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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#421

Post by avs733 »

wwweston wrote: post #413
scythe wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Icahn was claiming that Netflix was undervalued. To be fair, he was also angling for an acquisition. But a bid like that usually has a half-life; the market trends to a good price — and indeed, Netflix doubled in value by mid-2013. Elon is arguing that Twitter is mismanaged. He already probably pushed them on the edit button, even though they claimed he didn't. If he's right — and Goldman Sachs seems to agree — he co…

> Elon is arguing that Twitter is mismanaged. Anyone who thinks this is manifestly true should read this take from an ex-CEO of Reddit: https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 tl;dr: managing human interaction in any environment with limited accountability is a lot harder than it looks Also, there's the question of by what metrics one would argue it's mismanaged. Revenue and engagement trends? Profitabi…

By the “I personally don’t like your policies” metric.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#422

Post by avs733 »

legalcorrection wrote: post #419
yalogin wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, as a counter argument, there is every reason to believe that Musk will make a mockery of twitter and run it into the ground. A social media platform with a lot of responsibility is not for someone as egotistical as Musk. If Zuckerberg is bad, Musk could be catastrophic.

"Mockery" i.e. not censor people who say things you don't like.

It’s a completely ridiculous narrative to think that musk is interested in anyones free speech but his own. We should all be more aware of when the narratives billionaires pitch about themselves become perceived to be objective reality.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#423

Post by senthil_rajasek »

WalterBright wrote: post #17

Every company I know of that did a poison pill to prevent a takeover wound up tanking within a year or two and the shareholders wound up with sand. As a Twitter shareholder myself, the board is making a big mistake. As a legal matter, I don't understand how a board could sell shares to other shareholders at a lower price than to the entity wanting to buy shares to gain control.

Can you give some examples? I know one company that had the poison pill provision and did well.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#424

Post by rosndo »

roughly wrote: post #400
rosndo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ETF isn’t going to “accidentally” exceed 15% ownership of Twitter. Seriously, do you think funds playing with the kind of money to buy 15% of twitter often make careless purchases? >Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%. Such an arrangement would make Elon the beneficial owner of your shares.

> An ETF isn’t going to “accidentally” exceed 15% ownership of Twitter. No, but an ETF has a defined investment strategy, and if enough money comes into the ETF, it could potentially trigger this.

Do you think big ETFs just buy shares willy nilly without any due diligence on company charters and bylaws?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#425

Post by philosopher1234 »

NoOneNew wrote: post #259
jacobolus wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain Musk’s trap and who is being trapped?

If I knew the play, I wouldnt be sharing it publicly. My whole point is, Musk made a series of public actions that made a stir. One action had the board make a knee-jerk decision that seems somewhat logical. He's jabbing with his left and the Twitter board seems to have hopped to their left and he's maybe going to uppercut, right hook, maybe go for a knee or do nothing at all and get hammered on martinis or mojitos o…

No post body was provided.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#426

Post by hedora »

99_00 wrote: post #418

Musk wins if he buys the company. And he wins if he doesn't because his offer is bringing a lot of unwanted attention to the people who control Twitter. And it exposes people who are anti-free speach. A position that is now politically acceptable but will collapse under scrutiny and attention.

This has been a long slow slide in the US.

Previous media ownership rules would have prevented Twitter from existing at its current scale. This was explicitly to prevent too much editorial control from becoming too concentrated.

Regardless of whether Musk buys Twitter, the long term trend is likely to continue, at least until one party decides to stop it. (Consolidation was largely driven by rule changes made by the Regan, Bush, Clinton and second Bush administration. Other factors have accelerated it since.) E

Edit: I have a hard time having much sympathy for conservatives on this particular issue, since some rule changes were timed to allow conservative talk show networks to buy up large swaths of the US market, and also wre designed to allow Fox News to exist as a "entertainment" (obviously biased news) network. Having said that, liberal propaganda and conservative propaganda have the same root cause.

It's telling that the proposed "solution" to Twitter having censors is to let Elon Musk be the censor instead. The only thing that has worked in the past is decentralization of the news industry, but no one is calling for Twitter to be broken up. I guess both sides want it to exist so they can control it.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#427

Post by paulpauper »

If elon owns twitter privately he can just go through his comments and ban the impersonators on the spot. He has complained for years about twitter not doing enough to stop scam impersonators. In fact he can ban anyone then. He would literally have that power. Conversely, he could also unban anyone. There would be no chain of command. Imagine using fakebook but then also having the power to ban anyone too. I think he may even be able to read private DMs or see accounts who blocked him. It could have national security implications if he can read Obama's DMs for example.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#428

Post by avs733 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #404
adsteel_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there guardrails on this? This comment makes it sound like the board can print their own money.

> Are there guardrails on this? If you've ever wondered why corporations have authorized and issued shares, there you go. Increasing the authorized share count requires a shareholder vote. Issuing shares under that cap does not. When shareholders increase the number of authorized shares, they are delegating that decision making to the Board. It wasn't always like this. But as finance sped up, particularly towards the…

See also: stock buybacks

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#430

Post by browserman »

systemvoltage wrote: post #368
adsteel_ wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there guardrails on this? This comment makes it sound like the board can print their own money.

So far I've tried to understand the poison pill and there aren't any satisfactory responses, either on HN or elsewhere in the news. Wikipedia of Shareholder's Rights Plan is skimp in details as well. Everything I hear ostensibly appears to be "That should be illegal, makes zero sense". So with no good information out there, it seems like no one is an expert at this and making up bullshit.

I'm interested in this assumption that because you do not understand something, no one else must either. Is this a heuristic you apply to all fields of knowledge, or just business law?
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