Elon Musk moves ahead with Twitter deal in 13D filing
sec.gov
sec.gov
If it did turn out that Zatko had been talking to Musk's team, that would be a very big deal, not only undercutting a big part of Musk's current case (which he was set to lose anyways) but also falsifying several statements made both to the Delaware court and also to Congress(?!).
I wonder also if the appearance, performative as it is, that Musk is choosing to buy Twitter rather than being forced to buy Twitter is helpful for financing. He's more or less obligated to purchase Twitter, but there's no rule preventing him from offsetting the expense with a syndicate of co-investors; that syndicate might be easier to put together if he can shift the narrative.
Twitter would be lucky to be trading at $20 / share minus the supporting bid. Musk overpaid by a minimum of $15 billion because he doesn't properly control his impulse problems. There were numerous ways he could have proceeded more slowly in pursuing a purchase, without so tightly locking himself into that grotesque price tag.
Let's put his stupidity into perspective: $15 billion was his total net worth five years ago. It was half his net worth a bit over two years ago.
Next up, Tesla's stock is going to sink considerably from where it's at. It'll just amplify the pain of this over-pay.
Twitter is Teslas marketing department, and probably the marketing department for other Musk firms.
Musk gets to make sure this very valuable entity remains valuable.
Lots of press outlast are being turned into sponsored non-profits.
Seems Musk wants a similar model for this non-profiting for-profit.
I think it's just strong evidence that a lot of rich people got lucky once and managed to leverage that into getting richer because so much of life becomes Easy Mode at that point. Immediately not being subject to the "Boots" theory, but at scale, makes a huge difference.
I think there's a strong argument that Musk actually made a few smart decisions - right time, right place for electric cars. But reading some of the documents that have come out of this make it seems like he hit his limits a long time ago and is now floundering along uselessly.
To me it's just another strong argument that we shouldn't tolerate billionaires and they should be taxed out of existence until they're merely "extremely incredibly wealthy" and not nation-states unto themselves.
40B+ to scaffold a marketing department?
But in this case I don't think Musk is playing checkers, when everybody else is playing chess.. I think he was just doin drugs, and tweetin twetes.
Until you account for how grotesquely overvalued TSLA is, anyway
Dragging the rest of the stock market with it.
It’s like that domino meme, where the tiny brick is “19 year old writes bot tracking Musks private plane” and the huge brick being “stock market crashes”
People keep saying insane stuff like this as if the site just runs itself. That is absolutely not the case.
[1]: https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/the-co...
Censorship as a service...
[1] https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/twitter-saud...
If you compare the purchase price to what Twitter likely would cost without the deal–using the price change of other social media platforms and internet ad platforms as a benchmark–it seems likely that Musk is paying ~$20 billion over the current market value.
If Musk wants to offload even more stocks, he takes huge haircut. At least 50% or more. It's likely better to wait for better times and restructure Twitter.
No matter how you look at it, this is horrible deal for Musk unless he can make Twitter shine again.
Someone like Warren Buffet can make a one phone call and the deal gets closed in few days because his word can be trusted.
Of course, I thought this even before the Twitter fiasco started. I just believe it even more strongly now.
Brilliant man who worked in aviation and aerospace and did many things. Eccentric person with serious mental issues.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...
I have some family members from SA… very interesting culture to say the least!
Just because you did something stupid and wrong as a kid doesn't mean you should be able to get away with doing it as an adult.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-ric...
I wouldn't be surprised if Elon Musk only had about $1 billion liquid (aside from whatever goes towards paying known obligations, like the Twitter deal and tax bills), making him only 2x richer in cash terms than Johnny Depp at his peak.
But, I believe, you are largely correct. I don't think rich people rescue PMU horses.
He seems to have plenty of cash
What a great outlook for Twitter...
But if his investors wanted to get out of their contracts, they might have legal standing (IANAL), or at least enough threat of it to be allowed out of the contract by Musk to avoid more court battles, based on the fact that he has caused MAE...
After all, there is an open court case of Twitter v Musk (separate to Musk v Twitter) in which Twitter claimed:
"Since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price."
and
"Musk’s strategy is also a model of bad faith. While pretending to exercise the narrow right he has under the merger agreement to information for “consummation of the transaction,” Musk has been working furiously—albeit fruitlessly—to try to show that the company he promised to buy and not disparage has made material misrepresentations about its business to regulators and investors. He has also asserted, falsely, that consummation of the merger depends on the results of his fishing expedition and his ability to secure debt financing."
(Copied from the legal case Twitter filed - https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/07/14/twitter-vs-musk-t... )
Please if you are a bored billinaire that got suckered into this, take it all the way to trial. Then in the closing arguments "its just a prank bro"
Not equity. And probably at worse rates than could have been obtained in April.
$20 billion cash from Musk, $6.25 billion in personal bank loans to Musk (he is hooking his Tesla stocks)
Rest is senior secured bank loans and subordinated debt loaned against Twitter stock. The cost of the debt is about $1 billion per year if I remember correctly.
> In conclusion, Elon Musk's Twitter purchase will have to be heavily financed by someone else in order for him to complete it.
> In May, according to an SEC filing, Musk's Twitter buy was most heavily subsidized by Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud
Not a great sign for activists using Twitter speaking out against the Saudi government, just based on what has happened already in the past.
If they cant shift it off to the market they will just stick it in the trading book.
They may have to resell some of it at, say, 14% to get some of the risk off their books.
Making Twitter profitable cannot possibly include magnifying the alt-right minority of the U.S. Driving the moderate users and progressives away with TFG and moderation changes that allow QAnon misinformation would severely damage Twitter as a company.
I also guarantee some group of savvy developers are building Twitter 2.0 and will release it if and when Musk starts destroying the company from within.
Employees will quit. Users will abandon the site.
And I still think Musk is clueless about the tech stack. It's mindbogglingly complex and he's not going to replace the hardcore tech staff with sycophants off the street.
There's a necessary equilibrium required to keep Twitter going and growing the platform. I just don't think he's going to outright gut it and turn it into a mindless "free speech" platform. The shit-posts would humiliate him.
Or he turns it into Maga Social and doesn't care about financial losses.
Musk might like the circus around him, but a lot of people who have been texting him probably aren't enjoying the hundreds of news articles analyzing their private conversations. He could have gotten some communications that he'll become a persona non grata in many of his circles if he doesn't stop the court procedures immediately
When you are the richest or one of the top 5 richest people in the world, you are always at the center of circle and people flock (or bend) to you. I suspect this was more about him and how he looked than concern for those folks texting him.
He fucked up and his other alternatives were waaay more expensive (e.g. being forced to sell more stock and lose control of TSLA, shorters have a field day, people lose confidence on TSLA even though FSD is "one month away from working", it could all go down because of this).
No one sheds 44B "to honor a deal", at least not him, lol.
Epilogue: Matt Levine was on point all the time, I'd like to hear now from all the folks who were saying that Musk was going to get away with it.
inb4 "it was all 4D chess, this is what he wanted" Yeah, sure pal ...
I can't help but feel everyone is getting exactly what they deserve. Elon is buying a company he didn't want to buy as punishment for trolling that company and their leadership on that company's own platform. Twitter is getting new leadership and lord knows they need it [*]. And the shareholders are getting paid what they were told they'd be paid.
[*] Twitter truly is a clown car that fell into a gold mine, and as Elon says, the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1347126794172948483?lang...
I agree, though, the $1B is a red herring.
Twitter "deserves" this? No they don't.
The Delaware Chancery email/twitter account that follows proceedings noted that Musk's defence team sued to unseal a great deal of the comms for some reason that, frankly, defies all understanding. So it's not as though this "leaked" or Musk lost a motion to have them sealed. They were sealed by default. Musk moved to have them unsealed over Twitter's objections.
No, but many were thinking any breaking up fee would be 10B+. At that point, he might as well buy and have some asset at the end.
Levine was definitely on point. And I repeated here what he and others said, if Musk wants out negotiations start at 44B.
The "breakup fee" was a judge ordering him to pay 44B, plus a lot embarrassment. As @matwood pointed out, you start negotiating from that.
Musk would've jumped at the chance to pay a measly billion to get out of it months ago if he'd had the opportunity.
Some people did speculate that the reason Musk started publicly disparaging Twitter was in the hope that some of his financing would try to pull their agreements thus triggering this clause, but the expert opinions I saw were that the court wouldn't accept that, especially after Twitter filed suit against him, and sure enough that strategy (if it was a strategy) didn't pay off - otherwise he wouldn't be where he is today. (Matt Levine covered this particular theory well in his Bloomberg newsletter.)
Exhibit E is the part of the deal Musk signed to buy Twitter that's titled "Equity commitment letter dated April 20, 2022", and #6 is the final point of the exhibit which is a generic boilerplate clause with a sub header of "Governing Law; Consent to Jurisdiction". This point basically means "unless any laws make this contract illegal, because our contract isn't allowed to supersede any laws".
Exhibit E #6 is on page 113 of the contract [0] and I'll paste the full text below but it's a boring read! [1].
Also worth noting that even within Exhibit E, paragraph 2 says that the investor's obligations to fund this deal end only in two circumstances - either when they pay their obligation as part of the deal closing, or when the deal falls apart because of something in the contract terms (ie out of their hands). Full text also below [2]
[-1] edit to add that I'm not a lawyer (nor is this comment advice), just a bit of a nerd who's had the pleasure (:|) of negotiating and sometimes writing a few more contracts than I wish I had over the past decade, including with a couple of big publicly traded US companies. (Nothing close to as big as this deal of course, but these bits of the contract are pretty typical.)
[0] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/7d8ab22...
[1] "Governing Law; Consent to Jurisdiction. This letter agreement, and all actions, causes of action, claims, cross-claims, third-party claims or proceedings of any kind (whether at law, in equity, in contract, in tort or otherwise) that may be based upon, arise out of or relate to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim, third-party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith) shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Delaware, regardless of legal requirements that might otherwise govern under applicable principles of conflicts of laws. Each of the parties hereto hereby irrevocably and unconditionally (a) submits, for itself and its property, to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Delaware Court of Chancery (or, only if the Delaware Court of Chancery declines to accept jurisdiction over a particular matter, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware), and any appellate court from any thereof, in any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind arising out of or relating to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third- party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith), or for recognition or enforcement of any judgment, and agrees that all claims in respect of any such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind shall be heard and determined in such Delaware Court of Chancery (or, only if the Delaware Court of Chancery declines to accept jurisdiction over a particular matter, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware), (b) waives, to the fullest extent it may legally and effectively do so, any objection which it may now or hereafter have to the laying of venue of any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind arising out of or relating to this letter agreement, or the negotiation, execution or performance hereof (including any action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind based upon, arising out of or related to any representation or warranty made in or in connection herewith) in the Delaware Court of Chancery, any federal court of the United States of America sitting in the State of Delaware, or in any Delaware State court, (c) waives, to the fullest extent permitted by legal requirement, the defense of an inconvenient forum to the maintenance of such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind in any such court and (d) agrees that a final judgment in any such action, cause of action, claim, cross-claim or third-party claim or proceeding of any kind shall be conclusive and may be enforced in other jurisdictions by suit on the judgment or in any other manner provided by legal requirement."
[2] "Termination. The Equity Investor’s obligation to fund the Aggregate Equity Commitment will terminate automatically and immediately upon the earliest to occur of (a) the consummation of the Closing (if the Closing occurs) (but only if such obligation to fund the Aggregate Equity Commitment shall have been discharged in connection therewith) and (b) a termination or expiration of the Offer in accordance with its terms. Upon the termination or expiration of this letter agreement, no party hereto shall have any further obligations or liabilities hereunder."
Throughout this whole saga it has been popularly believed that (1) the breakup fee represents an option for Musk to get out of the deal and that (2) the financing contingency is easy to get out of by having the banks cancel their commitments.
Both have been untrue the entire time. If they were true, then Musk would not be proceeding with the deal at the original price.
I don't think at any point was he actually backing out of the deal, and I certainly don't think the whole thing was an elaborate scheme to sell Tesla stock.
This is like going into a Honda dealership, signing a bill of sale at 20% over MSRP for a Civic without looking at it, then arguing you should get a discount because the floor mats are ugly.
He fucked around, and he found out.
There's a reason everyone incorporates in Delaware. They don't have time for shenanigans.
You also don’t do that for a company you don’t truly intend to purchase, especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
IMO the fact that he made even one tweet ever about this whole debacle (prior to resolution) is evidence that he can’t trust his team (or his team is truly bad).
Your opinion relies on a couple things that are pretty unlikely. One, that someone as successful as Musk wouldn’t engage counsel that he completely trusts with 20% of his net worth. Two, that he went down this road without a real commitment to buy it, despite spending a ton of money in the effort to buy it.
The market turned, the valuation changed, and Musk tried a tactic to renegotiate his position. In the end, he is going to ultimately get what he really wanted, but the value of what he wanted will take a little more time to recover.
He entered into an entirely reckless contract because he was riding the high of his Big Joke. Not sure what’s hard to believe about an egomaniacal self-described troll getting himself into a tricky situation. Schoolchildren do it all the time.
Who knows what the deal is with his relationship with counsel but go ahead and read some of their filings to see what a clown show it is. Some of them seem to have been written by Musk himself and making claims that don’t even resemble legal arguments.
I have, but I am not a lawyer. Perhaps you are and can speak intelligently to their validity. What I will say is that there is a better than average chance that exceptionally good and well paid lawyers drew them up and a better than average chance that many of the armchair legal analysts commenting here and elsewhere are not good and well paid lawyers.
Wealthy business people I know are not adverse to risk, but they are methodical and are generally careful when large amounts of their own capital is at risk. This smells more to me like a calculated negotiation tactic to try grab a lower buy price that didn’t pay off for Musk more than anything else. In then end, he got what he originally wanted and at the price he was originally willing to pay.
I'm curious if there will be any attempt to recover damages from his legal representation. Maybe there was deficiency? Although I doubt any legal form is sufficiently capitalized or insured to make more than a tiny dent in the harm done to his fortune by this whole debacle. To be clear I assume he's been adequately represented but I mean he did make this offer so further buffoonery would not surprise.
Think about it, no one really got hurt here. Musk ultimately buys Twitter for the agreed price, no shareholder loses. Musk assumes the cost for Twitter’s lawyers for the lawsuit to preserve the deal by buying Twitter and Musk paid his lawyers to defend it. It was chump change to a billionaire to take a long shot bet to maybe make the deal a little sweeter and it didn’t work. Oh well, Musk has not lost any more than he was originally willing to risk.
That's not what twitter thinks and it's right in their original lawsuit:
155. Twitter has suffered and will continue to suffer irreparable harm as a result of defendants’ breaches.
If that harm is reflected in something else (the reputation of Twitter maybe?) that is damage Musk did to his own company.
So maybe whoever co-invested with Musk got hurt a bit, but they’ll still get whatever part of Twitter they wanted, for the price they agreed on.
> You don’t think anyone was hurt by the absolutely enormous amount of stress he chose to create?
Fair point, I imagine the last couple of months have not been great for many Twitter-employees.
> Or the army of lawyers that Twitter shareholders had to pay for?
As far as I know the shareholders don't directly pay for the lawyers, that money comes from some financial reserve Twitter has. In normal circumstances massive legal costs can reduce the value of a company, but in this case the shareholders will be able to sell each share for the same $54.20 as before the lawsuit. If the company becomes less valuable because of this, that's the problem of the next owner of the company. Since Musk will end up owning Twitter, he'll end up paying for the lawyers on both sides of this suit. Or am I missing something?
Only if you take really specific statements and turn them into a general theory. But this discussion isn't about theoretical thefts and deathbeds, it's one about the reality that Musk is buying Twitter[0]. There is no "army of lawyers that Twitter shareholders had to pay for", because the current shareholders won't have to pay anything. Twitter is paying for the lawyers and Musk will and up owning Twitter. That's not some moral judgement, it's a description of the facts. Nothing I've said so far is in defense of what Musk does.
To be clear: I behavior is justifiable. He created this mess by making really dumb decisions and then trying everything to get out of this situation by not caring about anything or anyone but himself. It has been a huge waste of time and money. But as it turns out, Musk will be the one owning a company he doesn't want, and as that owner he'll be the one paying for that wasted time and for the costs made by both parties of the lawsuit. It just seems that the person that's by far the most hurt by Musks actions is Musk himself.
[0]In this entire comment I'm assuming the deal actually goes through.
Some employees may have suffered undue emotional distress due to the excess uncertainty.
Anyone who sold TWTR while the price was depressed due to Musk's unjustified legal maneuvering certainly suffered economic injury.
Elon's creditors and co-investors may view his maneuvering as having damaged the asset, thus decreasing their expected returns.
To reiterate: I don't know if any of these people have a legal claim. And I acknowledge that Musk certainly injured himself the most. But the economic injuries suffered by these other parties are not trivial.
That is absolutely hilarious but also sad that people in 2022 are so fragile that they would try to claim such nonsense in all seriousness.
Never mind.
Anyone’s job can “potentially disappear” at any time and often without public notice and drama. I know former colleagues who showed up to work on a Monday morning at a company that had been operating profitably for decades to find the office shuttered and the company out of business just because the real estate it owned was more valuable to the owners than the company itself. No one at any level below the ownership group and CEO/CFO had any idea it was coming. Just wake up like another day and boom—a thousand people out of work.
If Twitter folk were worried to the point of health implications they have had six months to make a change. I know folks that would have given precious body parts for that kind of notice.
>what year this new “fragility” kicked in…
Apparently some year prior to 2022.
He risked his dignity and he lost it.
Even if this had been a negotiating ploy, Musk (through his extreme bad faith, including apparent destruction of evidence) put Twitter’s board in a box where they couldn’t possibly accept a lower price without exposing themselves to substantial personal legal exposure. He already agreed to buy the company at $44 billion, after all. There was no reason for them to return to the table, and many, many reasons for them not to.
> The market turned, the valuation changed, and Musk tried a tactic to renegotiate his position. In the end, he is going to ultimately get what he really wanted, but the value of what he wanted will take a little more time to recover.
Is this not someone making an informed judgement about Musk's motivations?
Not really, I’d call it more an uninformed opinion since I and pretty much everyone else on here was not privy to the inner working of Musk’s brain.
You can defend Musk all you want, but you simply cannot make the argument that he is a traditional, by-the-books, conservative business man. He's an impulsive, irrational, self-obsessed, risk-taking billionaire who flouts convention, tradition and consensus. His reckless instincts and his willingness to bend or break 'the rules' have worked incredibly well for him in the past. This time he fucked up big-time.
> ...especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
You think Musk is the kind of person who lets lawyers lead him around by the nose, that he is someone with a well-known and well-established reverence for the legal profession and the rule of law? This is absolutely not the case.
> Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
This is hilarious because the first part of your comment is literally you presenting sharing your view Musk's motivation (eg. "He has every intention of buying Twitter because he signed a purchase agreement! People who sign purchase agreements don't not buy the companies they committed to purchasing!").
Anyway, it's definitely not too early to make an informed judgement about the Twitter conflagration. Musk did everything he could to drag this debacle into the spotlight rather than handling it more discretely. He tried to weaponize public opinion for his own aims, and he also (very publicly) made a series of misleading or patently false allegations about Twitter in order to get his way. It's too late to argue that we should approach this with a neutral perspective.
I’m literally indifferent to to the man and his musings and I think that gives me a bit of a different perspective then the binary Musk opinions here on HN. However, my opinions are as uninformed to Musk’s internal intentions as all of the armchair lawyering and MBA’ing that is going on here…I guess I am just willing to admit it.
What is a fact is at the end of the day he is buying a company that he wanted, at a price he was willing to pay, and will do with it what he wants, despite Twitter’s attempts initially to keep him from buying it and apparently half the worlds horror that he is actually going to get it.
I appreciate the perspective you take, I think it's refreshing.
I think a lot of this debate centers around exactly this premise - we don't know that. We don't know he wanted it, and we don't know it's a price he was willing to pay. He said that but his actions don't really align with his words.
He has a history of playing fast-and-loose with the truth, either sharing optimistic or totally unrealistic deadlines that had not a chance of being met. Crazy technical solutions like the hyperloop that had to be walked back almost completely for being nutty. And a history of publicly attacking people who cross him ("pedo guy"). While he's got a lot of achievements too, his communication style leads (speaking for myself at least) people not to put quite so much faith into what he says, - and to pay a lot more attention to what he does.
We're all just speculating.
Yeah, plenty of deals get re-traded between signing and closing and purchase prices get re-cut, but the extreme bad faith by Musk after he signed the merger agreement made it functionally impossible for twitter’s board to do anything except hold him to the deal he made.
Everything he has done since signing the deal has been about delaying so he could sell TSLA, and letting tweeps know their values don't align with his. Hence asking the court to release his texts, and going full Russia Today right before he makes this offer to complete.
> This rule also covers any employee who has obtained material non-public corporate information, as well as any person who has received a “tip” from an Insider of the Company concerning information about the Company that is material and nonpublic, and trades (i.e. purchase or sells) the Company’s stock or other securities" [1]
The formal Insider Trading Policy applies to any person who has the information, for the purposes of this law Insider ( as defined in the first part) is materially same.
While you are half right that they are not "Insider" the law does not differentiate any person who got the information from the "Insider", so they are still a insider from the SEC regulations PoV and law applies to them if they trade on material non-public information obtained from a "tip".
[1]https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1164964/000101968715...
Provided you got the information legally.
Of the examples you cite:
Drone surveillance -> Probably illegal depending on local laws
clever analysis of public ID -> Likely legal, although given how CFAA is extremely loose on its interpretation of unlawful access I wouldn't be shocked if a prosecutor successfully argues that it was illegal .
Pretty sure acquiring it illegally doesn’t make you an insider, and you could still trade on it - albeit be liable for the crime you committed to get the info.
A famous recent example was the hack of press releases before they were released and used to make 100+M profit. [1] .
Note the SEC pursued this case not DoJ . SEC has only civil mandate and cannot pursue cases for hacking directly under CFAA which would be a criminal offense only the DoJ can and perhaps also did concurrently
"The SEC’s complaint charges each of the 32 defendants with violating federal antifraud laws and related SEC antifraud rules and seeks a final judgment ordering the defendants to pay penalties, return their allegedly ill-gotten gains with prejudgment interest, and be subject to permanent injunctions from future violations of the antifraud laws."
It's a bit confusing though, because earlier in the same article they seem to imply it's for insider trading. But they don't seem to actually say that's what they are being charged with.
The court of public opinion is a bully pulpit for the wealthy elite but only if its the public opinion you intend to sway. Elon was about to start taking swings at investors and board members, who arent generally moved by public bloviation or jingoist egocentrism. Chancery court didnt last long but im sure it was a sobering experience for such a cloistered elite, assuming the near constant looming presence of the SEC hasnt rattled his bones enough.
Skipping due diligence is the buyer's option. It may be irresponsible if you're using other people's money (especially money from public capital markets), but there's nothing that obligates me to closely look at an asset that I'm buying with my money or even my money and my buddies' money that they pledged.
It has potential to become the most liked tweet in history.
Matt Levine is always on point. He's a brillant writer and one of the funniest, too. A true living genius.
But even he wasn't able to predict that last development.
Also: Poor Matt. Tomorrow was supposed to be a day off for him, and it probably won't... ;-)
It may also be his most fun to write.
Go Matt! (Vacation can wait a day)
> Last night Musk tweeted that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” which sounds exhausting. The app will do everything, but it will start with two functions: You can read tweets, or you can be shot on a rocket into space. Choose wisely.
And also:
> Is he going to try to raise more money? Is he going to go out to potential investors again and say “changed my mind, Twitter is great now, this’ll be fun, can I pencil you in for $1 billion?” (...) Every little bit helps, no? What does the disclosure document for that investment look like? “Yes Elon Musk has said that Twitter is a dysfunctional fraudulent conspiracy, but everything is fine now, and it’s an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”
At the top:
> Programming note: I apparently have some very bad sins to atone for.
And then at the end of the Twitter saga:
> Anyway I’m tired of this and I have a new retirement plan. Every time this newsletter starts with “Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow,” Musk does something outrageous, and Twitter’s stock swings up or down. So I’m going to buy a bunch of Twitter straddles and then take a vacation, while Twitter is still public and that trick can still work. I’ll make a fortune.
He would need more sleep for that. I think a lot of his bizarre behavior can be explained by (a) generally being an asshole (b) medicating to avoid sleep.
So “what not to do, Elon Musk style”: Be unclear about intentions, have second thoughts, trying to play 4D chess with apparently no advisor than absolute amateurs to tame him or PR department to sway the public opinion your way, then keep being erratic with the judge.
Musk is now offering to execute the signed deal – which is the only thing Twitter asked to court to enforce. So it's absolutely helping resolve the dispute faster, without further legal costs or burdens on the court – and probably with the same end state as was most-likely earlier. And perhaps by signaling a specific clear future, damage to Twitter's position from the uncertainty & acrimony will halt & start to heal... benefiting its future owner, Musk.
Further, Twitter's complaint only asks the court to compel performance under the original agreement - it doesn't ask for extra damages from Musk's flip-flops. If Musk is offering exactly that performance, there's nothing for the court the compel, unless & until things change again. (If that happens, the stayed action can resume – and the judge would be even more disposed against Musk et al.)
If Twitter is still sold at the original fixed price, then Musk is left holding the asset he himself damaged and would have to essentially pay damages to himself.
The shareholders will still get the same payout regardless of the alleged damage to the company, unless they decided to sell before the sale, but I am not a lawyer so I don't know if they'd be able to sue successfully.
Of course, I don't believe Musk is the sole owner, so his co-buyers might have a case.
Shareholder lawsuits are weird; maybe someone who owns Twitter Inc stock could claim Musk's actions caused them to sell early, or otherwise suffer losses (margin calls?) due to his actions temporarily pushing the stock value below the deal price, even if the deal concludes. But I've not seen hints of any such stretches.
I largely agree with this supposition, which makes it unfortunate that Musk (and co) can take a step like this to try to eliminate discovery that could point to perjury and a clear conspiracy for market-manipulation.
Don’t assume that this prevents the matter from being looked at more closely though. Musk is a juicy target.
I can’t exactly blame Musk for taking the lesson from the last several years that the American social, political and legal systems are seemingly incapable of dealing with bad-faith actors who are loose with the truth and fluid in their commitment to their, uh, commitments, but it’s nice to know that Delaware Chancery is a place where bluster and obfuscation doesn’t fly. Yet, anyway.
The court case hasn't been paused yet. There has been, to my knowledge, no documents filed with the court even requesting it be stayed (or dismissed), let alone any such requests being granted. Musk's credibility before the court is pretty thoroughly shot, so I suspect the judge isn't going to grant such a request unless Twitter agrees to it--and Twitter so far hasn't shown any inclination to agree. And why should they? They're likely to win anyways, and having a court order telling Musk to go through with the deal provides an extra guarantee that Musk will actually go through with the deal rather than changing his mind for at least a third time.
42 days ago I commented on the Mudge whistleblower article that there is no way that news coming out at that moment was coincidence, and that the Silicon Valley powers-that-be were aligning against Twitter. Of course, I was accused of "blind hatred of Musk".
This community has some massive blindspots for it's heroes.
It appeared at the time that there was a PR campaign of some sorts just parroting the same talking points. It was obvious it was related to the acquisition.
But I was assured that Mudge is a hero of impeccable personal integrity, that he is beyond reproach, that only an ignorant brain-dead moron with no knowledge of greybeard hacking could even think that he might be anything less than a paladin of righteousness!
Seriously, though, that doesn't even begin to touch the Bad Shit coming out of discovery. For a guy claiming to be a centrist, he's co-ordinating with a pro-AfD/Putin German press baron, and for a "free speech champion" it's pretty odd that "the redacted senders and recipients lay the groundwork for a "war" and "battle" after Musk takes over Twitter — a "coordinated pressure campaign" that will lead to deplatforming of political enemies." (https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/15773449644046008...).
The fact that he's started tweeting pro-Putin talking points might be because of the political company that he keeps, perhaps it's because the source for Telsa and SpaceX's aluminium is Russia, but it's interesting that he's suddenly decided that he does want Twitter, after all, now that Ukrainian forces are making serious inroads toward the territory seized by Russia in 2014.
Edit: Not exactly proof of contact between Zatko and Musk, but found this:
https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/04/twitter-musk-zatko-whistle...
Twitter wants to keep looking in light of a mysterious email from May 6 that turned up in the files of Quinn Emanuel, a legal firm that represents Musk.
Specifically, someone reached out with an anonymous ProtonMail account on that date purporting to be a “former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation.” In the email, the sender suggests that Musk’s team get in touch on another platform (through “alternate secure means”) in order for them to provide information about Twitter.
What evidence is that?
> Plaintiff argues that its broader proposal is necessary to investigate an unusual May 6 email produced from the files of Quinn Emanuel. The email was sent from an anonymous account hosted by protonmail.com (a popular encrypted email provider) to Quinn Emanuel attorney Alex Spiro and purports to be from “a former Exec at Twitter leading teams directly involving Trust & Safety/Content Moderation.” The author offers Musk information on Twitter and suggests communicating “via alternate secure means.”
There was some indication that Mudge may have been in contact with him. He lost a lot of discovery motions about bots. His own experts told him that he had no case about Twitter bots. This case has been a loser from the beginning, and I think he thought he could get a better price by doing this. He likely didn't want anything else to come out.
The Twitter board did a great job not bowing to the pressure.
What do you mean by his behavior changing if his net worth were more liquid? Are you suggesting he couldn't afford expensive lawyers because he couldn't get enough cash?
He has had no issue paying lawyers. The fundamental problem is that the case is dumb and without merit and he was always going to lose it. Expensive lawyers can't fix that, at least not against a counterparty who also has expensive lawyers.
He was losing because he had a bad case, not because he had bad lawyers. The law was not on his side, and neither were the facts.
Of all his behaviour and stupidity here, I have never for a second believed he will just kick back and live the billionaire life. He’s a workaholic, and he loves Tesla, starship and more too much. Say what you will about his character and decision making, you can’t deny the guy works extremely hard and is devoted to making stuff better
And if that could be done in the US, the rich would absolutely do it. US legal structures, despite its flaws, is one of the better ones in the world.
If Musk were allowed to make a mockery of the Delaware court, it would have shaken the bedrock for the trillions of dollars that corporate America rests under.
I’m sure Musk will try anything to recoup his investment, so it’ll either go out with a bang, or he somehow manages to pull a rabbit out of his hat and actually turn twitter around. Though I don’t think that’s very likely.
Either way it’ll be a fun pastime to follow the unfolding of it.
I never scroll my "feed" or whatever they call it.
twitter limiting direct personal threats would be a welcome change.
So that example doesn't really hold up.
They say the only want to ban Q, Alex Jones, and conspiracy types but then you look at sites like Reddit who have adopted this moderation heavy approach and it's slowly becoming one giant mono-culture where the set of bannable wrongthink only ever grows larger. It's highly selectively enforced and usually does little to stop people from actually having opinions they don't like.
It's based on an ideology that treats people like sheep who can be fooled by selectively showing them information and guide them towards holding the same opinions as they do. And they want unaccountable tech companies to be the ones with this power.
Well, marketing empirically proves this to be true...
Twitter has started to let you control who can reply, but that removes some serendipity, so if everyone worth following does that, Twitter loses value.
As a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter, you have no control over what content will be served to you (the same goes for any filtering tools said ecosystem offers it's users). The state of a closed ecosystem today, does not guarantee that there won't be future state changes (and users have no control over those).
With a protocol like RSS you have full control over the content being served up to you. If a source you previously agreed with and enjoyed, starts souring for you then it is as simple as unsubscribing. It will not be pushed on you.
So as said before, the example doesn't really hold.
Twitter might some day remove the block button? They might some day push certain people on you, without recourse? Therefore, they have to ban these people now?
Rather it was an attempt at an simple example to explain to you the differences in control that a user of an open protocol has, versus the control a user in a closed ecosystem like Twitter has.
Think it didn't land.
This is about not wanting the "other nutters" on there along with "our nutters". Which will make things worse in some ways, so keeping it confined to one set of nutters is not without its merit.
I really don't need to use it regularly to know that it's filled with endless "hot takes" designed to aggravate instead of inviting meaningful discussion. The way twitter works actively promotes negativity, which is precisely why I don't use it. Also, I didn't never use it, I left the platform because of the above mentioned reasons.
I'm aware that twitter provides plenty of value for plenty of people and that it is very possible to curate your twitter experience in a way that avoids most of the negativity. But if twitter blows up there will be alternatives where the same people can derive the same value from.
And in the meantime I will absolutely enjoy a billionaire megalomaniac getting fleeced because he couldn't control is impulses.
I use twitter a lot to stay up to date on tech and follower developers. Your feed is what you make it, and if you curate it to only follow decent people you don't have to read all of the arguments and politics that happen on other parts of the site.
Everyone moans about centralization and screams "The internet is dead / the internet is 5 companies".... well if it implodes, maybe people will start writing proper blogs/arguments/documentation again and not try to make everything digestible in 15 seconds by the dumbest persons.
I wish that twitter will ban all politics/politicians off of it and push science topics instead. Ever since politicians hopped onto twitter, it's been a nightmare to be exposed to their thinking patterns and lies.
I don't/won' get joy from these platforms disappearing...it would be relief.
Actually, scratch the reputation bit. That's already toast.
Kudos to Twitter.
Checkmate.
If you're Musk or an apologist, how do you spin this in a way that doesn't say "Yeah, they were completely right and I had no basis for my claim"?
Regarding the information leakage, does this signal that Mr. Musk treats people poorly in his private dealings?
It's all damage mitigation at this point.
Its an AND not an OR. He either proceeds with purchase and loses billions, or proceeds with discovery/trial, has personal info exposed, and is then forced to proceed with purchase and lose billions. He's tried to stall proceedings so far, but has reached a legal dead end.
See: Facebook's declining usage, and the rise of TikTok.
Social networks are all quite replaceable, there are no exceptions.
Twitter won in its micro blogging space (there were numerous competitors for a brief time, way back), however it has never been a stellar product. It can and will be replaced if Musk turns it into a disaster.
It will be funny of the Blue Checkmarks have to form their own social media platform - or in incredibly irony - end up in one of the "right wing" platforms as a refuge of free speech.
Some people have a lot more influence than others, and the influential people are disproportionately on twitter.
Also politicians.
That is the whole problem though, isn't it? A few hundred random people on Twitter are often more than enough to manufacture a wave of articles across multiple news websites and newspapers.
Twitter isn't important, the problem is that influential entities think that Twitter is important (and representative).
Which makes it important..
https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/10/1/23381257/elon-musk-text...
>"Within days of the announcement that the Twitter board had accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer, Benioff, who is currently worth more than $6 billion, sent Musk a cryptic text about his own vision for the platform, writing on April 27, “Happy to talk about it if this is interesting: Twitter conversational OS—the townsquare for your digital life.”
Wow. This is like something right out of an episode of Mike Judge's "Silicon Valley." These people might be extremely wealthy but jeez they are basically buffoons. I'm guessing Beinoff only shares his "A" material with Musk and he obviously felt that "Twitter conversational OS" was worth sharing. You couldn't get any more Gavin Belson than either "conversational OS" or "the townsquare for your digital life.”
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23108357/redacted-ver...
Would they force him to buy Twitter? Pay a fine?
(The released texts start at page 85)
Maybe it's all nothing, but even so, fighting anything in court is a punishment of its own.
Almost all experts, and Twitter, believed the court would force him to buy, meaning Twitter absolutely wouldn't discuss a partial settlement, even if that had been put on the table which it wasn't (unless something happened during the court case that shifted the odds so far towards Musk looking likely to win that at that point he would be the one not interested in a settlement).
And there's no legal basis for the judge to suggest or order a settlement. Either Musk is right and the court would have ordered the contract breached (and perhaps fines on top for one or both sides), or Musk is wrong and he has to fulfil the contract he signed and buy the company at the price agreed.
If a fine were possible as a middle ground, Musk would still be pushing for that option.
It's all a moot point now though.
At a very high level, that's true. But at a slightly less high level they do this by guaranteeing predictability over fairness. And at a low level they do that through a lot of very specific implementation details people spend their lives studying.
So the level of abstraction you're operating at isn't very useful for this kind of prediction.
It won't hurt Twitter's value because it never really had credibility, but also doesn't need it. Nobody is going to get up tomorrow and say "I was going to tweet this, but I'll rumble it instead because Twitter has lied to the FTC since 2011!"
If he has to sell 20bn of Tesla stocks that may lower the value of Tesla, thus pull his net worth down.
In addition some of his sponsors might pull out of the deal after seeing his erratic handling of the case, thus he has to provide even more liquidity. Which means selling off more Tesla, which reduces his control.
It is always a good question to ask when entertained by these stories of titans and their 'games': whose mind are they playing games with? Couldn't possibly be the collective yours, could it?
On top of that, he's partially funding it by selling Tesla stock that is also worth less than it was when he originally made the offer.
This is an incredibly expensive game of 4D checkers.
Twitter would need some cool-headed, smart leadership for him to get the political gains out of it.
And what have his shenanigans achieved? We now have all his text messages which prove all the worst fears of the people who don't want him to own it.
But a court will not terminate or delay legal proceedings due to one party unilaterally offering to settle on the eve of trial, especially not if the offer is contingent on such court action. For the court to even delay proceedings this close to trial, both parties must approach the court requesting such a delay. And while this happens the overwhelming majority of the time when a settlement is being worked out, Musk is not a trustworthy counterparty and his prior behavior in this specific case works against him here. Twitter might be willing to delay the start of trial by a few days, but that's the best Musk will get unless he actually goes through with the acqusition.
There's no realistic possibility of the court terminating the proceedings before a deal closes unless Twitter withdraws its lawsuit. And they're not going to do that until the acquisition goes through, because if Musk pulls the rug out from under them again, they'd have to file a new lawsuit. That new lawsuit would be starting back at square one, and likely wouldn't be completed in time before the original offer expired.
Shudder thee who crave the old days.
They are gone.
Staying out of the media isn't really Elon's thing. I don't think we'll see that happen.
Though on the positive side, I think I'll personally find a debate about free speech to be way more interesting than the current celebrity drama legal fight over contract law.
Twitter will be forced to prioritize short-term profit to recoup Musk's losses and rage-porn style engagement content will be the easiest (and likely only) way they can do it.
He sent internet to Ukraine during the war, did you see other sat providers doing that?
Another company could have helped, aren't they worse for ignoring the issue entirely?
Or do you think it's better to not have any help from any company to make sure no good PR is had?
I was very surprised indeed that my little bank accounts used to manage hundreds of euros were also suitable to manage millions, one I sold shares in a startup. I thought I would be called by a full chain of managers and have to present 3D fingerprints of my eyes, then be called by various countries’ TRACFIN and IRS where I used to live. In reality, the French IRS guy told me my declaration was very simple and unsurprising.
1. From the bank's investment arm asking if there were any investment needs I had.
2. From the bank's private banking division to inform me of their services.
I honestly wonder what it takes to get flagged by regulators at this point.
While it is lot of one person to control individually, and even sizeable for a company to operate daily it is not that much in the grand scheme of things. These days some companies have cash balances that size, famously Apple had more than $200+ Billion in short term assets at one point.
Big banks regularly deal with billions of dollars transferred around everyday. Market makers and central bankers etc do these numbers frequently without blinking twice.
[1] His bankers who are already underwriting the loans can also easily loan him the rest against Tesla stock.
There's even a picture of the check on MS's Twitter: https://twitter.com/morganstanley/status/1315673245291614208...
Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 26, 2022
To paraphrase Mao, "Let 2, only 2, and exactly 2 flowers bloom."
You could be right though about the working conditions, I worked with some Tesla business analysts to do some software integration with them and it didn’t go super great. They wouldn’t communicate for m awhile, then they’d yell and screaming at us for not doing something they hadn’t asked us to do, seemed pretty bad. So you might be right! It’s possible I’d hate it.
Just the other day Facebook flagged me for hate speech because I used some analogy that wasn’t at all hate speech or advocating for violence. Satirical in nature, but I’m sure I used some flag words like “Nazi” and “Hitler”.
We’ve all been slowly trained by an algorithm to make sure we don’t say the no no words, and more keep appearing. So you end up with people in Wall Street Bets saying they’re all “highly regarded” because they’ll get in trouble if they say what they used to say.
As I’ve gotten older instead of feeling like an adult I’m feeling more and more like a child being nannied by all these services.
If I worked at Twitter and Musk does precisely what he says, ensures you can say anything you can legally say in the US on Twitter, I feel like I’d be doing some good in the world to work for the company.
How do you respond to Musk's idea of requiring people to sign up to Twitter with their real name and/or ID? That seems to me that it would have an absolutely massive chilling effect on free speech and I cannot understand how free speech warriors would be behind that at all.
I am not a free speech absolutist but even I recognise the need for anonymous free speech on a service like Twitter. You'd cheerfully go and work in service of that goal?
Seemed like they spin wheels only to push out and then kill half-baked features.
Ofc, this could be "anyone's" fault but all the same...
This also allows them to move their HQ out of zombieland.
If you feel confident that the deal will close soon you can put your money in now and get a guaranteed 4% return. It's up to your own analysis of the risk/reward situation.
At least he's committed to transparency in moderation and the algorithm.
He was just sued for his lack of commitment.
You really believe he is “committed to transparency in moderation and the algorithm”?
I have some real estate on Mars for sale if you are interested.
Seems they just have a "system" or "human" problem because tons of spam accounts get reported but it seems to take a long time to get them removed.
Why do you think and attribute him to those achievements?
Are you? Tell us.
If you don't agree that people can be hurt with language, than you don't agree with content moderation in the first place so your objection is meaningless... those who don't agree that people can be hurt with language arguing about content moderation is like those who hate all cheese arguing over what we should put on the cheese plate.
I never said I disagree that language can be hurtful, and I never disagreed with content moderation (Both things, I have never said, you're putting words in my mouth).
All I'm saying is that guidelines and rules should be clear instead of hidden from public view cause then that leads to arbitrary enforcement, and clear bias.
The argument that making it public will make people "workaround it" is terrible, because thats the whole point of the rules. "Heres what you can do and can't do, if what you do doesn't violate the current rules, but shouldn't be done, then the rules need to be revised".
Why not nationalize it? Then at least the US constitution would apply, your first amendment rights would be protected, and it would truly be a public space.
Responding to the comment below:
> Nationalize the news? We can be just like Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela!
> Who needs pesky freedom of speech anyway.
We have that dude. Voice of America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
No one, atleast domestically gives a shit about it. Which is just beautiful! The most American thing ever.
Nationalize the news? We can be just like Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela!
Who needs pesky freedom of speech anyway.
Just regulate it, like we regulate other communication networks.
The phone company can't ban people for political speech from it's phone lines, and the government doesn't run into 1st amendment issues with that.
Let's change the law, so that our existing laws, are expanded to apply to social media companies.
Not necessarily. There is already a texas social media law, that does part of what the anti-censorship crowd wants. The appeals court upheld the law, and the supreme court has not struck it down yet.
That law, in 1 state alone, could have a huge effect on social media pretty soon, already.
Now, in terms of Twitter, I worry.
Per the annual report 2019[1] Twitter spent
- $1.8B in Cost of Revenue
- $1.2B in R&D
- $1.1B in Sales/Marketing
- $0.58B in Administration
- $0.76B in Litigation
Unlike other tech companies, it looks like a private Twitter can be profitable.
Elon could even do layoffs and move staff to cheaper locations like Europe. Salaries in States are much higher than they are in London/Ireland, for example[2].
[1] https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar...
[2] https://www.levels.fyi/companies/twitter/salaries/software-e...
A lot of people will gladly take a "pay cut" to work fully remote or in a location they actually want to be.
I will always be of the opinion that massive corporate campuses for tech companies are some of the most wasteful expenditures... but I'm also not the CEO of a massive tech company, lol.
I thought Musk hates remote workers.
Funny the title of this post sounds like he made a tweet that turned into a SEC filing.
Musk is the one billionaire that I honestly believe thinks of humanity's best interests in the big picture, long term. He's clearly identified Twitter and social media in general as a challenge to be wrestled with. Just really glad about it tbh.
I find that hard to believe now.
He looks like a toddler throwing a fit. That doesn't sound like someone who has humanities best interests at heart.
I could believe that he thinks he's that billionaire. However, his competence leaves something to be desired. Just yesterday, he had a peace proposal for the current Russo-Ukrainian war that boils down to "give Russia everything it wants" on the basis that that's what the eventual peace is going to be, the fact that the Russian military and milblogger sphere is in full-blown panic over Ukrainian successes in Lyman and near Kherson. Or take this case, where Musk and his attorneys have completely shot their credibility with the judge--in a case where there will be no jury, only the judge ruling on the merits.
In short, Musk does seem to have the tech-bro attitude of "I always know what the right answer is, and everyone who tries to tell me otherwise is an idiot." That is not the kind of person I want working towards humanity's best interests.
Elon: The richest and most successful business person in the history of humanity
Hacker news: he's not competent
Why don't we go a step further and say that poor people deserve to be poor because they're incompetent?
>in the history of humanity [citation needed]
Growing your wealth more than a hundred fold in 10 years implies competence.
Rockefeller probably still has him bet, never mind historical figures such as Mansa Munsa or Augustus Caesar (though in rather different contexts).
Personally, I wouldn't frame things in terms of competence, but trustworthiness. However, his disdain for public transport does seem rather myopic...
I also weight "success" with how much is inherited. Elon obviously inherited a ton, but Augustus literally inherited the most powerful state on the planet.
One of Elon's most visible projects (Hyperloop) is literally public transit.
Elon does not actively work on the Hyperloop, and critics have argued it may even be a red herring that he put out there deliberately to distract from more realistic and well-proven high speed rail technology. What Elon (or at least the Boring Company) did work on, though, is the 'Vegas Loop', a sad joke of a project.
You're drastically underestimating how much Russia wants. Musks idea would probably only give them Crimea, not the other four provinces.
Also, someone incompetently trying to work in humanities best interest is still way better than most billionaires.
Musk was basically repeating Kremlin propaganda a day ago on Twitter itself. If we're going to hand a platform to unaccountable billionaires maybe not to the one who is mentally unstable, is heavily invested in and praises autocratic adversaries for their working conditions and randomly accuses people of pedophilia.
Musk himself is probably the most prominent mental health victim of that site and if anything he should have logged out of his account instead of buying the thing
Also prepare for "bots being banned soon, definitely by end of year" for the next 30 years.
"I would pay $44 for this, but my wallet is in my wife's purse. Can we shake on the deal, then I'll find her so I can pay you?"
Elon and the knitter shake hands. As soon as she turns away, he drops the scarf to the ground, unzips his pants, starts urinating onto the scarf and shouting.
"You failed to disclose that this scarf is now soaked in pee, so I lower my offer to $20. HEY, patrons in this booth! Beware, these garments may contain urine! Okay, I changed my mind. I don't want to buy it anymore."
An hour later, police arrive to find Elon getting ice cream with his kid or whatever. "Mr. Musk, can you step over here with us?"
"Look, is this about the scarf? I said I would pay $44, and hey! I found my wife, got my wallet out of her purse. That's all this was about. Now, will $44 please make you go away?"
From there I took a few liberties for a laugh, apologies if it didn't land.
Then Musk sued not to buy Twitter, and they flipped: ELON MUST BE FORCED TO BUY TWITTER!
Now he's back to buying Twitter (same price and terms as before), and the Left is overcome with joy…that he's buying Twitter.
Genius.
Has anyone, anywhere, anytime flipped more people to his side than Elon Musk did over the last few months? This is successful PR at another level.
[0] AFAICT, the Right has always been happy Musk is buying Twitter.
If anyone else does not trust Elon Musk like me, I've made a Twitter alternative. You can import your tweet history from Twitter and .. not give Elon Musk your data.
But,
a) The banks may well be able to sell these bonds, just with a higher yield. b) Maybe there are some clients out there with lotsa cash (Buffet, Bezos, Gates) who would love to have Elon owe them tens of billions of dollars at 10% yield.
If the whole thing goes tits up, then the bondholders own Twitter, not Elon.
It’s not a happy day for the banks, and they may yet try to walk, but they will absolutely have legal exposure if they do. When Musk started getting second thoughts, Grimes (the Morgan Stanley Grimes, not the surrogate Grimes) started distancing himself from that aspect of this clown show right away.
Based on other comments in this thread, your hypothesis (while interesting) might fall short. Apparently there is a legal stipulation that if bank financing falls through, Musk is personally on the hook to make up the difference.
If the stipulation is in place, Musk can't use the bank's failure to finance as a scapegoat for the deal falling through. He can't walk away from the deal paying a 1 billion dollar penalty, he will have to buy Twitter at the original agreed upon price.
That being said, if your hypothesis is valid and the deal falls apart due to lack of financing -- buying some put options on Twitter right now could prove to be an extremely profitable move.
Musk actually can get out of the deal if he doesn't have the financing. But he has the financing, because the banks signed commitment letters. These commitment letters are valid until the beginning of next year. That's why he tried to drag out the lawsuit in the hope, that deadline might be passed.