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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

If top executives in a public company are primarily judged on maximizing shareholder value these guys are some of the best of all time.

They successfully sold a multi-billion dollar tech company for a premium at the absolute height of the market, ending up getting shareholders something like 5x the market value as of the closing date.

I’m not a fan of golden parachutes and excessive executive compensation in general, but if there’s ever an exception these guys are it. They successfully transferred tens of billions of dollars in cash from the richest guy in the world into shareholders pockets.

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"They successfully transferred tens of billions of dollars in cash from the richest guy in the world into shareholders pockets."

Was it done because of them or in spite of them?

They were also very likely big shareholders, potentially earning more from the deal then the parachute, so... Both?

That part is in the article too.

They went to court to ensure the deal went through after the buyer got cold feet too late. It definitely wasn't in spite of them.

I agree. Those guys played ol' Musky lake a fiddle.

No way at all. Musk played itself. Have you been paying any attention to this? They were pretty much forced to sell at the beginning.

They wanted to avoid the deal at first, then shareholders told them to continue in the deal and sell it to Musk. So they did exactly what shareholders wanted them to do.

Musk did not wanted to buy Twitter at all, he wanted to liquidate his stock without crashing stock price of Tesla. In the end Tesla crashed and he was forced to buy Twitter for absurd price.

I mean we’re all guessing here on motivation.

But I think he did want to buy it and realized pretty quick that he had overbid.

If he wanted to back out of the deal he wouldn’t have insisted on an absurdly airtight offer. It was ironclad, no way out. No lawyer would have allowed it unless the client insisted. If he had wanted a way to back out all he would have needed to do is set back and let his lawyers do what lawyers do when crafting the offer. Instead he insisted on an offer that will be taught in law school as the canonical ironclad offer. I can’t believe he though he’d be backing out when he made that offer. The man is unhinged but not a moron.

Musk wanted to sell Tesla shares after promising he will never do that. He needed an excuse that will not cause already overvalued tesla stock to crash.

He will need money because of a trail he is in.

He thought he could get away with cashing out tesla, paying fine and riding hype train of saving twitter.

Well that train hit the wall it seems. And he is stuck with twitter

As I said, he got into this by himself. No one played a ruse on him.

I mean yeah, this is a pretty big own-goal for Musk, but someone made damn sure that purchase contract heavily favored Twitter with no wiggle room for Musk, and you can bet it wasn't Musk's lawyers. At minimum the Twitter exec team had the foresight to know Musk wasn't reliable and lock him down.

It was probably an incompetent advisor on Musk's side, or maybe he had good advice but still pressed to do the thing in a rush and screwed everything up.

Twitter peeps didn't write and sign that contract :P

"someone made damn sure that purchase contract heavily favored Twitter with no wiggle room for Musk"

That is what you might expect to happen: Twitter wasn't looking for a buyer. You had a motivated buyer and an unmotivated seller so you would expect the contract to favor the seller or there would be no sale.

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