Hacker News Reader

Comment by RustyConsul | Hacker News Reader

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'.

View on HN

> 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.

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

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com