This feels more like hes trying to make the Twitter stakeholder lawsuit go away by announcing an offer (who wants to be suing their new boss?) than an actual acquisition attempt.
Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
431–440 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#432What happens to employee unvested stock grants when you're taken private?
I guess they are forced to sale?
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#433All: speech here isn't very free when the server can't stay up, and it's smoking right now, for obvious reasons.
I'm going to prune some of the top-heavy subthreads and possibly restrict the page size a bit. There are over 2500 comments in this thread, and if you want to read them all you're going to have to click "More" at the bottom of each page, or go like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025061&p=5
...and so on. Sorry everyone! (Yes, fixes are coming, yes it's all very slow.)
Edit: also, if some of you would log out for the day, that would ease the load considerably. (I hate to ask that, but it's true. Make sure you haven't lost your password!)
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#434I liked Elon Musk better when he was less focused on a being a celebrity and trying to protect his effectively infinite stack of virtual cash. At one point he was worth $300 billion--today it is merely $265 billion. He could literally retire 100,000 times over (a comfortable middle-class $80k/yr lifestyle)--or maybe just 10,000 times over (comfortably in the 1% at $800k/yr).
Money aside, clearly that's just not enough for him anymore. He got sucked into the fame game and inevitably had to step on faces to keep climbing. And that made him a target, and now he's going to go punish those Twitter trolls like a baby with an enormous wallet.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#435As 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…
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31025740.
(Not for moderation reasons—simply to prune the thread so the server isn't quite as overwhelmed.)
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#436Everyone here is talking about free speech and Twitter censorship, but I have a different take:
How do we know Elon Musk won't just ban criticism of him or his business ventures (Tesla / SpaceX / The Boring Company / Starlink / etc)?
We know that his claims of being a "free speech absolutist" are absolute bullshit, because the moment the speech is about him he turns to every trick in the book to try and censor it[0]. This includes firing internal critics of himself and getting dox on anonymous bloggers so he could threaten to sue their employers.
If Elon buys Twitter and makes any major changes to it's policies, it will be for the worse. I probably will delete my account at that point.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#437I suspect most of the commenters supporting the right of a private company to moderate content is completely contingent on what those moderation policies are. Commenters feign holding an absolute position but would certainly balk if the moderation ever turned against them and the idea they support. If you believe on principle, the right of private companies to moderate content, then you must support all kinds of absu…
I believe those things would be within Twitter's rights, but would object to them as being bad ideas that would make me not want to use the platform. That isn't the same as saying I think Twitter doesn't have the right to do them, though.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#438I'm not sure Musk knows what he's doing, this feels like a personal vendetta. I'm also not sure he has any likelihood of succeeding in the first place, I wouldn't necessarily assume anyone is going to take him up at that price. And (quite frankly) I don't think that Musk is a very good free speech activist. I think he's regularly hypocritical about free speech and regularly engages in his own forms of censorship; I d…
I think the one thing you're missing out is the true potential downside. Which is that over the last decade Silicon Valley social media companies have taken an extra-ordinarily long and painful path to understanding how they need to handle speech on their platforms. Musk's position is basically "Do what Mark Zuckerberg did in the early 2010s". There is a reason why facebook no longer acts like that, there's a reason facebook has changed it's name to disassociate from that. And Facebook didn't suffer from their actions there - the commonwealth did.
Potentially this is Musk bringing back systematic misinformation, troll farms, accidentallly enabling genocides etc. etc.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#439I have to admit: I hope this happens mostly for the entertainment value. Also, I think that this business of shutting down opinions of people we dislike or disagree with is really bad for society long term. I think Musk might stop that.
I am 100% sure that Musk would be fine with people criticizing him, Tesla or SpaceX or anything else that he has a hand in and would never shut anything like that down. Like that time when he started a personal vendetta against someone who suggested he didn't know what he was talking ... oh, wait.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#440As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this. Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium. There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs. See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the…
If you think the premium isn't high enough, the best thing to do is borrow some money and launch your own bid. Go for it, I say!