Can someone give me a layman's explanation as to why taking Twitter private would allow Elon to make the changes he wants to make that he couldn't do if it was still public?
Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
421–430 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#422I just realized that we can use the current stock price to derive a probability that Elon Musks offer will be accepted. Let `cp` be the current stock price; let `op` be the original price, before the offer was made; let `bp` be the bid price, what Musk offered; and let P be the probability that the offer is accepted. Then it must apply that `cp = op + P*(bp - op)` Meaning: The current price is the original price plus…
Good idea, but actually you'll probably want to look at the option markets as well, to take account the exact strike price at which Musk wishes to take Twitter private. If you only look at spot price (i.e. TWTR stock), then you need some way to factor out all the other beliefs market participants have about Twitter (e.g. stat-arb correlations with NASDAQ index).
As of time of writing, the delta on a $55 TWTR call option expiring 2 months from now is 0.297, representing a ~30% probability it will be in-the-money. But you still need to subtract the probability that the share price gets there without Mr. Musk's help.
You can also google "merger arbitrage" on google scholar to find some more maths on the subject.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#423From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…
> Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like).
This is such an oversimplification that it verges on being a straw man argument.
You talk about authoritarian take-overs. Your problem wasn’t limitations on free speech. It was that people who didn’t care about laws got into positions of power, and enough people in that country didn’t care enough when the law was ignored.
Authoritarians don’t care about precedents or laws. If a law is causing them problems they’ll change it. It happens all the time. And an ignorant or misinformed population can be easily distracted with red herrings like xenophobia and homophobia.
There’s been a rise in fringe extremists in the US. Many of them are ardent supporters of Donald Trump, who benefitted tremendously from the megaphone that Twitter provided, a company that isn’t even 20 years old and yet has come to represent freedom of speech somehow and arguably helped him get elected. This is the same man who launched an all out attack on elections, one of the tenets of the democracy; a man who also threatened to cut off access to White House press briefings to any news channel that attacked him; a man who sent the police on peaceful protesters in DC just so he could do a photo-op. All of those are serious attacks on democracy, and he has faced zero consequences, Twitter or no Twitter. Why? Because his zealot supporters are too busy trying to ban books, limiting abortion and bringing back an LGBT rights as a major political topic to care.
Extremism is dangerous too. Electing people who don’t care about the law is dangerous. Once those are allowed to fester and take over, democracy is already in grave danger and laws or precedents won’t provide much help.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#424I don't have an opinion over the consequences for politics over this, I'm just excited over the potential shakedown of the social media landscape that I grew to despise. Musk is an activist, can make it or break it. He is absolutely right over its enormous potential, all the problems it has - as a business or ones it creates for the society - can be solved. Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once yo…
That’s all very nice sounding, but there’s a kind of gritty assembly language that this all compiles down to: “I want the high-speed electronic dissemination of information shaped like this.”
It’s an open question whether or not it’s possible to avoid shaping the firehouse in a modern liberal democracy, but you could go your whole life and never meet a person truly disinterested in bending it towards their particular tribalism.
The whole time I was at FB I had two groups of people, each screaming in one ear, that we were not doing enough to suppress the “other” people.
How do you put shit on a global electronic network without “gaming the system”? Have no bias? You got that down we should make you king.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#425For all those saying govnt should control platforms like this bear in mind that the free market is working even in this case. A single person decided to take a massive social media private only after a few years of it being a bad actor (see anti free speech sentiment around Twitter.) In a socialist/state-run world any regulation would take years to pass to only then cripple the platform and make it a worse version of itself in many ways maybe except the primary goal of the regulation.
A non-public Twitter will have less pressure from the outside to "perform" and not taken hostage to follow the current dogmatic norms of the population allowing it to undergo much needed and necessary changes to make it a better platform.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#426> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial I don't think we have evidence to support this. Pursuant to the last major thread on the topic, I was thinking further about it, and realized that the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate. We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does t…
In general, more free speech is always preferable to less free speech. If you could stand on your proverbial soapbox and say something in the town square then you should be able to say the same thing on Twitter (modern day town square) without being censored. No one knows exactly what Elon will do but I think whatever he does will be a positive ... IMHO.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#427The only people complaining about free speech are literally right-wingers spreading verifiable lies (and this includes non US right-wingers). The fact that this is an issue is a tragic flood of propaganda by these liars.
[deleted]
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#428As somebody from the first world who has had the experience of moderating Internet forums… free speech in the sense of “the government generally shouldn’t control people’s speech, with limited exceptions” is good and necessary. Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO. Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, po…
You're arguing as if "platforms" exist in a vacuum, sealed off from the the 'free expression area'.
How much do you think Twitter matters?
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#429OK. I'm a huge admirer of everything Musk has a accomplished, but... W.T.F.? Taking on Twitter will not only be a huge amount of work, it is likely consume a ridiculous amount of talent -- which could be focused instead on building next-generation humanoid robots, electric vehicles, energy solutions, reusable spaceships, and space stations. Musk has a long history of taking on more than it's humanly possible, but so…
You definitely have a point. SpaceX and Tesla were also near death in 2008.
I feel like there are only so many moonshots you can pull off before you get a Waterloo as you said.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#430> Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial I don't think we have evidence to support this. Pursuant to the last major thread on the topic, I was thinking further about it, and realized that the vast majority of progress civilization has made has been under conditions much more regulated in terms of which ideas may propagate. We've never had a situation where fake news can and does spread the way it does t…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025090. (Not for moderation reasons—simply to prune the thread so the server isn't quite as overwhelmed.)