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Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
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Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#722So Twitter was at $70 per share a year ago. So what? Jack Dorsey was CEO a year ago, too. The share price was $33 less than a month ago. But, despite an absolutely incredible roller-coaster news cycle, things have been definitely trending down at Twitter ($33/share last month), which was reflected in its share price. The current executive team (and Dorsey) had wasted time focusing on things that didn't matter instead…
Everyone currently holding $TWTR believes that the true value is greater than the current price. To make a successful hostile bid, you need to pay not just "more than the current price", but "more than the holders of 50% of current shares believe the company to be worth". Usually bidders use analyst price targets to guess at the distribution of holders' internal price targets. This is what makes it so difficult, and…
What happens if they reject his offer?
He sells and the price falls.
Then he announces a new platform and the price falls again.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#723I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.
Nah, the people who advocate that private platforms reserve the right to censor themselves tend to know what the 1st amendment means regarding government censorship.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#724> "if my offer is rejected i will reconsider my ownership in twitter." Thats an immense amount of selling pressure on the stock... This is a threat. He's negotiating with a gun to their head.
This is standard operating procedure for takeovers, but I think you're massively overestimating the amount of pressure someone selling 9% of the company places on the stock price. Someone buying 9% (with an expecation that they would buy more) moved the stock $10. The same person selling 9% stock (with no possibility that can sell more) is unlikely to move the stock more than that.
I disagree. The fact that someone is willing to buy a stake in a company suggests the company has some potential. The fact that someone having bought a company is willing to dump their entire ownership so quickly suggests the company may be rotten from the inside. The latter would exert a much stronger downward pressure on the stock, in my opinion.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#725What if Twitter employees threaten to leave en-masse? I'd seen some reports that people quit when he became the largest shareholder. It's not outside the realm of possibility.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#726I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.
Not really. When moderation goes away, platforms become rife with racism, spam, scams and less than desirable actors. We've seen this with Gab and Parler.
Eh that's a bit of a different mechanism. If you bootstrap a platform from 0 users with the core concept being a lack of moderation, then you're likely to attract those who have been banned, excluded, or otherwise ostracized from existing platforms. This happens because those who support lack of moderation but still have a choice to remain are likely to remain on the existing platforms due to network effects.
Whereas if you start with the popular platform and progressively remove moderation, you end up with different effects, because you still have the core, non-bad-actor population. That is, if your signal-to-noise ratio goes down, but the absolute amount of interaction with your platform increases, it may still be worth it.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#727I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.
Not really. When moderation goes away, platforms become rife with racism, spam, scams and less than desirable actors. We've seen this with Gab and Parler.
Why does everyone think Elon Musk wants zero moderation? He always talks about free speech, not zero moderation. There’s an important difference.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#728What he did today is thousand times better than shelling money behind the charity that many billionaires doing. Under Elon twitter can enable true "freedom of expression." Parag's one sided stand to enable woke culture, and board's support to that clearly showing how extreme right mindset they have when running this company. Today we can't hear the voice of other side on this platform, they are either shutdown or suspended even if you are former prez https://twitter.com/jack/status/651003891153108997
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#729> Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk offered to take Twitter Inc. private in a deal valued at $43 billion, lambasting company management and saying he’s the person who can unlock the “extraordinary potential” of a communication platform used daily by more than 200 million people.
That's intriguing. Twitter's user facing APIs have been pretty stale in the last decade or so, in fact it could be said that they have regressed. If you regularly use something like Slack then it's easy to see how Twitter have wasted 1000s of integration opportunities. With the right direction it could become an exciting platform again. I don't think Musk intends to do anything like that, though.
Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private
#730So Twitter was at $70 per share a year ago. So what? Jack Dorsey was CEO a year ago, too. The share price was $33 less than a month ago. But, despite an absolutely incredible roller-coaster news cycle, things have been definitely trending down at Twitter ($33/share last month), which was reflected in its share price. The current executive team (and Dorsey) had wasted time focusing on things that didn't matter instead…
> Boards have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision. The fact that their primary concern has to be for their shareholders and not whether the sale will be good at all for the rest of humanity is a huge problem in my eyes.
I echo /u/Babypuncher’s call for human idealism.
Legally, the Board can consider stakeholder goals and morality. I think if Musk announced a profitable-but-legal foray into genocide, you could urge shareholders to reject it, and no court will hold otherwise.
But at some point the shareholders can overrule you. And in those cases, we find management’s highest goal is usually preserving their own special salary, not the “interests of humanity.”