Even after the drops in tech stocks, he has enough money to fund the takeover if he really wants it. Did he not even consider that possibility? Twitter having bots is not surprising to anyone even a tiny bit informed. Their public records and filings have this data. Did he not even read those?
The whole thing is just bizarre and stupid, yes.
To me it seems like griefer [0] behavior. The goal is to just duck with Twitter and derive joy from others pain.
Musk is a gamer and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s pretty common to see people who are bored or max level or whatever who just mess with other players like a cat does with a mouse. They expel more of their own energy to cause discomfort to their target. An example may be spending 10 gold pieces to make the target lose 1 gold piece.
It “doesn’t make sense” rationally until you take into account the value of the confusion, pain, negative experiences for the target as a sort of currency.
So it seems perfectly common for me to see Musk spend a few billion in fines or whatever to make life worse for Twitter.
One theory I’ve seen to explain why Musk wants to buy Twitter is to shut it down. If that’s the goal then it’s actually much cheaper not to pay $40B to acquire it and shut it down, but to do this sort of thing that seeds uncertainty so when he pulls out the stock price plummets and Twitter dies from an acceleration from it’s likely path.
Musk has lots of followers and was marketing snakeoil perfectly well before Twitter and will be fine after Twitter. I think Musk’s Twitter count is based on his activity, not the other way around. He’s not rich because of Twitter.
But it’s just a theory and there could be other reasons.
Could be that Twitter just had bad management and by cutting lots of staff and establishing a clear ToS they can plaster ads everywhere and let trump back on to drum up activity.
Who knows? It’s kind of boring to me and I try not to follow it, but it leaks into my feeds. I just noticed the behavior and it reminds me of encountering griefers in games I’ve played.
I think this Griefer theory explains a lot of the antisocial behavior we see out of executives and politicians who have beaten the game of life. We structure the game to make "Sociopath" the character class most likely to reach level 99 and win the game, and then we wonder why there are so many sociopaths using game-winning wealth to grief everyone else.
Whether or not that was the purpose is speculation but being held up as a champion of free speech (as if) I’m sure did great things for his ego too.
…maybe they’ll change the law one day and he can run against Schwarzenegger.
Meanwhile, Elon could not run against Arnold for governor of California: Elon is not a citizen of California and Arnold has been disqualified from running again since 2011 due to term limits.
It can get tricky and people (or states) can argue/sue about it because it can make a big difference in taxes. Elon became a citizen of Texas before he made all the money that resulted in his 11 billion dollar federal tax bill last year and in doing so probably saved himself 5 to 7 billion dollars that otherwise would have gone to California.
Musk is not fully trusted by either side. He says a lot of things that traditional conservatives (especially those who don’t buy into climate change) oppose.
The left ideology is the dominant force in pop culture, and those views are in vogue. He’s speaking out against some of those things and that’s getting him a lot of attention.
It will be interesting to see if conservative car types decide to give electric cars a go. Keeping a close eye on a famous YouTube mechanic.
You'd have to live very far away from any so-called "conservative car types" to believe this.
Currently, the conservative base is much more prone to thinking that electric cars are going to be _forced_ on them by a cabal who want to erase fossil fuels use from the earth.
Not saying they're correct, but your theory is just as baseless as theirs is.
And as much as he trash talks Warren Buffet, I think he was basically following his advice of “buy what you know.” He just got burned by amazingly bad market timing.
Due to the market drop the dollar figure is now more expensive relatively speaking. I would not be surprised if some lawsuits fly back and forth and the deal winds up going through at a valuation that is similar in relative terms to the offer when it was made but different numerically.
I have no idea what that means. You think they negotiate to 53.69/share so Musk can save some face?
So they could agree to a new lower price and Twitter shareholders would still make the same money relative to the recent value of the stock and Musk would take a similar ding relative to his net worth.
It's like if you agree with someone's heirs to buy something after the current owners croaks but the current owner takes long enough to croak that the market for that thing changes. The typical path forward is to re-adjust so the deal is just as fair for both parties as it used to be and get on with it. But because of the dollar figures involved here the parties will sue each other instead of exchanging emails/texts like normal people looking to buy and sell stuff do.
What? So let's imagine I bought 10000 shares of TWTR in 2018 for $25. And now Musk wants to revise the offer down from 54.20 down to 34.20. Why should I accept a $200k smaller return, just to be more "fair to Elon" in terms of the effect on his net worth?
Or worse, what if I bought 10000 shares close to the peak? Why should I accept a $200k larger loss on the stock?
He made a contract to pay a certain price - it's in no way a wash to shareholders if he wants to pay less. He just made a bad deal. Nobody forced him to sign a contract to acquire Twitter at that price.
If Twitter had gone through the current tech market drop, without Musk hanging over it, it could easily be down 60-70%, maybe even 80%.
Twitter is a terrible business on paper with the current board. It wouldn't have done well in this tech crash.
Musk must be pretty annoyed that if he had waiting about 30 days he could have gotten twitter for 60% less money.
Consumer law gives you certain protection varying from place to place because it is impossible to verify what you buy online, but a bid on the stock of a public company is not an Amazon purchase and hence does not have the same kind of protections.
And in a way that is Elon's play: to claim that he put that bid in with important information being withheld by the company that would have had a material effect on the bid price. A reasonable person might take the position that Elon should have done his due diligence before making that bid.
WeWork failed at that, and even the slightest increase in intrest rates might doom thosr businesses. We will see so.
Good that you survived so, facing of against 30 million in funding isn't easy, regardless of how stupid that money is.
It's an execution of the contractual terms, not an annulment of the contract.
The whole tech field, including Tesla and Twitter has seen stock prices drop.
Yes Musk can leverage less money, but he also has to spend less to buy Twitter.
Best not even to look at the amounts until your close to retirement and need to adjust your investments.
It doesn't make Elon look great, but some of the other theories…
- he wants to feed his ego because he doesn't already have enough to feed his ego
- he wants to make money because he doesn't have enough money
- he wants to grief twitter because it's such a good tool for him and he uses it every day
- he wants to get more people to preorder cars since the waiting line is only a year right now
...are just bonkers.
Generally, this is far too complicated and involved to be any kind of effective scheme. He has professional managers and lawyers who could have easily come up with dozens of ways to sell tsla stock without this public legal morass.
The situation most likely is as it seems: He wanted to buy twitter for personal reasons and is in the process of doing so.
*** He wanted to buy twitter for personal readons [reasons] and is in the process of doing so. ***
I suppose that he wanted to buy Twitter. Perhaps it was for personal and business reasons. I simply don't know.
Also, at this point it seems like he might have decided not to purchase Twitter.
Nonetheless, the following comment which you successfully refuted...
*** Am I the only one who thinks it's obvious he was pretending to buy Twitter to try cover his cashing out of massive amounts of tesla? ***
was ridiculous.
He could have justified the stock sale in plenty of other ways, including reallocating funds to his other companies, without forcing himself into a $44B deal.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
Not seriously, HOWEVER, I would now worry about him a lot more as a competitor or enemy as he's shown he's happy to blow what is -- to me -- an unthinkable amount of cash on whimsy and for the lulz.
This is all a side show and negotiation tactics. Really not bizarre at all. The original offer is at least 10 billion or so too much now.