Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I think we're in lockstep here.

I'm no fan of Musk (he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech) but that doesn't mean that Twitter leadership is any better. Just not as well PR'd.

Dorsey himself was mostly an imbecile who drank too much of his own Kool Aid. Twitter has for years been the standard bearer for the most opaque, and incoherent content management; from user feedback to bots, just a village with only idiots. It was eventually going to catch up to them, the question now is to whom does the bulk of the suffering land on, not whether it lands or not.

View on HN

I’m a huge musk fan, but I still think his trying to get out of the Twitter deal is lame buyer's remorse and his arguments are weak. I see it as mostly unrelated to this mudge issue.

Musk posted a meme explaining why he pulled out.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1546344529460174849

Yeah - but that's dumb bullshit. He can't legally pull out because of that.

He waived all of that to force Twitter to agree to the deal (because it'd be basically impossible for the board to reject it). This made sense at the time, because the board was looking for ways to weasel out of it because (imo) they politically don't like Musk. Then the market crashed and suddenly he was overpaying a ton for Twitter, then he complains about bots (this isn't new information from when he made the deal).

Whether or not the bots thing is true isn't even relevant based on the deal he put forward.

I think he earnestly wanted to buy Twitter for principled reasons around speech which I agree with. He structured the deal in such a way where Twitter's board couldn't reject it (because it was so favorable to shareholders). Then when the market tanked the deal way overpriced Twitter, but he had already committed to it so he's trying everything to get out of it. I suspect he actually believes the things he's arguing (he's always seemed pretty earnest to me), I just think he's wrong in this case and it's mostly driven by motivated reasoning.

That doesn't mean Twitter isn't a disaster, just that they're in the right with regard to him having to close the deal.

>I think he earnestly wanted to buy Twitter for principled reasons around speech which I agree with. He structured the deal in such a way where Twitter's board couldn't reject it (because it was so favorable to shareholders). Then when the market tanked the deal way overpriced Twitter, but he had already committed to it so he's trying everything to get out of it.

That's not how business valuations work (it's how speculation works). If Twitter was fairly valued by Elon Musk before the crash then it would be fairly valued now - the fundamentals of the business haven't changed.

One could argue that the value of a company is the sum of net present value of the future free cash flows it can produce. If the market crash is because of peope realizing there is a recession coming for example, it makes sense to update your expectations about the net present value of future cash flows - probably in sum a bit lower than before probably.

"If Twitter was fairly valued by Elon Musk before the crash then it would be fairly valued now"

That's a big if - I think a lot of this stuff is more speculation than any sort of fundamental cash flow valuation. A lot Twitter's actual value (its network effect and influence) is hard to measure anyway.

> That's not how business valuations work (it's how speculation works). If Twitter was fairly valued by Elon Musk before the crash then it would be fairly valued now - the fundamentals of the business haven't changed.

Some "fundamentals" of a business like twitter's value are:

1. Product/market fit, finances, etc. What you mean by "fundamentals" I think.

2. How easy it is for them to raise money (i.e. the "public sentiment" of VC towards their company and the industry)

3. How likely it is for regulation to stifle their growth, which is a derivative of public sentiment.

4. How much shares can be sold for, i.e. the public sentiment about how much it's worth.

5. Predicted future sentiment of their users and of advertisers, both of which impact expected future revenue.

2-5 all change with public sentiment, and a market crash changes public sentiment of many companies at once.

It's self-evident that elon musk is overpaying more now than before unless you insist that twitter's value is not actually related to 2-5 above, or 2-5 above should have been trivially predictable 100% accurately already as part of its "fundamentals", both of which seem obviously silly.

I mean, okay. But it's not like he had $44B in cash lying around.

Implicitly, this was always, "I'm going to trade X% of Tesla for 100% of Twitter." Then the valuation of both Twitter and Tesla dropped, so to the extent that you think the "value" of a business is wholly determined by its fundamentals, then okay, they're both still the same "value" but now have lower prices.

Except that he hadn't sold the Tesla yet, so he was trading Tesla (at new lower price) for Twitter (at old higher price), and if you previously thought that X% of Tesla was worth Twitter, and Twitter is still worth the same thing, it's now X+Y% of Tesla.

Of course, it's not like the fundamentals of Twitter didn't change. Twitter's revenue comes from advertising, and it's entirely reasonable to believe that it was actually materially affected by the economic downturn, not just in terms of the speculation of the stock, but by how the business functions.

(None of this is to take the position that Musk ought to be able to back out of the deal: if the market had gone even hotter and now Musk could've traded less than X% of Tesla for the agreed upon, now conservative price for Twitter, it's not like the deal would've been renegotiated.)

Valuation involves imperfect information. As the information changes so does the valuation.

granted, I'm not entirely certain Musk wants to pull out vs. getting a better price/discount on the purchase...

The why doesn't matter, he explicitly waived the ability to back out of the deal for any of the reasons he's cited.

Twitter is a tyre pyre, but he should have thought about that before putting ink on that deal.

If Musk actually believes this represents anything it puts his IQ in the single digit - low double digits range.

So what you're saying is that an idiot can become the richest man in the world without being born into it?

How often has that happened in the entire history?

If 5 billion people flip coins all day long one of them will eventually flip only heads all day.

Profoundly dumb people have been heads of state, CEOs etc. So why not the richest person in the world?

Alternative suggestion would be that he doesnt actually believe that the reason he is trying not to buy twitter is the reason he was buying twitter.

>Profoundly dumb people have been heads of state, CEOs etc. So why not the richest person in the world?

It's simple to explain away - other people have appointed heads of state. And I have not heard of an idiot (in medical sense) top20 Forbes list CEO who's also been there since day 1 (i.e. the founder, not some figurehead appointed by a board for an arbitrary reason).

Can you appoint yourself the strongest person in the world or the fastest 100m runner in the world?

[0]While someone like the Saudi king or Putin can in theory allocate their respective states' funds to themselves and thus become the richest, that would simply be converting power into money, and not a result of some kind of entrepreneurial ability.

>If 5 billion people flip coins all day long one of them will eventually flip only heads all day.

This argument is flawed since that would assume a person would win some money every time they flipped correctly, when in reality nobody is going to pay anyone for succeeding in a flip. And applying that directly to business also breaks down because it is self-evident that the ways to lose money greatly outnumber the ways to gain money.

He literally said he was buying it to fix the bot problem. It's not like he was unaware that bots existed on twitter.

Right? Elon was pretty much insinuating, before the deal, that he thought the bot problem on twitter was much bigger than what Twitter officially stated. And now he's trying to get out of the deal by claiming that the bot problem on twitter was much bigger than what Twitter officially stated.

He is trying to get out of the deal because he's about to lose billions of dollars buying a pretty crappy company. All this stuff about bots is dishonest nonsense. He could have chosen to do due diligence, and chose not to.

Oh they are unrelated, but he will leverage the Mudge moment for all it can be.

Never been a "fan" of a personality, but I used to really like Tesla and SpaceX, but after hearing a little about how their critical software is...not developed like critical software...I am very wary of what kind of engineering is going over there. With Musk deciding to amp up his celebrity with Twitter antics, I just can't respect him any more.

Can you elaborate? I'm very curious how they develop software.

Without getting into details, AFAICT they do not use any typical high-assurance software stacks, such as Ada or Spark or such that might be typical in avionics, like Airbus software. The use off-the-shelf tools like C++ and LLVM.

There's obviously a lot of legacy Ada out there, but would you say it's 'typical' for new code being written? I don't have that sense. There's probably more MISRA C/++ code floating around at this point. I have no idea how compliant SX is, but I've heard mentions of Power of 10 rules and JPL standards. For what it's worth, their track record doesn't seem concerning nowadays.

I think commercial avionics is the only place you still find ada. Cars have been c or c++ even for safety critical for many years. Even defense abandoned ada well over a decade ago, and they invented it right? And medical jumped right on the windows ce bandwagon as soon as it popped up... I feel like a good pipelene with lots of static analysis asan, and really good tests is probably the best you can expect out of safety critical stuff these days. The days of provably safe software, and certified compilers are probably gone. And if you told me tesla was using folders with dates in the names for version control, and they preferred to test in production, I wouldn't ne surprised. Horrified, but not surprised.

Well, US defense industry got a waiver for C++ in JSF but I'm not sure if call it a success story.

A lot of stuff is still going on legacy stacks that Ada was created to replace

Not to rain on your parade, but neither do any of the other automotive companies. Ada and SPARK is amazing, but I don't think I've seen it used outside aerospace/defence.

You don't know what kind of tools they've developed internally and Ada/Spark is far from the end-all be-all of high assurance programming.

High assurance comes from the overall systems design and testing, not the software itself. Afterall, radiation can cause any piece of software, including those written in Ada, to completely skip instructions.

What is amusing is I am a fan of musk precisely because "he's truly worked very hard to be the most provacatively pustulent punkass of tech"

I tend to like people that blow up social norms and conventions

What like calling a first responder a pedophile?

Thats a major error in judgement. Even billionaires are capable of this

Doubling down is worse than error in judgement.

The man injected himself into an ongoing crisis he had little insight into, and when rejected, his ego was so hurt that he used his influence to accuse individuals he knew nothing about if pedophilia, all while they were in the midst of trying to rescue a dozen children from imminent death.

That’s not a “major error in judgement”. That’s the behavior of a completely deranged individual.

> completely deranged individual

That's quite a large exaggeration. I can think of some much much worse things that an actual "completely deranged individual" would do.

Musk was butthurt and lashed out. That does not equal "completely deranged individual"

"Musk was butthurt and lashed out. That does not equal "completely deranged individual" "

When you have the kind of audience and pull he has, unless you are totally daft to it (which he shows no sign of) then yes it's very abusively deranged.

> Musk was butthurt and lashed out. That does not equal "completely deranged individual"

Lashed out in a way where, given his influence, he could easily ruin the person's life. Which is bad in and of itself. But he did it while the man was actively involved in trying to save a dozen children from immediate death. And then doubled down later.

That is deranged.

lmao the extent to which the tech crowd will defend all of his stupidity and let him get away with a slap on his wrist. He had a megalomaniac ego moment and called some of the greatest heroes to have ever existed pedophiles for being the only people capable of pulling of a rescue like that. One of them died in the rescue efforts. Musk is all the way up his own ass, and this needs to be acknowledged regardless of his supposed "genius".

No calling out government, twitter, etc on their BS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com