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Elon’s Out

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Re: Elon’s Out

#261

Post by Waterluvian »

alphabetting wrote: post #4

I found this part most interesting. Public awareness of the Delaware Court of Chancery is about to skyrocket during this court battle. The fact that Musk is working in such bad faith here — that he seems so unconcerned with law and the contract he signed — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it will certainly annoy a Delaware chancellor; Delaware likes to think of itself as a stable place for corporate deals, with predi…

Reminds me of the impotence of the American system to deal with Trump over the years. And he opened the flood gates for scofflaws.

If they don’t make an example of Musk (if he so deserves it), the same thing will happen and Delaware will become less useful for corporations.

Re: Elon’s Out

#262

Post by [deleted] »

loceng wrote: post #254
roca wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "cave diver paedophile" incident made it abundantly clear to everyone willing to see that whatever else he may be, Musk is a malicious clown. It was always only a matter of time before that had greater consequences.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Elon’s Out

#263

Post by [deleted] »

labrador wrote: post #203

I believe he was sincere, but found out quickly that a lot of people had strong feelings about his plans for the platform. It's possible he was in danger of losing people he really needs for his other businesses. I don't blame him for bailing out on a lose/lose situation.

[deleted]

Re: Elon’s Out

#264

Post by [deleted] »

loceng wrote: post #254
roca wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "cave diver paedophile" incident made it abundantly clear to everyone willing to see that whatever else he may be, Musk is a malicious clown. It was always only a matter of time before that had greater consequences.

Quoted post unavailable.

[deleted]

Re: Elon’s Out

#265

Post by mabbo »

A fun side effect of all of this: if you believe in the court's ability to force Musk to buy Twitter, you should continue to buy up stock until it reaches the price Musk agreed to pay for it.

If you don't believe he'll be forced to pay, you should sell and/or short until it's at whatever you think the right market value for a stock of Twitter ought to be.

And wherever the price is between those two is a direct function of what experts believe the probability of each outcome is. It's like a massive betting market on a legal case.

Re: Elon’s Out

#266

Post by roca »

loceng wrote: post #254
roca wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "cave diver paedophile" incident made it abundantly clear to everyone willing to see that whatever else he may be, Musk is a malicious clown. It was always only a matter of time before that had greater consequences.

Quoted post unavailable.

Taking your version of events at face value: Musk hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on someone who merely criticized his rescue plan, received some lies from said investigator, and uncritically repeated them to his massive social media following, thus smearing the person concerned ... and this makes Musk a tireless advocate for the truth and social media sanity.

Musk cultists are the worst.

PS, if Musk can so easily be deceived into spreading false information --- even when he, so incredibly rich and smart, hired the source of the information --- why would you trust anything he says?

EDIT: "Musk cultists are the worst" was out of line. I apologise.

Re: Elon’s Out

#267

Post by henry_bone »

I see the author's scepticism of the bots argument, but I don't think it's one that should be dismissed so easily. I don't know anything, but isn't the value of these big tech properties largely in the number of actual human daily active users?

When Facebook acquired whatsapp, I remember reading that it wasn't the tech per se that facebook really wanted. It was the daily active users. Whatsapp had (still has? dunno) a pretty big userbase. That was the where a lot of the value lay for facebook, or so I understand.

So, if daily active users are important to the value of the property, do we believe twitter's SEC filing estimates of That really does seem like a legit reason to abort the deal. Twitter is representing A more cynical view might be that Musk is simply looking to lower the price. Exposure of Twitter's bot problems in a court might not be very good for the share price. Just having Musk pull out (9 kids, he never pulls out) probably dips the share price. So, isn't it all good leverage to bring the price down?

Re: Elon’s Out

#268

Post by dane-pgp »

Nevermark wrote: post #109
BobbyJo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In very direct, real terms, assets are power. They represent resources to do things. The problem here isn't that wealth is power, it will always be power. The issue is that a single person has been allowed to accumulate too much.

It would mitigate the problem if institutions could be strengthened by design to be less sensitive to corruption or special treatment. There are lots of successful examples - constitutions, voting, term limits, separate judiciary, non-political commuters, etc The big problem I see in the design of egalitarian systems, is explicitly addressing the need for continuous response to new forms of centralization. I don’t kn…

> But the constitution is silent on any guidance or requirement on addressing new power centralization problems.

The federal constitution says that voting is left up to the states, so arguably the centralization problem is ~50 different experiments which have all gone wrong in the exact same way.

You could say that the federal constitution should have put some guidance in place to stop exactly this correlated failure, but ironically that would introduce more centralization as there would be one rule forced on all the individual states.

Whether that's a good idea or not I think depends on how good the rule is in practice. Unfortunately the rule you suggest highlights just how difficult it is to write a good one. For example, how do you define "coordinated organization"?

If both major parties split into 50 different organizations that all happened to endorse the same candidate for president (but for nominally different state-specific reasons), should the SCOTUS have the power to ban those political organizations (and perhaps ban one and not the other)?

Fortunately we can look to other countries that have managed to avoid political duopoly by using voting systems which don't penalize people for voting for new parties. Even better, some US states have already implemented such a system[0], and, going back to your point about constitutions, the people of Maine managed to introduce RCV not because of a constitutional requirement, but despite a narrow (state) constitutional prohibition.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...

Re: Elon’s Out

#269

Post by peyton »

camjohnson26 wrote: post #207
nerdawson wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve creating artificially inflated asset prices You can buy shares in other car manufacturers. Why would Tesla disproportionately benefit from inflated asset prices?

Because car companies are boring, and in an era of cheap money the meme wins. “Sexy” automakers also got insane multiples, look at where Lucid and Rivian were trading. But the capital is diverted to whatever asset people think will keep going up, not the one that will create value in the form of profits. This is also why GameStop, AMC, DogeCoin, Shiba Inu, NFTs, Pokémon cards, etc. were trading so high, the meme is t…

Yeah he’s a fundraising beast. It’s part of his job duties.

Re: Elon’s Out

#270

Post by rurp »

moomin wrote: post #27
alphabetting wrote: post #4

I found this part most interesting. Public awareness of the Delaware Court of Chancery is about to skyrocket during this court battle. The fact that Musk is working in such bad faith here — that he seems so unconcerned with law and the contract he signed — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it will certainly annoy a Delaware chancellor; Delaware likes to think of itself as a stable place for corporate deals, with predi…

This is one of those things that could genuinely cause problem for the entire US (corporate) legal system. There’s a genuine danger that the result of this case will be “some people are too powerful to be regulated by the US system, and this is now obvious”.

Agreed, this situation is uncomfortably similar to a number Trump crises. Much of our legal system is based on norms and good faith, which a sufficiently motivated and powerful psychopath can pervert to their advantage.

I have no idea what will happen here. Musk is clearly in the wrong both legally and ethically, but I suspect he will weasel out of resbonsibility for the damage he's caused. That alone will be bad enough, but the much larger risk is that it opens the floodgates for slightly less powerful scumbags to flout the law.

US law and democracy are shakier than I've seen in my lifetime, and Musk is actively taking a sledgehammer to a piece of that foundation for his own greed and whim.

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