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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

It wasn't worth $44B when he bought it, so I'm not sure why the NY Times would even use that number in any way. If I pay someone $100,000 for a stick they found on the side of the road, it doesn't make that stick worth $100k.

I doubt Twitter was worth $19B even before Musk overpaid for it. It was a 15 year old company that couldn't make money.

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A stick that someone paid $100k for is absolutely a stick worth $100k - what people are willing to pay for things is how we assign them value. Twitter's stock was trading at ~$45/share before any rumors of acquisition - so somewhere around $35B - they'd made roughly $1B in net income in the year prior to the buyout. This meme about them "not making money" is so silly. Aside from a one-time settlement in 2020, Twitter had a very stable and fairly profitable business - hence why Elon had to pay $44 Billion to buy the company from the existing shareholders.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

>twitters stock was trading for $45 a charge before any rumor of acquisition

What is this, alternate reality land? It was trading for $16 (albeit this was a low point) a share when Musk started his pump and dump scheme, which rocketed the value to 45 a share, which is the point that Musk decided he doesn’t want it and also began proceedings to dump stock.

There were ATH in the $45 range, but TWTR was on a clear downward trend.

You should maybe look at a stock chart instead of making silly, easily disprovable statements from memory like "ATH in the $45 range"? It nearly reached $80 in 2021... It spent several months above $60/share.

https://imgur.com/a/VsoZ7mD

I don't have quick access to share prices older than Jan 1st 2019 - but from that date through the date of Elon's first share purchase on Jan 31st, 2022 - Twitter's average price was was $44/share.

I only went back enough to look at the Musk nonsense. So I guess I should have worded “the highs in the several months leading up to twitter were around $45, but twitter tanked and was still trending down at $16 when musk started attempting to manipulate the market”.

We aren’t talking about when musk first purchased shares. We’re talking about when twitter was trading at $16 when musk attempted to then manipulate the stock market by stating he’d buy twitter, which shot twitter back up.

You could make that argument except this is a stick someone said he’d pay $100k for to get attention, then the courts forced him follow through. Slightly different.

More like someone wrote a contract to buy a stick for $100k, took multiple steps including hiring bankers to raise financing to buy the stick for $100k, threatened to sue the seller of the stick if they didn't sell it to him for $100k and then eventually tried to back out..

> It wasn't worth $44B when he bought it, so I'm not sure why the NY Times would even use that number in any way. If I pay someone $100,000 for a stick they found on the side of the road, it doesn't make that stick worth $100k.

This is almost exactly how accounting works. Whenever they want to decide how much something is worth the answer is the most someone else would pay for it.

Doesn't make it less insane, especially in the presence of idiots with huge sums of money.

> If I pay someone $100,000 for a stick they found on the side of the road, it doesn't make that stick worth $100k.

So why did you pay $100,000?

This line of thinking is so basic. Say I bought a lotto ticket for $5. Does that mean it's worth $5?

Say I bought this cabbage...

When you bought that $5 lotto ticket, it was worth $5. After the lotto is drawn, it's either worth approximately nothing or potentially a lot more than $5.

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