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.
You say social engineering, I say criminal fraud.
Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#482It 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…
He is a man who owns and can raise massive amounts of money and promise smart people the ability to build something they want to build. That he gets so much credit for his ventures is a very strange thing to me given how many he has vs how few hours in the day he must have to actually pay any attention to them.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#483If Musk’s team does a deeper dive than Twitter is willing to invest in and determines that the number of bots is material, it calls into question the entire financial model of Twitter. Customers will demand refunds and earnings will have to be restated going back years. It’s going to be a nuclear financial bomb.
So of course Twitter is going to sandbag. They can’t afford to release that data because they know it’s going to be material. Musk knows this and Twitter knows this.
I think Twitter is actually fucked now because their number of accounts will come into question and maybe even the SEC might squeeze them. But Twitter will probably look tough but try to close this chapter as quickly as possible and hope that no one digs deeper into the fake accounts.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#484It 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…
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
People here don't know what claims in entirety were made by either party, and thus, it's impossible to speculate. This is what courts are for and Elon, and his team, are not idiots.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#485This is going to Delaware Chancery court, and if his ridiculous claims hold it does turn upside down long-held general principles of mergers and acquisitions that would affect.. everyone. I don't think the court will side with him on this. In the past, they have forced mergers to go through..
So embarrassing if he ends up being forced to own it and everyone knows he tried to back out.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#486Suppose the filing is true - all of it. Let’s start the conversation with that and see what people think and what happens next to Twitter.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#487Twitter can’t give Musk the data he needs to determine fake accounts. It’s obvious that while Twitter does some work to detect fake accounts, they probably only go after low hanging fruit. Twitter is balancing investment costs vs impact to the platform and obviously they are coming in light. Everyone that uses Twitter knows it has a bot problem. If Musk’s team does a deeper dive than Twitter is willing to invest in a…
Which is precisely the problem with signing a "I'm buying you for $44B" and then claiming you had no idea they had so many bots to back out of it.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#488One senses there are hoards of lawyers out there gleefully rubbing their hands together and salivating over the feasting to come.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#489Twitter can’t give Musk the data he needs to determine fake accounts. It’s obvious that while Twitter does some work to detect fake accounts, they probably only go after low hanging fruit. Twitter is balancing investment costs vs impact to the platform and obviously they are coming in light. Everyone that uses Twitter knows it has a bot problem. If Musk’s team does a deeper dive than Twitter is willing to invest in a…
This doesn't make sense. "Material" is a term of art defined with regard to the current deal, there's no such thing as determining "the number of bots is material" in a general sense such that customers (I presume you mean advertisers) would automatically be allowed to sue.
Sure, if Musk finds Twitter has historically lied that would be significant. But Twitter doesn't have a single "bot number". In specific circumstances they make specific calculations using defined procedures. For example, the number Musk is whining about uses active - not all - users as the denominator, so of course it's going to be lower than the "real" number of bots.
Surprisingly to me, so far Musk hasn't provided an argument beyond this same sort of word salad. Maybe he's playing n-dimensional chess, but if Twitter sues him he'll presumably have to make his real secret arguments in open court. We'll see then.
Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement
#490I stand by my theory that the whole thing was a displacement activity that caught his attention instead of something else more arduous that he was supposed to do that month. Like when I suddenly develop an interest in Columbo trivia when actually I'm supposed to be doing my accounts.