Hacker News Reader

Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

He got slammed in discovery, lost a lot of his pre-trial motions, and started losing a ton of his net worth by appearing like a buffoon. He was about to go into an emergency conference at the Delaware Chancery court, and I assume that he was being told "you are going to lose" by his lawyers if not the Chancellor herself.

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.

View on HN

What I absolutely love about this country is that even the world's richest person has no power over even small courts.

What? Why would you say that? Much more plausible is the view that if you have high dollar lawyers on both sides crafting an airtight contract, and a jurisdiction that is heavily incentivized to stick to the letter of the law, then you can count on proper enforcement ... in contract cases. I would not apply this lesson to literally any other area of the legal system.

Well, in some other countries he'd just buy the judge with a couple of mil and be done with it.

In many countries the judge would be bought off or threatened. There would be people "falling off windows".

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.

The rich can often basically just buy their way out so there's no need for anyone to fall out of any window.

The idea that the rich don't influence the courts in America is absurd. The reason why Musk couldn't just "do what he wanted" is because the other side of the table was also the wealthy elites. When it comes to elites vs elites, things start to get played by the book.

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.

The entity on the other side of the case also wasn't exactly a poor slob.

That would result in a gang war

The Delaware Court of Chancery is not exactly a small court. Almost every high-budget matter of corporate law goes through this court, and they regularly deal with cases involving billions of dollars. Given how important corporate law and corporations are, it may be the most powerful trial court in the country.

even the world's richest person has no power over even basic common sense.

It's interesting to consider how Musk's behavior might change if his net worth was more liquid. I'd expect him to buy up a platoon of lawyers, send them off to battle in his stead, and go join Larry Ellison on his island for mojitos at sundown.

He already hired the best lawyers available.

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.

Once you're spending $10 million on a case, you can find the best lawyers, and it's hard to get much additional meaningful work from just hiring more 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.

And it is not like Twitter doesn't have good and enough lawyers either. So the outcome between those is pretty much neutral. Which only leaves the facts and laws, which are on their side...

> and go join Larry Ellison on his island for mojitos at sundown.

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

he sure is dedicated, but I wouldn't say he makes stuff better

Wait until we all travel around Mars in self driving Tesla's.

Presumably all with stage 3 cancer from the radiation on our way to a mandatory shift to pay off our several million dollar fare over the next 300 years of multigenerational indentured servitude.

You think reusable rockets are not making stuff better overall for the space program?

Nah, they think Musk is a net negative to SpaceX. Which sounds likely to me.

I think you are overestimating how much money it would need to send a platoon of lawyers. It would relatively cheap thing for Elon.

Musk made the share sales months ago, you can find them on Bloomberg. Lawyers need to be in constant communication with their clients, but Musk's bizarre behavior this case is largely just because he's Musk. Look at his attempt to take Tesla private in 2018, look at the insane shit he tweets. He's a very smart leader who has accomplished incredible things (he may not be responsible for every line of code but leadership can be a lot more important, look at Microsoft under Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella), but he also has serious issues

Even an army of the smartest lawyers cannot protect the dumbest client

Reply on news.ycombinator.com