If the designer of Bloomberg.com is on HN... thank your for making a decent looking news site. Literally every other site I'm bombarded with sensory overload. This site just lets me read the article in sweet serenity.
Elon’s Out
401–410 of 767 posts
Re: Elon’s Out
#402Re: Elon’s Out
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could certainly try; you can start a lawsuit without any real basis if that's how you want to spend your money. Trying to argue, in court, that you are entitled to have your investment insulated from loss due the primary owner selling it?
>due to the primary owner selling it We were talking about the courts seizing the assets though, it's not being voluntarily sold.
Why would that make a difference. When someone defaults on a house/car the seized asset is often sold under value, nobody has any ground to sue.
Re: Elon’s Out
#404I 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…
"There is not a whisper of evidence for this claim, no hint that there might be evidence, no acknowledgement that a reasonable reader of this letter might want to see evidence."
This is completely wrong, right? The evidence might not be terrific but it's definitely more than a whisper.
Re: Elon’s Out
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m having it hard taking you seriously given you making such a basic mistake of thinking they could seize spacex property directly. What industry do you work in?
Oh give me a break. Property of a privately owned company can be directly seized. I have not done an analysis on exactly which of Musk's private companies are jointly owned, and how the ownership is structured. It's a comment on hn for crying out loud.
SpaceX is well known to have a bunch of investors. Put a little effort in before explicitly calling out that the government could seize rockets. It’s as silly as saying they could start just taking Model 3s from the Tesla factory to get their money back.
Re: Elon’s Out
#406Earlier 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.
Musk owns about 25% of Tesla, mostly after investing about $50M in Tesla's early funding rounds. His wealth today comes largely because Tesla (under his leadership as CEO) has become a company that investors now believe is incredibly valuable, and they've driven up the stock price. At what point in this process did Musk "accumulate" this ownership of Tesla, and exactly what do you propose should have happened to stop…
> what do you propose should have happened
Every unit of time (year or month) you have to declare what stocks you own and you get taxed based on how much they're worth.
Re: Elon’s Out
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
It's wild to me that people think that Elon might actually face legal consequences for this. The Delaware court isn't some magical place run by elves. It's a court in the US. You know what's a lot cheaper than $34 billion dollars, or heck even $1 billion dollars? $200k for 3-4 judges. The Supreme Court just changed the law of the land based on a right-wing political campaign. You think a billionare, let alone the ric…
> It's wild to me that people think that Elon might actually face legal consequences for this.
This stuff goes both ways. Yes Elon has a lot of money. But twitter is worth XX billions of dollars.
Twitter is willing to spend a lot of those billions of dollars, in order to get Elon to pay the agreed upon price that he committed too.
This is not the case of a nobody vs a billionaire. This is instead multiple billion dollar entities fighting each other.
Re: Elon’s Out
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Sure, you can sue them to close the deal but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. LOL, I'm sure the juice will be worth the squeeze on a $44 billion dollar house.
Nope. Years of court battles distracts the company and keeps other buyers away.
There are no other buyers at this price or anything near it, Musk simply messed up. The deal he proposed is beyond stupid and the effect this can have on all of Musk's holdings is the thing to watch for, Twitter could well be his Waterloo. 'Is this the hill you want to die on?' is always a good question to ask yourself before you dig in and from where I'm sitting Twitter was 'optional' in Musk's arsenal, he had all of the benefits without the downsides as it was.
Maybe his ego is incompatible with not owning the things he relies on but in this case that ownership comes with a pretty hefty price tag and even people at Musk's level don't throw around tens of billions of dollars lightly (normally speaking, that is).
Re: Elon’s Out
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
Musk has sold billions in stock at this point, so this whole "it's stock that's increased in value independent of Musk" line of thinking is a bad misdirection.
And every time he has sold he has paid huge taxes on those sales.
It should be payed every year, not just when sold. Joe Nobody pays property taxes every year, not just when he sells his meager house.
Re: Elon’s Out
#410This article says Musk agreed to buy Twitter mostly as a joke. I think there's a far better explanation. This wasn't a joke for Musk because after agreeing to buy Twitter he proceeded to sell billions of dollars' worth of TSLA stock, supposedly to finance the purchase. Even for the richest man in the world that's not a joke. I think a better explanation is that Musk offered to buy Twitter as a cover for selling billi…
Thank you for the explanations. How this is not one of the top comments is beyond me. This comment most logically explains all the drama started several months when Musk offered to buy Twitter. The stories generated several of the highest rated posts and several of the most commented posts at HN, just adding to the drama. Now it seems that it's quite a possibility that the Twitter drama is just a red herring for Musk…
> How this is not one of the top comments is beyond me.
Uhm... Exactly this is mentioned in the article:
> He also gave himself an excuse to sell a bunch of Tesla stock near the highs.
So Levine already mentioned this.