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Comment by karamanolev | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to know how the logistics work for putting $44B in escrow. Can't be just casually making a $44B wire transfer?

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This was quite interesting: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2019/02/how-do-the-... (I think there's a corresponding youtube video, and this is the transcript). Of course $XX billions is vastly more than paying for your Picasso.

So, by credit card, wire or cheque, which are valid even for billions of dollars. Morale: Don’t ever write plenty of zeroes as a joke expecting a signal that it can’t possibly be taken seriously. In the same fashion: Once you propose a price for a house in France, you are committed to buy. A bit like this guy who has to buy Twitter now.

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.

I remember a similar experience and I received precisely two phone calls:

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.

If you sold your shares and everything is reported for tax purposes, why does it have to be flagged by refulators?

During the 08 financial crisis, Mitsubishi wrote a $9 billion CHECK to close an investment in Morgan Stanley over a holiday weekend. The concern was that MS's stock would nosedive if the deal wasn't done before the market opened. The check was apparently enough to legally close the deal on a weekend when it wasn't possible to wire funds.

There's even a picture of the check on MS's Twitter: https://twitter.com/morganstanley/status/1315673245291614208...

I would’ve tried changing that last dot to a comma just to see what happens.

Ultimately it is just numbers on two systems if he already has the liquid cash [1], it shouldn't matter how big the numbers are, the transaction workflow is more or less the same. In the Revlon transfer Citibank screwed up that $900M only had 3 people working on the actual execution and verification.

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.

A wire transfer to whom? Would Twitter get that cash and then distribute it to share holders? Or how does going private get handled these days?

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