Live data from Hacker News

Elon has decided not to join our board

twitter.com

521–530 of 542 posts

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#521
post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read what Musk says now or years ago he actually is very much for moderation, but not censorship or banning people of the platform. In a way Musk is for something similar to HN point system.

HN is a bad analogy because it has a lot of invisible moderation tools used by the all-powerful moderators, including: - banning - shadow-banning - deleting offensive messages - detaching off-topic threads The only difference with HN is that their rules are different. Everything else is very similar to Twitter.

Hn is like Gab though, the users feel aligned with the management ideologically so they don't mind being censored by them.

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't he take out a loan using his Tesla stock as collateral, and use that to fund a purchase of Twitter? That way he'd avoid selling any stock (and having to pay taxes on the sale), although he'd have to somehow fund the interest payments on the loan (which could be done through smaller stock sales, which would incur taxes, but he'd still pay less tax selling to fund the interest than selling to fund the principa…

Rich people do this to buy yachts and sports cars (for I dunno, tens of millions), but borrowing $15 billion? I'm kinda skeptical any banks would bite here. The collateral would be a huge portion of his Tesla stock, enough that a crash in TSLA could put the whole loan at risk.

Blackrock

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And everyone's profile picture needs to be the same as mine.

No of course not. Everyone should have the same profile picture, except his which is giant and flashy so you can see it prominently.

You are fungible, I am not

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#524
post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an entrepreneur, I’ve been following Elon’s progress going back to when he sold zip2. It became evident he was an outlier when his new company merged with then sold PayPal and so I’ve been following him closely since that time - I don’t think there is an interview of his I haven’t watched. Adding all those up, it’s probably over 60 hours of interviews over a roughly 20 year timeline. It’s not just the hours of int…

> he doesn’t give a rats ass about money or profit Is that why he keeps lying on Twitter that SEC has had to go after him?

Huh? What does that have to do with anything? Now you’re just being totally ignorant

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#525
post #102

Maybe he was going to fail the background check? But that is curious.

You don't "fail" a background check at that level. They get whatever info is in it and decide on what to do about it, I guess. But the decision as to whether to put a 9% shareholder on the board or not is clearly not going to be left to random bureaucratic process. And let's be honest: if the world's richest man had dirt in his past that a mere "background check" would turn up, we'd clearly already know about it.

Yeah, I just thought it was ironic at that point that a background check is needed for really paramount people. But it makes sense - it's probably some regulation requirement / sec one to verify conflict of interests.

"And let's be honest: if the world's richest man had dirt in his past that a mere "background check" would turn up, we'd clearly already know about it. "

Exactly. I just find it laudable there's an established process to bring someone on the board and it involves a background check!

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the currencies that are built on "trust-less networks" and are resistant to government interferences. But a single person can manipulate the entire currency with some tweets and a bit of capital. cool cool cool. Did Elon profit from that? i.e. He bought at the bottom and sold at the top? Or did he lose along with everyone else in the "dump" phase? Bitcoin: You don't have to trust anyone... except Elon.

> Did Elon profit from that? i.e. He bought at the bottom and sold at the top? That same quarter, Tesla reported almost $500 million in realized capital gains on BTC. And Elon owns Tesla stock. The rest is left as an exercise to the reader.

You are missing the part where they were accepting bitcoin as payment for cars. So how much of those gains were for Cars sold, vs inflated Bitcoin price based on Elon tweets?

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#529
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this was a polite way of saying they couldn't agree on terms of his board position. For example, he would probably have been restricted on the kinds of tweets he could make. He recently started a poll asking if he should turn Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter because so few people show up. They would certainly not want him doing that if he's on the board.

There is no agreement on terms. As a member of the board you are required by law to always do and say what is in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. Someone probably sat him down and explained that he doesn't hold a majority of voting shares at Twitter, and that the company and other investors wouldn't put up with his shit. With a 75% majority, the other shareholders could vote to nullify his shar…

At the very least we know they offered him a position on the board in exchange for a guarantee that he would not purchase more than 15% of shares. There were definitely terms, and we do not know all of them.

Re: Elon has decided not to join our board

#530
post #15

hmmm not sure how I feel about this. I bought Twitter stock after I knew he will be joining the board. Hopefully he has something bigger in mind.

I bet the stock goes up tomorrow on people speculating he'll do a takeover.

...and it did
Post reply on HN