him or Armadillo Aerospace doing business with Elon (and Armadillo has been in "hibernation" since 2013).

Ah I didn't see Carmack in the commit when it was posted.

If you are curious to see if he knows what he is talking about or not, you can hear it directly from him instead of from employees:

"Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI | Lex Fridman": https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA

My take after hearing the interview? Alex Fridman knows what is talking about, Elon Musk no.

> Why do people think they have a better idea of his abilities than those who work with him?

It appears your argument is, "Elon is a great engineer, therefore he can't be messing around with his Twitter acquisition deal."

Your mistake is assuming that a great thinker cannot be mistaken, even outside his domain. A counterexample is the scientist who pioneered PCR. Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for his efforts! And yet he also believes in astrology and that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

There's no reason to think that Elon Musk (who appears in no danger of winning a Nobel Prize) does not have his own goofy thoughts and actions, one of which appears to be making an insincere bid to buy Twitter just to make himself look big while weakening them. Time will tell whether that's the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_...

> It appears your argument is, "Elon is a great engineer, therefore he can't be messing around with his Twitter acquisition deal."

No. His argument was a response to:

>>> "OTOH, its patently obvious that he isn't some kind of genius, more like a gambler who managed a winning streak and somehow thinks its because they have a lucky charm."

And was a very robust response at that.

If he's such a great genius, why is he devoting so much energy to trolling Twitter? Either he's not such a genius, or he is and he's squandering his talents.

Because trolling authoritarians is a noble cause.

Tbh at least in space community everyone seems to think he is squandering his talents when spending any time at all on Twitter (let alone buying it).

I'm not sure any of those prove he is a genius (SD>>4 say). Why does every successful person have to be a super intelligent person? None of the quotes, the interviews I've heard, etc put beyond what I would expect of a reasonably intelligent engineer. Engineering/Science/Math attract "geeks" sometimes with frightening Jeopardy levels of breadth in general science/engineering/etc fields.

And given all the batsh*t crazy, conjecture, etc one hears from him, i'm inclined to believe its less unstable genius, more lucky nerd. That doesn't mean he isn't smart/driven/etc, it just means he isn't this big brain who can predict the future and knows the secret formula to living on mars. In some ways the successes are logical steps. AKA, the tesla manufacturing problems, translate to knowing how to avoid similar issues when building rockets. Most of what has been accomplished looks like well applied engineering, which is more about sweat than genius. So from the outside it looks more like a mix of gambling + luck + solid management skills + ability to avoid technical dead ends. Does that make him a genius, or just someone with tenacity? Given the failures and close calls, I'm included to believe its less genius, more tenacity and just enough luck. Both tesla and space-X have been one bad day away from not existing. The fact that they are still around is luck as much as skill.

There's a lot of things you can say about Elon like crazy, blinded by money and power, hubris, etc. Lucky? If you start one billion dollar company, sure. The man built up Paypal, Space X and Tesla. The jury is still out on Boring Company but it's still drilling in Las Vegas.

I'm sure he got lucky with Paypal but you can't luck out this many times. The guy clearly knows how to build billion dollar businesses.

What's even more remarkable is that there's basically no tradition of rich and powerful people in business slapping each other on the back and praising each other in public, giving each other awards, going to the same parties, and doing favors for each other. Which makes these notable people praising the richest man in the world really stand out as obviously authentic.

it's super simple, they're jealous.

Eh. He sounds like someone who has a breadth of interests, but that doesn't necessarily make him a genius. Obviously you'll find complimentary statements regarding the world's richest man, and if he's a fairly nerdy one such compliments will often take the form of "oh he's so smart". Maybe he is super smart. But it's not clear to me how someone with a deep knowledge of the matter could've said, in 2015, that 2018 would bring cars with "full self driving", nor how he could have made similar dead wrong forecasts in the years following.

At the very least he's lucky with respect to how he's never faced significant consequences for his great number of mistakes, boneheaded statements, and arguably criminal behavior.

It's interesting that people are using this moment to fault Elon, when it's one of his finest moments. Making an 'offer' on what you believe to be good faith. Hidden in your pocket, you know the other party is acting in bad faith. (Twitter says 5% of the DAU is bots) Elon calls them out on that ridiculously low number, says the deal is on hold until this fraud is verified.

Obviously the bots on twitter account for more than 5%, and will be at the detriment of the biggest KPI that twitter touts. He's given them a taste of what will happen if they walk away from the deal by 'putting it on hold' and watching the stock lose 10% in precisely the same day as a general market recovery.

He now has the ability to renegotiate below his 'best and final offer'.

Seems like a risky move but this whole thing is high risk so, it’s not out of the question.

> it's one of his finest moments

What if he dedicated this energy to reducing homelessness or slowing climate change? Showing up a tech company for having a lot of fake accounts seems more like a dick measuring contest than a fine moment for anyone.

It's not his job to reduce homelessness or slow climate change. Dedicate your energy to getting your elected representatives to do their jobs. They have orders of magnitude more money and power.

And Twitter is helping get around elite failures that are causing those problems to persist: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/actually-twitter-is-re...

There seem to be a lot of people on HN, as anywhere, who lionize Elon Musk and praise seemingly everything he does -- like the post I replied to, which characterized his business with Twitter as among his "finest moments."

I'd personally suggest that his work to electrify the car market is very important. His moves to buy Twitter -- sincere or not -- seem like utter bullshit. Especially compared to the things he could do to significantly improve lives for millions if not billions of people. And all at a lower cost than buying a social media company.

So nothing Tesla has accomplished so far has helped toward slowing climate change going forward?

That work is great! Let's have more of it. Trolling social media companies on the other hand only serves the ego of sensitive billionaires and their superfans.

Ah yes. Great securities fraud moment indeed.

> Elon calls them out on that ridiculously low number, says the deal is on hold until this fraud is verified.

This is a fantasy because that's not how any of this works. He can't put the deal on hold, the number of bots on twitter doesn't give him an out, regardless of wether it's five percent or 35 percent — in short, he doesn't have a position of leverage if twitter wants to pursue it legally. Read Matt Levine's latest columns for a complete and thorough breakdown.

This whole debacle is not some kind of '5D chess' move from Musk, it's just the inevitable outcome of a fickle, ego-driven billionaire throwing his money around, and possibly (deservedly!) losing a huge amount of his fortune.

That is your working hypothesis? A fickle, ego driven person gives the world the first reusable rockets and electric cars? I hope you’re just speaking like this out of anger.

> A fickle, ego driven person gives the world the first reusable rockets and electric cars?

I didn't assert that the aforementioned qualities are mutually exclusive with notable achievement, and I'd even argue that being ego-driven, in particular, would help with such efforts.

That said, did Musk bring us the first reusable rockets? Almost certainly not. He didn't even bring us the first commercial reusable rocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Shepard#First_vertical_sof...).

And you can't possibly think that musk truly introduced the world's first electric cars, can you? There were electric carriages as early as the 1830s, and quite a few commercially available electric cars in the 20th century.

Tweet from 3 days ago by Hindenburg Research:

> NEW FROM US: We Are Short Twitter

> Musk Holds All The Cards. We See a Significant Risk That The Twitter Deal Gets Repriced Lower

Space Karen's reply:

> Interesting. Don’t forget to look on the bright side of life sometimes!

https://twitter.com/HindenburgRes/status/1523677782211186690

On the bright side they can probably get out of their position today for 15-20% profit. Not bad for a 3 days trade.

Space Karen! That’s good

After the market crash a day ago, there was a joke on Twitter about Musk cancelling the offer, burning a billion and buying Twitter later at a half price.

Conspiracies and jokes aside, how one determines(at contractually acceptable certainty) what accounts are absolutely fake or bot account? It's not like they ticked the checkbox saying "I am a fake account".

If the sellers and buyers are not on the same page here, wouldn't that drag in court for years maybe?

After all, maybe Musk will actually burn a billion only to buy Twitter later at a half price or less and save $20B+. Twitter might end to be much more cheaper after a stock crash due to the bearish markets and that fake users scandal(?) that Musk exposed(?).

Except when the market as a whole goes down it impacts everyone who was bringing money to the table in this deal. I wonder if the financing he's gathered is getting nervous. It might be harder for him to raise the money again, even if the price is better.

Tesla stock also suffered quite a lot, AFAIK that was how Musk was going to finance the deal.

That said, Tesla doesn't have "more than %5 fake users" problem that came out just as the deal was closing. I guess Musk is a luck man.

bots are not fake, they can be useful accounts. I have one that still works, another kept being taken down so i stopped reinstating it. To say that twitter is ran by schoolchildren would be understatement

> how one determines(...) what accounts are absolutely fake

Right now, Twitter's ability to ferret out fake accounts is just completely ineffective. In the communities I follow, I see literally hundreds of reply posts under each tweet of certain people, all with the same profile picture as the OP, all tweeting about giveaways.

Twitter should be focussed on cleaning up their product, and one of the variables required for that is knowing what amount of users are being used to spam scam messages. The fact that they can't means twitter's development isn't prioritising it. A ballpark estimate of the order of magnitude of that figure should be possible for them if they were in any way actively trying to solve the problem, which they are obviously not doing.

They can do much better if they wanted to. They don't.

There are very obvious patterns that I as a single person can see about fake accounts.

Twitter, a huge tech company with access to a lot of engineers and AI, can probably do much better than me.

They don't because they don't want to.

Here’s a program that can detect bots

  For user in Twitter:
    Confirmation = random(number)
    Send user message(“if you are not a bot reply with”, confirmation)

Variations can be devised but the real risk is that it also identifies inactive accounts.

You know how iPhones can extract verification codes from SMS? The botmasters will simply create a regex to extract the number and reply accordingly.

Just use a captcha image. Not foolproof, but would eliminate a huge swath of bots.

They don't even try this. Why?

Then they will simply solve the captchas using captcha solvers or humans paid pennies per captcha. You do something else and the botmasters will respond.

It's really hard to get rid of bots and fake accounts. Also, false positives are expensive because you end up annoying a real human and as a result your mistake doesn't disappear until you make it right.

The cat and mouse game of bots vs captchas has been going on for a long time and has become increasingly sophisticated. "Just use a captcha image" is a 10 year old solution, if not more.

How would they know to write that code if they were not expecting it? Just do it as a one-off on a particular day without any warning. And you can show it to some small sample % of total users then extrapolate, so that the average botmaster wouldn’t even notice.

I guess you can run a sting operation, it may work.

Beat botnets with this one simple trick!

Aren't you just suggesting a very simple CAPTCHA challenge? This is an area that has seen an arms race for over a decade of platforms coming up with increasingly complex "human-intelligence" challenges, and botmasters coming up with increasingly ingenious ways to bypass them (including, sometimes, using real human intelligence)

As a private company, Musk can also set his own management fees / owner compensation / call it what ever

1) Pay $1B fine to Twitter

2) Buy cheaper

3) Get a $1B chairman first year bonus from Twitter

He'll probably find a way to write it off on taxes as well

The $1B are lost in (2). He will have to pay about $1B more if he has to pay the fee to twitter because then the company is worth $1B more.

It's not $1B exactly because he already owns some shares so he doesn't have to pay extra for those.

The fact that it goes to a company he later acquires makes it seem like an obvious move. Is it?

I could see the captcha solution someone mentioned being possible.

Take a randomly selected group of 10,000 active users, show them a captcha, and look at the percentage of respondents.

Random captchas ("We need to re-confirm you're a human") sounds like a great idea, although annoying to someone just wanting to post a quick 20-word tweet.

But it would have the useful side effect of slowing people down from tweeting impulsively, a practice that demeans the conversation and sometimes ends careers.

The GP post wasn't describing a method for stopping fake accounts, they were describing how to sample what percentage of accounts are fake.

This may work

this would not work well because the sample would be biased

newer accounts are much more likely to be bots compared to older ones

you would have to sample IDs by age and create a distribution based on ID age

And then you can extrapolate how many overall are fake

Hindenburg Research (which is notorious for unmasking frauds, stock promoters and market manipulators) called it on May 9th:

https://twitter.com/HindenburgRes/status/1523677782211186690

Musk tried to use all his 90M followers weight and his snark belitteling them into closing the short :

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1523693971842957312

Good on them for not listening to the noise and making bank.

In many years of watching sports, politics, business, culture I have seldom seen a more distasteful character than mr. Musk.

Back in my ignorant days I couldn't stand shortsellers, I considered them to be haters.

Oh so little did I know. They are the custodian of market sanity and also the saviors of the American consumer, they keep in check these megalomaniacal cult figures such as Musk, Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Adam Neumann who enrich themselves by inflating financial bubbles of epic proportions while providing little to no quality of life to the consumer

Dumb question, do you know why he’d care about shorts? He’s already agreed a price, does it really matter if people are buying and selling it way lower than that before he buys it all? Is it just an appearance thing?

Short sellers push the price down, so on the chance he does go through with the purchase, he is seen like a fool who overpaid for the stock. And we all know how much narcissists like looking like fools.

I don't think he was pressuring them to close the short, I think he was hinting that it'd be good for him if he could reprice the deal.

No one takes short-n-distort crews seriously after the 2016-2018 disaster.

If you equate Musk with Holmes I cannot take anything you say seriously. Wishful thinking at is finest.

I'm having trouble understanding his reasoning.

Musk refers to an article which claims that false or spam accounts represent fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

In his Tweet, he suddenly wants to know whether spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.

Aren't these concepts (percentage of users and percentage of monetizable daily active users) something totally different?

Maybe this is performance art designed to demonstrate the menace of communication media that require you to strip out crucial qualifiers from your claims in order to fit into an artificial character size limit?

You have 260 characters, and can create threads. I've read plenty of Twitter threads that are at least as persuasively argued as a similarly long blog post.

Do they even define "users"?

I'm a lurker on Twitter. I follow people but don't tweet. Do I count as a user? My behavior is probably difficult to discern from a bot (using a third party app).

The bots everyone is concerned about are the ones tweeting, but there are probably all kinds of "legitimate" bots, like the ones that tweet when Apple pushes a software update, or something goes on sale on Steam.

That 5% number may be describing the "legitimate" bots, while what everyone cares about is the illegitimate ones.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fa...

    >Twitter Inc(TWTR.N)estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

    >The social media company had 229 million users who were served advertising in the first quarter. read more

Funnily enough, Elon Musk's tweet does not mention "monetizable".

It seems evident that a bot user is almost never monetizable, so you'd think the amount of bots in Twitters monetizable user base would be very close to zero even if the total amount of bot users is 90% of the total user base.

They define “monetizable” to mean that the user is using Twitter in a way that could serve ads. (I think they mean this in contrast to, like, API only usage, although I’ve never seen Twitter explain this in more detail.)

These aren’t objective measures though, with agreed upon standards and Twitter is incentivized to err on false positives.

In subscription-based video games, bots are absolutely monetized (and some people use it as an argument to explain why editors might seem slow at suspending them). In its current iteration, bots are not monetizable on Twitter, but we can imagine a world where they are.

Why do you think a bot is not monetizable? What if some payed by Putin pro-Russian trashtalker (bot by definition) without Adblock installed (unlike most of decent users who are not happy to see some ads in the social network they love) - who is monetizable and who is not in this case?

Because they devalue your ad business. Your views don't lead to enough click-throughs which don't lead to conversions for the buyer. Even if you imagine that the paid sockpuppet operator might be interested in the ads, their whole business is representing themselves as being from a country they're not so the targeting is all wrong.

Why isn't a bit monetizable? - True, you can't monetize that account via ads, but for one it drives conversation, thus interaction with other users thus allows to send those other users mire ads and the bot operator is willing to get his message out and might be willing to pay.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

    > Still committed to acquisition

Don't care about the reasons, but finally one of these platforms are getting called on their BS.

MAU has a large impact on valuation, all of these platforms are filled with spam bots, and they are allowed to flourish because it pumps up those numbers. The platforms content suffers (Instagram comments anyone?), but they reach higher valuations because of these nonsense MAU numbers. They are all guilty of fraud. It's well within their ability to combat bots, but they have zero motivation to do so.

Eager to see what comes out of this.

Elon backing out because he realized he will lose a lot of money on this because his TSLA shares are also plunging as a _direct_ result of his actions.

The whole stock market is plunging, is this also a “_direct_ result of his actions”?

Some people seem to think that Elon == "The Market". I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get a "Yes!" as the answer.

Some other people seem to think that the market is crashing because crypto.

What happened to good old fundamentals... earnings and rates? Sigh.

AFAIK crypto is following the regular markets. As a crypto fanboy I do not see a problem on the crypto territory.

Other than Luna perhaps, which shook the trust in stablecoins. If crypto market didn't go down significantly, Luna would have still been probably up and stable.

But one might also argue that what happened to Luna now might have prevented a catastrophe MUCH bigger in the future though.

tesla stocks are crashing way more than all the other stocks tho

This isn't true

S&P 500 down 18% from 52 Week High

Vanguard total stock market down 20% from 52 week high

Tesla down 40% from 52 week high

Sure seems true that it has crashed more than the stock market in general. And guess what, on news that he might pull out of the twitter deal, TSLA up 6% in pre-market trading at the moment...

Yes that's correct, on average TSLA is down more then SPX. But you cannot compare a index to a single stock. Since you'll have stocks that are also up.

Compared to the other leaders weight wise in the SP500 (AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, AMZN, etc) TSLA is down about the same.

No, looks more like 20-25% for the others vs 40% for tesla.

Crazy theory: Tesla stock is crashing, Musk used hos Tesla stock in his financing of the Twotter acquisition (security against loans and what not) and cannot secure the funding now. Having a 1 billion "fine" to pay if the deal falls through, he is now looking for an easy way out, hence trying to find something "material" in Twitters numbers.

That is completely incorrect. TSLA is holding up quite well. Take a look at SHOP for example. Nov last year it was $1700 now it's $350. TSLA was $1200 and now it's $750. It's holding up really well compared to some others.

"_direct_", Tesla is way overvalued and we all know it. Where is the cybertruck, roadster, semi and FSD? All promised years ago and the only real progress seems to be on a nutured cybertruck.

It’s direct because (1) he is selling and collateralizing his shares, and (2) he is also taking on a role to overhaul Twitter that’s going to take time away from Tesla.

Pure speculation: Musk still wants Twitter and doesn't care about the money that lawsuits or a breakup might cost. What he cares about is looking foolish for buying Twitter at a premium to it's stock price right before tech stock prices tumble even further.

In short, it's not about money, not about new information (% spam accounts), not about cold feet, it's about what he thinks would be seen as an embarrassingly bad business decision.

Here's what prompted this. Yesterday Elon saw a bunch of obvious bots[1] and asked "If Twitter can tell the difference between real and fake users, why does it allow these in our comments?"

That's a good question. Anyone have a good answer?

1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524909413462573058

So you're saying that Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter without knowing about the above issue

I'll say that makes him look like an amateur ..

I'm more interested in the slightly less snarky question of what led Elon to believe the number was <5%

How is he expected to know whether Twitter knows if their bot% number is accurate? You're suggesting he should know more than Twitter does about their internal data. And it's the internal data that is being disputed.

Tech is down and Elon now wants out. Musk knew the numbers and didn't care before everything started crashing.

Bend over, Elon. Pony up the gigabuck and go home.

"Still committed to acquisition" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

He probably wants to save $10bn on the price and stick it to the board that originally tried to block the deal with a poison pill.

It's not really a good question, and I suspect he knows that. Twitter can simply:

1. Sample x twitter accounts

2. Have humans review the accounts manually to determine if they are bots. This isn't perfect but can be good enough.

3. Extrapolate.

You'll come up with a reasonable percentage with this method to share with shareholders, but you can't use this method at scale to actually fix the issue.

Taking an absolutely wild guess here, but the reasoning sounds like a Due Diligence finding by one of the financing partners to me. E.g. one of the banks that would loan some of the money hired a commercial DD team. The 5% fake accounts was a red flag raised by them and the bank is making their financing subject to an explanation on the 5% fake account topic. Maybe the bank is also only pushing this „finding“, since they want weasel out of the deal, but can only due this for legitimate DD findings. The business plan probably has 5% fake accounts as an assumption in it and if this is 15% the economics would change. /End of wild guess

Looks like a repeat of the "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."

The inimitable Matt Levine in his Bloomberg Money Stuff column, two days ago:

> As I have said before:

"Uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past."

> Perhaps he has decided that the joke would be even funnier if he signed a merger agreement, lined up billions of dollars of financing from banks and equity partners, committed to a $1 billion breakup fee and a specific-performance right in the merger agreement, got through antitrust review and a shareholder vote, showed up at the closing and said “nope, just kidding!” I mean, that would be very funny.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-11/terra-...

It wasn't a joke though, the Saudi Investment Fund made the promise to back it up, which was allegedly witnessed by the Tesla CFO as well.

Musk had one 30-minute conversation about potentially taking Tesla private with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (“Saudi PIF”) on July 31, 2018. No price was discussed, no structure for the transaction was proposed, no amount of funding was agreed.

That is the full extent of the promise to back it up.

If it wasnt a joke or stock price manipulation to stop loans against the stock from triggering, then Musk is retarded. Its pretty obvious he isnt retarded so it must be one of the other options.

> No price was discussed.

To be fair, the stock price is public info. It is generally understood that to take a company public you need a slightly higher offer and support of shareholders and/or board (Elon). So I could see how you could both be on roughly the same page re: price without talking about specific numbers.

If he thought they were on the same page then he is a retard.

>Its pretty obvious he isnt retarded

What makes that obvious?

If it was a joke, then he must be. Which he isn't. So it must be another option.

I started reading this column to follow this saga, and I have been delighted so far. He has a way of explaining very complex financial topics in a way that's easy to understand. And his writing about the twitter deal is full of wit and personality.

It's a great tragedy that his column is off today. Cannot wait to see what he has to say on Monday

He sometimes makes an exception to his day off if the events merit it, in his opinion. There might yet be a column today.

He Did.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

> Programming note: Money Stuff was supposed to be off today, but then my boss, Elon Musk, called me in to work anyway.

:-)

Which direction of this is meant to be the “better”?

Is it too high and it’s not worth what they say?

Or is it too low and there’s not much room for improvement through better tools to remove them?

Hypothesis: The deal will go through once his stock price goes back up - if this were to occur it would be strong circumstantial evidence to suspect he is timing the market.

Many people predicted a couple of weeks ago he would wiggle out...

The implied volatility of those twitter option remained at 99%

66% across expirations

People were betting

I still have my puts.

The whole thing was a pump and dump. He sold billions in shares weeks ago.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-sells-billions-of-dol...

In order to fund the Twitter deal. They were Tesla not Twitter shares.

Yeap. Sell high, TSLA tank, buy low.

Pump and dump by definition.

I'd like Bezos to buy it and then stay out of it (editorially) like he did WashPo

I hope everyone gets that this is a joke

I'm still waiting for proof that Bezo's is inluencing WP's editors.

It seems to be a position of faith either way. It depends on your world outlook (aka priors).

All tweets in STAR answer format only

Bezos is clearly the smarter oligarch. He just wanted to buy an outlet on the cheap (several hundred million or so?) just to soften the bad press but generally stay out of it.

I really dislike using the phrasing oligarch, when you can compare it to actual oligarchs. People like putin and his close ‘friends’ who use and force economic downturns so they can buy up national companies and markets so they own most of it.

Musk/Bezos can’t ring up Biden and develop a scheme with him (or orchestrated by him) to seize more of the market and dictate politics. They have to use more subtle means.

This doesn’t mean that they have no sway, or that they’re not far more powerful than the average citizen. They just aren’t buddies with a dictator that enriches himself and them.

Can some explain what the spam/fake accounts are? In my little corner of 4 or 5 accounts with 2500 followers total, and a dozen or so hashtags I check frequently, I really rarely see spam or bot accounts ... I mean they pop up but its not a major aspect of twitter for me in my daily experience. And I use twitter a LOT.

Are they counting my +1 accounts as fake? they're not, they each represent a different side of myself that's real, even if they don't bear my name. one for a site I created, one for a particular community I participate in, etc...

most of the sane one's here called his including me.

Tis is a way for Elon to back out by saving face since he did not notify Twitter upon the 9% threshold which would oopne himself to lawsuits from investors.

Elon's comment is just as likely to have been made in jest as serious, which is not a take I've seen in these comments. If you follow his Twitter account then it seems in line with his sense of humor.

A lot of people get pretty riled up over his tweets it seems. If it brings you joy then follow it. If it messes with your mind, then maybe just unfollow it. He's rich, mercurial, sarcastic, and a lot of other things, but ultimately you can just disconnect from it and go about your life.

The odds have always been good for the 'Musk talks big, doesn't follow through' outcome.

I hate to point to my old posts and say I told you so but ... actually now that I am doing it, I am not hating it that much. Anyways, Elon did not have the money to buy Twitter, he had to sell a bunch of Tesla stock to do so, he tried to sell some stock and then the price of Tesla stock collapsed and there you have it. Just as I said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109355#31111059

I mean he was literally buying twitter? How did he not have the money for it? Now that new information has come to light the deal is on hold. Maybe he came to his senses and realized twitter isn't worth what he's paying for it and that it will probably become a wasteland if he succeeds in making it "absolute free, short of violent threats, speech" friendly.

> the deal is on hold.

The deal cannot be put on hold. It's either moving forward or it isn't.

> Twitter Incestimated [...]

That's an unfortunate bot error from Reuters. For a moment I thought I was mistaken about what "Inc." should expand to.

If twitter could detect what accounts were spam/fake accounts.. wouldn't they just.. ban them?

The number of spam/fake accounts depends highly on the accuracy of your classifier. Twitter's classifier could just be: "This account is not fake" and there's nothing Elon could say. He can't even sue because for all intents and purposes Twitter is not lying, the classifier is just wrong.

No, they need to show user growth. This is the problem with the public markets. Companies must grow, QoQ or they are a failure. Its at the root of so many of our issues. Some businesses should not grow, or need not grow. Stability is good for the market, but not good for today's Wall St pump and dump where the goal is to fleece others, not to build a viable, reliable business.

Anyone else laughing maniacally? I am. This is so great. Tesla is tanking. Twitter is, too (and so is the market in general but if the Twitter deal were a sure thing it’d be trading at near 54.20 but it’s not…). I think the market is finally figuring out that Musk is a smart guy with no filter and says anything he wants to because he was given a platform because Tesla’s stock has 10x’d.

Hopefully those Tesla/Elon Musk fanboys finally realize that Elon musk is just another capitalist with some sugar coat lol

It was as if millions of twitter trolls with a distorted idea of free speech suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

This could be why senior execs were let go yesterday. Heavily inflated numbers putting the deal at risk of a significantly lower price.

The two twitter exec firings yesterday must be related to this. Musk must have asked for proof which the product team could not produce.

What is your thinking behind "must be"?

Those exits were not planned, one guy was even on parental leave, so it was definitely a rushed thing. That always stinks when an acquisition is taking place.

One person (their VP Product) was on paternity. You don't fire people like that unless they did something very very wrong.

Misrepresenting spam/bot accounts would fall under that bucket. If the number of spam accounts is like 20% (instead of 5%), not only would the deal fall through, other shareholders would sue twitter.

Not sure this misrepresentation would count as financial misrepresentation (which results in jail etc under Sarbanes-Oxley)

> You don't fire people like that unless they did something very very wrong.

If he's on paternity leave he won't have been responsible for a number that came out last week.

Well, he is still responsible for the process through which the number was derived (assuming the process was put in place by him).

Pretty sure twitter have a dashboard with these numbers, and don't do it manually. So if this dashboard makes data up, I'm pretty sure VP of Product's head is on the table, since it's a really sensitive data to report wrong. And twitter firing him can be a way to protect the top exec from the SEC, blaming him for everything.

> You don't fire people like that unless they did something very very wrong.

That's assuming the firings are fully rational, and no self-interest was involved.

I can easily imagine a number of scenarios where Parag fired the guy knowing he had done nothing wrong in order to attempt to protect himself in some way.

That makes no sense, especially because on of them was on paternity leave and is probably not involved in getting some numbers from the database.

The guy had 5 years to get the numbers right, but didn't. (if that's the cause)

You don't think a high level exec is on the hook to pull a few numbers during their paternity leave to help seal a multi billion dollar deal?

Its more about the process of how that number was derived.

An alternate explanation is Parag knows this is going to get ugly and is sparing his exec team from going through this with him.

> Uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-11/terra-...

“Puer aeternus is Latin for ‘eternal boy’, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young”

Score another one for Hindenburg, who predicted something like this (and bet on it) less than a week before it happened: https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

The guy has mastered the art of stock price manipulation

Has he really? a) it's really obvious that he's doing it — I cannot believe he hasn't fallen foul of regulators yet b) he hasn't gained anything from this particular deal yet, as far as I can tell

He used that excuse to sell 9B of Tesla stocks. It's pretty hard to justify selling that much as a CEO of the company.

$9B sounds big… until you realize it's a tiny % of his holding.

It doesn't matter how tiny. 9 billion in stock market trade by management will move the market both from the amount of sell orders and from the market reaction.

It also sounds big until it costs him $50 billion.

Wow. Now that you say it, that seems really obvious. He managed to do an unscheduled sale of stock at the peak of the market.

Unfortunately, he didn't expect Tsla to go down so much. So now, on paper at least, he has lost more on this deal than he gained. Call it a little bit of Karma.

Michael Burry I think has been speculating this from the start. Probably others.

Edit: Well not exactly but this is what he said: https://twitter.com/BurryArchive/status/1460124776597495808?...

Don't believe it. Twitter made this filing May 2, and it took Musk 11 days to respond?

The whole world knows that there is more spam than 5% (depending on how you measure it).

This is just a way of getting out of the deal and/or negotiating a better price; in particular now that general market valuations have changed.

Musk is already locked into the deal. If it is possible for him to back out he will have at least one billion dollars in breakup fees. [1]

This could be a setup to give him an reason to cause a breakup of the deal (he can't just walk away!) but there are real money consequences.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-02/twitte...

Whether or not Elon Musk is worth $42 billion or $41 billion is completely immaterial to his quality of life. This is why gonzo-extreme wealth inequality ruins the power of markets: once the marginal value of a dollar falls to zero for any given actor, they can keep a market irrational indefinitely with no penalty.

If you're the sort of person who wants to believe in the power of markets, then you need to make sure that every participant has actual skin in the game, which means stopping people from accumulating so much wealth that they render the market permanently irrational, and the irony is that fomenting runaway wealth inequality is a natural tendency of markets.

>This is why gonzo-extreme wealth inequality ruins the power of markets: once the marginal value of a dollar falls to zero for any given actor, they can keep a market irrational indefinitely with no penalty.

This is an excellent point. Our assumptions of rationality don't hold up as well with this amount of money. One billion dollars means something totally different to him than it means to the average person.

What's "funny" (sad/tragic not haha) is that his cult will have bought into this on the 'anything he touches turns to gold' tip.

Shorting Twitter, out of the public eye, on the other hand, is perfectly Musk-like approach (see previous Tesla stock manipulation). Simple and efficient

I don’t understand how an acquisition offer that takes months to finalize doesn’t account for changes in the stock price. Is that standard practice?

yeah, apparently. If the market collapses, or Twitter collapses due to bad earnings, that is not enough to walk away, according to Matt Levine:

> Much of the negotiation in a merger agreement is over what might go wrong: How could the deal fall through, and what would happen if it does? We talked about the main issues yesterday, and let’s go through them again.

> 1. Can Musk just change his mind? The short answer is no. If Musk changes his mind without a good reason, Twitter can force him to close the deal, as long as his debt financing is available. That is, if all of the conditions to closing are satisfied, and if Musk’s banks are willing to fund the $13 billion of Twitter debt and $12.5 billion of Tesla margin loans that they’ve promised, then Twitter can force Musk to put up the $21 billion of cash that he has promised and close the deal. (Section 9.9(b).) Short of that, though — short of actually forcing Musk to close the deal, which is tricky — Musk’s liability is limited to a reverse termination fee of $1 billion.[7] This is exactly what I laid out yesterday, except that I assumed the reverse termination fee would be $1,420,690,000, because Elon Musk loves meme numbers and Twitter seems willing to play along. The $1 billion breakup fee, while pretty standard for a deal of this size, is bizarre for an Elon Musk deal. Not a 420 in sight! (420 is a weed joke.)

> 2. What if Twitter’s business breaks? Musk does not have to close the deal if there has been a “material adverse effect” at Twitter. (Sections 4.9 and 7.2(b).) “Material adverse effect” is defined on page 5 of the agreement and it is long. Actually the definition doesn’t say much; it just says, tautologically, that a “Material Adverse Effect” is “any change, event, effect or circumstance which, individually or in the aggregate, has resulted in or would reasonably be expected to result in a material adverse effect on the business, financial condition or results of operations” of Twitter. All the action is in the exceptions to the MAE. As I suggested yesterday, there are lots of them, and it is somewhat difficult to think of an event that would cause a material adverse effect on Twitter’s business but not be covered by an exception to the MAE. If Twitter does badly due to all sorts of general conditions (changes in law, general economic and financial conditions, pandemics, etc.), that does not count as an MAE. If Twitter fails “to meet internal, analysts’ or other earnings estimates or financial projections or forecasts for any period,” that doesn’t count as an MAE; just having bad earnings isn’t enough. And, as usual, bad effects that result from “the negotiation, execution, announcement, performance, consummation or existence of this Agreement or the transactions contemplated by this Agreement” do not count as an MAE, though here they felt it necessary to spell out “including (A) by reason of the identity of Elon Musk, Parent or any of their Affiliates or their respective financing sources, or any communication by Parent or any of its Affiliates or their respective financing sources, including regarding their plans or intentions with respect to the conduct of the business of the Company.” If Elon Musk breaks Twitter by tweeting his plans for it, he still has to buy it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-27/bill-h...

Strange. Makes the whole thing seem more like a theatrical bid for attention than a serious acquisition offer.

$50.00 + "$4.20" is a theatrical bid.

But, as various people are pointing out, if Musk has to pay the $1B penalty, that's hardly going to hurt him...and if Twitter's stock price drops by, say, 30%, that gives Musk a clear opening to save over 10x that penalty on a future offer.

Now, there's still a reasonable question as to whether the board would be willing to consider a second offer if he does something like that with the first one, but it's certainly not a guarantee that they'd turn up their noses.

> doesn’t account for changes in the stock price

It does.

So then the theories about Elon wanting to get out of the deal (because the shares have lost value) are incorrect?

Stonks only go up. Elon didnt get the memo about stonks going down occasionally, now making excuses to get out of overpaying.

That or it was a classic pump and dump ...

The craziest thing in this world is that there are more conspiracy theories about Bill Gates being a super villain than Elon Musk.

Talk about the opposite sketches!

It seems like there’s a growing distrust of seriousness lately. Caring isn’t cool or whatever.

If you look into What Bill Gates' attention is focused on (massive landholder, wants the world fed synthetic beef, hopes the next pandemic will be centrally managed and controlled, ownership stakes in media, connected to Epstein), regardless of intent these things have 'scarier' implications than Musk's electric vehicles, rockets and Twitter ownership.

Indeed; Musk just looks like a cartoon villain.

Gates walks the walk.

Gates’ attention is focused on solving problems for people in emerging economies.

What you’ve quoted are the types of batshit crazy conspiracy theories I’m referring to.

What did he quote? He only stated facts.

Which of those are conspiracy theories? Hasn't Gates publicly spoken about all of those things?

The notion that anything Gates has spoken about has scary implications. For example “massive landholder”, so?

Wants the world to be fed synthetic beef. So?

Wants a centrally managed pandemic. So?

Connection to Epstein. Orly?

The answers to my questions above (ie. so what) are the batshit crazy conspiracy theories.

As long as you don't foresee any issue with massive central control of food supply, medical response or synthetic products, sure, there's no implications whatsoever. But handing over that sort of control should never be done 'for free.'

Then there's the obvious question, why is Gates so focused on emerging economies when there are many, many local problems to solve, albeit more expensive and not so easily monetizable...

Has anyone here done this calculation before?

How hard is it to reliably spot fake accounts across millions of users for SEC-level reporting fidelity?

is this what legally valid, openly public, stock manipulation looks like?

I guess Twitter can ban Musk now for not going through with the deal. If that happens, where will he get all the attention?

you have to delete your twitter account

The deal break clause should have been this...

Twitter Inc estimated.

Oh the difference a missing space makes.

I think the (TWRT_T) link in the press release got removed by a summarizing bot or a summarizing intern. Thus, through chance and endless change, the English language has again been improved. I do believe I will now add "incestimate" to my personal lexicon for any assessment of an entity's value that comes from that self-same entity.

There's no one in finance on HN and it shows. Elon can pay the $1Bn breakup fee and renegotiate the deal at a lower price, given the current market conditions. This is completely reasonable and rational, and Hindenburg called it days ago; but the top comment right now is arguing that Elon is "unhinged".

Just an excuse. Either he actually has changed his mind, or other people, possibly government, made him change his mind. I can definitely believe that the U.S. government does not want to allow just anyone to wield something like Twitter to their liking.

Could it have to do with the recent stock/crypto slump? Perhaps he doesn’t have the cash any more because his assets have rapidly diminished in value since he begun the take over.

It’s not clear to me why the calculation over bots and spam would threaten the deal.

How is this not hypocrisy? Isn't all social networking spam? Elon would do well to embrace the strengths of the medium rather than run away from it. I expected his amazebrains to understand this but maybe he is getting too old for modern tech.

Are there plausible links between this announcement and the recent Twitter firings?

Is there a reason that when you are not logged in, the comments below a tweet are sorted by time rather than upvotes?

This makes it pretty hard (in case of a popular tweet like this one impossible) to find the more important replies.

I don't get all the hate here.

If Twitter lied about spambot counts that violates the deal.

Are there numbers/estimates for % of bots in other social media sites?

Toxic hubris. The man is high on his own supply and he's acting like a spoiled child. I have no respect for this kind of stuff from a mature, capable person. Its trolling and it's destructive.

https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1525049369552048129

As Matt Levine points out in today's Money Stuff: no, it's not. There's no such thing as "temporarily on hold". Musk is obligated to buy Twitter. He can't just pay a break-up fee; Twitter can compel him to complete the deal. Musk's only "out" is that a Delaware court finds a "Material Adverse Effect" occurrence. They (1) never do, (2) there's a rule of thumb for the magnitude of an effect to qualify as "Material" (something like 40% off revenue), and (3) the bot-user thing he's talking about was specifically disclaimed by Twitter in their filings, and likely can't be the basis of an MAE claim.

None of this is to say the deal will go through; Musk can just ignore the law, as is his wont.

Curious why this is immediately about Elon and his psyche? Is it not possible that Twitter may have/be wildly understated/ing how many fake accounts are present on its platform in an effort to stay above water and such information is coming to light during diligence? Wouldn't that type of discovery put any “normal” deal on hold? It’s usually not great as a buyer when you discover the item you just bought or are looking to buy isn’t actually worth what you perceived or were lead to believe it is which is why these deals involve diligence in the first place.

It's because of his way of doing things in the past and his credibility. Why does he even need to announce this on Twitter if this isn't another one of his schemes.

If this was anyone else we wouldn't bat an eyelid.

People on HN really despise him. I think I saw someone call him Space Karen.

This entire comment section is frothing with hate, and not much objectivity.

LOL... I called this on here a while back while all the Elon worshipers told me how Elon was a great man that would fix Twitter and bring about world peace.

Have you read the article?

I really hope you have read the guidelines: [0]

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Okay, sorry, it's just that it's not nearly as unambigious as they claim. It could be an exit move, it could also be Musk trying to renegotiate the price. Also, he just tweeted: "Still committed to acquisition." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

The statements are contradicting. You don't announce that a deal is on hold unless you're questioning whether you're committed. That is like telling your fiance the wedding is on hold. I'm hopeful just the tweet saying the deal was on hold will be considered a violation of the agreement as it will clearly affect the stock price.

This is classic Musk playing 5D chess

Only one top level comment visible on the first page ...

You have to hand it to the man. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, and have zero interest in Twitter, yet I'm drawn to this comments section like a moth to a flame.

He knows what he's doing.

It is possible, that Musk didn't expect the twitter deal to become as politicised, as it did. Maybe he just got afraid of getting into the center of politics in the US. For example the state is a major customer, and they could just stop buying launch services from SpaceX for example, as the president might not agree with the politics of Mr Musk.

I mean look at Bezos, he got into a fight with Trump, and the pentagon preferred Azure to AWS, all of a sudden. Yeah, and a year later that deal got cancelled too, by the next administration [1]. I mean Musk has a lot of business with Uncle Sam, he really can't play his own game, in terms of politics.

I mean, i mean, they really have a lot of 'leverage' with Musk, to begin with. I would guess that Musk would be looking for a way out of the twitter deal, in order to protect his business. Also the economy is going into a recession, therefore his deals with the various governments are going to be much more important. Look, there is even talk of Musk building an e-tank with a German firm, Rheinmetall [2]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDe7OGpPodM

If Musk wasn't aware of the political, contractual, and regulatory implications of the twitter deal then he wasn't listening to his legal team. It seems to be one of his favorite business strategies.

Interesting perspective. Actually the US government payed for the service:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...

sorry, answered in the wrong thread.

I think that Musk is not very good at politics, However I might be wrong.

Did Twitter stock price just drop 20%?

Alwaleed bin Talal and the folks from Qatar are gonna be upset

Twitter is about to become a marketing platform.

The guy is a clown. Don’t trust what he says.

I bet twitter stock price is gonna take a dive!

Pretty sure the SEC is going to love this one.

ITT: conspiracy theories and personal insults

Elon Musk called a guy a pedophile. He deserves to be insulted.

Elon Musk is the Donald Trump of market manipulators. Is there a formal term for this type of leadership that both exhibit? Rapid ready-fire-aim comments and actions? Constantly keeping everyone involved laser focused on what could be coming next, scared to death.

Is this what the future of executive and political leadership looks like? The bull in the china shop?

Both personalities will be graduate level studies of sociology and phycology for years to come. And the crazy thing is that this stuff resonates so well with so many people (read: the cult of Trump and Elon)

He can back out let the market slaughter twitter and buy it for a massive discount right down the road.

Wouldn't be the first time Musk is manipulating stock prices with a tweet.

Considering the blood bath in tech stock I recon is actually more of a case of him badly timing the bid. Had he waited a couple of weeks more he could have picked it up for 1/2. The price will plunge today. My bet is 25% or more.

Just looked it up, the last days hit my last AMZN shares pretty hard... Bad timing indeed!

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter, he knows it and it looks like he's trying to knock the price down or exit the deal entirely

The wording of the contract had lots of text describing the various ways in which either party could become liable for backing out of the deal.

If I was to ever make a deal involving Elon Musk the first thing I’d make sure is to have paragraphs making it clear that Elon doesn’t open his mouth about it until the deal is either completed or cancelled.

I used to like Elon circa 2018 up until he started acting up (pedo guy, et al), but the main thing that soured my opinion of him lies in being -- don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged.

I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel. What I can't really tell is if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

I just listen to the space stuff and tune everything else out.

Same here. SpaceX does impressive work. The rest of Elon's companies? Not so much for me.

He's such a polarizing figure folks can't seem to detach the worthwhile things he's done from all his other flaws. Elon isn't particularly impressive as an engineer or scientist, but incredibly impressive as a product and business person. Realize that he's a brand, and try not to fall for the marketing.

He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).

> He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things like building reusable rockets or practical mass-market EV's. Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower. (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)

You should read Steve Jobs' biography for another example of someone with these characteristics.

Do read it on your iPhone for even more cognitive dissonance ;)

The characteristic is being able to see the talents of others and exploit them. Jobs was and Musk is great at that, although Musk is an actual [software] engineer.

Those employees trapped on an island for months developing SpaceX rockets in miserable conditions did the work.

I've always felt Musk's most unique ability was finding the right people to fill the right roles and somehow convince these people to come work 8 days a week for him.

He is definitely technical. Like, his engineers can explain stuff to him. That said, let's not extoll Musk as some super-brilliant mind. He is good, but not THAT good. He pissed off a lot of people at PayPal when he was aggressively pushing for Windows servers.

I was under the impression he was the money / marketing guy, I didn't realise he built or designed any rockets / EVs himself.

This! Amazes me everyone thinks he’s the brain behind the incredible technologies his companies create.

Even if this was true (nearly everyone who has studied Musk says that although he may not lead day to day engineering, he is gifted at figuring this stuff out)…

It is clearly non-trivial to rally a group of people, funding sources, and, er, marketing resources to accomplish what he has accomplished.

Evidence: nobody else has done it.

> Evidence: nobody else has done it.

Er... what? He's focussed his attention on some specific problems and made good progress solving them; people have been doing that for as long as there have been people.

Sure he's had great success and clearly does a lot of things well. He's not singular in that.

You need to watch this interview with Tim Dodd (the space YouTuber) and you'll realise in the first 15 minutes he really is an engineer https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw

I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but being good for humanity overall is not the same as being a good person to be around. He definitely did a lot of good for this world, but that doesn't mean that he's an easy person - quite to the contrary, to be this successful, you need to be very assertive and sure of yourself.

Look at Bill Gates for another example. His early business dealings are well known to be ruthless and he pushed MS at the cost of a lot of things, but now he uses his wealth mostly for good.

As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".

The question is whether the damage these people made while accumulating wealth gets compensated by the good they did later. With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure. Musk actually looks better. He has shaken up two industries that needed a good shake.

> With Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller I don’t think so. With Gates I am not sure

All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so. It's only their greed which didn't make them cashout before Standard Oil/Microsoft eventually outcompeted them delivering a better product to the consumer.

Same with Facebook v. Myspace and Google v. Yahoo. Nobody sheds a tear for the shareholders of Myspace and Yahoo. Rightfully so.

Musk is robbing taxpayers in the form of subsidies and tax credits for luxury vehicles which all end up parked in front of Bel Air mansions and 5th Avenue shops.

On top of that he already said that he'll never do philantropy

> All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer. Nobody sheds a tear for the paper-millionaires, rightfully so.

Well actually... Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape, until there was a change of US Presidential administration, after which Microsoft was given a wrist slap, and then 9/11 immediately hit, which made the issue disappear from public consciousness.

I'm not exaggerating here: the Department of Justice announced it was no longer seeking to break up Microsoft in September 2001. See this article from the WSJ literally the day before 9/11: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000076767888491506

> Microsoft was almost broken up by the government for what it did to Netscape

It should have been given the medal of freedom instead...those crackpots at netscape wanted to charge people money for the browser.

Only former netscape shareholders could possibly defend Netscape.

Microsoft I will always defend, the decision by Gates and Ballmer to allow piracy enabled me and my family to always have the latest version of Windows/Word/Encarta/IE even though we were poor.

The Federal EV tax credit for Tesla was completely phased out in 2020.

“All 3 of them took wealth away from paper-millionaire shareholders of competing companies (eg. Netscape) and delivered superior quality of life to the consumer”

Especially Carnegie made life miserable for tens of thousands of his workers. No amount of charity can make up for the amount of suffering he caused.

Exactly. In capitalism, if you want to become rich, successful and admired (purely selfless motivations), you usually end up being good for humanity as a byproduct.

That "usually" is doing a whoooooole lot of heavy lifting. Capitalism is the ultimate "fuck you, got mine" system, and only serves the good of society with heavy-handed intervention.

Assertiveness and being sure of yourself can almost be considered prerequisites to becoming that successful, sure I can buy that. Doing things like constantly posting juvenile and inflammatory stuff on Twitter (such as baselessly accusing people who you think have slighted you of being pedophiles), that I'm not as convinced points to traits that are as positive.

> As much as we'd like, we really can't reduce people to "good person" and "bad person".

I don't find that difficult at all. Yes, obviously literally every single person have good and bad characteristics and have done good and bad things. But as a human being I'm perfectly able to look at those things in aggregate and decide for myself if I think they tally up to someone being what I would personally consider a good or bad person.

> truly world-changing things

Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years. The past year was a very slow year for the car selling business except for luxury vehicles of course (which Tesla is). In 2021 Teslas accounted for approx. 1% of total global vehicles sales.

1% in 20 years. World-changing.

This can also be said about good-hearted people, most of them don't have world-changing achievements. It's said that the rate of psychopathy among CEOs is above the population average.

So not sure what's your point. But I like the passive aggressive nature of your comment.

> Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower.

On the contrary, our world is practically made for those people to be successful. Psychopaths do great in unbridled capitalism.

You should read some history books and find out how successful and effective they were in collectivist societies (eg. Nazi Germany, USSR) too.

> "truly world changing"

> That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things

Nobody should be surprised when a CEO acts like a jagoff, that's par for the course.

To wit, so quickly HN forgets about Jobs and his cult of personality. Ten years ago, it felt like half of the people on this forum had their lips so far up Jobs' sphincter that they could see the sunlight through his nostrils. Now it seems this adulation has found a new outlet.

It's a reminder that cult of personality is a virus which can attack anyone ranging from the successful full stack developer making 200k in the Bay area to the Iowa farmer trying to figure out who to vote for.

It's also a reminder that things can always become worse. At least Jobs managed to first put a phone in every pocket and only then got paid for it. Like Gates with PCs.

Also Jobs was paid a salary because his hubris got himself outed from Apple the first time around and his ownership was down to single digits.

Musk first sued for the right to be called the founder of Tesla , he then managed to inflate a financial bubble to get paid upfront for work he'll never deliver.

It's the gilded age of frauds out there.

Actually narcissistic, manipulative, and low empathy people tend to do better in capitalist societies. It tends to be a benefit, rather than a hindrance, when it comes to finding professional success.

I mean, you’ll alienate yourself from everyone, but you’ll be rich!

Source: My wife professionally studies personality disorders

yup, and you know what his super power is?

_money_

Anyone with enough billions can do what Elon has done.

1) He didn’t start with billions

2) Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit, and they did start with billions

Ford pioneered modern car manufacturing, and Boeing got stuff farthet out in space. Shooting a Tesla on a SpaceX rocket was just a publicity stunt. A genius one it seems.

> Boeing got stuff farthet out in space.

Despite which SLS is still not flying and Starliner is stuck in test flights and not human certified, despite both having been started a bit before SpaceX was being valued as high as $1.3 billion.

Similar with Ford: fantastic past! Yet the money from that past win didn’t let them do what Musk did.

QED, “billions” are not enough by themselves.

What was the gain from having a car in a trans-Martian orbit other than yet more space junk?

Judging by the difference between the funding rounds 2 months before the launch and the one 2 months after, it gained $3.4 billion.

I should have been more specific. The gain for humanity.

Other than a demonstration that the new experimental launch vehicle worked? Sure, shame nobody took him up on the offer a free launch, but I kinda understand why people didn’t want to risk its maiden flight.

(Something something Romans: https://youtu.be/Qc7HmhrgTuQ).

it was a demo flight for prospective customers. I don't think it was intended to do anything for humanity.

> Neither Boeing nor Ford have put a car into a trans-Martian Solar orbit

Good?

This reminds me of the scene from the film "Tin Cup" where he asks "You ever shoot par with a 7 iron?" and his rival replies "Hell Roy, it never even occurred to me to try." (The backstory being that Tin Cup and his caddy broke all of his other golf clubs in a childish argument.)

Boeing made the x-37, which is autonomously roving around space, and landing on its own.

Musk pointed a rocket at the sky and pressed play. In terms of difficulty, boosting a car into an extended orbit is trivial. Manoeuvring a "space plane" to intersect multiple satellites, grab them and return to earth, that is orders of magnitude harder.

Ford make cheap cars world wide at volume, and pioneered the production line.

as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time. I am rich because I joined the right start up and got bought out. yeah I worked hard, but not anywhere near hard enough to justify the money I got.

The same with musk.

> as for point one, like me, he was in the right place at the right time.

Let me rephrase:

SpaceX was valued at less than one billion dollars when they launched the first Falcon 9 to orbit.

The total money raised in the investment rounds only exceeded $1 billion in 2015, after 13 launches.

Total raised from investors only exceeded $2 billion, enough to be called “billions” plural, in Jan 2019, which is just before SpaceX got Starhopper off the ground.

https://craft.co/spacex/funding-rounds

In comparison, the per-launch cost of the SLS is estimated to be “over $2 billion”, plus dev cost, and an Orion capsule would be extra.

SpaceX didn’t need billions to achieve impressive things, just for ridiculous things like “enable the colonisation of Mars”.

"narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, "

Is it rare? We just had a president with similar traits

Not an American, but what worthwhile things did the former president achieve for you? Our media painted him in a less-than-pleasant light.

Worthwhile things: stacking the Supreme Court with far-right justices & lowering taxes for the wealthy. These are massive successes for the party he represents (which is actually a minority of the country, unfortunately)

Simply achieving the office is what I was referring to

Not that impressive, but something our society needs to grapple with: how left hemisphere’s distorted view of reality is highly functional in our cuurent way of life and especially around capitalism.

Much of that is addressed in McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain.

I don’t think Musk is a bad person, but he is displaying like many "high functioning" people in our current economic and political systems, signs of lack of empathy, hyper materialist views, etc.

Unsurprisingly left hemisphere dominant people (who are unbalanced), can do very well in systems that are designed by the left hemisphere and reward everything the left hemisphere is about (control, supposed knowledge of how reality works or is, power, inflated sense of self and ideas of being "self made" etc.)

> (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)

I always find it so amusing when the best thing anyone can say about our previous White House occupant is what he DIDN'T do (and not for lack of trying!). As if a pet rock or farm animal couldn't have accomplished the same feat.

And completely ignoring that he was trying his damndest to provoke Iran into a war as late as early 2020, by ordering an airstrike on one of their generals.

Smart doesn't mean wise. Yes, he has pushed electric car and space market forward, but he talked about e-cars and going to Mars back when he was 14. He is literally a rich kid living out his teenage phantasies. Albeit successfully. He is still a tool.

It's precisely this narcissistic personality which some people love about him.

Personally I blame marvel movies. Many immature people think the world is a superhero flick and Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark: arrogant billionaire genius who is going to fix the world from his superlab.

Notably, Tony Stark nearly destroyed the world because he was an unelected oligarch who thought he knew better than everyone else...

IIRC, MCU Tony Stark was based on Musk.

Honestly I would rather blame some fans (Musk included) of great shows like Rick & Morty, IASIP, Breaking Bad or the Joker movie for mistaking protagonists/anti-heros/funny characters for people to emulate and completely missing the point.

If you cheer the part you're supposed to laugh at/feel sad for, I start to get a picture of what "dangerous" media could mean.

As a counterpoint to shows like the ones you list (where they revel in showing terrible, yet likable, characters doing terrible things), the show "Mythic Quest" flips and shows terrible characters struggling with trying to change within themselves, and how it's a slow, discontinuous process where it's possible to both backslide and recover.

Tony Stark had a strong sense of accountability/guilt though.

In the first movie he commits extrajudicial killings (maybe these are murders, maybe not) and then when leaving the scene almost kills a 'friendly' pilot, while laughing about it all with his buddy.

I'm Civil War he tries to kill the man who murdered his parents, for revenge, not justice.

And when Stark almost killed thr world through Ultron, after being traumatised by near death experience saving NYC, he continued his self righteousness and ran straight for the Sarcovia Accords as a counter balance.

If you look at the Avengers from a realistic perspective then they're a group of anarchistic, unhinged, uncontrollable vigilantes who resist any kind of oversight or procedures to reduce collateral damage.

They possesses supernatural abilities and incredible technologies and use them to... maintain American hegemony and the capitalist status quo. It's almost some Elysium type shit.

Relevant smbc: https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305

> narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

It sounds as if Musk and Twitter are a match made in heaven.

People love a charismatic narcissist though.

Isn’t that a tautology? Everyone likes charisma, don’t they?

No - I mean people often find narcissism charismatic.

Ah, understood. Thanks for the clarification! :)

Previous and the current presidents are far worse evil people. They first destroyed lives with meaningless lockdowns then pumped trillions of dollars which destroyed economy and impoverished people. Musk cannot even come close to these.

I find it fascinating when someone agrees with me about a person (e.g. the previous president being evil) but their list of reasons has none of the items on my long, long list of terrible actions and, instead, has only items from my "at least they did the following" list.

    He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, 
    dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, 
    unhinged.

    I can't believe that so many people still haven't 
    figured him out

Many of their fans love them precisely because of those "negative" qualities.

> don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged

[my bad misunderstood what unhinged means.]

That is not a clinically recognised term.

Some doctors do give that diagnostic.

anymore.

That is quite misleading as it has been. It is part of the ASD in these days [1, 2].

[1]: https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/5855/asperger-syn...

[2]: Mirkovic B, Gérardin P (April 2019). "Asperger's syndrome: What to consider?". L'Encéphale. 45 (2): 169–174. doi:10.1016/j.encep.2018.11.005. PMID 30736970. S2CID 73452546. "Asperger's syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is part of the large family of autism spectrum disorders."

To be fair, it was a distinct diagnosis from autism until relatively recently. It was "absorbed" into autism in DSM 4 or 5.

So if he was diagnosed with Asperger's in the past, he would now be considered to be on the autism spectrum.

It's now considered a autism spectrum disorder, but you could literally have received an "Asperger's Syndrome" diagnosis in the past 10 years.

It IS a "clinically recognized term" in the sense that if you went to a mental health professional and said "I have Asperger's Syndrome" they might say politely "we don't call it that anymore" but it is very unlikely they would rudely say "I don't know what that is, it is not a clinically recognized term."

>He said that he has Aspergers.

People are often looking for explanations for their personalities or interests. Look at how many people claim to be "on the spectrum" on HN underneath any article on the topic.

I've known many people with spectrum disorders. Some were difficult to work with and you make accommodations. A few were assholes.

Universally, the assholes with spectrum disorders used their diagnosis to get away with abusive behaviour and, in two cases, sexual harassment.

Most people go to some lengths to ensure that their health doesn't present in such a way that it needs to be an excuse for their behaviour. Especially in autistic communities. A certain amount of masking seems to be a requirement to function as a responsible adult.

I and lots of my friends have that or equivalent diagnoses. It doesn't make you unhinged.

If you've met one person with Aspbergers, you've met one person with Aspbergers?

What does this even mean? Meeting one person with Asperger's who is not unhinged is sufficient to show that not all people with Asperger's are unhinged.

I wish people would stop excusing bad behavior with "oh they're autistic". It just makes us autistic people look bad by association.

I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

I remember listening to someone describe a conversation they had with him or where he was speaking, and he relayed that Elon was telling them that in his world he can't relate to people because to him its like everyone is a toddler mentally and he has to go down to their level....now, I just fully don't believe that, that sounds like the most contrived "I'm a genius peasants" story imaginable, something out of a movie.

This comes across in his public persona too. Elon's entire vibe is like a 14 year old who thinks they know everything and everyone else is stupid.

I agree but I'm also unsure if he's putting on that persona because his audience has reacted to it in a positive way. Flanderisation, I think they call it?

My mom called it "seeking negative attention"

Flanderisation is a little different -- generally applied to fictional characters, its when a single trait overrides every other aspect of your personality. Ned Flanders on the Simpsons is the inspiration for the term: a character initially created as a foil and mirror for Homer Simpson (kind, calm, and collected where Homer is typically brash, emotional, and chaotic) became a one-note character defined by his faith.

I guess you could kind of apply it to Musk in that he seems to revel in being something of a jerk, but (in the view of someone who's been very skeptical of Musk for a while) it's not an all-consuming thing.

That’s pretty evident with his technobabble. He uses just enough technical buzzwords that impress non-technical folks and acts like he is an expert in every topic he talks about.

Currently being in my x-th, and out of order rewatch, of DS9 I kind of blame Star Trek for that. Technobabble, check. Geniusus saving the day and universe, check. Moral superiority, check. Throw in some Tony Stark vibes and you have it. And social media influencing.

> Technobabble, check. Geniusus saving the day and universe, check. Moral superiority, check.

It's a shame that these are so often the takeaways from a show that is at its core about a group of people with different skillsets and backgrounds working together with mutual trust and respect to further a common goal.

I mentioned that it is my x-th tike watching DS9? I like Star Trek, there simply are some aspects that didn't age too well, or that I see differently now.

As a comparison, back the day I t liked Babylon 5 better. Tried watching it again and just couldn't the way I can always rewatch ST TNG, DS9 or even Voyager.

Apologies, I didn't mean that as a statement about you personally. I more meant to agree that those are aspects of Trek that many latch on to (while missing some of the healthier lessons).

Trek has a lot of those. Dax as a gender fluid character for example. Or Data being an artificial life form. The risk of the Federation becoming military dictatorship.

On the other hand there is the fact that Starfleet is the de-facto military junta, a morally fine one of course. Or moral high horse crap like the prime directive. The overall optimism is good so, and especially DS9 did a good job in showing the ambivalency that comes from ideals meeting real politics. E.g. the arc between Sisko and the Maquis, having Sisko side with, of all people, war criminal Dukat.

All Musk's plastic surgery and hair implants do make him look kinda weird like Odo.

Or he is slowly loosong his ability to keep a form for a lengthy period of time.

It's not that uncommon among people with Asperger-like traits, which Musk has publicly acknowledged in 2021.

Acknowledged or claimed?

Elon would be completely forgiven if his politics were more left-wing than they currently are.

Like Michael Avenatti?

Please cite examples to support this, er, rather extraordinary assertion. Which prominent left-wing figures have acted like Elon Musk and have been "completely forgiven"?

I don’t think they were stating it as in they had examples, they were extrapolating from other left leaning activities like BLM vs Insurrection. Similar aggressive approaches but only insurrection gets attention as bad.

BLM protested police brutality. Jan 6th wanted to stop / prevent a democratic election process. Seems like different things to me.

> Jan 6th wanted to stop / prevent a democratic election process.

And possibly abduct or murder congresspeople (thinking of the guy with clearly visible tie wrap restraints, or the republican that was telling where to find democrat members of congress)

And the violent parts of both were pretty roundly condemned?

These two are not comparable; you're trying to push an indefensible equivalence.

I'm struggling to understand what Elon Musk's crime actually is? Being successful? Having influence on the internet? Not following the narrow railroad tracks of a particular ideology?

I think it would just be different people complaining in that case.

(My impression of his politics is more that they’re anarchic then left/right, but I’m not excited enough by his words to listen beyond the presentations and random support for e.g. UBI).

That’s the thing though, you don’t have to seek attention or power. That’s not an Asperger trait. That’s the thing which really makes it inexcusable.

You can also be rich and relatively unknown, most rich people are. He chooses to be super public.

He uses that attention and focus in ways that benefit the world at large. Like helping build more ethical AI's, or getting people to Mars. There's nothing wrong with that IMHO.

My concern is he losing his focus. I know I get distracted from the work I am supposed to be doing (sometimes my paid job but even more so at home). I really should be finishing some home renovation work but there is that mail box I need to finish, and the 3D printed lid for a mouse trap, and the synthesizer I am thinking of building, oh wait there is an nice branch from the plum tree we trimmed that I could turn into a flute on the lathe...

Elon really needs to focus on the energy and transportation thing that he really is good at.

sorry to pick you up on this, and i’m unable to phrase this in such a way as to not sound inflammatory (again, apologies):

* which ethical AI would that be?

* how many people has elon sent to mars now?

elon has marketed an image to people, one of a tony stark-like figure, that might do or say the wrong thing at the time, but who truly wants to make everything better.

the reality is that, whilst perhaps not a conman (although i find my opinion of him leaning to that end more each day), he’s definitely just another profit-driven business man, with little to no regard of the people around him. and probably a sociopath.

bill gates has done (a lot) more for humanity. and i’m not particularly fond of him, either.

Can you elaborate on Musk being a conman? I don't follow the news these days.

Well there was that incident where he committed securities fraud by saying he's taking Tesla private at a certain amount.

There is something wrong instigating further extreme resource exhaustion to serve boyish Star Trek pipe dreams.

There’s absolutely no guarantee he’s on the right track. Humans expanding away from Earth is as likely as us being able to rewrite the speed of light.

There’s no rewriting the fundamentals of reality. One really bad day and Mars colony is wiped out. How much damage we do here before getting there is a real concern.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people consider some problems here on earth to be hopelessly intractable, but simultaneously consider a livable human colony on Mars to be not only achievable, but also not subject to the same supposedly intractable problems of today.

A Mars colony is merely an engineering problem. The intractable problems on Earth are stuck because millions of dollars don't want them solved.

What is it about Mars that would cause those same problems to collapse into mere engineering problems over there?

There really isn't a comparison between engineers figuring out how to build a sustainable biosphere on Mars, and the problems that we're presumably discussing on Earth, like climate change and pollution, which are political problems inasmuch as billion dollar business models are benefiting from them, and actively fighting your efforts to interfere.

I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.

Please, go on. I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”

This is what I mean. Obsession and success with engineering has titillated people to the point of blind faith. Externalities do not exist in their conceptual void. It’s become akin to unfalsifiable religious belief.

> I like how you try to extricate getting to Mars as it’s own thing despite the industrial effort to do so exacerbating climate problems that are political problems.

If humanity doesn't spend the resources on spreading humanity throughout the universe, then the resources will be spent on disposable plastic toys that fill landfills. It's not as if an edenic utopia is being despoiled for this boondoggle. Our environment isn't in its precarious state because of too much space travel. We're debating over the disposition of a tiny fraction of our dwindling material resources, negligible in the grand scheme.

> I want to hear more about how thermodynamics can be waved away for “just an engineering project.”

If we have a limited period before climate doomsday, then we'd better get cracking on space travel before it's too late.

I don't think being rich is his end goal. His goal is to do great things, to advance humanity (in very specific ways), maybe having a great legacy. Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media. Being rich and unknown isn't a great strategy to achieve his goals.

> Being rich helps him achieve these goals, but so does building hype and being present in the media.

Does it? I know literally nothing about the personality of the Wright brothers. Or Henry Ford. Or Thomas Edison. Their legacy is their inventions. Hype and media coverage are temporary at best. And unfortunately, Musk's hype and media presence tends to show him at his worst. I'm not sure whether Musk fans realize how many non-fans actually despise the guy. If anything, he's wrecking his legacy. Shut up and build stuff.

I mean, Thomas Edison may as well be a 200 year old Elon Musk. Practically all he did was be a hype man.

Ford was pretty similar from my reading.

Both men had early career success and worked harder than most at achieving their goals. But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.

I imagine Elon's legacy (should he be remembered) will not be his twitter shitposting, but electric cars and rocketry.

> But their ongoing successes were very much political and public perception. Ford especially was incredibly politically active and noisy about it.

Nobody remembers Ford's political activism. Apparently he ran for US Senate once and lost. Is there any reason to think that Ford's political activism had anything to do with the success of the Ford Motor Company?

Ford hyping cars is fine and expected. Ford hyping politics doesn't really seem to add anything. In fact, it appears that there were some antisemitic writings associated with Ford, there was a lawsuit and a consumer boycott, and he was forced to apologize.

A common fallacy is to assume that everything a successful person does in life contributes to their success. OJ Simpson was one of the greatest football running backs ever, and he was also a murderer. You might say, "if he wasn't a violent person, then he wouldn't have been a great running back", but somehow Barry Sanders managed not to murder anyone.

Edison and Ford had the small detail that the product they sold became widespread among the population very quickly.

They represented the last effort after standing on the shoulders of giants, basically being the person who got to sign off the quality of life improvement and reap the financial reward. It happens, could have been somebody else but in the end it was them.

mr.Musk has been at the helm of Tesla for 20 years and his product is nor widespread (only 1% of total number of global vehicles sold in FY21) nor revolutionary from a quality of life standpoint (at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc....if anything the Quality Of life gap is towards the other automakers)

> at the end of the day it's a car and you can hardly tell the difference between Tesla EVs and MercedesEQS, iBMW, Toyota EVs etc..

I'll go a step further and I can hardly tell the difference between a Tesla and a used ICE car.

I have not enough karma to make the point above and not risking ending up underwater.

But the hell with it...I can always delete it.

I think people are taking crazy pills, they religiously follow this guy and his delusions about becoming a multiplanetary specie before the Sun becomes a red giant....5 billions years from now.

As they have such thoughts they have to walk through human feces and scenes from the Walking Dead...only with the homeless instead of zombies.

Stuff that would scare them to death if they saw it in a movie or compel them to pity if they happened in the background of a live news reportage from Ukraine.

Instead it's happening under their nose as they wonder if Mars is ambitious enough or we should aim directly for the Andromeda Galaxy.

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

That's like saying a 1930 Ford Model A is not that different from a 1930 Cadillac. That doesn't mean that Ford didn't change the automobile industry in a historic way before 1930.

Where is Tesla's equivalent of the Model T, or Windows 95 or the Wright Brothers biplane, or the Montgolfier brothers hot air baloon?

The paradigm shift that gets to 95% marketshare before getting copied? Nowhere to be seen.

Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.

When people say they are not a car company they are right. They are a cult company. They sell cult. Of the techno-utopian kind.

Yes. Tesla changed the way people feel about Tesla.

Importantly, some of those people were in positions of influence at other auto manufacturers. So Tesla didn't have to capture 95% marketshare to change the industry.

I think that the blinding glamour of a Tesla has faded quite a bit. I think, 20 years on, we expect to see strong competition to them. The lane assist, the adaptive cruise control, the touch screen console... these are a bit boring now. Others have had them for a long time. Some probably had them before Tesla. Hopefully, several competitors will start offering 500 km range EVs. Tesla can still cult that advantage.

But the cult of Tesla scared established players. Everyone has scrambled to adapt since. And the public has been persuaded to keep the pressure on. Tesla represents an historic shift. I don't have to like them or buy them. But I recognize their place in history.

Alternative take, things like the space program; while there are some prominent names in there like Wernher von Braun and Louis Armstrong, the endeavour which changed human history was an endeavour by many people, not just a few individuals with Personalities. Same with other current endeavours like nuclear fusion and the LHC; I can't name any individual person behind those projects. They are a lot more selfless.

Meanwhile, there's great engineers working at both Tesla and SpaceX, but the only person you know is Elon.

Musk's bullshit endangers the valuable things he's doing.

If he wants to make Starship a reality, he needs permits and government contracts.

I met an African-American man about ten years ago who owned an excellent patent portfolio covering technology like this

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6695260

but he was the only black person I've ever met who hated Barack Obama. He was an extreme Republican, thought Democrats all worked for the anti-Christ, etc.

I figured there was no way he'd succeed at what he was trying to do because he'd need to make nice with the government no matter who the administration was. I haven't heard from him again.

I see Musk going down the same road. I can only imagine the last man is dying on Earth 1000 years from now and cursing: "If only Elon Musk didn't have to post that tweet we would have made it to Mars."

There’s absolutely no reason to believe he’s on the right track

No science says “yes rockets and spreading through the stars is definitely the future for humans.”

The odds he’s just exacerbating damaging industrial feedback loops and a worse mess for the future are much higher than successful Mars colonies and extrasolar expansion coming from his efforts

I can't buy this. He very clearly seems to relish public attention for its own sake. Otherwise we'd have to accept that his hyping of random crypto tokens (e.g. DOGE) is somehow indirectly connected to saving the world or advancing humanity.

As with all outputs from any neurodiversity or personality disorder, it's a reason not an excuse

> not that uncommon among people with Asperger-like traits

Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong. Its a spectrum, normally around social interaction, and not understanding, or being able to pick up on the slow of social information.

However for most high functioning people it is possible, with work, to mitigate those "negative" qualities.

It is not an excuse to be a dick. What Elon is doing is a choice. He is perfectly capable of interacting with people enough to have a series of relationships with people without making them feel like shit. I would therefore postulate that whilst he might be on the spectrum, he has worked hard to mitigate it.

What Elon is, is a rich school boy.

> the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong

No, it's actually because you don't think it's wrong in the first place.

I understand why people prefer to lie to protect other's emotions, or why people prefer being high-status rather than being right, but I disagree with that, I think it's wrong.

That's a false dichotomy - there is a whole range of options between 'lying to save someones feelings' and 'being rude'.

My 13 year old child reached this epiphany just this week (ADHD, not Aspergers). They told me "whenever I think about something, I am really interested in it but then I simply stop thinking about it and do something else." They were a little upset because they wanted to continue with those interesting activities. We had a nice long talk about reaching a maturity point where their active thoughts can control their impulses.

Yes, it is more complex than simply "mind over matter", but it's still an important development milestone.

(total tangent but i've had a couple moments like this with my kids. It's amazing to see, i love it)

> If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

Sometimes, you know it’s wrong, at least at some level, but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.

> but are so fucking tired of masking all the time you just do it anyway.

I feel like "masking" is being used for "be polite". I didn't decide to be rude, I decided not to mask my disability.

That is bullshit.

People on the spectrum may have a harder time understanding what is rude, and that may give some passes when you don't realize it. But if you decide to ignore what you've learned is rude, you're just an ass.

"Being polite" is emotional labor, whether or not that labor takes the form of "masking" a disability. While of course we should be respectful of those we engage with, avoidance of emotional labor should always take precedence over shallow notions of politeness that have nothing to do with actual respect for others.

> "Being polite" is emotional labor,

And "going to bathroom and not pissing on the floor" is physical labor. Even more so if you are on crutches.

I completely disagree with your artificial distinction between "being respectful to others" and "politeness". Politeness is defined as being respectful to others

We all benefit from a more polite interaction. To refuse to be polite because it requires effort is just taking advantage of the system without paying it back.

> Lets get one thing straight. If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

This might be a nitpick, I wouldn't describe it as an "understanding" problem. Usually we understand that there are social cues and what they mean (at least in the mild cases). The difference is in the strength of that signal.

It's like as if people have a warning indicator when doing things socially inept. Most folks seem to have a loud klaxon "You are being an ass! Stop that!". With ASD, it's more like a quiet "check engine" light that's easy to overlook.

If you never experience the social pressure to actively look for that indicator light (see exhibit E.), you never really build strong social graces. Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.

> Or, maybe you just don't give a damn about masking, too tired, just not interested.

I strongly feel this is the case with not only Musk, but a lot of high ranking "leaders"; I believe that you need an amount of ruthlessness, of indifference, an ability to turn off your morals to be in that position and get even richer. I mean just look at how he fucks his staff over and expects them to work ridiculous hours, bragging about how much he works (the difference being he gets paid for every second he is alive, while staff only gets paid for contract hours).

> If you are on the spectrum, the reason you act like this is because you don't understand that you are doing something wrong.

completely untrue, nearly all autistic people I know including me are hyper-aware of social situations and specifically act in ways to avoid being a dick. this is a pop-psychology notion of autism.

Yeah, but that's because we spent our childhoods and young adulthoods dealing with the consequences of not understanding what we were doing wrong, and put effort into figuring out what we were doing wrong and fixing it.

Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.

Your last sentence resonates with me. I would add that he might consider different efforts he might make and determine that it wouldn't change the results. He might offend a different 2/3 of the audience and please a different 1/3 of the audience. So why exhaust yourself all the time when the outcome is arguably indistinguishable?

Somebody on the outside might see a big difference in result, say a 50% approval rating vs a 35% approval rating. But from the inside it can all look the same: "everybody hates me anyway" or "most people love me anyway".

> Now, I don't think Musk never faced consequences when he was young, and never learned this stuff, but I do think he faces absolutely no consequences today, and is happy to not put in any effort.

my late step-father would say this person needs an "ass-whoopin"

I don't take anyone that uses the Asperger moniker seriously anymore; the guy was - in all likelihood - an eugenicist who picked out the "good" kind of autistic children and sent the "bad" ones off to get "euthanized"; see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5907291/.

Plus, it's often used as an excuse or a mark of honor; an excuse for unacceptable behaviour, and a mark of honor for being super smart and not like those Other Autists who struggle in their day to day.

The word has been besmirched by its namesake and the behaviour of those using it to distinguish themselves from "other" people with autism.

Musk has publicly said a lot of things that were BS for attention and sympathy

Let’s not act like our air gapped view of him through screens can provide an accurate diagnosis of real medical conditions

Do you know engineers? I’ve had this conversation I can’t count how many times in my life.

I do, I happen to be one, but I've never approached someone who wasn't an engineer like they have the mental capacity of a child (baring literal children). I can't play the cello, but I know music majors who can and they would struggle in Thermo. I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.

> I can't play the cello, but I know music majors who can and they would struggle in Thermo.

You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!

> I don't see how anything but hubris can make someone see differently.

We don't know the context of this conversation with Musk. In "just between us engineers" conversations, there's plenty of hubris to go around. It's not just engineers, of course. Many of the highly educated professionals I know will express demeaning opinions about religious people or rural folks after a few drinks.

To be clear, I don't think being condescending is a virtue. But I don't see any reason to single Musk out for that specifically. I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.

> You can use thermo to build civilization, but you can't use a cello to do that!

Depends on how you define “civilization”!

I definite it in terms of inventing air conditioning: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...

Oh interesting, didn't realize civilization started in 1902.

> I don't see him talking shit about how stupid everyone is, like many people do.

That would Provo be because the attached attic sis related to belong musk not “everybody” and “many people”.

> baring literal children

Baring literal children isn't legal!

Good point but i think good engineers can be this way only in their field.

Yes, I am one and work with engineers. I had these doscussions, almost exclusively with the actually pretty bad engineers.

Indeed, it's hard for someone to be a good engineer unless they have some breadth of mind.

Good engineering is a team effort. Engineers unwilling to listen because of some self-percieved superiority complex are bad at that. And they hardly get any better.

I don't mean to defend snobishness, but it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field. That comes across as arrogant and dismissive to almost everybody because it is. But it doesn't mean you can't work in a team of equals.

Somebody like Anish Giri might be a very good sport and play a (very short) game of chess with me, but I doubt he would expect to learn anything from it. Of course, he probably wouldn't waste his time on me. Either way, he would still be a great asset to help somebody like Ian Nepomniachtchi prepare for a tournament.

Of course, being considerate and welcoming to everybody all the time is super awesome. Those who manage it have my respect whether they are perceived as the best in their field or not.

> it is possible to be in the top 10% of your field and dismiss anybody not in the top 30% of your field

This is how the 10% end up with 5 jobs in 8 years, watching those who they thought were beneath them rise up and take leadership positions because they're too much of a pain in the ass to work with.

It's a particular kind of intelligence. I'm actually in a relationship with somebody who tends to lean this direction. If you know what you're dealing with it's not too burdensome.

What's happening is, you have a person (Elon) of exceptional intelligence, so they can recognize a thing or concept and instantly follow it out to rational conclusions faster than the people around them, but they have not developed their intuitive side and don't respect the empty part, the unknown part, of the problem space.

It's like that halting problem thing: they become so accustomed to being able to see 'the answer' that they get blind to the mystery, the ambiguity of the non-answers and the areas where a real innovation will come from. They're not surprised by anything, or surprisable, so they become a specific kind of intelligent, very very quick and correct.

If you're a designer/inventor/artist type person you rely much more heavily on the non-answer spaces because those are where you work. That's not Elon. He has people for that, and takes the credit for their work, and impresses them so much with his ability to be quick that they go right along with it. In real terms they could not get their stuff done without him as that ringleader, figurehead, the 'Mr. Outside' there to impress the masses and get them to give him their money. It's a symbiotic relationship and Elon has done that over and over.

Don't look to Elon personally to have the revolutionary idea. However, if you show him one, he may well see where it leads way quicker than you do… and take it, and make a business out of it, and then hire you and have you doing it whilst taking a big cut of what you earn from it.

In this way Elon 'gets' capitalism as well and quickly as he gets everything else. He's definitely the man for late stage capitalism.

This is a pretty good observation IMO. I've always wondered why his timelines are so ridiculous. It jives with what you said because maybe he looks at current state and can follow it to the end state but misses the unknowns in-between. The devil is always in the details. But i would expect that of someone relatively new to the job of GettingThingsDone and Musk has been doing this for a long time. I can't get my head around why his timelines are so outside the realm of reality. Any date he gives i just mentally ignore because it's wildly unreliable.

His timelines are of the kond you get from clueless founders overpromising revolutionary products. It works, he gets all the funding he needs.

It feels like Elon Musk read that anecdote about how von Neumann spoke with three year-olds as equals, and somehow managed to conclude that the lesson was about expressions of superiority rather than about expressions of empathy.

The core difference is that von Neumann was a genius and did many, many things single handedly. I feel Musk is a businessman who would take credit for the work done by someone like von Neumann.

well given enough time who knows how history will judge Musk. Take Bill Gates, anyone working in tech in the 90s knows he's about as ruthless as you can possibly be. Now Gates is known as a saint as he tries to buy his way into heaven.

He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in. Take for example photographer and journalist Tim Dodd. Since Tim has a huge passion for rockets and actually wants to dig into the details of rocket engine cycles, manufacturing scale up - all the stuff Elon finds interesting - he really opens up.

That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest. I struggled with it a lot until I learned to be more social with other folks' topics of discussion. I think Elon is the logical endpoint of what happens when you have zero pressure to socially accommodate.

It does seem like he's increasingly emboldened to act an ass since being crowned world's richest man.

I watched those interviews on his Everyday Astronaut YouTube channel.

Musk looked bored with Tim, was often evasive, gave the appearance of wanting to get away from a fanboy.

The few times he would "open up" it was more like a recitation from someone to a disinterested audience — or as though Musk's mind was somewhere else, not really engaged or focused on the interviewer.

EDIT: Skimming the two-part interview again, Musk seems to switch between seemingly being engaged to not. Maybe it is because the interview went on really long and appears to be uncut.

That's charitable. That was a really long interview/behind the scenes. I also interpreted it mostly as being tired (he normally works obscene hours and around this time he was particularly burning both ends).

I think it's telling that he didn't tell Tim to scram or he even got that close of a look at all. If he wanted to get away, he could have easily done so.

The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.

> The disparity is even more obvious in the pressers when reporters ask typical reporter questions, vs when someone (often Tim, but there are others) asks something technical.

Can you even imagine being Musk and running an EV company and a rocket company and having to field questions from your typical journalists? Like that Q from a journalist about why the new image of the black home at the center of our galaxy is so blurry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31353677.

one thing about that interview i've always wondered about. There was a part where Musk was talking about the heat shield and lamenting about progress and then watched some guy bang on a heating tile with their hands for about 10 seconds. After that, he picks up his phone to make a call then the interview cuts to a different scene entirely. I get the feeling that phone call was not a pleasant one and SpaceX asked it be removed from the footage.

Later on when he was giving that update at Starbase he mentioned the heat shield and thanked someone for a "robust" shield. I couldn't quite tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

not trying to make excuses but Musk mentioned at the end he was suffering from pretty bad back pain too. Back pain on your feet really sucks and can destroy a coherent thought.

Having said that, Musk is pretty much the worst communicator i've ever heard at the C suite level. I hope/pray he's better when talking to direct reports trying to get his crazy ass ideas and timelines done. Those poor poor people if he's not...

On the other hand, he says outright stupid things all the time and only if he gets into a topic you know a thing or two about, you realize how wrong he often is.

One thing that almost everybody on HN should be able to judge as completely wrong is his claim about "L5 autonomy very close / later this year" [1].

L5 autonomy is the equivalent of the halting problem. L5 is a goal that can't be achieved [2], just like no program can be written that determines if the input program will ever terminate. [3]

So what to make of this, if this apparently smart guy says entry-level stupid things?

[1]: https://electrek.co/2020/07/09/tesla-tsla-elon-musk-level-5-...

[2]: https://macdailynews.com/2019/01/07/waymo-ceo-level-5-fully-...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

Edit: Because so many replies here about why I compare it to the Halting problem: That comparison is invalid as many of you pointed out. My reasoning was not in a strict mathematical sense, but more like this: even experienced humans can't drive in every condition. There are situations where you just need to stop. L5 autonomy will only work if we create AGI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...), so that the system can observe itself and think about itself. An AGI might be possible (in the far future), whereas the Halting problem is mathematically impossible. Thanks for pointing this out.

I mean, he has a pretty clear financial incentive to say stuff like this given that he runs an auto manufacturer that heavily invests in vehicular automation.

Not saying he's right, but find me a company that doesn't polish their own turds, even just a little bit. Everyone trying to sell something is painting the best picture of their product possible.

There's polishing a turd, then there's calling a pile of shit a chocolate cake.

I really hope this becomes an actual idiom.

Yeah, but even this doesn't seem very thoughtful. He recently acknowledged his predictions around full self-driving were wrong, and said it was because he'd failed to appreciate that it would essentially require artificial general intelligence.

Then he claimed we'd have that solved by 2023.

Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.

> Not sure what the upside is of being known for repeatedly making non-rational predictions and being wrong.

It can significantly move markets in the short term, which he seems to have become adept at doing over the last few years. And unfortunately, the stock market isn't really interested in long-term thinking, it's largely about breaking news and twitter rumors nowadays.

Well, he's definitely mastered market manipulation. I take your point there.

But, the degree of absurdity across predictions undermines even that strategy over time. I think he does himself a disservice here. He should get out of his own way and allow his actual achievements to speak louder than irrational predictions (and other distractions).

I totally agree, and that's the very definition of short-term thinking: doing what's best for today at tomorrow's expense.

L5 autonomy is a absolutely a long way off (if ever practially acheivable) and Elon is a bullshit artist, but I don't understand your comparison to the halting problem. Could you elaborate?

I interperate your comparison to the halting problem to mean that even if we ignore the feasability of a particular solution, it is literally an impossible problem to solve.

My understanding of L5 is driving without external human intervention. In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?

> In one sense we already have the technology to do that - our brians. It would never be feasible (or ethical), but if we could put a human brain inside every tesla, wouldn't that achieve L5?

It would achieve L5 of a sort, but people don't usually mean "L5 autonomy" in the sense of "capable of crashing the vehicle deliberately to protest the horror of their existence".

I think equating to the halting problem is silly, but the ISO levels are a bit of a mess.

* Level 5 is a vehicle that never needs a human to take over and can drive in "all conditions". Humans do not meet this driving standard.

* Level 4 is a vehicle, that within a set of vehicle-defined conditions can drive the vehicle without a human ever having to take over. It refuses to drive unless the conditions are met.

So a level 4 car could be a vehicle that can drive in a 1 block area of residential streets only... or something that can drive in way more conditions than I could safely attempt, but refuses to drive in say, whiteout blizzard conditions at night.

The difficulty of creating L5 autonomy and the provable impossibility of the halting problem are not comparable at all.

There is absolutely nothing fundamental that makes L5 autonomy impossible, while the halting problem is provably impossible, as normally formulated.

I don't know how close or far away L5 autonomy is, but it's definitely theoretically reachable, while the halting problem is always going to be impossible.

Halting problem comparison is silly, but L5 autonomy as defined ("all conditions") is probably not attainable.

A car that would complete all the trips I'm willing to complete, and some more, but refuses under some circumstances (e.g. whiteout blizzard conditions) would be a L4 vehicle under the ISO definition.

When we are actually have cars that sufficiently close to what humans can do in terms of range of condition, I suspect the level 5 definition will be updated to be more like:

Can drive in approximately the same set of conditions as a human (professional driver?), possibly being unwilling to drive in certain (seldom encountered) conditions where most humans would, but offset by being willing to drive in conditions few people would.

Importantly, the car must avoid completely giving up on driving mid trip (as opposed to deciding "too dangerous, turn around and go back at next opportunity"), unless conditions are comparable to those in which a human would give up mid trip (which are pretty limited, as humans seldom just stop and give up on the road unless the car is broken down, or fully stuck. At worst, in some really bad conditions, humans may pull other to wait for the storm/extreme-fog/etc to blow over.)

Or perhaps at that point we won't need the definition anymore. It becomes a bit arbitrary and market-y at that point. Assuming that we don't end up with a single vendor.

"My BMW still drove during the snows in February, but my neighbor's Tesla said it wouldn't drive 2 of the days." "Yah, but mine doesn't insist that the windows are perfectly clean and pristine before starting a trip!"

We probably should never have had level 5, but split L4 into a couple levels: heavily geofenced/restricted vs. relatively unlimited applicability with some restrictions.

Will never be achieved? Only if humanity dies ous quickly. If, literally, even the dumbest people can learn how to drive, I'm sure with enough time we'll be able to replicate that autonomously.

I know what the halting problem is and I had to study why it cannot work.

However, for L5, you just have a quote saying it doesn't work. We know it is mathematically possible for L5 to work because, well, humans perform at that level. We know that our vision, our ears, our hands and senses are enough input to solve the problem.

Do you have a direct connection between them or are you just using it as a metaphor for an unsolvable problem?

I needed a reminder, so I opened a new tab in Chromium and typed in 'the halting problem' and hit return and Chromium immediately crashed :)

Which is not only funny, it's exactly why the halting problem is so hard…

Humans actually don't perform at L5, we perform at a very high level of L4. (Still, the halting problem comparison is silly).

That Waymo CEO quote is about feasibility of fully autonomous driving in snow / rain. Seems unreasonable to even expect that. But I don't think it's as intractable as the halting problem. There's no formal proof against feasibility of L5.

But as far as Musk, yes he lies and isn't shy about it. It's shameless and overt. Perhaps he justifies it as being part of his job.

Hmm... While I don't see any evidence that L5 autonomous driving is near, I don't follow your argument that L5 is equivalent to the halting problem. Can you explain?

I am not convinced that L5 is fundamentally impossible (unless we posit that humans are also not L5 autonomous, which I suppose one could argue, as they are prone to driving errors). Granted I subscribe to Universality, and assume that humans are not capable of hyper-computation.

Elon has changed his tune (somewhat) about automated driving. He said in an interview that he now believes full auto-drive requires AGI.

Personally I think full auto-drive requires us to change to the roads to make them work for machines... but that's a different story.

I heard him say FSD will be fully functional by next year in the ted interview he did a few weeks ago.

I mean, they already ship it, don't they? How do their customers square these statements with what they were sold and can enable with the flick of a button?

Or is this FSD in the sense of "my car can drive itself home after dropping me off" type of thing?

I think he knows intellectually that a lot of his claims and predictions are bogus, but he also knows that his fanboys are all over it. Look at the amount of preorders for cars that - as it turns out - were years away still, if at all (thinking of the new roadster, pick-up truck and big trailer truck at the moment). Look at Tesla's stock which is based entirely on hype and less so on actual product, market share or financial results. Look at how many companies and universities around the world started developing a Hyperloop just because he mentioned it - I don't even know if there was like a grant for it or some other financial incentive.

Intellectually everyone can deduct that a long distance hyperloop is science fiction, ridiculously expensive, complicated, and will likely face long outages at any incident (see the channel tunnel, but like if it was 10-100x as long and a vacuum). But because Musk says it with Confidence, an army of fans jumps onto it.

Unfortunately you are doing the very thing that you accuse Musk of doing. L5 autonomy is not formalized (nor do I think it is able to be formalized) to the extent that would permit a rigorous proof showing it is isomorphic to the halting problem.

Your claim conflates a nebulous, squishy, human goal with a formally and rigorously proven mathematical problem. The only support offered is links to wikipedia and news articles, none of which help connect the two in an equally formal and rigorous fashion.

You make that he's a businessman who also tries to sell his product. We try to judge him as an engineer, but he's much more than that.

he says outright stupid things all the time and only if he gets into a topic you know a thing or two about, you realize how wrong he often is.

Recently he said "complexity and cost of a car is greater than that of a humanoid robot".

Let’s not diagnose him sympathetically without evidence

He’s posting his cold brew pics to Twitter. Caffeine is a psychoactive substance that can foster manic behavior. Lack of sleep can create cognitive stability issues. Been there with both.

Who knows if he’s taken other things here and there as Mr Private Plane bounces around socializing.

Despite Twitter, how much of Elon’s life we don’t see is significant.

He openly admitted to having (deprecated term) Asperger's syndrome on SNL.

> That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest.

Despite people in tech conflating ASD/ADHD and using them as some kind of weird bragging right (and excuse for not considering others), I don't know that there is any public information about his having either condition.

> He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in.

That's just called childish behavior, and despite it's name it is common in a lot of adults, not just Musk.

But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them. That is basically how cults work.

He openly admitted to having (deprecated term) Asperger's syndrome on SNL.

> That's just called childish behavior,

That's pretty judgy, IMHO.

> But most adults who act that way can't get away with it. When it is paired with wealth and a megaphone as it is with Musk and others like him, not only can they get away with it, but it can be amplified by a mass following of people who wish they could get away with it, and live vicariously through them.

True.

> That's pretty judgy, IMHO.

I punch up. Even if he has Aspergers, with his amount of wealth and power he doesn't get to escape my judgement.

> I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

Agreed. Musk has gone full Assange.

At least for Assange, one can say that being holed up for years in an embassy room and now having to face decades in an US prison (or even the death penalty!) isn't going to make anyone feel well.

I would have genuinely laughed out loud if someone said that to my face. My reaction would have been to give him a reality check - "My man, you may know some things, but definitely don't know it all!". Perhaps, also ask him - "Have you considered that some of those people considered talking to you as dealing with a toddler who thinks he knows it all?"

Then he laughs, turns away and talks to somebody else and leaves. He will still feel superior and not waste time.

See for instance https://youtu.be/ye8zcgxWMDc where he only stays as it's a major presse event (the guy buy his side was running for chancellor to succeed Merkel; and yeah the questions were "dumb" but with your questions you won't get a better response)

That'll definitely teach him a lesson, I'm sure it would make him reflect on his behaviour and will make him a changed man.

He's just a Steve Jobs who doesn't know to keep his worst traits hidden from the public eye.

More like tye worst version of Jobs before his firing from Apple. And not just hiding his worst traits, but also unable of keepong them in check.

How has he lost his sauce? He's actually delivering on his two major companies. He's shipping electric cars at an insane growth rate. He's doing what car companies had 100 years to do and still can't get right in the US. All the other electric car companies are basically vaporware VC money pits. He's also delivering on SpaceX. I get it, you don't like his politics or share his sense of humor but don't pretend like he's some unhinged twitter personality.

Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2022 was $18.756B, a 80.54% increase year-over-year.

Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022 was $59.810B, a 74.73% increase year-over-year.

Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020.

Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019.

Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue

> he seems lost in his own sauce

I read this as a polite way of saying he's up his own arse, which seems accurate.

Sure he's arrogant but I wouldn't rank his accomplishments and person hood by tweets. He has an incredible record as an engineering manager and investor and to brush that off is just silly.

I will brush that off, because the character of our leadership matters. It would be a regrettable outcome if our next generation of leaders acts as boorishly as Elon Musk does. We want leaders who inspire others to be the best version of themselves, and that includes treating others with respect and care.

High on his own gas.

> I get it, you don't like his politics or share his sense of humor but don't pretend like he's some unhinged twitter personality.

He called Vernon Unsworth a "pedo guy" in a tweet after he rescued all of those kids in Thailand and criticized Musk's plan to build a small submarine to get them out. That wasn't a joke, it wasn't meant to elicit a humorous response, it was clearly meant to defame someone. Notice that accusing folks of pedophilia has become a pretty common tactic for the right nowadays.

Calling someone a pedo seems pretty unhinged for a billionaire responsible for running major companies, it honestly surprised me how Musk would spend his public energy saying that kind of stuff, and especially when you consider the power dynamics involved, it's hard to interpret his actions as anything other than driven by insecurity. But I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

It's slang. Maybe not tasteful or obscure but it is just an insult. You ever have someone attack you and call them a name? It's pretty human. Someone's life isn't defined by an insult he used years ago. You need to get over it...

https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-pedo-guy-really-...

No. A person in Musk’s position should know better than to behave this way, and perhaps to even bounce drafts of his communications off a trusted confidant for feedback before hitting “send.” Heck, I do this myself a couple times a month, and I’m nowhere near his level of power and influence. It’s not like he can’t afford an army of comms people.

You know, it's funny to me how often the "just kidding, it's slang" argument gets used. You'd think someone as smart and talented as Musk would've figured somewhere along the way to actually say what they mean. Which strangely enough, he seems to do just fine most of the time. But you're right, it's all my fault and I should really get over it and be more empathetic towards the billionaires that can't seem to communicate clearly.

When you have tens of millions of Twitter followers and are an international celebrity, it's reasonable expect a modicum of care when making public statements about a private individual. I don't really care how that phrase would be interpreted at a private school in South Africa in the 1980s. What matters is how it can reasonably be expected to be interpreted by the millions upon millions of people who heard it as a result of Musk using it.

It doesn't really matter if this was intentional malice or reckless negligence. It was wildly, wildly unacceptable either way.

> You ever have someone attack you and call them a name?

No, I'm a mature adult. Sure, I'll disagree with someone. Hell, I'll even say things like, "that was a bigoted statement", but I will never make up an insult to avenge an attack. I work every day to prevent that behaviour in my kids. I'm not going to replicate it in my life.

It's also not up to you to decide when someone "needs to get over it."

Slang?! What is it slang for, pray tell?

Why are you springing to the defense of the richest person in the world? Are you hoping to get in his good graces or... something?

He didn’t just call him a pedo guy. Elon also emailed a bunch of journalists to make serious (and untrue) accusations that the guy was a “child rapist.”

My thoughts on this are that extremely smart, hard-charging people with heavy narcissistic traits are "constrained" in their earlier years by:

1. They still need to follow the basic rules of society, i.e. people haven't started "God-Emperor Elon" memes yet, so not every single person is going to bow down.

2. Before they've achieved amazing success, they aren't 100% confident in their other-wordly abilities. Now, given his success with PayPal, Tesla, and Space-X, it's easy for him to believe his own press.

Thus, Elon is now at the point where all of his negative traits are essentially allowed to "run wild" because they are constrained neither by society at large, nor his own doubts.

I still respect him, probably more every year.

I never liked him before and probably won't in the future. I doubt I'd like anybody who's literally dragging humanity into the future, but he is doing that.

Whether he's doing it right, or whether he's doing it well is an open question, but no other single person is to this degree shoving humanity forward this often and this much, as far as I know.

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

There are other similarities - impulsiveness in business, Twitter obsession, strong COVID downplaying...

Isn't the deal on hold because the price might be too high for a bunch of spam accounts? If so, I'm not sure what you're on about.

Sounds reasonable to confirm the actual number of spam accounts before spending 44 billion. Likewise I double check the service history of used cars too.

Do you think it is reasonable to do your due diligence after you made an offer?

How do you know what due diligence was done and what new information might have come up? If the company misrepresented its users to Musk during negotiations that wouldn't be very reasonable.

I obviously don't know the details, but knowing the number of actual users on Twitter is probably the most important factor to base an offer on? He's not exactly new on Twitter, so if Twitter claims 5% bots he just accepts that? I find that extremely unlikely, unless he had another motive.

>How do you know what due diligence was done and what new information might have come up?

Based on the "Funding secured" or "Pedo guy" nonsense revealed in court documents, I have a pretty good idea how much due diligence was done prior to the offer: zero.

This would be more akin to the inspection period when buying a house.

The threat of the deal blowing up with so much on the line is what holds Twitter’s feet to the fire.

I've been involved in a couple of due diligence processes that were part of the conditions of the formal offer.

You don't open your books to a competitor or in a hostile takeover situation.

that's how it works in the bussiness world. you first make an offer, and then it enters the due diligence phase when information is shared and these matters are investigated.

Isn't that something he should've done before making an offer? It's not like he just discovered that bots are a thing.

You think Twitter would be that open to let someone dig that deep into their IP before a purchase?

It was pretty much a hostile take over ... quite sure they didn't let him come in and "kick the tires" on their user data.

then...maybe he shouldn't have made the offer?

This happens all the time. Literally. Sometimes you can kick the tires if you have a letter of intent, sometimes the offer is conditional on passing a due diligence.

No, you make closing contingent on certain parameters. Twitter execs aren't going to drop their panties for inspection unless there's a good chance the deal might close.

Yes. Like when you make an offer on a house but then your inspector finds a crack in the ceiling and you back out because the bank promised you 3.5% with no points and nothing down but when the paperwork is done you’ve got a 6% interest rate with $10,000 in fees, property tax assessment tripled, your parents who were going to help out suddenly don’t want to gift you $75,000 for the down payment, there was a murder 2 blocks away and the housing market just collapsed so paying 100% over the asking price (which was already twice what it’s worth) doesn’t sound a good idea.

In other words, have you seen what tech stocks have done in the last week?

Elon doesn’t have the money to buy Twitter, and his lenders are getting nervous that it’s a bad investment for a juvenile prank.

As Benedict Evans said, Elon breaks our mental model of productive people because he is a bullshitter who delivers.

Delivers? Hardly. Autonomous driving? Hyperloop? The tunnel thing?

Cheap space launches, fast satellite internet and arguably the car company that made EVs a commodity. He also invested a lot of money in the things you mentioned and, as far as I'm aware, none of those is canceled.

He promises a lot, but to say he didn't also achieve a lot would be lying.

I agree woth Tesla, it accelerated the EV market by a couple of years. Without a model considerably cheaper than 30k USD so Tesla is far from being a commodity.

Not sure how much cheaper SpaceX launches are for comparable payloads and orbits. I'd suspect they are, with e.g. Ariane developed for other thongs than LEO launches. As SpaceX isn't public wr don't have any reliable numbers. Based on some old leaked material, it is less than sure whether or not SpaceX is coonsiderably cheaper than the competition. Regardless, SpaceX is impressive.

If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.

> Not sure how much cheaper SpaceX launches are for comparable payloads and orbits. I'd suspect they are, with e.g. Ariane developed for other thongs than LEO launches.

The direct competitor to SpaceX is the Space Launch System [0], with a cost of over two billion per launch. SpaceX charges below 100M$ [1] (and has cheaper options available [2]) and you can actually buy it right now (EDIT: although it's true that Ariane is in the same ballpark).

> If Starlink is actually sustainable and profitable has to be seen, it could as well just be a way to push SpaceX profitabiliy further down the road through a Starlink IPO. Now way to tell either way.

Whether a business can survive in the long term is never 100%. Still, you, as an average consumer, can order a satellite dish and get fast and mostly reliable internet for a reasonable-ish price right now. I'd say that checks as delivered.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

[1] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf

[2] https://www.spacex.com/rideshare/

https://www.seradata.com/arianespace-lowers-ariane-5-launch-...

You forgot Ariane Space. And the 100 million ballpark numbet is for Ariane 5, a rocket initially developed for a European shuttle program and not commercial, cheap satelite launches.

Edit: Starlonk is cheaper than alternative satelite provoders. Whether or not this is selling dollars for cents is the question, one that cannot be answered by Starlonk's existence itself.

SLS is a new rocket and you are comparing its development cost to the launch cost of a SpaceX rocket without its R&D cost.

Ariane V, delta, and soyuz launches are all cheaper per kilogram than SpaceX.

> SLS is a new rocket and you are comparing its development cost to the launch cost of a SpaceX rocket without its R&D cost.

Look on Wikipedia, the sideboard quotes cost per launch as:

> Over US$2 billion excluding development (estimate)

I'm not aware of the pricing of Soyuz and Ariane V, though.

>> I'm not aware of the pricing of Soyuz and Ariane V, though.

Both of which are much more SpaceX alternatives than SLS.

You're "not sure" how much cheaper SpaceX launches are because you clearly and obviously didn't take 10 seconds to research before running your mouth. That info is readily available.

You're also understating Tesla's significance. No surprise, I guess.

Ariane 5 launches are getting close enough to SpaceX in some markets, and Ariane Space is much more open about actual numbers and finacials. Agreed so, these figures are readily available.

SpaceX isn't that much cheaper than Ariane. Satellite internet existed before Starlink. Electric cars existed before Tesla (of course) and many manufacturers offer more affordable EVs.

But it is cheaper?

He delivers a lot of announcements for future projects.

You can buy a Tesla, a Starlink connection, or a launch of your satellite on Falcon 9 if you need it and have enough money. These are real, existing, widely used products.

And you could buy a luxury car before Tesla, and you can choose your lixury EV from all konds of brands now. Satelite internet existed before, ground based fibre usually is the better solution in most cases, there is a reason satelite communication is expensive when done by everyone else. And the Russians, Ariane,... happily sold launches to anyone before SpaceX.

True, true, true, and yet not the entire story, because if all the previous products were better than those ones, those would have failed. There is a lot of automotive or space companies that have gone bankrupt and no one even remembers them anymore.

Innovation does not mean only "coming up with something never yet seen". This is rare. Innovation also means making things more streamlined, efficient, more widely available, more capable.

Starlink is a huge boon in places like Mariupol right now. Its capability matters, even though a random person from London can get cheaper service by fibre.

You can also for many years now preorder Cybertruck and Roadster which are just around the corner or pay $12k to turn your car into a robotaxi very soon I swear. How many years have they been about to use dojo? There's also just plain embarrassing stuff like Boring Company and that half thought out robot idea that he announced before they'd even started looking into it. He does have a few hits but I feel like recently he's just throwing stuff out there with no follow through at all just to keep up his image

This is actually a good argument, much better than the visceral hate shown in some other comments.

I don't get the irrational hate or the irrational love. He's a flawed, perhaps deeply flawed, billionaire who has been involved in some cool things, some not so cool but profitable things and some flops.

Oh, come on. Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX.

I mean, I don't think he's Tony Stark either, but stop cherry picking.

That's the point though. He is very far from perfect and has as much of a record for highly ambitious projects failing altogether as he does for them succeeding. On the positive side, his ratio of successes to failures probably beats out most people, and his failures probably haven't done too much societal harm (especially compared to the good done by his successes).

But it's still not a good idea to treat any of his announcements or ideas as anything near a sure thing. His bullshitting still has a fairly high chance of turning out as bullshit.

But this could be said of any successful person:

"Steve Jobs delivers? Ha! The Lisa, Apple III, Pixar Computer, Next Computer. Checkmate!"

Unpredictable rewards create obsession, it all tracks. He’d probably be less popular if he actually delivered 100%

More background if you’ve not come across intermittent reinforcement

https://www.nirandfar.com/want-to-hook-your-users-drive-them...

As of today, some Ukrainians are alive (and some Russians dead) because of Starlink. Not a small feat, to substantially influence the progress of a major war between European powers. Few businesses aside from manufacturers of weapons can claim something like that.

I'm not immediately clear why the guy shouldn't have personal moonshot projects, pursued alongside more conventionally realistic ideas?

He delivers very little of what he promises.

Most of his ideas aren't even something anyone should deliver. Hyperloop and Boring Company are terrible ideas.

Meanwhile everything else is over-promise/under-deliver.

If I measured by the standards I have for myself, then I would agree he overpromises and underdelivers.

Compared to the marketing bluster I see from the old aerospace companies and greenwashing from older car companies, however, he’s a spectacular breath of fresh air with his honesty, openness, and willingness to say things have a less than 100% chance of success.

And I say that despite agreeing with you about Hyperloop and TBC.

While you've described his behaviour quite accurately, I don't believe he's a fool. This could of course be due to the marketing buzz and fanboyism around him which I might have imbibed myself but I don't believe he's a fool.

Squaring his public behaviour with his presumed intelligence suggests that he's doing all this for some specific purpose. Either it's marketing to a certain contingent that he's interested in selling to. Perhaps it's brand building to help hiring or something else for one of his companies. His movie cameos, shitposts etc. all seem to be calculated to create a connection between him and a younger demographic. Or maybe, I'm over intellectualising and he's just drunk on his own image or power. Can't really say.

I don't particularly "like" the guy. But then again, I make it a point to try not to have an emotional opinion about any public figure. The default position is "ignore" and that's where I'm still at.

Some years ago a friend suggested someone should make a browser extension that replaces the text of every Elon Musk tweet with “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!” and I made a quick MVP: https://gist.github.com/cyco130/d96f678d41fd7acfe4ac6c4e01d2...

Edit: Alas, it doesn't work anymore. Updates are welcome. Edit2: Updated!

I have the distinct feeling that Elon's motives are genuine, that he genuinely believes he is on a mission to save humanity, and is genuinely convinced that he is the only one who is able to do it. The problem is the last point - he's developed something of a saviour complex, and has convinced himself that if what is at stake is important enough (reverse climate change, become interplanetary species, restore free speech) he somehow has a moral obligation to take it upon himself. Whereas earlier in his career financial constraints might have hemmed him in, not that he's the richest man in the world he's becoming tempted to use that power in an Emperor of the Universe fashion, attempting to fix everything he believes important. If he stuck to solving just one existential problem, such as electrifying transport, he'd probably be quite well respected in the long run. The richest man in the world, who already holds massive power, also buying up the "de facto town square" was never going to go down well. We need more people with Elon's vision, drive and determination, not one Elon with more and more power.

I agree with you on this and think his savior complex is likely compounded by things like the potential Twitter buyout. There are a lot of people who view Twitter as a extremist echo chamber and want to see it change, so they're treating Musk like Twitter's savior now. Anecdotally, I've seen as much support for Musk's actions accidentally destroying Twitter as 'fixing' it.

When I see how small of a subset of the population actively use Twitter, or have even posted once, compared to the political power it has, it's hard for me to argue we're better with it around.

The outsized influence of twitter largely has to do with the fact that basically every journalist, celebrity, politician, brand, influencer (original, pre-Instagram meaning of person on youtube/twitch/whatever who can accidentally/deliberately create trends just by wearing something or offhandedly mentioning something).

Having all of those people, plus pretty small proportion of "regular people", can make it really feel like everyone is on twitter. But the many of the heaviest "regular people" users are often actually those who are trying to promote some agenda, which can be one that is very not-representative of the public at large.

But this feeling of everyone being on there, means that if a small group of vocal participants who have an agenda can get something trending, especially if they can do with with only limited pushback from other groups, it makes it feel like something everyone cares about. Worse is that the algorithm tends to promote extreme views a lot because they get more interactions.

Now the influencers, politicians, celebrities, journalists, etc are not very much not immune to mistaking an artificially algorithmically inflated hot take by a tiny but vocal minority on twitter as representing a consensus of a huge group of regular people on twitter. The next thing you know, the current twitter outrage is on the news, and your favorite celebs are probably talking about it both on and off twitter.

This can cause people who never would have seen or interacted with the twitter controversy to become involved. Obviously if the news is talking about it, this is a big thing that a very sizable chink of the population is feeling, right? It could not possibly be not something initially stirred up by at most few hundred extremists of some form on Twitter, right? Wrong.

This makes much more sense than calling him a fraud and projecting one's envy onto him. Frauds don't build and they don't solve problems.

His fans are supporting the savior complex because he's virtually the only one who is actively making a better future in a significant way. While everything else is crumbling. They forgive the mistakes he makes given that context.

The highest upvoted comments in this thread are just that: jealous people who cannot believe they aren't successful but he is.

Success is measured by subtraction.

If Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, TheBoringScam etc. disappeared overnight, consumers quality of life would not be affected one bit. It's very similar to Ferrari or Tiffany&CO going under..it's meh. Contrast that with Exxon, Saudi Aramco, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Walmart, Costco, VW, Daimler...

There are unknown private companies such as Vitol selling 300bn dollars worth of products per year. Do you know Vitol? No? Well why would you...the CEO isn't constantly shitposting on twitter.

Musk is like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden etc. What you call success is what people who don't fall for cult of personality call "being a BS-seller". Convincing fans and supporters that they are some sort of hero against dark forces

You dislike someone who built multiple pioneering tech companies because of mean tweets and a vague resemblance to Trump’s demeanor? Being a bit of a blow hard isn’t exactly unusual among CEOs of multibillion companies! Does anyone remember Steve Jobs?

Heck, narcissism is currency in Silicon Valley. I don’t know what else I’d call the whole “we’re changing the world through Ad Tech” shtick.

He doesn't just write mean tweets. He broadcasts to an audience of 90 million people that a cave diver who was critical of him (correctly so, as it turned out) is a pedophile. He attempts to get a lawyer fired from a firm working with his companies because she happened to work at SEC on enforcement cases related to his companies. None of this is news to you, which is why I'm wondering why you would be so glib.

I think the word that might fit better than unhinged is 'capricious' - given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour.

The overall sentiment on HN is pretty clear from the replies here. And I agree with a lot of it, he seems to do and say a lot of things impulsively without thinking them through, that often tend to be dumb.

The one thing I respect though (and expect most people here won't) is that he appears to have the "nouveau riche" disrespect for the establishment, and doesn't feel he needs to kiss anyone's ass or play by the rules in a system that is already rigged for rich people. The fact that he has annoyed so many, especially elite/establishment figures, is a good thing. I'd much rather see him use his wealth to piss off the establishment than just to grow richer safely, which he could easily do. So maybe his annoying behavior is at least partially by design, and the fact that it bothers everyone is exactly what he wants, which I think deserves some respect.

What anti-establishment stuff has he done? All of the negative things I see people mention about him are just general asshole behaviour rather than things that annoy the establishment.

He's supporting free speech, while the establishment supports censoring the population.

Censorship is the tool of the establishment. Free speech gives power to the people. That's as anti-establishment as it gets.

Is he really though? You say this as if the twitter acquisition is over and done, and Free Speech has been saved by Musk doing......what exactly? So far we have so few details about what his plans for the platform are (or if he even has any) that everyone is free to project their own ideal outcome onto his actions. Let's wait a bit and see what happens before declaring him the savior of free speech.

He has multiple examples of using censorship himself to protect his companies. He denied a reviewer access to their vehicle, has stifled the speech of former employees of his companies, and has tried to silence a dissenter publishing publicly available data of his plane. You've fallen for the hype; Elon merely dresses himself in the flag of a free speech absolutist. He is exactly like the establishment in this regard: speech for me, but not for thee.

He has never advocated for removing speech from the public square or removing your right to hear speech. He didn't tell twitter to remove any account. He offered someone money (ie a private arrangement) to take it down and changed his mind. That's very different from forcibly revoking it and imposing censorship on the population.

You've fallen for a warped definition of free speech and censorship that is endlessly regurgitated by NPCs.

A world where Twitter is controlled by a self-interested Musk, while Facebook is basically aligned with the US political establishment, enables better dissemination of ideas than a world where Twitter and Facebook are both aligned with the establishment. Because Musk has notably different biases than the establishment, and either platform is sufficient for the purpose of giving nationally-relevant ideas adequate distribution.

(For this reason, in a world where Musk already controlled Twitter, I would oppose anything that increased his leverage w.r.t. Facebook, because yes, you're correct that Musk's biases are not harmless.)

This is exactly what people said that they liked about trump. Essentially he isn't polished and says stupid things, "just like regular people!"

Is this the new trend? Whenever a wealthy person turns out to be stupid, a certain group of people say "he's sticking it to the establishment"?

> Is this the new trend?

Just a recent wave of populists?

Attacking the government also gets you tons of attention and adoration since it's such an easy target. It's like making an airline food joke in the 90s.

I have similar feelings as you do about Elon, and take anything he says with a grain of salt. But, he’s in some (not all!) aspects the world’s most successful company leader, and he got there with exactly this behavior. Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

Musk is the best, or at least among the best, marketers currently alive. That's it. Let's not make more out of this than it is.

I agree, and Elon seems to know - he closed Tesla's PR department a while back to (re)gain full message control.

That's a pretty big deal though, since businesses usually run on marketing, and not on raw engineering prowess. Without great marketing, you can't even attract great engineers.

Some people argue that the Nazis were as successful as they were due to propaganda (my final thesis at school was about Goebbels) - a sibling of marketing. Marketing rules the world.

>> Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

Trump was the first president since the 80’s/early 90’s not to get a second term. Acting like an asshole only gets you so far maybe until people grow tired of it.

Bring an a*hole got T his first term, being an idiot lost him his second. And, I'd argue, all the terms until his death after the second one.

Putin is another example. Being a ruthless, smart sociopath got him all his power, being an idiot once lost him almost everything.

What has Putin lost?

His influence on Western politics? A big chunk of the Russian economy? Finnland joining NATO? His ability to divide NATO countries? That list is quite long.

I’m not sure he had any of those to lose (nor that, eg, Finland joining NATO is assured) — except the economy one, where the ruble is faring better than the dollar.

The ruble currently trades stronger against the US dollar than September 2021.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RUB=X/

The situation is still in progress, but if Russia can get out of this mess with just loss of Donbass, Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet, they would have to gratulate themselves for unexpected salvation. That would be akin to the Russo-Japanese war, where their diplomats were able pull off a much more reasonable peace than one would expect from the actual war result.

The worst case scenario is a civil war like the one that followed their military collapse in WWI. Only with nukes in the mix. Yuck.

What makes you think that is the likely outcome?

The attrition of Russian military equipment is very high and they are in no position to replenish it fast enough.

At the same time, the Ukrainians are receiving enormous amounts of high tech equipment from a coalition of states that, taken together, is about 30 times as rich as Russia and much more technologically capable.

The Russians already had to abandon their Kiev push and now are retreating from the Kharkiv region, unable to take a city located mere 25 miles from their own border and next to the major Russian military hub of Belgorod.

Three or four months of further attrition warfare like that and they will have nothing left to deploy into battle.

And you aren’t concerned about Ukrainian troop losses or equipment losses?

Nor the unrest in the US about spending $50B+ in foreign aid while (literally) letting US babies starve?

Nor the inflation and supply shortages caused by lack of Ukrainian and Russia supplies to the West/abroad?

Nor our allies turning against us — eg, Saudi Arabia and Mexico challenging US foreign policy or the massive decrease in support between votes in the UN?

And you believe that Ukraine and it’s backers can sustain another 3-4 months of this combat? — and then muster the forces to expel Russia from Donbas and Crimea?

The Ukrainians will definitely take some losses, but nations defending themselves from an attack have higher motivation to bear them. Plus, the worst danger for Ukraine - indiscriminate shelling of cities such as Kyiv and Kharkhiv, where a lot of civilians live - has receded with the failure of both Russian offensives. Russia does not have enough missiles to turn entire metropolitan areas into rubble, and conventional artillery can only shoot so far.

Americans usually do not riot over money spent on the armed forces, otherwise the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns would have led to a country collapse back home - both were an order of magnitude more expensive. I would even say that Americans are, of all the Western nations, the most complacent about high military spending.

Inflation and supply shortages are a real thing, yes. Definitely worrisome. But if Russia can be knocked down from their imperial madness for some decades, I'll buy it. Things look a lot different from behind the former Iron Curtain, where I am from; being under Russian yoke for decades will make you say "Never Again". Of all the tyrannies of Central Europe, only the Nazis were worse than the rule of the Kremlin.

I do not particularly care about Saudi Arabia (IMHO it is not our ally, but a major source of terrorism and extremism, exporting Wahhabist and Salafist ideology by the truckload) nor Mexico. (What reason would Mexico even have to join any pro-Russian coalition?) UN is generally a corrupt sham where the most useless diplomats and politicians of the world are disposed of.

Yes, I think that both Ukraine and its backers are by now invested enough that they will persist until they break the capability of Russia to engage in war. European land wars are like that and always have been. Americans may view things differently, because their wars are usually fought abroad. For Europe, war is an unpleasant, but historically familiar phenomenon, and countries generally only surrender if they really cannot fight anymore.

Which is the state I expect Russia to reach sooner. Their logistics are abysmal, their industry isn't in a state to support such attrition, and there isn't a single industrially developed country on Earth willing to throw material support behind them. They can get Eritrea to vote with them in the UN, but Eritrea won't supply them with tanks and planes.

And the only major power that was their hope, China, does not look willing to shackle itself to the corpse of a dying empire.

Huh, I see many of those points as the opposite.

I guess we’ll have to see in a few months.

I appreciate the detailed answers!

No, he didn't "get there" with this behavior. Elon's unstable erratic mini-Trump phase is relatively recent. Tesla and SpaceX were well-established on their current paths well before then.

He seems to know his limits in the public. He throws low blows to US politicians, but if he has nothing but good to say about China or Xi Jinping he stays silent. He likes to punch down. That's a behavior Twitter and his supporters rewards. He is the second most effective Twitter user after Trump. It's indecent and disgusting behavior but it works.

His business process is to try many things and fail a lot, nothing wrong with that as long as some of them succeed. He jumps into very hard challenges, then fails or iterates until there is success. His full automation of of Tesla factories with robots attempt cost Tesla several years, but Tesla is still success.

His marketing is full of bullshit. He he has at least 4 vaporware announcements for each real product. For example, that dancing robot man and self-driving cars “Next Year” every year since 2014.

Do you realize that the Russians are literally threatening him openly because of the Ukrainian Starlink operation? The Kremlin mob has a lot of assassinations behind it, so their threat is absolutely credible, not a random brain fart on the Internet.

>The Kremlin mob has a lot of assassinations behind it,

Only against former Russians or Russians. Russia throws lots of empty threats, but has not threatened Musk personally.

Angering Xi and China can affect his business, so he shuts up like a good boy.

Yeah, the supposed free speech absolutist, cowtowing to Communists. Who Elon doesn't talk about is more interesting than the punching down he always does.

I mostly agree with you. Just to play devil's advocate though, I wonder if this is just an artifact of him being overly open / verbose. In other words, I suspect that all this stuff would normally happen behind closed doors anyway during due diligence. Similarly if you look at his performance in Tesla / SpaceX is terms of hard metrics I guess he's doing pretty well even though he might be talking about self driving being a year away all the time.

It would sure be ironic if he followed the genius-to-madman trajectory of Nikola Tesla.

Influencer attention seeking has broken people brains. The troll is fed, and for some there is an infinite loop of getting attention from certain acts leading to more extreme acts.

Its just a prank bro.

I have no evidence but was thinking about his work schedule, which by his own omission is insane, and he is running multiple companies. Along with his outspoken nature and need to insult people publicly makes me wonder if he is using some amphetamine or similar. Erratic behavior seems to be a side effect that comes with all that energy. Again, no evidence just throwing it out there

Best nickname I heard for him was "Phoney Stark".

We want to believe in the cool, if a bit unhinged, hero-engineer that builds all the cool stuff we were promised in all the sci-fi movies as kids but failed to materialize, such as Mars colonies and self-driving cars. A lot of that failure is due to some things being a ton harder in reality than fiction, but a lot is also due to a managerialist, short-term culture that no longer seems to be thinking big and taking risks. Musk is the avatar for those who want these cool things and kicks back against the prevailing culture - a real-life counterpart to the billionaire genius in the Marvel movies.

The problem is, of course, that Tony Stark is a fictional character and Musk is not. Not only has he been drinking his own kool aid of late, but he's not much of a hero either, rather a spoiled bully who punches down.

The dude built a rocket company, an automotive juggernaut, a brain implant research company, and a few other things. I wouldn't call these "phoney".

The dude did not, in fact, build those things. The dude was present for them in some capacity.

And Tesla is hardly a juggernaut, their cars have horrible build quality (speaking as someone who owns a Tesla) and are likely to face stiff competition in the next five years from companies that know how to actually build cars.

Tesla's market share is approximately 14%. They are impressive, innovative and might have a bright future but they aren't at the juggernaut stage yet. Their huge market cap and cultural share is because of their dominance in a small, previously ignored subset of the market that is expected to grow.

It amazes me how easily you cast aspersions onto someone you don't even know. To go so far to accuse someone who leads massive innovations and organizations and still has enough time to share his thoughts on Twitter as someone who's "disorderly".

What would we say of you, if your life were so public?

The main thing that soured my opinion is that he supported Bitcoin and other crypto. The environmental damage from crypto is larger than the environmental savings for all electric cars. Elon Musk went from being one of the best things to happen to the planet to someone doing less than nothing for it.

Same here, for me I started to lose interest for him when he started to sell the boring company as a solution to traffic jams.

The solution already exists and it's called "public transport".

I suspect this might be due to being surrounded by people who are too impressed by him to called out an idea when it's not sound.

Then the memes, then the crypto tokens, then it just got all weird so I stopped listening.

unhinged is absolutely the right word to describe him. Not just in terms of acting up, but also in terms of testing the boundaries of lawful behavior. A kind of behavior that can only be explained by the assumption that he thinks he is above the law (probably because he has a large number of fanboys and money). This is also similar to the behavior of the US politician that you are alluding to.

Funny how many smear articles against him are going on. Because he wants to stop online censorship of conservatives.

How many here would do what they consider right knowing they will be vilified for it.

>Funny how many smear articles against him are going on.

He was The Left's darling, now he's The Right's darling.

Personally, I think he made a mistake. I feel like Elon wants to be liked, but the celebrity/media left are now going to have their go at him.

I can't vouch for everyone supposedly writing smear articles/commenting on Musk but my own problem is that there is a public cost to his antics like "Going private" , "just bought 9% of TWTR" , "won't buy TWTR" etc. There's a reason SEC has rules around these. If Musk had done it once, you could call it eccentric or just plain stupid. If there's a pattern to it, perhaps his intentions aren't really to save the world or even noble. I'd trust someone who is openly greedy than someone who claims to do virtuous things while doing shady things.

Unhinged? It is possible, that Musk didn't expect the twitter deal to become as politicised, as it did. Maybe he just got afraid of getting into the center of politics in the US. For example the state is a major customer, and they could just stop buying launch services from SpaceX for example, as the president might not agree with the politics of Mr Musk.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDe7OGpPodM

After this war, Musk is probably in no danger of losing federal contracts just because of his free speech politics.

The Russians knocked out the entire Ukrainian SATCOM infrastructure at the start of the war, plus quite a few stations elsewhere in Europe; AFAIK none of them went online again. Electronic warfare at its finest. Once this happened, Starlink was used as a drop-in substitute and defeated all Russian attempts to knock it out too. The Ukrainians coordinate their artillery, drones etc. over Starlink and the Russians can ... gnash their teeth.

This is an impressive capability and it gives the U.S. a huge advantage in any potential future military conflict with a near-peer power. Advantages like that aren't discarded just because of random culture war flare-ups.

Interesting perspective. Actually the US government payed for the service:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...

They did, which actually indicates that they find value in it already in its embryonal phase. (The necessary satellite constellation is far from complete right now.)

He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

When there is distance he'll be able to be viewed with a dispassionate lens. Historians and future generations will put the mistakes in their proper context as they benefit from sustainable transport, reusable rocket ships and free speech in the public square.

> He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

Going to call bullshit on that one, because it's an easy way to discount all the downright shitty crap he's done.

I think it is amazing what Musk has accomplished, and if you look throughout history most hard-charging folks that get shit done tend to have a ton of narcissistic traits and are not really folks you'd want to be friends with. Both Newton and Edison were legendary assholes. Many of "... The Great" leaders throughout history achieved their "greatness" by mass murder.

So it's not incongruous at all to call out Elon for being a giant narcissistic, lying dickhead, and to also be in awe of his accomplishments.

It all makes sense if you assume he’s a dumb guy who got rich by accident.

Isn’t trying to reprice a shrewd move at this point? The market has taken a huge hit since he made his move and the options for Twitter haven’t exactly improved.

I absolutely agree. He will save himself $5-15 billion depending on the new offer price, a total no brainer. A big short selling hedge fund came out 4 days ago and laid this exact scenario out on the table https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

No. A shrewd move would have been to not do a fumbling hostile takeover. Everyone knows that tech stocks traditionally take a hit when the fed raises rates. He could have done this in a slower and more traditional way instead of attempting the largest leveraged buyout in history on a whim.

Now he has to work with a ton of contractual and legal issues, up to and including twitter being able to force him to go through with the deal, unless he can find clear evidence of fraud in their user numbers.

Couldn't agree more. I think "unhinged" is the perfect descriptor. I like a lot of what he proposes and how he thinks (when he's not attention seeking), but I absolutely cannot stand the pathetic meme crap and shit-posting he does. Sadly, he also reminds me of the failed coup guy, but I honestly think he might be more dangerous. Because not only is he desperate for attention, he's also pretty clever. That's a bad combination and I fear old age Elon is going to be even more trouble...

Same. It was the saga of the media talking about poor working conditions and safety at Tesla, then his response by making an anti-media media site, then the fallout from that, then his decision to use those trapped kids as an opportunity to publicly virtue-signal by "building a rescue submarine", and his infantile tantrum when he was told that wasn't useful.

If Elon Musk had shut the fuck up in 2010 I'd probably be calling for statues to be built of him.

Elon is acting like the weird kid in school who accidentally did something that kinda made him popular and thought he could do it over and over but everyone just got tired of it after the first couple times

> indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel.

Why is it disorderly to not want to acquire a company that may be lying about their figures?

dang can we flagkill this entire thread? The thread is mainly unsubstantiated character attacks with no supporting arguments.

I think he’s always been like that to an extent. In his biography there are stories of him staying up all night and re-writing everyone’s code in his earlier days.

Elon gets attention because he is doing absolutely astonishingly amazing things.

The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before. And that's how that sort of thing looks.

I agree with this too. It's like everyone on this thread wants Elon to be a perfectly manicured fully formed opinion on everything and that he needs to be batting 1000. He's batting far beyond anyone else that's try to move the needle - don't forget that. I don't pretend that I agree with a lot of what Elon does but I recognize someone who is fundamentally changing the planet.

To the comments of him not wanting to talk to the press most of the time because it's boring ... do you guys know how boring talking to the press is? You get equal parts adoration and pot shots without actually gaining anything but trying to get a message threw. There are very few enlightening moments in dealing with press and podcasts and you are constantly guarded about some asinine sound byte taken out of context. It's not like the podcast/press corps are typically deeply knowledgeable and are going to bring up some new idea to help you out. It's about getting a message out to different groups of people and it is really boring/wearing if you don't like saying the same thing over and over again.

I guess the saying goes - haters are going to hate as is deeply visible on the thread.

I would add that not only is talking to the press boring it is fraught with risk. I would never talk to the press about anything unless forced.

> The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before.

Indecisiveness and disorderliness are the least of his problems, at least as far as the public is concerned.

He's a bully and he's untrustworthy.

Well, if he was a sensitive soul he would have stopped what he was doing, long time ago. Just look at this thread.

Thank you FartyMcFarter for your judgment, hopefully we can all live up to your standards.

I lost all respect for him when he seriously posited that life is a simulation.

Why are we so obsessed with loving or hating him.

Both amount to celebrity worship. We enable the drama which feeds off both the love AND the hate.

I posit that mature intelligent people don't care about Elon.

Our rallying for or railing against him, is an expression of our own narcissism, as if our individual opinions of him change literally anything in the world.

People need to grow up and focus on their own lives and changing things within their power.

musk is kinda the closet thing to a celebrity there is in the tech scene

I very much agree with all you said, but it's also a way to find likeminded people.

If I discuss with somebody and they agree with me that Musk is a conman and a cult leader, chances are they have the same mental framework around other broader things such as how SV has become a hotspot for cults.

How maybe it's time to get out of such hotspot for cults, how maybe the template for success isn't inflating a financial bubble such as Tesla but going old school like Microsoft, without raising any money, going straight to building products and attack Goliath without fear like they did with IBM, not in the press but in the marketplace.

I mostly agree with this, and would add that thoughts on Elon make a great Rorschach test (and a less great but still interesting test on what bits of misinformation have stuck to a person). But I disagree with the "enlightened disinterested middle" prescription. A mature intelligent person can love and hate and be disinterested in things (and people), too, and regardless of how other people think (or don't think) about the thing or person. There's an old copypasta going around again that implicitly makes this point at least for liking -- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/if-x-has-a-million-fans-im-on... -- a mature intelligent person should be able to have their likes and dislikes be mostly independent of what others think. (My own bias is somewhat contrarian, I notice myself irrationally starting to like something less if it becomes more popular. Sometimes I can justify it more rationally by saying that popularity changed the thing -- our opinions are part of our brains and thus are part of the world and can indeed sometimes affect the world even beyond our brains, effects are more likely when more brains share opinions -- and I like the thing it became less, or even actively dislike it, without having to diminish my liking of what used to be. Sometimes I realize I'm being irrational, notice my feelings aren't what I want them to be, and attempt to correct them (sometimes towards disinterest!). Sometimes I don't care. But the correct thing is not necessarily disinterest, nor a more extreme stance I once thought which was abandoning my likes and other emotions altogether.)

I think what’s worst is how boring he is in all these shenanigans. Peter Thiel invents a method to sue your business out of existence. Evil, yes, but also smart. Musk? Calls people he doesn’t like pedophiles. Like some schoolchild, or Republican House candidate.

And Musks politics are similar: dumb, but also dumb in exactly the same half-informed wannabe libertarian 20-year old American guy way as half the people on Reddit.

It’s really rather strange, because Musk isn’t anywhere close to normal in many other ways, and good ways, too. Making five or six businesses work, some at the same time, with only two or three duds along the way, is far ahead of anyone else and can almost claim statistical significance.

Seems a lot of what drives Musk is a need to feel that he's smarter than everyone else, even (or especially) if he suspects it may not be true. So he takes the position that the minions of the world are unworthy burdens to him. This includes governments, other organizations and anything/anyone he perceives is attempting to regulate or otherwise "constrain" him.

There's an obvious immaturity there too, wherein he responds to any criticism, hint that he may be wrong, or regulatory effort with the equivalent of a childish "you're just stupid!"

His battles with the SEC are a classic example, and it would be on-brand if this Twitter deal was as much about thumbing the eye of regulators as anything else. His announcement today had at one point caused a 20% dip in Twitter's pre-market price and 5% bump for Tesla's. The entire ride has been an exercise in manipulation.

So, I've wondered at times if a lot of this superiority act is really just deep insecurity, and he needs the world to constantly reassure him that he's as smart as he needs them to believe he is. When you look at the attention-seeking behavior you mentioned, it definitely aligns.

You've got it wrong - the tumbling today was because Twitter was artificially inflated and being held on the hopes of a deal. As soon as the market tanked, the price of twitter still held out hope on a deal. Elon isn't about to pay full freight in a sinking macroeconomic environment.

In terms of his behavior you speak of - could be right, could be wrong. I don't think he needs the reinforcement at this point. He's already proved himself - he now just needs to keep executing. My concern is that he doesn't have the energy, focus and clarity of thought to make it happen.

Also I do have legit concerns on the mental health of our older twitter guys (> 50 ) as I have noticed there has been a lot of trolling poor behavior in that crowd and a turn to the hard right. Maybe it's the social validation needed at a later age?

>the tumbling today was because Twitter was artificially inflated and being held on the hopes of a deal

We're saying the same thing. Yes, the deal itself inflated the price. But, Musk announcing today that the deal was on hold pending proof of the fake account numbers contributed to the steep pull back. Musk did not have to make the announcement publicly, and he knew what would happen when he did.

Now, guess what happens to the price when he comes out next week and says the numbers he sought were proven to his satisfaction.

He's been playing a deal-on, deal-off game from the start and the stock has responded accordingly. He has a history of enjoying that market manipulation power, including on the crypto side.

He's been slapped for it by the SEC for his other companies, and has made no secret about his disdain for that fact.

>He's already proved himself

Insecurity is frequently not rooted in reality. Musk knows he's a smart guy, but the kind of insecurity I'm talking about may never be quenchable.

Fair point about the deal on deal off. I would have to say though, he probably wants the deal to go through but not at the current market prices. Whats the quote - 'all's fair in love and war'?

True about security. Maybe that insecurity is the force that has driven him to actually achieve what he has accomplished. Sometimes your greatest asset can be your largest liability. Let's hope it stays on the asset side - for all of our sakes.

True. Could very well be that insecurity has driven him. That's probably fairly common. For instance, imposter syndrome is a very real thing and I know that my fight against it has propelled me.

The problem, of course, is that it can also create toxicity. And, Musk being a very powerful man can make that a dangerous thing. I think that's what you're alluding to.

My biggest concern is his apparent belief that his power and "contributions to society" mean he should be beyond accountability or should be able to decide which rules apply to him. That's the stuff of dystopian future sci-fi.

In fact, it concerns me when people believe they should be able to unilaterally decide what rules apply to anyone.

Agree - absolute power corrupts absolutely. Everyone is accountable and no one is above reproach. He probably is living on a huge power surge right now which might make him feel invincible (as power does) - it would be a classic time to make a misstep.

Hope his ego comes back to earth and he can keep executing. Will keep watching.

I agree with the overall sentiment of your comment in principle, but I'm actually not rooting for Musk to keep executing. I've seen enough of him to be deeply concerned about what he'd do with even more power.

Parag Agrawal warned us all more than a month ago, "There will be distractions ahead…"

https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201

> he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

Think of it as simulated annealing [1].

Usually finds pretty decent extrema

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

>if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.

I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.

This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.

All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.

>He went from being wealthy growing up

This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.

His dad was half owner of an emerald mine.

From wikipedia:

"The family was very wealthy in Elon's youth; Errol Musk once said, 'We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe.'"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Childhood_and_family

When people start using abstract measures to describe something easily quantifiable, it's usually because they're dissembling.

We have a pretty good idea what Errol's net worth is, and it's a couple million bucks.

The emerald mine in question was purchased for the equivalent of $40,000.

Imagine arguing that somebody didn’t have financial backing because his dad sold plane and bought emerald mine for half of profit (in country then known for black worker exploitation) for $40.000, and is worth couple millions at best.

This is how every discussion on Errol Musk's wealth goes.

Someone makes an implication that they were fabulously wealthy, using abstract measures like emerald mines, or small planes as a substitute for a concrete measure of wealth.

Someone points out the value of both those things was actually quite low.

Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

But they were still decidedly middle class. They all had to work for a living. And in American terms, there are tens of millions of households with similar wealth. Upper middle class, to be sure, but nothing unusual.

And the emerald mine, such as it was, is said to have been in Zambia, not South Africa.

> Then the goal posts shift to how much more money the Musk family had than the average family, which is true enough.

There's hardly a move of goalpost here. People merely argue that showing Elon as self-made "in parent's garage" is bullshit. He had family with capabilities to enable him to participate in ecoms bubble.

> Zambia, not South Africa

"You are wrong, that labour camp wasn't in USSR but in North Korea." I've haven't named the country BTW.

A million dollars in 1970-1980 is worth around 3 to 7 million dollars now. 3 millions in that period is worth at least 10 millions right now. And there is decidedly not tens of millions of households in the US with that networth, let alone a single person.

To be clear, his net worth is a couple million dollars today.

As someone pointed out in another comment, "wealthy" does not mean "never having to work again". My life growing up would have been dramatically different if my parents had been worth even a low amount of millions, and the opportunities available to me would have been drastically higher.

In today's money it's the equivalent of about $150,000, and funded by selling a plane that sold for twice that amount. I would classify having enough disposable income to own a $300,000 plane & a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

I should note that my working definition of "wealthy" doesn't mean they never have to work again, or don't have to work to maintain their desired lifestyle. Other people may have different benchmarks. As you said, abstract measures aren't easily quantified, and someone else's benchmark for wealthy may be higher.

> I would classify a net worth of a few million to be wealthy.

This describes many boomers that simply own a house.

>This describes most boomers and older GenXs.

It most assuredly does not.

The median net worth of the Baby Boomer generation in America is $1.2 million.

Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m because there are a lot of very rich boomers.

https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-baby-boomer-net-wort...

> Median net worth of boomers is $200k, average net worth is $1.2m

That's not mathematically logical. 'Average' can be used to describe mean, median or mode.

While average is more informal, it is the same as the mean, mathematically speaking. Some people may use it, well, informally, to represent other concepts, but the mathematical definition is quite clear.

Right. And the point here is that the original comment implied that most people in that age bracket had a net worth of $1.2 million.

So median is the relevant interpretation of average in that context. Your correction and interpretation are valid.

You’re right, I edited the comment shortly after posting it. Most boomers don’t have 3M in housing. But many do and owning a house on the coast is not considered remarkable.

This is some motivated accounting right here. You have no idea what debt financed either of those assets.

Couple million is still leagues above middle class

When we're discussing total net worth, a couple million dollars is decidedly middle class.

In the US, there are 13.6 million households with a net worth over $1 million when excluding their primary residence, out of a total of 126 million households.

Over 10% of households in the US, even when excluding the value of their home, have over a million dollars in assets.

So 10% is middle class? Shouldn’t it be 35+?

Besides that, Elon didn't inherit that wealth. He moved to Canada with little money, worked blue collar jobs and had student debt. That's what he started with. At Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer.

People WANT to believe a mythology that Elon started off rich to feel better about not accomplishing anything with their own equally or more privileged life. People that started with little themselves don't have this level of cognitive dissonance and see it more as an immigrant success story and inspiration.

> When he started Zip2 he couldn't afford a second computer

What does this sentence mean, why’d he need a second computer? Parsing out the odd wording that means he could afford a computer

What’s with the second computer? It’s proper nerd sniped me this haha

One computer for development, one for a server. He couldn't afford a second so had to use his primary for both purposes.

Actually in fairness that does make sense given a bit of thought

He got a $28,000 loan from his father when starting Zip2.

The biggest privilege is having your family's security net, even if you don't use it. Musk has also had luck, being in the right time and place for the dot-com boom. Unlike a lot of people who grew up privileged, he's been a hustler with great business instincts. Unlike a lot of hustlers with great business instincts, he grew up privileged.

False, it was not when starting Zip2, it was a later funding round and the funding didn't depend on Errol's investment

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211064937004589056

I looked for a source other than a tweet from Musk, who like many entrepreneurs is known to stretch the truth. Couldn’t find a definitive source, but it’s mentioned going as far back as the 90s according to Google, with not enough detail to say the exact timing but suggesting that it was crucial at the time. Of course, that’s also a hallmark of startup stories.

The loan came later and he was no more privileged than the average Canadian or American at the time. People who dismiss it as privilege are projecting envy, full stop.

And what are people who feel the need to defend the world’s richest person projecting?

Could the average American in 1995 give a $28,000 loan to his kid? Median net worth was ~$100,000 in today’s dollars. If ‘privilege’ has negative connotations for you, use ‘luck’ instead. I don’t think there’s any question that Musk made some of his own luck through hard work and intelligence, but we often observe the rich with survivorship bias because it would upset the social order if we stopped believing that hard work and intelligence are enough to become rich.

like anyone in developing countries and especially wealthy white South Africans do fit this bill rather well would hoard their actual private wealth in other jurisdictions. just because the company itself is worth nothing on paper doesn't mean they haven't pillaged the country resources for private gain like all the other wanna-be crooks and aspiring kleptocrats. [1][2]

There is a good reason why the family left SA the moment apartheid was abolished and why Elon Musk never went back since the end of apartheid.

Every entitled chuckle-duck born with a silver spoon in their mouth likes to launder their past to make them look self-made. Elon is no different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands:_Tax_Havens_a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleptopia

Well right now the highest value note in south Africa is worth about $13.

I'm sure many HN regulars have homes costing much more than a safe full of $13 notes.

I wouldn't be too confident that "We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." is an amount of money that would actually make someone particularly wealthy by American standards without doing a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of and how much it had been worth at the time.

Why would anything right now be relevant to Elon growing up 40 years ago?

> and how much it had been worth at the time

Why assume that the safe was full of South African currency?

> a fair bit of research on what currency that safe would have been full of

There are too many unknowns: the currency, the denominations, the size of the safe. There is little point in speculating whether it was (or was not) a life-changing sum.

At the time the South African Rand was kept somewhat pegged to the US Dollar, and has an average value of R2/$.

According to others, that story is severely embellished:

https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

Wikipedia is not a reliable source for every info in the world. I hope people realize that. It's funny that some people blindly trust what some unknown party has written on the net on any kind of subject.

Tertiary sources (e.g. encyclopedias) are inherently this way regardless of whether or not it is editable by nearly anyone. One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes, with mechanisms to mark problems with articles rather than deleting them. This ultimately leads to a degree of editorial transparency that is unmet by any other type of source of this kind.

Anyone who has tried to insert a true, but counter narrative, fact into a topical article know where the limits of your description are.

For any popular topic, there are self-appointed watchdogs who will revert edits in bad faith and argue with you on the Talk page until you give up and go away. There aren't enough admins to adjudicate all disputes, so what you're reading on a controversial topic is often the product of the most stubborn arguers.

That's how the sausage is made on WP.

> One of the strengths in Wikipedia is crowd sourcing and a strong editorial culture that, for example, enforces citing sources and giving unbiased takes,

This is a laughable statement. That's assuming the newspapers acting as sources are devoid of bias, while we clearly know that they are partisan in the own right: even stuff that the NYT is heavily biased and can't be seriously used as a reference for everything.

Crowd-sourcing is not a robust mechanism to prevent that from happening either. Just look at every controversial topic on Wikipedia, there is only one narrative that is accepted while the reality might be way more complex that what is portrayed in a paragraph.

We certainly don't and shouldn't blindly trust you, since all you're doing is attacking Wikipedia's reliability, instead of presenting any reliable facts or evidence or citations about the actual discussion topic himself, Elon Musk. Wikipedia is a hell of a lot more reliable than some random guy on the internet who doesn't have a point or any evidence, and has to resort to generically attacking Wikipedia instead.

Attacking the very idea that it's even possible to know the truth is what you do when the truth isn't on your side.

Wikipedia is great for many things, but I would steer clear of it for biographical information of prominent contemporary persons. It's very political and the amount of on-the-fly stealth editing that goes on the site should discredit it. Great for technical information or basic history. Avoid it like the plague anywhere it seeks to weigh in on "the current thing".

When you have to attack Wikipedia as being generically unreliable, instead of presenting some reliable facts and citations about the discussion topic that actually prove your point, you don't have a point.

Left bias is very prevalent: https://youtu.be/kiRgJYMw6YA

What facts would you believe? Elon himself tells a very different story:

https://www.amazon.com/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Fantastic-Future/dp/...

It has been a long-standing complaint for awhile. In partricular, there appears to be a core group of editors that have displayed a blatant bias against Israel. Huge ommissions of information that only inflame anti-semitic passions and hinder real dialogue from occuring. There are other issues, but this one shows the limitations of wikipedia and how a narrow mindset can comandeer a few pages. Again, I like wikipedia, but it's only reliable for mundane issues.

https://aish.com/48964486/

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/wikipedias-jewish-problem-pe...

Also, personal campaigns being carried out to smear people. Not a good look for a neutral non-partisan outfit. That's why I ignore bios about anyone as a rule on wiki.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/former-wikipedia-edi...

It's well documented that Elon was quite poor as a student in Canada/US.

He left South Africa at 17 with no money to speak of. He's estranged from his father for reasons no one talks about, which makes the father's possible wealth irrelevant.

And yet this "apartheid emerald mine fortune" is such a good story that it will keep being "internet true" forever.

Meh, whatever you think of the 'angle' of the NYTimes article, it was pretty clear from talking to his classmates that they were in a very wealthy area of Joberg.. his dad was successful in business (being part owner of at least one mineral mine) and was a local politician.

> Interviews with relatives and former classmates reveal an upbringing in elite, segregated white communities that were littered with anti-Black government propaganda, and detached from the atrocities that white political leaders inflicted on the Black majority.

> Mr. Musk, 50, grew up in the economic hub of Johannesburg, the executive capital of Pretoria and the coastal city of Durban. His suburban communities were largely shrouded in misinformation. Newspapers sometimes arrived on doorsteps with whole sections blacked out, and nightly news bulletins ended with the national anthem and an image of the national flag flapping as the names of white young men who were killed fighting for the government scrolled on the screen.

> “We were really clueless as white South African teenagers. Really clueless,” said Melanie Cheary, a classmate of Mr. Musk’s during the two years he spent at Bryanston High School in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, where Black people were rarely seen other than in service of white families living in palatial homes.

They go onto say that Musk had black friends and left SA to avoid serving the apartheid government via mandatory military service.

Incorrect. Earlier on, his parents were well educated and had good jobs, and enough money that his father owned an airplane. This alone makes your "at best" remark highly inaccurate. At a minimum in Musk's early life he was very comfortably in the middle of the middle class, but I would class nearly any family with enough disposable income to have an airplane to be "wealthy". Your standards for this may vary, and I'm open to your definition of wealthy being much higher, but his family was far from poor.

On top of that, his father has claimes he sold the plane for the equivalent of about $300,000 in today's money and used some of it to purchase shares in gemstone mine, which then went on to make them even wealthier. This isn't independently confirmed. His father may have exaggerated. However others have said his family also own the largest house in the area, which sounds wealthy to me.

Elon has disputed some of this, but not offered details beyond merely disputing some of this. He said his parents have been supported financially for the last 20 years, but going back 20 years from when he made that statement would put it in the late 90's, so it is not incompatible with growing up wealthy even though he now supports his parents. Plenty of multi-millionaires would tell their parents, "Hey, if you don't want to you don't have to work anymore. I got this".

Also none of this is incompatible with Elon's own account of arriving in Canada with little money & ending up with student debt. It's possible Elon exaggerated but for these purposes I'll take him at his word. Because by his own account Elon didn't like Apartheid. His father also has a reputation of being quite an asshole. It would be perfectly understandable for him to "peace out" and go his own way, and it wouldn't change the fact that growing up his family was wealthy. In fact I know someone who did pretty much the same thing: Their father was terrorized the family in fear & abuse, but was extremely successful with a very expensive first house, another vacation home, etc. His father wanted him to continue in his (professional) footsteps but he wanted none of it, joined the military for the free education and after getting out went on to become extremely wealthy himself.

Most people who are into airplanes or boats scrounge by considerably to be able to afford one for leisure. Which is evident by the fact that he had to flip his hobby plane to fund a business purchase.

According to his father flipping the plane was only partly connected to funding the mine. He flipped the plane, and was only then offered the mine opportunity. He might have had ample funds for the mine regardless.

Either way, scrounging by to purchase a $300,000 luxury good (today's $ for the sell price of the plane) still qualifies a person as wealthy in my book, especially when taken together with owning the largest home in their area & his father's real estate & consulting business. It still means you had at least $300,000 in disposable income. Just because you choose to spend all of your disposable income on something like that doesn't mean you aren't wealthy.

A "middle class" South African with a Canadian passport in his back pocket acting as an escape hatch for when apartheid was close to collapsing.

That's a long way to says he's a bit of a dick.

Sometimes going the long way around is what's necessary.

not this time though

He's a divisive figure, and people who like him will tune out if someone doesn't like him, and people who don't like him will tune out when someone likes him.

So, I tried to walk the line without using judgmental language. My own opinion is that he's a complicated figure. I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him, how much of it is an act, and if it's truly him whether or not it's a representative small slice of him or not. I have a firm judgement on his his public persona, which I think makes him look like an asshole (the pedo guy stuff alone clinches that) but even if that's an accurate picture of him as a whole I still admire what he has accomplished.

I'm not entirely sure these two opposites should have the same weight. Being a decent human should be the default and just some minor steps into shitty behaviour should be enough to justify significant criticism of a person. Consider the following generalisation on a random someone's behaviour:

Someone is sexist against 50% of the people the interact with? They are sexist.

Someone is sexist against 20% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.

That someone is sexist against 5% of the people the interact with? Still sexist.

The person does not stop being sexist/shitty/$negative_trait just because they most of the time are not acting on it. They become nice when they stop altogether, or at least make clear effort to stop.

So, back to Elon, considering his recent praise of work/life balance and slave-like conditions in China, I see no reason to believe his nice side should be considered equally or more worthy of praise than his negative side be considered for criticism.

Something like sexism, racism, etc are in a different category than merely "shitty", I think.

Putting Musk aside, I'd have to know a little more about what you mean by $negative_trait to agree or not. Everyone has negative traits, everyone is occasionally shitty. Frequency certainly matters, but assuming it's not very regular than maybe it comes down to what you said about "clear effort to stop". You have to be self aware enough to recognize it when it happens and work on doing better.

He is a complicated man and I think that's how history will look back on him. If he really does put people on Mars, I think that is about as big an impact on the history of the human race as one can have.

Everybody is flawed at some level. Maybe when you get to a certain level of fame and/or wealth it just amplifies all the good and bad in you.

I mean look at all the other “big names” in tech… Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. These are highly flawed individuals.

Hell look at the entertainment industry… so many of the most famous successful people turn out to be hugely flawed. Take Jonny Depp for example—that dude has some major issues. Or to a much greater extent Bill Cosby. Cosby transformed TV in so many different incredibly positive ways and look how it ended…

Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.

> Fame and wealth does some weird stuff to people.

This is the crucial point. Power corrupts, a painful fact long established. Therefore, when the power and wealth of an individual grows, they deserve more scrutiny and criticism. You don't "give them a break because they're human". The self-preservation of society and freedom itself demands that we closely scrutinize the powerful. If you don't want to be scrutinized like that, then it's easy to avoid becoming a leader. It's a cliche, but with great power comes great responsibility, and Musk is still acting like a child half the time, egged on by a legion of equally childish fans.

> I can't come to a firm judgement on him because I don't know how much of what we see is truly him

I say all we can judge someone is what they do. It's perfectly fine to judge Musk on his public persona. Unless you want to try to divine secret reasons for his public actions, but even that is judging him based on his public persona.

I'm not saying you need to naively believe what he says are his motivations. But his public persona is at least somewhat predictable.

Your one liner totally fails to embody what was said.

While failing to provide a historical account, it summed up the result quite concisely.

If you go back to the question that was being answered, you'll notice that the historical account was the point.

> if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

Yeah, no I agree with you. I would delete it if I could but the time has past. I guess I'm kind of a dick, too.

I like Kara Swisher's take on Musk:

"He’s obviously a visionary. I prefer dealing with him to others because he gives you genuine answers. He will call you back. He will have a beef with you when others run away because they’re cowardly. If he disagrees, he’ll be in your face, but at least he’s in your face. I’m perfectly fine with that. In a world where everybody’s making a lot of silly stuff, he’s not. Cars, rockets, solar, these are important things. He can’t be as silly or as fascist as people make him out to be. Maybe he does act like a stupid tech bro sometimes, but maybe he’s a little more complex than that? Thomas Edison was not a nice man. Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people — Steve Jobs, for example. The times we live in are so reductive that it’s really hard to be able to get our minds around a truly complex human being. And that’s what he is."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/04/kara-swisher-on-elon...

> Many inventors were very difficult, problematic people

Musk's not much of an inventor, though. Certainly, that's not why he's rich.

Part of the criticism of Musk is that the popular view of him is totally out of whack with what you get if you just look at what he does, and has done. He's not Tony Stark.

I think we need to distinguish between inventor (literally building new things themselves) vs executor (making stuff happen that would not have happened otherwise, or least not as quickly).

I think Elon falls much more into the second category, which I agree is not really like Tony Stark, but I think still provides a ton of value to society. I think there's a real argument to be made that he is the reason we have dropped cost per pound of payload to orbit by over half with reusable rockets, even if he himself didn't invent the functionality.

Oh, he deserves plenty of credit. He seems to be quite good at, at least, certain aspects of running a business, and happens to be interested in some fun and/or useful things, which is nice.

But he's not a super-genius, and given how flighty he can be, when he announces various Grand Visions, it's wise to take a wait-and-see approach. His big mouth probably ought to have landed him in quite a bit of legal trouble, too, except that it's so much harder for the justice system to deal with rich people than poor people.

It's not that he's uniquely awful among successful business dudes, since much of the above is true about many of them—his PR and superfans are just... grating.

Third category: Owner. Inventors invent things. Executors help them do so. Owners, the Edisons of the world, are the people with the property interest in the invention. They are the ones who get to deploy and use inventions within their business.

Which is why the Steve Jobs analogy might work better than Edison.

Henry Ford seems an apt comparison. "Industrialist and business magnate", from Wikipedia's Henry Ford article, seems to pretty much cover it. Though with less of a focus on making products affordable for the normal person (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just a difference in priorities).

That still makes him a pretty big deal, of course.

Yeah, Musk, Ford, Jobs, and Edison are all a big deal regardless of their role in actually inventing technology. I think Jobs is the most appropriate analog because he also has a public perception as being the person who created the tech which isn't really accurate. I'm not sure Ford had that reputation and Edison was more hands on.

It is also probably worth nothing that they all had another trait in common. They were all notorious assholes for various reasons.

Yeah, sorry, should have included that in my other post, but I do agree that Jobs is a decent analog, too. Similar public profile, sort-of similar reputation, though Jobs wasn't as prone to strident, public bullshitting.

Edison wasn't necessarily an inventor either.

That said if you're a patron of inventors then you are an inventor. If you can manage the pain of failing and failing and failing, then in my book you're creative and a co-inventor.

Is he really a visionary? Because from what I can tell, he has roughly the same background reading science fiction and making extrapolations from current science to the future, and has made similar conclusions about the risks of not multi-homing humanity, and the challenge of building intelligent non-humans. That doesn't make him a visionary.

My conclusion instead is that Elon Musk is Chaos Titan; like the netflix chaos monkey, but basically just going around causing chaos by hyping up twitter and then causing massive swings with individual tweets.

I think that's a good question.

I don't mind Musk much either way and while I'm annoyed when he wants to let Trump back on Twitter after what I strongly believe was an attempt at a coup d'état, or him removing, say, the mobile charger in new Teslas I still like the products that his companies make and when he sits down and does an interview he says things that resonate with me.

So what makes someone a visionary? I mean I sit down and have a vision where Earth is a multi-planetary species, we build an outpost on the Moon within the next few years, and then Mars, and then mine asteroids. But is that all it takes? If so I think the word visionary is often either misapplied or is quite diluted. But if we take into account the need to execute on such visions, naturally, calling Musk a visionary makes more sense. Maybe we just don't have a great word (or one isn't immediately coming to mind) for someone who says "we should go to Mars, and I'm going to participate/lead in the creation of the entity that will do that".

He's obviously a finance guy.

Comparing him to Edison is appropriate I think, in both the good and bad ways that represents. I've also heard him compared with William C. Durant (Of GM circa 1910) which I think is also an appropriate comparison in both good and bad ways.

>Edison

I agree, and think of him in much the same was as I think of Edison. It's strange how polarizing a figure Musk is. It seems like a majority of people (or maybe a vocal minority) either want to attribute every single thing to his own personal genius, no help from others or good fortune. While others view everything he's accomplished as nothing more than luck born out on the backs of other people's labor. I don't know where the balance lies between those two extremes but I doubt that either one is very accurate.

Penelope Scott's "Rät" [1] touches on this in a way I adore -

    So fuck your tunnels, fuck your cars, fuck your rockets, fuck your cars again
    You promised you'd be Tesla, but you're just another Edison

Been listening to this song on repeat as my FAANG exit date approaches.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpxT9TLGoLI

John Carmack's take: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Kevin Watson's take, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

Every person is a bit of a dick in one way or another. And people who have done high impact things in their lives will have greater opportunity to have made mistakes, no matter how good, ethical, or smart they are.

Most elite celebrities, politicians, and businesspeople simply put a lot of effort into pretending to be perfect, mostly out of vanity. They lie, hide, avoid all controversy, and employ teams of PR people to craft their public image using publicity stunts, bribery, philanthropy and all kinds of tricks that have been proven to work for thousands of years.

If Elon Musk followed the elite PR playbook, a lot more people would like him, probably a lot of the haters in this thread. Which says more about them than him.

Elon Musk offers a glimpse of what very powerful/successful, and basically good, people are often really like.

I'd argue that:

1. Anyone who completely denigrates and dismisses Elon Musk is a blind hater.

2. Anyone who claims he's without flaws is a fanboy with rose colored glasses on.

3. And only people who agree with his own assessment of himself, that he's a "mixed bag", are assessing him clearly and with intellectual honesty.

Exactly. Nobody is perfect and everybody has some deep dark skeletons in their closet. The mistake I think society makes is expecting celebrities / wealthy to be any different.

Do they have a responsibility to set a positive example? Absolutely. Is that always achievable? Turns out probably not.

I think society needs to learn to forgive. We got really good at canceling people, but we haven’t got very good at forgiveness. In the internet age where your entire life can be saved on the internet, it is important to realize people change, everybody makes mistakes (sometimes even very stupid ones) and people aren’t perfect.

I don’t know… I guess they say you should never meet your heroes. I think now that we can peek behind the curtain and often see the “actual person” we have to come to terms with the fact that under all the fancy dress and act, even the “highest” in society are ultimately the same flawed, imperfect humans as the rest of us.

None of us really know what the fuck we are doing… we are all making it up as we go along. Even the most successful amongst us.

I’m fine with forgiving most things, but not in the absence of any attempt at apology and recompense.

The “pedo guy” accusation was beyond the pale and, so far as I remember, Musk doubled down on it vs making any sincere attempt at an apology.

Yeah. I guess what I didn’t want to imply is we can’t be upset with their behavior. It’s okay to take serious issues with said behavior. It’s even okay to call out bad behavior

And yeah… the pedo guy thing was completely uncalled for.

Granted, a friend of mine who met him at a party around 2011 or 2012 in SF, her opinion of him was a "total dick"

I think he's fun, to be honest. Better than the other billionaires who made their money making everything worse.

Richest person ever? Not even close https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-rich...

It's hard to compare people who lived under vastly different economic systems. I would also put people who were the leaders of their country into a different category: the line between what they own and what is part of the nation's wealth is very blurry. I think even for more recent private individuals like the Carnegies it's a little more complicated than taking assets multiplied by inflation rates. Spending power also comes into it, and you could use another measure like net worth as a % of GDP.

Musk may still fall short in those ways, which is why I made the "ever" a question. Poking around the internet a bit more-- your link & others-- it seems pretty likely. Then again I'm not sure there can really be a meaningful difference in wealth between anyone who was worth the equivalent of > $100B in todays money, however it's calculated. (Possibly you'd distinguish between money on paper vs. more tangible assets. Or some method of distinguishing Musk's wealth, a lot of which seems based on the speculative future value of Tesla than based in its current operations)

Yes, that article is doing some really weird comparisons. JD Rockfeller's net worth was no higher than $24B in modern inflation-adjusted dollars, but the article claims more than 10x that figure.

His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.

I'd have to know more about it. Did he have any reason for moving to windows? If there was a sound business case then I wouldn't call it impulsive. Even if it was impulsive, I don't think it falls into the same category as what we see from him today.

My opinion is that he had no GOOD reason. He just knew the Windows dev stack and has a giant ego. But, I'm probably biased since he reminds me of managers/PMs I've worked with in my career that have weak opinions strongly held which affect me.

I think it's similar to how he has banned use of Kanban or other Toyota Production System principles at Tesla (which is the easy explanation for their poor build quality, see: U.S. car manufacturing 1970's).

Which is ironic, Tesla is running one of Toyotas former top tier factories outside of Japan. A joint venture with GM at that.

Oh yeah totally ironic. The factory where Toyota taught GM how to make cars reliably has completely regressed to a mess of scrap and tents. They even got rid of the railroad siding which seems crazy to me for a pro-environment company.

> He went from being wealthy growing up

He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.

I would generally consider upper class to be wealthy, of course it's not a very specific term, individual definitions are going to vary greatly. A successful SV engineer old enough to have kids can easily be worth a few $million. That seems wealthy to me, but it's a subjective measure. I guess you could survey a bunch of people to try & get consensus on it, and evaluate the benchmark from there.

Source that he was really wealthy growing up? People seem to say this all the time but he says he worked his way through college without any help from his dad: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072

You added the "really". Otherwise I don't bother posting sources for every single thing that is easy to find online.

Elon disputes some accounts of his family's wealth, but also doesn't offer much else on the topic except that he arrived in Canada with little money and ended with student debt. This is not incompatible with growing up in a wealthy family. People peace-out from their family for all sorts of reasons, and Elon himself gives a great one when he said he didn't want to be a part of apartheid, and that his father was a terrible person. I know someone who did that because of a similar father issue: very wealthy family, and the person wanted no part of his father's help once he was old enough to leave home.

By the father's own account they owned a plane worth about $300,000 in today's money. That alone-- enough to have a luxury good of that value-- is enough to put someone down as wealthy to me.

To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price.

If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?

Good point - A former colleague made an asking price offer on a house in 2007 that was rejected by the sellers. He bought the same house a year later from them for 70% of his original offer thanks to the Great Recession.

There’s been a huge stock market crash since he first initiated the buyout. It would have been unhinged if he didn’t try to renegotiate the price or otherwise pull out.

It can be argued that the whole idea of Musk buying Twitter is unhinged, but it doesn’t seem much different to Bezos buying WaPo, it’s simply on a larger scale. Media companies provide good political power/$ value to billionaires.

I get the feeling he is a lifelong nerd with poor social skills, but after his success and wealth he is now perceived as an interesting person with high social status, and it just isn't in him to deal well with it.

He divorced his wife, starts dating actresses and musicians, the latter turns him on to smoking pot and he thinks to himself, "Hey, I'm now a cool guy who smokes pot. I need to show people I'm a cool guy who smokes pot" and goes on Joe Rogan and shows off his new coolness. Same thing with his twitter antics.

The first time I heard him speak was watching clips from his solar roof announcements. He had the charisma and presentation skills of a 4th grader giving a book report.

This + the bro cult around him on Twitter certainly make him hard to stomach sometimes. But still, when I see he is on a podcast or some other media it is usually worth the listen.

I wonder how different I would be if what I did was highly successful and I had the money to do what I want / indulge myself at my whim... I worry it wouldn't be pretty...

Is it not possible that Elon is acting in a perfectly rational way based on information that has come to light during diligence? Or am I missing something more subtle between the lines? It seems at least possible that Elon or Twitter’s board or both hold inaccurate views about how valuable Twitter actually is…

No? Have you seen his communication style? It's not one of a person acting "perfectly rational".

He does not look indecisive :), to the contrary seems to be jumping to action without bothering much about consequences. For example, why make acquisition bid without checking on spam accounts first? IIRC his offer letter to the Twitter did not carry this condition about spam bots.

The foundation of Musk's wealth, above all else, is that he operates as a one-man marketing machine. The funding for all of his ventures depends on Musk. The magnet for ravenous, loyal, intelligent nerds (and thus, the ability to eventually deliver on his promises!) is powered by Musk. The ability for any of his ventures to cover a failure to deliver with a PR/controversy storm -- yup, it depends on Musk.

I like your comparison with Big T. He is, in some sense, a sleeker and more savvy Trump. Trump does have a similar psychic energy to Elon, but he's an older model. He came from the TV world. Now, the TV world was pretty powerful -- it got DT elected president! But Americans are not living in the TV world this century; they're living in the social media world.

This is the origin of the Twitter thing. It's not about Twitter's profit, or free speech, or anything as lofty as that. Here's what happened with Twitter:

Trump got elected based, in part, on his statements on Twitter. Around the same time, Elon was astroturfing Reddit, Twitter, etc. to build the hype machine that eventually became the $1T social media product, Tesla.

Elon, consciously or not, came to realize that simply by his statements on Twitter, could manipulate the world to his whim. He fired the entire corporate PR team at Tesla. He realizes, why do I need a PR team? I can shape the narrative just as well with my social media account!

Then, BOOM! Trump gets banned from Twitter, and immediately disappears completely from discussion. Just like that, in the blink of an eye -- erased from public imagination. Do you remember how quickly this happened? He was black holed from the public imagination in a couple days. As soon as the trending hashtag disappeared, Trump was gone.

Elon saw this happen. He made the connection between his valuations and his Twitter account. And remember, at this point, Elon's compensation is basically tied entirely to the stock price. He realizes that leaving his podium on someone else's property is a mortal risk. And... here we are.

Twitter is pretty stupid not to have banned Elon as soon as he left the slightest hint of acquisition.

Musk does not come from a scientific or technical lineage: his father wasn't a geotechnical engineer, a computer programmer, or a physicist. He was a chiropractor. A chiropractor! This is the essence of Elon. He is the greatest influencer of our time.

Elon Musk did this recent keynote for the FT. "Future of the Car: Elon Musk Keynote Interview" https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc

Said he will have full FSD in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107

Will be landing uncrewed Starship on Mars in 3 to 5 years: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=2444

Most ironic of all is the talk about Tunnels: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=4000

It was a shame that the FT, with a London based journalist, forgot to ask the question if he has ever heard about this Sci-Fi tunnel transport system called the London Metro :-)

> unhinged

I have this speculative theory that Elon Musk's public behavior is a complex long term ruse. I suspect his odd behavior is intentionally designed to get other to underestimate him. Consider it a mental form of the drunken fist martial arts style [1], where a fighter will use unpredictable body movements to confuse the opponent.

I use the word "theory" intentionally. I have explainable reasons for how I formed this theory. But now is not the place for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_boxing

The only reason Elon looks superhuman to so many people is by comparison to our worthless decadent elite. He's a decent engineer with a strong work ethic and resources who actually does do things, making him look like a comic book superhero. That's because the rest of his class is mostly jacking off on yachts, sponsoring bullshit politics of various flavors, posturing at glorified overpriced TED sessions (Davos etc.), or running companies whose products and market they don't understand full of people who have meetings to discuss the meeting schedule.

If our elite really were a meritocracy Elon would be average among his peers, if that.

I’m not a fan of Elon, would never buy a Tesla. But Vernon Unsworth was worse in the whole incident. He started the whole argument. Elon was asked for help. He tried to help. Vernon threw his toys out of the cot. Elon responded like a child. Vernon sued and got laughed out of court.

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Elon. The ‘pedo guy’ thing isn’t one of them.

To add details, Elon's sub prototype seemed fine, and his team worked with Thai authorities to evaluate its use to resolve the incident. It was deemed they didn't have enough time (given the constraints) to actually finish it, and diving was a more practical option given the entirety of the situation.

Thai authorities told Elon as such, boys in the cave were already saved by the time he brought over the sub, and everything was fine.

Then that one specific diver comes out of nowhere and tweets that it was all just a PR stunt and that Elon could "shove that sub up where it hurts". While Elon's response was an immature retort, it is a bit disingenuous how people seem to imply that he lashed out at the diver out of nowhere with that insult just because his sub wasnt used for the incident. That wasn't an issue at all, and he took the rejection from Thai authorities just fine. It was one of the divers that decided to throw this random insult at him, and Elon's retort (no matter how appropriate or inappropriate it was) was just a "one-up" response. Immature and inappropriate response, sure. But let's not act as if he decided to lash out on some innocent guy out of nowhere.

Direct quote[0]: "Just as I didn’t literally mean he was a pedophile, I’m sure he didn’t literally mean shoving a sub up my a--".

0. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/elon-...

I started to become concerned about Elon when I read his 2017 interview with Rolling Stone[0]:

> I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence. Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters…

He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

> He is one of the most brilliant men alive

I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.

While I don't disagree with you, there must be _some_ level of 'right place and time' involved with anyone who holds superlative accolades. Same can be said for the converse.

Yeah it's called being born wealthy, and then becoming a billionaire.

Yeah that's why Bezo's Blue Origin is doing so well compared to SpaceX.

You could say the same thing about Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison. Good luck convincing folks neither is a genius.

Indeed. But it’s well documented that both Jobs and Edison were shrewd businessmen first, rather than technical geniuses.

Geniuses at self-promotion and manipulating others, certainly. A world full of Jobses would be an unlivable dystopia. A world full of Wozniaks, now that would be interesting.

I think you might both be right, but never agree with each other, due to the trickiness of language. That is to say, depending on your definition of "genius" (and depending on the still not fully understood nature of genius), you might on the one hand agree that he qualifies as being a "genius", but isn't "one of the most brilliant men alive."

Setting aside any purely semantic disagreements (for example the fact that "one of the most brilliant men alive" is highly dependent on the number of other brilliant men around), I think part of what OP is arguing against is the implication that most people attribute a specific kind of genius to him (and OP should definitely step in to disagree with me here if I am mistaken). For example, most people may agree that Warren Buffet is a genius, but it's clear (to me at least), that they mean genius in a very different way in that context than when applied to Musk. The implication seems to strongly be that Musk is not merely a savvy businessman, but a "brilliant scientist" or "brilliant engineer" or something as well, something I think no one would assign to Buffet. Buffet bought Duracell, but no one believes he is key to battery technology. For the record, I am not arguing about whether Musk is or is not this kind of genius, just that Musk is a unique case in that the conversation exists on this axis, arguably much more so than even with Steve Jobs (who most people at best attribute "design genius" to, but will readily admit is not an "engineering genius", and in fact may even attribute the ability to see "past that" as one of his strengths). So I think the frustration I detect in this argument is that Musk seems to often be imagined in the same ranks as the actual Nikola Tesla perhaps, which they feel is unearned, and then the defense given is more appropriate for an Edison or Ford-esque "businessy crossover genius", vs. a description of direct technical accomplishments. Again, I am not arguing either way as to where he should be placed, just pointing out that I see a lot of this sort of "talking past each other", since "genius" colloquially implies something that doesn't make "Steve Jobs" immediately come to mind, vs. Einstein.

He's a classic visionary with the ability to manifest that vision in others with his words. His track record speaks for itself, likely because of his vision and willingness to risk. He likely has strong skills in seeing positive outcomes and cast them as truths into others. He will continue to succeed in business outcomes, until his vision falters.

Tesla was basically a fully government funded entity for the first decade of Musk's ownership. His greatest skill with Tesla lay in promoting it (and doing an even better job of promoting the myth of Tesla being hand built by himself alone) and in securing government benefits.

There was the direct half a billion dollars in loans the government gave Tesla after the financial crisis without which it would have collapsed. But even more so, the only reason Tesla could survive financially during the 2010s was a combination of government subsidies and government green credits which essentially had the likes of GM and Ford paying Tesla to build cars (so they could offset their credits).

What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.

> What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.

They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.

A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.

Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.

Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.

It could be what drives him and if he goes to therapy it might ruin that, I believe this is a common reason why people like that don't go to therapy. I don't know if he needs therapy or not by the way.

Honestly going to sleep alone is awful. My SO is in another country right now and I think I understand why old people tend to die shortly after their partner does.

This is strong evidence that you can have it all financially and still be a miserable human. The most valuable skills are recognizing when you have "enough", and being content with keeping yourself company.

I started becoming concerned about peterth3 when I read his HN comment in 2022.

> He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

He started diagnosing people online either without meeting them or knowing them personally. It's sad in some ways. I'm sure he's a decent engineer but he'd be 10x happier and more effective if he focused on himself and not trying to find fault in others.

dang, a personal attack…

I’ll leave. Peace

It was an ad lib, I simply swapped out Musk with your name and replaced relevant nouns.

Are you saying you can hurl personal insults, but others can't at you?

Here's why YTA:

!) OP says "[Elon Musk] is one of the most brilliant men alive" and suggests he would benefit from therapy. IMO this isn't really a personal insult towards Elon.

2) Your "ad lib" intentionally excluded the "brilliant man" part of OP's comment and replaces it with "decent engineer." This makes your comment a direct insult to OP. Implying that they're not a good engineer.

3) Elon Musk is a public figure. The richest man alive. Even if OP was insulting Elon, that is completely different from what you're doing. Criticizing people in power is good. Insulting strangers online is mean.

4) OP didn't even diagnose Elon with codependence, that was the Rolling Stone author. Suggesting someone could benefit from therapy is not a diagnosis.

5) Ironically OP rarely comments on HN while you're commenting several times a day. With lots of negative, argumentative, and judgemental comments.

"Personal attacks are not allowed on HN" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9683927

I think you would benefit from therapy since you seem to be too sensitive. Do you feel insulted by that?

Maybe GP shouldn't insult people if they don't have thick enough skin to be treated the same.

I don't care if you're famous or not, I'll give you the same tone as you give others.

But yes I can be an asshole, never claimed not to be. I can also be nice. They way I treat people depends on how they treat others.

The word you're looking for is eccentric.

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

Elon Musk isn't an attention seeker and never has been. I don't get how people make this argument. Every chance he gets, he redirects praise to the people of his companies.

He is the kind of person one has to maintain complex opinions about.

He didn't create the first mass market modern EV (that was Nissan), but he did what the rest of the auto industry could have but refused to do: Reverse the polarity of the desirability of EVs.

His views on metropolitan public transit and car facilitated sprawl are backward, but I doubt most traditional auto executives think any differently (just look at the amazing metro system in the Detroit area! /s), they just don't voice it as openly.

He has tons of money and power but feels little accountability to anyone, not even his shareholders, much less any community, country, or society.

You might say that's great, that it frees him to think "outside the box". That is true, but societal obligations are not all bad - they ground a wealthy and powerful person in the reality of people who have far less power than them, and temper some of the blindness brought on by their narcissism.

He was always like this, from what I remember. Then again, I was put off of him back in the 90s because it was just kind of embarrassing to watch someone who was (at the time) 2-3x my age be so desperate for validation.

Elon was bullied pretty heavily, and I think he clung to the nerds as his social savior in response, but he still doesn't have the self-confidence/spine to let his ideas stand on their own. It's kind of sad: He basically has a parasocial relationship with the geek/nerd community (and probably the rationalists too) and he thinks it's real, but it can't be when Elon brings his resources to bear whenever he's losing an argument.

> Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

Take it easy on Biden. Many geriatric patients act strangely because their sense of self awareness has faded with age.

The problem is reward this kind of behavior. Trump became president by be the most outlandish buffoon. Kanye is a billionaire for his antics. It's all free advertising for their brands. Probably 100s of millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

One thing I really like about this new Elon is, while he is liberal, he's more real. There are a lot of liberals playing a part - like towing the liberal line. However a lot of ACTUAL liberals in person might be like, shit let's stop abortion or lets stop illegal immigration or lets cheer black people but I don't want everyone on TV to be black (I'm not saying all of them - but real people have actual opinions like that). There's too much focus on hyper liberalism or LEFTism right now and I rather think the word is not unhinged it's REAL. Same REAL that elected Trump.

In the United States there is very little leftism. If you think there is, point to any major party etc that is advocating to dismantle the existing power hierarchy and transfer ownership of the means of production to workers. The most "radical" mainstream advocacy we typically see is around reform, which really isn't radical at all.

It's true that there are pockets of leftist activism here and there, but said activists have very little power or influence. There's no communist bogeyman waiting round the corner to redistribute your wealth (or whatever else it is that people imagine communism to be).

It's important to reiterate that liberal and progressive are not synonyms for leftism. Advocating for social change in and of itself is not leftism. More Black people on TV isn't leftism, and the notion is quite absurd, especially since it's far from true that everyone on TV is Black now.

The reason this is so important IMO is that we can't have productive discussions about social and political issues if we don't understand the basic terms and concepts under discussion.

As to Musk, I don't know what to think. He's certainly made some good business decisions, but he also goes off the deep end on occasion. I don't think calling him liberal really makes much sense. When you're one of the richest people in the world, your world view is undoubtedly much different than that of an average person.

And just in general the labels "liberal" and "conservative" aren't very meaningful, especially in that most people could be considered either depending on which issue you're looking at. And when you look at how people actually live and what they prioritize, the lines become even blurrier.

> I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

All agents have two modes: exploiting and exploring

Indecisive and disorderly are the qualities of exploring.

The thing with Elon is that he has no respect for rules. This is what makes his companies successful. His company will zag when everybody zigs, because he will say “zigging is stupid, and only an idiot would do it that way”, after which he will be mocked by all the zigging rule-followers, and ultimately either be proven right, or dead-wrong.

This lack of respect of rules brought him to the top, and somewhere along the way he seems to have forgotten how to turn it off. So now he does whatever he wants whenever he wants and who cares about the consequences because why should he follow someone else’s rules? This greatly offends many people, while simultaneously attracting a fan club who love his rogue character.

I’m a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, etc. but I think Elon has been acting a little off lately. It feels like he started acting like any other rich guy who is more concerned about his own money than anything else.

If Trump is reelected this year, Republicans can thank Elon. He’s campaigning against democrats, wants Trump to be back on Twitter, said banning Trump was morally wrong (I guess letting the incitements of violence, lies about election fraud while committing the fraud himself, was morally acceptable to Elon).

This is exactly what Charlie Munger said when asked why he and Buffett invested in BYD and not in Tesla. He said Elon was a certified genius and a lose cannon. (That was before TSLA did 20x. And also well before Musk teased them about their love of moats and candy.)

with the market taking a nose dive, elon musk probably doesn't have the money he thought he had.

Elon found his out then when he realised this deal was insane.

Looks like someone got in over his head and is looking for an excuse to back out of the deal.

Who deserves this much attention? Elon or the countless people with mental illnesses living on the street?

This is more sane than if it went through. If he really wants a microblog he can build it for $1b or buy substack.

I guess we'll find out more at 6/9

Elon is a smart guy and while this may seem knee jerkish to some and attributable to mental characteristics by others I’m pretty certain it will work out for him. Why? Look at his past accomplishments. This guy is a visionary and isn’t afraid to take risks to get’r done. Disclaimer: Not even close to smart enough to judge this guy.

> Disclaimer: Not even close to smart enough to judge this guy.

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.

Surprised that people know so much about Musk and claim they don’t like him. I can see nerding out on your hero or whatever, but to be motivated to research his personal upbringing out of disdain for the man strikes me as a bit unhinged. As someone who is 60/40 pro musk it’s bizarre the emotions he triggers in certain types of people. If we could somehow harness that energy…

> If we could somehow harness that energy…

I think Musk already figured this out: he's overworking his employees and overselling to his customers. He's a marketing genius, better than Steve Jobs

Did you ever wonder that employees wanted to work for Steve Jobs and Elon Musk?

From my experience, and personal contacts that have both joined and left SpaceX, this is the case.

These comments never made any sense. A job at Tesla is not akin to Slavery. But most people act like it is. Why?

of course they wanted, and it might still be a good deal for them long term. But compared to market rates, the USD/hour is smaller in Tesla than at most tech companies. Musk makes up the difference with PR: he sales the job so well that people are willing to take a paycut to work there. Nothing wrong with that, also nothing wrong with being convinced to spend more on a car than you need too, in fact I think most Americans do anyway...

I don't think it's weird. I know a lot about the life of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and Bernie Madoff, but that doesn't mean that I like them. Not trying to compare Musk to a serial killer or a Ponzi schemer, but my point is that I think most of his critics will acknowledge that he's an interesting person, even if they think he's a douchebag.

I think he is interesting. The details of his father’s financial transactions feels a little bit obsessive but yeah, obviously if you are the sort to spend time studying Ted Bundy, I guess Elon’s father isn’t totally off brand. Who am I to judge. I find a lot of things interesting myself, though less often people, more often ideas. To each their own!

Musk really brings out some of the worst in this community. I suppose many have subconscious jealousy, because there's the delusions of grandeur types that "just know inside" that eventually they will be huge founder/CEO's of something, and yet no matter what it is, it will never live up to what Elon has done having success after success of the biggest kinds, fucking starting electric vehicles tackling climate change (!!) and the world's premier rocket (!!) company.

Not only that, but he really has the adulation of normies. I mean, this is supposed to be a community of builders, "definite optimism", that we can work hard and will good things into the universe. And yet, I have the most "degenerate" type people on Instagram posting clips of Elon speaking how we need to not get caught up on the doom mongering, it's not going to help us move humanity forward and actually do the things we need to do. Yet here, it's mostly negativity, "we're doomed and everything is shit".

I also frequent a forum about sport X. It's a young man's game and most spend tons of hours practicing it. So who frequents this forum? Generally, all the people who have aged out of it, unable to play all the time like they used to, and they are just shitting all over anything any professional does. I mean they are vicious on the slightest technical things, and yet they're all much worse, sitting on a forum criticizing it, instead of doing it. This thread reminded me of that so much.

Hackernews is the best. Hates crypto check. Hates Elon check. Hates longevity check.

HN has its fair share of cynics. Just like in a stock market you need bulls and bears , you need people to peek behind the stories and tell whether there is substance or full of shit. It's up to us (the other readers) to be influenced or learn or tune out, isn't it? You don't buy a stock or sell one because someone yelled something, do you?

HN prefers nuance to personality cults. When Elon does something good, he tends to get praise here; when he’s in chaotic neutral mode he gets the eye-rolls he deserves.

Anyone trying to stem the tide of censorship on social media platforms would be chaotic good in my book.

Its never to late for due diligence

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252512620/British-court-...

https://www.cio.com/article/304397/the-hp-autonomy-lawsuit-t...

In best case scenario might end up like this with Twitter CEO (which one) facing securities fraud charges.

"Spam/fake accounts do represent less than 5% of users" This claim raises lots of open questions. If they are able to determine the fake users, why they did not just delete these users? Don't they have such an spam detection and prevention process?

Also I think it is a lot more than %5. Also, again, I think it is still OK only if the half percent of the users represent the real (not-spam) users. The spam users are increasing and becoming much harder to determine when the user base grows. Even if you're running a simple blog and you notice lots of spams in your comments when you get some traffic. %5 is just not a realistic value.

Also lets not forget about "the paid" users. There is such a thing behind the scenes and they are not spam/fake.

If you can do a statistical sample of a very small number of users, say 0.1%, and do very expensive detailed investigation of them that determines 5% are fake, you can easily extrapolate that 5% to the entire userbase with small confidence bounds, but have no idea which of the rest of the users are fake.

You can in principle conduct user interviews to determine the likely percentage, without having a clear way to ide tify every individual account. Similar in principle to how you conduct pre-election polls.

5% of monetizable users - a crucial distinction, since it completely ignores bots which might represent 80% of the accounts while not being monetizable

If Twitter is true to their word that bots are less than 5% of the user base, then they should not have a problem providing evidence for that. It's an entirely valid question not just in Musk's interest, it's in the interest of every shareholder.

The only questionable thing here is that Musk either does not grasp (or care) how influential his tweets are. He's tweeting as if he's just a random person with an opinion, but in reality his tweets tank stocks, pump (or dump) crypto, and activates a lot of harassment towards anybody he criticizes. With this in mind, the question about bots should have been asked behind closed doors.

Usually, I don't at all have the impression that there's some evil master plan behind it, they are spontaneous clumsy tweets based on whatever is bothering him.

Which in this case are bots that make Twitter unusable for him, or anybody else with a large following. Twitter very much deserves scrutiny and heavy criticism as it comes to bots. Look at Musk's tweets, within seconds there's hundreds of bots replying all with the same avatar and a slight misspelling of a user they're trying to mimic.

It's a stunningly primitive pattern, and yet still Twitter is entirely incompetent or lax to address it. For years. These bot replies come in from their API and work based on accounts or simple keywords.

Don't try this on somebody else's tweet, but you can test this yourself. Type "I need help with my metamask password". The moment you hit send, the notifications come rolling in.

Setting aside Musk's intentions with Twitter, I am fully in favor of the wake-up call. The bot problem. A mysterious verification protocol. Weird boosts and declines in followers. Unclear censorship and shadow banning protocols. Twitter has some explaining to do.

This takeover attempt carries a similar world historical significance to the Girardian interpretation of the Crucifixion.

Jesus exposed the underlying collective violence, the scapegoat mechanism, that holds society together. Exposing the hidden mechanism weakens it, its psychological efficacy. And so of course the powers that be reacted, trying to silence Jesus and suppress his movement. But in doing so they only proved Jesus’s point, turning him into the ultimate example of the scapegoat and ensuring his message would echo through the ages.

In the Information age, Musk is exposing the informational violence, censorship and propaganda, that power relies upon. And so of course the powers that be conspire to thwart his takeover attempt of the world’s most important social network, pulling the levers of law and regulation and politics to stop this simple business transaction, while running defamatory stories about him in the press. But in doing so they only reveal the true extent of their lies and deceit, ensuring Musk’s message reverberates through the public consciousness. The moment of revelation is inescapable.

Is this a joke?

I think it's art and, as the youths are wont to say, I am here for it!

Musk is Christ is the hottest take I’ve seen in this thread so far, thanks!

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