Elon Musk

wonder if the bot excuse is calculated to avoid paying the $1b backout fee, claiming they gave him bunk info

Elon Musk logic is literally: I'm going to buy Twitter to fix the bot problem, but I am actually going to wait for a further analysis of Twitter's bot problem.

— William Turton (@WilliamTurton) May 13, 2022

iirc musk specifically waived the diligence out (it's common for buyers to require a diligence out that allows them to break the deal if they find something bad during diligence), so i don't think he's trying to do that. it's also stupid because the bot thing was literally in twitter's public disclosures well before the deal was signed.

orchestrating this to sell tesla stock strikes me as unlikely too given the $1B breakup fee, that's really expensive and he hasn't sold (or was planning to sell) that much anyway... fwiw he sold way more in 2021 https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/14/elon-musks-stock-sales-could-total-18-billion-by-the-end-of-year-.html

I have no facts or reasoning to back this up, but my heart tells me that the big rich guy is going to win, and that it’s going to involve the other rich people also winning, somehow

Then some people will get pissed and it’ll be like “well there’s going to be a lawsuit over that one, you better believe that!”

Then 3-5 years from now on page A19 there will be some news on the progress of the settlement, and he’ll still be incredible rich, and will probably own google or some dumb shit as well

I finally realize the basic reality which is that to rich people, settlements are the costs of doing business, and that the small cluster of legal teams who know how to negotiate those settlements are doing it not to deter or punish or redistribute the money back to normal people, but instead just to get their slice of the pie. There is no one involved that is a good person, it’s just them getting theirs and then selling it to everyone else as the law in action or whatever we say these days.

Reminds me of how I have to pay $8/month on a mandatory “concierge” service for my shitty apartment. It’s supposed to help me and lead to them doing cool stuff like repairing things. In real life, they just don’t respond, not for me and not for the other neighbors with the same mandatory concierge. We all just laugh (actually, I do - they tend to just complain about it literally every time I see them, to the point where I am now actively avoiding them because I cannot hear about this concierge debacle one more time unless I’m the one writing about it on an Elon Musk thread) because what are you going to do? It’s a total scam, everyone knows it, the concierge gets to pick up free money and they obviously are friends with whoever owns the apartments.

I’m sure after these kinds of giant transactions are over, everyone gathers around a flame and worships Baal while cutting themselves with the edges of $100 bills

i know I have a tendency to be a little Pollyanna-ish about these things but I think obscenely rich people scamming each other but mostly scamming poorer people who will be forced by but to sit there and endure the scam will be like 97% of the global economy before the end of decade

*forced by law

i believe it will be more like 98% in some places, less so than others, unevenly distributed. but the trend of money is toward total, complete bullshit while people can't afford healthcare or housing

the only one single idea that elon musk has about that is to make people indentured slaves on his shitty new mining planets

龜 what do you think he's doing then? occam's razor (which would apply if he was like carl icahn rather than a zany narcissist dweeb) is he's just trying to drive the price down, which is fair enough i guess.

that’s what we’ll have to call innovation xp

this guy makes trump look like charles foster kane

龜 what do you think he's doing then? occam's razor (which would apply if he was like carl icahn rather than a zany narcissist dweeb) is he's just trying to drive the price down, which is fair enough i guess.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, May 13, 2022 12:08 PM (thirty-six minutes ago)

i think that's probably the most likely scenario, the deal got better every day for twitter from the day he signed the contract via the stock market continuing to crash. the best outcome imo would be for musk to get twitter back to the bargaining table but just as they sit down the market recovers to where it was when they signed and musk still has to buy at 54.20.

probably the calculus from musk's perspective is that musk would rather pay $1 billion in a breakup fee and dare twitter to sue him for specific performance (and all the very public pr and morale damage that would cause) rather than overpay by $5-10 billion (or whatever he think's twitter's valuation is now against this market backdrop. there is the other calculus of everybody on twitter laughing at him if he pulls out, i think he probably still smarts from the whole funding secured thing. who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

what is trump's "rosebud" because i bet it's either gross or cruel xp and sorry

Trump's "Rosebud" is the old mayonnaise jar he used to kill caterpillars before they could become something beautiful

jarful of eyeballs from kids he had his juvenile pa's/droogs beat unconscious.

His asshole

Jerkoff sock he lost behind his bed in 1964.

sorry all

lol cmon man

To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter.

I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 14, 2022

100 followers! you can tell this man is serious

Truly wish this guy would just blast himself into pieces on one of his rockets

The question now is, has Musk invented a set of underground tunnels for transportation, like London already had 150 years ago, or given the narrow clearance and the fire risk has he invented a set of underground tunnels for interring bodies, like Rome already had 2000 years ago.

— Warren Terra (@warren__terra) May 14, 2022

so it turns out the testing 100 followers tweet was a tease towards violating an NDA. great job, idiot.

no one thinks he will pay $54.20 per share for twtr. no one.

Remember, this is the guy who tweeted he was going to heroically take over the rescue mission for that group stuck in the underwater cave a couple of years ago and all that came of it was a lawsuit for slandering someone who was actually useful as a pedo on twitter.

no, he's just not stupid enough to overpay that much for TWTR.

He was! He literally bought it Twitter at the top of the market. He’s trying to get out or negotiate the price down because his friends are laughing at him and he can no longer afford it.

it wasn't the top of the market, but it makes no sense to try to figure out his intention at the time, whether he misjudged the market or was on some type of bender. he obviously finally figured it out when his btc position went underwater and tsls and twtr were tanking. everyone has been shorting every pop on twtr and tsla for weeks.

Eh, “he’s not stupid enough to overpay that much” doesn’t hold water. He quite clearly was. All that’s changed is what he can afford.

ok, you are reading too much into that. I am speaking about the present.

I mean I agree that he’s not so very stupid that he thinks 54.20 is a fair price.

I’m just pointing out that he was the one who offered that price, so he must be stupid.

I guess we can conclude he’s stupid, but not very stupid.

i think it's a useless thing to argue if you are not doing anything with the information. anyway he has enough institutional and saudi backers now that his tsla shares aren't as much on the line. but if he had just waited a little longer he could have gotten twtr shares at $27-$30.

If ilx is not for arguing claims on whose truthfulness you are not going to act then I don’t know what it’s for any more.

But fwiw I work at Twitter for now so I do have some skin in the game and what I think about musk does matter for what I do next.

Anyway I think my objection is the consensus in his replies that we are dealing with someone very smart because he is negotiating down the price. He offered the original price! He’s obviously an idiot!

lol, it's good i didn't post my original target for twtr shares if the elon deal doesn't go through. but he has until oct.

Ha if the deal collapses it’s headed for the teens. I am under no illusions.

pretty clear that elon is in some way unstable but has been able to ride it to the point where he may be too big to fail

read a pretty convincing twitter thread from a lawyer with expertise in such matters that twitter has good case to make him go through with the deal at the agreed upon price

yeah matt levine wrote about this in his column.... seemed to come to the conclusion that while twitter legally could do that, he wasnt sure if it would be worth the hassle for them?

idk its looking like a good price

true. his reasoning was -

On the other hand, what if he does it anyway? What if he just says “no, I’d rather not close”? What is Twitter going to do? Sue him? It is easy for me, sitting here and looking at the contract, to say that Twitter would win that lawsuit and a court would order Musk to pay the money and close the deal. I do think that![3] But actually making that happen requires filing a lawsuit and going to court and asking a judge to make him pay billions of dollars to buy a company he doesn’t want. It requires his banks to fund $13 billion of debt for a risky leveraged buyout whose whimsical buyer is no longer interested.

Contractually this is all pretty buttoned-up, and I think a Delaware court would have a ton of sympathy for Twitter and none at all for Musk, who is acting in the most transparent and smirking bad faith. But there is a lot that could still go wrong. Suing would take time, and would cause bad publicity, and would create uncertainty among employees and users and advertisers. Letting him walk, focusing on the business, and taking the $1 billion — or negotiating a slightly higher breakup fee to save face — might be a better, though terrible, outcome for Twitter.

"uncertainty among employees" is one way of putting it. lmao at their reaction to the news the board is suing someone who doesn't want to be their boss to make him be their boss.

It requires his banks to fund $13 billion of debt for a risky leveraged buyout whose whimsical buyer is no longer interested.

this part is wrong tho regardless what the bank does musk by virtue of being ~the richest man in the world~ has no argument that he cant get the money

and i suspect the board might be more worried about sharholder value than employee/product uncertainty particularly in the context of a tanking market

at the very least they cld prob get him to cough up another billion or two

also, chalk up statistics as another thing musk is bad at. sample size is much more important than population. 100 is pretty good! sure, 200 or 300 would be better, but if they only found 1 or 2 spam accounts in the 100 then less than 5% is a good estimate.

and i suspect the board might be more worried about sharholder value than employee/product uncertainty particularly in the context of a tanking market

i think it's a useless thing to argue if you are not doing anything with the information. anyway he has enough institutional and saudi backers now that his tsla shares aren't as much on the line. but if he had just waited a little longer he could have gotten twtr shares at $27-$30.

― Yerac, Sunday, May 15, 2022 4:34 PM (yesterday)

he's apparently got enough to take his margin loan down from $13B to $6-7B, but he also committed to provide $21B of his own money, which is pretty lol at the price of $54.20 - if he can negotiate a price at half of what he committed to, he saves $10B of his own cash, it's a good incentive.

it's also funny how he own goaled his tsla shares, he revealed his financing plans on 4/20 and tsla shares are down 25% since then.