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Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

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Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#291

Post by kelnos »

avalys wrote: post #197
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another belief floated by Josh Wolfe (an investor with Lux Capital) who claimed it was a ruse to liquidate Tesla stock en masse without Tesla hodlers getting suspicious and tanking the inflated stock price. https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1545387947578597376

The deal includes a "specific performance" clause, which allows Twitter to force Musk to carry out the deal. He can't simply pay $1 billion and walk away, he's in for a very messy legal fight. This pretext about bots is incredibly weak and he's in no way guaranteed to win. If this really were part of some grand master plan, I think he would have left himself an easier out.

It also depends on what the Twitter board and shareholders want. Will they want to get bought out and owned by someone who clearly doesn't want to own the company, and may run it into the ground out of spite? Certainly some shareholders will just want to take the money and run (the agreed-upon buyout price is quite a premium over the current stock price), but others will be more interested in protecting the future of Twitter as a company and platform.

Agree that there will be a massive legal fight, but my guess is that it will be over how much extra Musk has to pay to get out of the deal (beyond the $1B breakup fee), than over making him perform. But who knows; only time will tell.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#292

Post by crmd »

idiotsecant wrote: post #216
TillE wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the initial decision was something like "hey I could actually just buy Twitter, that would be funny". It's less clear to me why he almost immediately started trying to back out. It's probably a waste of a significant chunk of money, but is that all?

It makes more sense if you assume that Elon Musk is both a sometimes successful businessman and also suffering from unmanaged bipolar disorder.

Agree 100%. I’ve never met Elon but his online behavior in the run up to and immediately after the Twitter deal sure seemed hypomanic to me.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#293

Post by halukakin »

pryce wrote: post #155
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another belief floated by Josh Wolfe (an investor with Lux Capital) who claimed it was a ruse to liquidate Tesla stock en masse without Tesla hodlers getting suspicious and tanking the inflated stock price. https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1545387947578597376

If someone's stock is as incredibly overinflated as Tesla has been for so long, choosing the most effective way to liquidate stock without triggering a run becomes a social engineering problem with the incentive of a multi-billion dollar payoff. Honestly I think other people trying to read this situation in some way that ignores a multi billion dollar incentive just sitting there is utterly naive.

This would have been switching from an overinflated stock to a much more overinflated stock.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#294

Post by elliekelly »

paxys wrote: post #149
cormacrelf wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because they want him to pay the agreed price. It is an extremely good deal for the shareholders now, so they are behaving perfectly rationally. And they can possibly force him to.

Yes but it was clear (to all outside observers, not the board apparently) that Musk never intended to pay the agreed price. He was just collecting enough material from them to justify his breach, and fake users was a smokescreen. Their response to any questions/statements about fake users should have been the equivalent of "you signed the agreement, now stick to it" not "let's work together and resolve your issues".

I’m not terribly familiar with the specifics of the deal but IIRC there’s a penalty clause that’s dependent on who, ultimately, backs out of the deal. It seems like Musk is angling to get Twitter to pull out and Twitter is doing everything they can to engage with Musk’s requests in “good faith” so he can’t claim Twitter has constructively backed out— a bit of M&A malicious compliance/a game of chicken, I believe.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#295

Post by mft_ »

fooey wrote: post #211
minimaxir wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His team apparently had a tough time verifying the data due to API rate limits. > While Twitter has provided some information, that information has come with strings attached, use limitations or other artificial formatting features, which has rendered some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisors. For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer “APIs” first explicitly…

the contract says they can't make any demands that have materially adverse effect on the company if he was hitting up against rate limits, it's easy for Twitter to call his requests adverse

How would it be adverse? Are you suggesting his data scientists are querying the API so much that they are DDoSing Twitter?

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#296

Post by eatsyourtacos »

adrr wrote: post #43

Twitter is going to be the downfall of Elon. I don’t understand is fascination with it. It’s a big distraction and he alienates a certain percentage of his customers for Tesla.

>I don’t understand is fascination with it

I think it's simple.. he is insanely egotistical. He thinks he is some super genius. I'm not saying he's not a smart guy, but he was able to benefit from the early dot-com era mostly because of timing- he happen to be a smart guy at the right age of tech when it was much "easier". There are millions of people who are really smart and work in tech but it's not like they can just magically make an insane amount of money like early on.

He thinks because he is the richest person in the world that he has also worked the most and is the smartest. Both are extremely far from reality- but you can't convince someone of him like that.

Anyway- my point is he loves being able to just post a tweet and have however many people read it and talk about it. Similar to someone like Trump- they just love all the attention to an insane amount, and unfortunately technology makes that possible these days.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#298

Post by shuckles »

chernevik wrote: post #264

The filed letter ( https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922... ) isn't the knockdown argument I would be expecting. Musk is saying, you haven't demonstrated your numbers are accurate. But having signed the merger agreement and waived due diligence, I think he needs to demonstrate that they are _not_ accurate. Complaining Twitter rate-limited his API access (which would be very foolish on their par…

Twitter has already said they'll sue for specific performance: https://twitter.com/btaylor/status/1545526087089696768

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#299

Post by petilon »

mft_ wrote: post #288
petilon wrote: post #53

This is good for Twitter, and good for the world. Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed, would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate. My guess is Musk never intended to buy Twitter. He needed an excuse for dumping billions of dollars' worth of TSLA at its peak (while at the same time faulting Bill Gates for shorting TSLA), and his…

> Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed Genuinely interested, and not just trying to argue: how would you otherwise define free speech? It sounds like you think free speech should have defined limits - which surely means it's not free speech any more?

I am going to let Sacha Baron Cohen, of all people, answer your question [1]:

Voltaire was right when he said "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to millions of people. President Trump using Twitter has spread conspiracy theories more than 1700 times to his 67 million followers.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly There will always be racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and child abusers. We should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Zuckerberg says people should decide what's credible, not tech companies. When 2/3rds of millennials have not heard of Auschwitz how are they supposed to know what's true? There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymaWq5yZIYM

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#300

Post by Flankk »

dathinab wrote: post #167
adrr wrote: post #43

Twitter is going to be the downfall of Elon. I don’t understand is fascination with it. It’s a big distraction and he alienates a certain percentage of his customers for Tesla.

Because a non small part of his success is based on portraying himself as a form of real world tony stark, mainly over twitter. Without that he wouldn't have gotten nearly anywhere close to where he ended up. Because for a lot of his ventures he used that image to collect way more money then the company would normally had gotten and the used the additional money to try to beat the completion enough so that the invest…

Tony Stark from the comic books was based on Howard Hughes. When they developed the character for film, they used Elon Musk as inspiration for the character. So you have it backwards, Elon was even in Iron Man 2. Most of his PR stunts make the news so I don't think Twitter makes much difference.
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