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Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

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Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#361

Post by Sporktacular »

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.

Minus 1 billion for a termination fee. Why would he have agreed to that if it was his plan all along?

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#362

Post by throwaway09223 »

spfzero wrote: post #343
pryce wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the incentive you mean is to move out of a stock you think is overvalued (I agree about that). But that works with any purchase, not just Twitter. And with that motive in mind, Twitter would be a really unwise company to buy, when there are so many companies available with actual asset value around. Wouldn't you rather buy something with your over-inflated stock that had some value-preservation attributes? Fo…

According to the above theory, a value move (diversifying from TSLA to something else) is precisely what must be avoided.

The move would have to be perceived as financially irrational for it to be operable in terms of distracting the market from the diversification.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#363

Post by openthc »

the_biot wrote: post #308
openthc wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than one financial analysit/money manager has floated this idea in our circle. It seems reasonalble; an pointing to the last time he sold a bunch (11B?) and told everyone it was to pay his taxes. They seem to think it was to just convert some high-risk (TSLA) to low risk (Cash, etc).

That sounds reasonably logical, but by what measure of logic is overpaying for Twitter, of all assets, a good deal? There are surely better companies to do this sort of thing with, and end up with an actually valuable asset at the end of it.

To over simplify: it's the trick of a illusionist; look over there! Something interesting (now switch the rabbit for the dove or whatever). So while GenPop is looking at this noisy deal; he's able to shuffle around money in three(?) ways -- where the net result is to reduce the TSLA holdings w/o too much penalty (or somethign). I'm not smart or rich enough to fully understand. The logic is distraction to execute a big dollar amount shift in equity positions.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#364

Post by vitaflo »

hartator wrote: post #346

Everyone is saying Musk waived is due diligence rights. Where can I read that?

He didn’t wave them he simply didn’t do them. The time for due diligence is before you sign a binding contract. Once you sign no amount of “extra” diligence maters because you already made a binding decision. Elon signed without doing enough due diligence and now wants to get out because of it but that’s not how binding contracts work.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#365

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

meragrin_ wrote: post #352
georgeecollins wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right- he waived diligence. Twitter has no obligation to prove anything to him. Twitter is obligated to give him documents if they are reasonable to request and helpful for him in financial planning. If the documents Twitter has on hand are flawed or not comprehensive, that doesn't give a pretext to leave the deal. I am sure his lawyers know this and it will all be negotiated.

If Twitter fails to provide reasonable access to data necessary to secure debt to finance the purchase, it does indeed give a pretext to leave the deal. It is part of the merger agreement. You can't tell me that a lender would not want some independent assessment of Twitter's claims before lending.

it seems he was given access to the Firehose, AKA all the data, but curiously failed to mention that in his filing (I guess it was enough, and he had no complaints?), instead complaining about rate limiting on more specific APIs (the standard Twitter API), which seem extraneous given the Firehose

also, said rate limits were lifted

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#366

Post by adamrezich »

minimaxir wrote: post #319
adamrezich wrote: post #313

lots of emotionally-charged comments here, which is pretty disappointing. if we look at this dispassionately, perhaps we can come to better conclusions than "elon big poopy head freeze peach bad". for example, one possibility is that Musk never intended to actually buy Twitter because he had reasonable suspicions that the <5% spam/bot figure provided by Twitter was intentionally incorrect (i.e. fraudulent), and he ju…

> one possibility is that Musk never intended to actually buy Twitter Which was a common perspective when the idea was floated around, until he signed a legal agreement actually saying he was going to buy Twitter.

sure, but now more events have unfolded, the results of which remain to be seen—so why can't we discuss the situation and speculate as to what will happen going forward without all the emotionally-loaded verbiage?

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#367

Post by camjohnson26 »

hwers wrote: post #278
timsneath wrote: post #17

It seems apparent to this observer that he developed cold feet pretty fast after an impetuous decision, and has been looking for any reason to back out of it since then. The spam accounts angle seems like a convenient scapegoat, rather than a real surprise to him. He's clearly eccentric in his approach to decision making: I don't think any Harvard Business School course will teach "the Musk Principles". But it's uncl…

This is such a terrible look for Elon. I’ve really liked him up until now but this just feels like playing with our emotions. Honestly starting to question how much hope there is for mars to happen at all.

Musk receives a lot of flak because he presents extremely hard problems as easy, and sells the idea that only he can solve them. But this is clearly not true, just look at all the progress that is happening in automated driving and EV technology outside of Tesla, with Waymo, Cruise, and other companies already offering limited driverless rides, and with the Rivian and Ford 150 Lightning beating the cybertruck to market by years.

Real progress takes real work, not promises and marketing fluff. If humanity makes it to Mars it will likely be without his help.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#368

Post by tux2bsd »

ramacastro wrote: post #297

Quoted post unavailable.

The IT industry is extremely left leaning on the whole. People who are intelligent enough to know better, it's a very strange phenomenon.

Twitter has one of the worst interfaces known to man, I'm amazed anyone uses it.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#369

Post by notahacker »

godelski wrote: post #61
redact207 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is he's hit that obscene level of wealth and realizes he is now beyond the controls of the system, and can therefore game it to his advantage. When you can afford the best legal team money can buy and payoff the rest of the gatekeepers, then the game is simply to transfer wealth into your own pocket in bigger chunks.

Honestly, so what if he's out $60 bn. I don't think this would affect his lifestyle in any way whatsoever. But it would affect his high score. I'm guessing at one point he realized the former but later realized the latter and cared more about that. Though he's still got a 88bn lead on second place so I'm not sure why he cares.

Not sure it's going to affect his probably-not-that-lavish lifestyle that much. But since those billions are in stock it likely it will affect his level of control of companies, his ability to attract future investments and his future decisions. Which people paying attention to tech companies probably care about more than what flavour caviar he eats and what schools his kids go to anyway.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#370

Post by chernevik »

timsneath wrote: post #17

It seems apparent to this observer that he developed cold feet pretty fast after an impetuous decision, and has been looking for any reason to back out of it since then. The spam accounts angle seems like a convenient scapegoat, rather than a real surprise to him. He's clearly eccentric in his approach to decision making: I don't think any Harvard Business School course will teach "the Musk Principles". But it's uncl…

It seems like his lawyers aren't very good, and maybe neither his bankers.
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