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Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg | Hacker News Reader

What!? How has nobody filed for a stay yet!?

What do you supposed the legal teams are doing right now? Presumably there is some effort to make musk sign an even more iron clad deal before agreeing to a stay. Something like, "no condition that existed prior to October 5, 2022, material or not, shall be grounds for terminating the merger agreement." Perhaps they want him to remove the financing contingency given that if financing falls through Elon bears the majority of the blame for that.

I guess from Twitter's perspective it's fine if things go to a trial since they are going to win anyway. And every day that passes increases the torque on Elon and X holdings. They have him over a barrel so why not demand concessions to ensure that no more shenanigans occur?

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> How has nobody filed for a stay yet!?

Twitter doesn't want one, and would oppose a request for one. The judge in the case has been openly skeptical of Musk's delaying tactics and indicated the other day she thinks Musk let Signal conversations delete during discovery (https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/5/23389568/musk-twitter-sig...).

He's out of good will here.

Exactly. He literally signed a contract that he tried to renege on. Now they are supposed to just take his word that everything is copacetic again?

It should probably be signal boosted that when you are under a discovery documentation hold, the fact that services like Signal have auto-deletion as a feature do not protect those documents from Discovery and actively work against the user's best interests.

"But your honor, I can't produce those documents because they were on a conveyor belt into a furnace" isn't a valid legal defense.

It is if you don’t have access to the conveyor. Otherwise, you’d be liable for documents lost due to acts of God. He can still be in trouble if they can prove he used signal specifically to avoid disclosures during discovery.

Signal deletions aren't an act of God.

Upon receipt of a preservation order, those Signal conversations should've been preserved. Give an intern the task of screenshotting them all. The same rules apply if, say, you delete email after 30 days; you have to pause that process once you've been required to retain evidence.

In this increasingly stretched metaphor he was the one that turned on the conveyor - disappearing texts is an option you have to turn on, not mandatory and not enabled by default.

How can they know or prove that he was even texting with Signal? How do they know those messages existed?

Some of the other parties to the conversations saved them. Then the court was like “wait a sec Elon, Mr. Whomever has this Signal conversation with you, where’s your copy of this conversation?”

> Presumably there is some effort to make musk sign an even more iron clad deal

Why would anyone trust a piece of paper with Musk's signature on it after the months of tantrum he just pulled over this acquisition?

The deal is already ironclad as it is. That didn't stop the tantrum. The only thing that's holding leeway over Musk right now is this court case.

Twitter has no reason to stop the trial until the deal has closed (it can happen early next week).

Why leave any room for Musk to delay or change his mind. Fool me once ...

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