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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> Everything about this makes me think he's just too rich to be fired... anyone else would have been.

Don't really like this framing of the problem - he owns a majority of voting shares, and he paid (or, rather, overpaid) mightily for that right. You can't really be "fired" from being an owner, and I'll note Musk is no longer CEO (and, sure, you can argue the new CEO was hired to be the fall girl/glass cliff example, but that was still her eyes-wide-open choice).

People wrung their hands about Zuckerberg as well (he also has a majority of voting shares of Facebook), but in retrospect that hand-wringing looked premature, at least from a shareholder perspective - Meta is nearly back at its peak and has tripled its stock price from late 2022.

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> Don't really like this framing of the problem - he owns a majority of voting shares, and he paid (or, rather, overpaid) mightily for that right. You can't really be "fired" from being an owner.

This is basically what people mean by "too rich to fire". I don't think anyone is suggesting that if he wasn't a stakeholder, he'd keep his job solely because he had a lot of money. I think it fair to say that, if Twitter was a publicly traded company with a board of directors, Elon likely would have been fired by now. Or, at the very least, significantly reigned in.

In that case we should thank our stars it’s not a public company. Musk taking over twitter has done more to expose corruption and hypocrisy than almost anything else. The Twitter Leaks, balancing the algorithms, and even biasing them against the same people they used to be biased for (all while the same people that defended censorship now whine about it) pulled the masks off many in power.

Sure he might just drive it all into the ground, but the interim piloting has created so much good (whether some acknowledge it or not).

That's bait.

I wonder if the lenders can push him out if/when Twitter stops making debt payments.

Yes, if you file for bankruptcy, debt creditors have rights senior to equity holders.

In that case, seems like there's a way to get back our lovably dysfunctional social network. Just gotta outlast their cash on hand.

Edit: Pre-acquisition Twitter bonds are trading at ~70 cents on the dollar. Seems like the acquisition financing isn't being traded yet -- banks trying to avoid facing write downs?

According to Musk, Twitter is now at least break even. Who knows if that's true or not.

I would presume he means they're break-even in cashflow (aka the bills he actually wants to pay).

They are racking up massive debt to leaseholders, cloud providers...

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