Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

The system appears to have come under existential pressure.

I used to be a free speech absolutist. I'm wondering, now, if absolute free speech is like direct democracy. It's fine in theory. But if we look at its history, the track record consistently veers towards chaos. (Much more for direct democracies than free speech, though.) A value set can be laudable but useless if any attempt at manifesting it tears its host apart.

I haven't made up my mind one way or the other. But the debate unfolding across society doesn't seem unreasonable. (My hunch is the problem is dark-box amplification algorithms married to ad-supported business models. Not Billy Bob tweeting KKK NFTs or whatever.)

What you're saying is why do regulations allow for this? Idk, but this is a regulatory question, and therefore it should be directed at the government not at the billionaire in question.

It varies. I'll preface this by saying I am not privy to the specifics of this deal, but in general this depends on the terms of the options plan. Some employees may have their options accelerated upon triggering events like a change of control. Others may have options accelerated on a "double trigger" such as a chance of control followed by termination.

> And what’s my incentive to work for an established private company with no stock growth prospect? I guess Twitter will have to pay 500k senior eng. salaries in cash instead of stock?

You don't need publicly traded securities to have deferred compensation. Shares continue to exist even if the company is private and liquidity events can be structured to allow employees to cash out in a "controlled and deferred" fashion. Plus you could structure deferred compensation entirely without those liquidity events or shares for that matter. Just promise to pay people $X in Y years

Conventional wisdom today seems to be that most people are mindless meme relay bots that simply believe and propagate whatever they read if it's presented in the right way or pushes the right emotional buttons. Sure there are some people you might describe that way, but is it really most people?

Personally I've been on the fence for a long time. I am not ready to throw in the towel on the idea of a global radically open conversation, but I have certainly had my faith in humanity shaken profoundly by things like Qanon. A disturbingly large number of people are frighteningly gullible. Are there people who simply can't mentally handle unfiltered information?