Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

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If FTX and the pathetic Elon-simping txts from the Twitter lawsuit discovery have revealed anything, it's that once you reach a certain level of wealth you're so immune from consequences that losing money has zero effect on you personally, and since most of these guys are extremely ego-centric to begin with, that removes the only constraint they seriously cared about. There are exceptions to this, but that seems to be the trend.

Billionaires in general aren't playing 4D chess, why would they? 4D chess is hard, requires sacrifice and valuing something bigger than oneself and one's bank account. Much easier to jump on popular hype trains. If it works you look like a genius and have a million stans to stroke you off, and money number go up so you can flex on other billionaires. If it fails nothing really happens to you personally.

SBF wasn't actually at that level, but he had enough paper wealth that he clearly thought he was. We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars.

Sam is going to jail maybe for the rest of his life, that is a 'consequence'.

Elon is facing a $25B write-down of Twitter the moment, that's also a 'consequence'.

They are definitely playing 2D++ chess, and a bit of cheating, making us think they are playing 3D sometimes, but they are not stupid. Most of their glib stuff is calculated and it works to great effect.

Musk will probably pull through and still be one of the richest dudes ever with Tesla and Space X still floating, even if the rest burns, that's still way ahead.

If Elon was not rich and he did the same things you'd call him dumb. Why are we pretending someone who impulsively decided they'd buy twitter without due diligence "not stupid"?

The statement that he hasn't done due dilligence and the draw down on the investment are both pure speculation.

Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).

This all sounds like very silly Elon bashing to me.

You might want to read more about the terms of the deal. Musk specifically waived due diligence, which is why he couldn't break the deal when he wanted to:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...

This was unusual to the point of getting criticism from a judge when Twitter sued to force him to follow through on the deal (which bought them at a significant premium over market):

https://www.businessinsider.com/judge-calls-elon-musk-legal-...

> Furthermore it doesn't make much sense to calculate drawdown of a 40 billion USD investment with a timeframe of a few months. The idea of any large investment is to make it grow with time after long term interventions (years, decades).

This is vaguely true but in this case the big question is how he'll make it massively more profitable than it's ever been. Twitter was marginally profitable for the last few years but the massive debt load Musk saddled the company with means they need to increase profits by whole number multiples simply to catch up to where they were in 2019-2021. It's not enough to get advertisers back, they have to significantly increase their spending.

No. The draw down is already happening by major financial institutions that have to put a material value on Twitter. They are cutting it in half.

It absolutely makes sense to re-established a valuation if there are 'material events' and there have been - notably, major layoffs, operational problems, customers have left in drives. Most poignantly, the CEO has indicated 'there is a very material chance' that Twitter could go bankrupt.

What do you think 'we could go bankrupt' means? I means that, and, it was not the case prior to his arrival.

Finally, there has been a major market correction which has affected the price of all tech companies. Were Twitter to be a public company probably it'd be worth 1/2 as much - essentially P/E ratios have changed, even if the business did not.

Twitter is worth 1/4 what it was before - Musk bought at the peak and even if he did nothing it'd be worth a lot less, but his actions have caused the business harm with no predictable positive outcome (the changes mostly don't seem to align with some kind of plan to profitability).

> customers have left in drives.

That seems to be even more true of the customers that pay the bills, that is, advertisers.

"If Elon was not rich and he did the same things you'd call him dumb. "

? Yes, and ?

You can say and do (and should) a ton of things when you are rich, that you should not / cannot when you are not rich.

> We're watching the wealthy equivalent of that COVID-denier who, with their last breath before being intubated, calls the doctors and nurses who diagnosed them liars.

Which is a work of fiction. Such a thing probably happened no more than a few times. The only reason it gets parroted back is because it serves as a nice bit of propaganda to gin up fear and get people to fall in line.

How does pointing out idiots doing idiotic things "gin up fear"? If it gins up anything it's pity. The fearful ones are the people being intubated and denying the cause up to their last breath, they're so fearful that they might be even partly responsible for their circumstances, they lack the moral constitution to admit it. They're weak, and weak people do not induce fear unless they're in a mob.

If I showed you a homeless person dead from a heroin overdose, would you fear heroin? No, because it's entirely within your control whether you use it or not. I think you need to learn how propaganda works.

> Which is a work of fiction.

Anyone who's spent time browsing r/HermanCainAward, or knows nurses who've been on the COVID front lines, can assure you that it's not. People die horrible deaths, often clawing harder than ever to the conspiracy theories they've been fed.

Herman Cain's Twitter account was still tweeting COVID denialism after he died of COVID.

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