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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

No. Not even semantically correct. If he didn't want to do something and the other party in the negotiation used the legal system to make him do it he was forced by someone else to do it.

Anyway, it's beside the point. Elon OWNS twitter. Do you all understand what ownership means? Like how you own a phone? If he wants to smash his new toy into the ground and break it that's his prerogative. Employees need to stop deluding themselves that any part of a business belongs to them because they were part of the process in creating it. The salary you are paid is the price for control of everything you contribute to a company.

If you hate that idea, much like I do myself, you should start your own business.

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He got himself into the situation where he was required to buy Twitter because he signed a binding contract - that's how binding contracts work, and not understanding that the contract was binding is why he now owns Twitter.

In the end, he bought Twitter without being forced to, because he probably saw he was going to lose in court if he kept up with trying to get out of his binding agreement.

This is why a person needs to understand the contracts they sign. If you don't have an out, you can't change your mind. If you can just change your mind to get out of a binding contract, then it's not a binding contract.

Separately, I'm not making any comments about Twitter employees and their claims against the business, that's a completely separate topic.

This is a very tabula rasa approach to personal responsibility. He was compelled by enforcement of a prior binding agreement that he entered into freely. More than freely. That he proposed and originated!

This isn't how it works. He wanted to buy Twitter and in a typically impulsive Musk fashion, he signed a contract and waived due diligence. Once you sign a contract you can't just back out of it and act like it's not your fault when they force you to abide by your word.

And he does own Twitter, yes. Everyone is just laughing at him spending billions of dollars to destroy something due to a problem he created. It just also sucks for the people involved being hurt by a billionaires tantrum.

I agree about the ownership side. If I was an employee I'd have started job hunting the moment he started making comments about buying.

The employees do have power, they could refuse to work en-masse and he can find out how hard or easy it is to hire a completely new crew. But I'm guessing there's too much internal strife and disagreement for that to happen.

Plus I have to agree with his assessment - there's not that much to twitter really, it's hardly a massively complicated and sprawling software product. They have too many people. Some of those complaining about being let go have... titles that don't make that much sense for the kind of businsess twitter is. I hate seeing people lose their job. Companies should be a bit more circumspect in their hiring.

> If he didn't want to do something and the other party in the negotiation used the legal system to make him do it he was forced by someone else to do it.

Who do you think signed the contract in the first place?

He was only "forced" by the courts once he tried to go back on his contract. Nobody forced him to buy twitter.

> If he didn't want to do something and the other party in the negotiation used the legal system to make him do it he was forced by someone else to do it.

The complication here is that his offer was so outlandishly high that he essentially tied Twitter management's hands. If they had not sued him, they would almost certainly be subject to litigation from their own shareholders, because not doing everything to sell at this price would have amounted to corporate mismanagement (In practice, top management gets a lot of leeway from the courts when it comes to maximizing shareholder value, but I can't imagine leaving a 30%+ markup over the current stock price on the table would have passed muster).

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