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Elon’s Out

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Re: Elon’s Out

#441

Post by Victerius »

Volundr wrote: post #435
avalys wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the Wall Street Journal this afternoon: "“What are they going to do if there is a judgment and he says, ‘Well, I’m still not going to buy it’?” said Zohar Goshen, professor of transactional law at Columbia Law School. “They don’t really have tools to force him to go through with it. You don’t put people in jail because they don’t buy something.”" https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-elon-musk-set-for-unpre...

Why would you? Just seize and liquidate his Telsa stock, and pay it to Twitter. Done, no jail needed. Courts are entirely capable of seizing such assets.

How would the Delaware Chancery seize $44B worth of Elon Musk's TSLA shares?

Re: Elon’s Out

#442

Post by roenxi »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #400
pc86 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that a wealth tax was passed, wouldn't the cause here be proper reporting and collection of said tax? You can declare illegal income on your federal return and pay taxes on it. They're not (in this hypothetical I guess?) asking what you're doing , just how much it's made you.

The issue is that people can change how they own things so they don't have to disclose. The law is necessarily public and people can adjust the way they structure ownership accordingly. We see this all the time already. For example, Medicaid won't pay for your extremely expensive end of life care if you have assets. So, people give away their assets (to a trust, to family) before applying for Medicaid to cover their…

And the added problem that the assets need to be valued to tax them - for liquid assets this will be much more challenging than income. Things like CGT or income tax happen at the same time as a transaction in dollars so they are easy to value. Wealth taxes would be open to gaming using the same process you describe here.

Re: Elon’s Out

#443

Post by b112 »

jjav wrote: post #372
throwaway09223 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose. If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his…

> There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. There are remedies for people like you and me and most people who disobey court orders. You can observe time and again that for those who are well connected and have some billions, the concept of law is far more malleable.

Even if what you say is true (it isn't), this is a battle between billionaires, eg the board and large stockholders @ twitter.

Re: Elon’s Out

#444

Post by jmccaf »

mise_en_place wrote: post #286
throwaway09223 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose. If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his…

Ok let’s say he has a bunch of stock as well as paintings, cars, etc. how do you divvy that up? Cut the painting in half and give it to Twitter? The rich are very wise at hiding money in assets that cannot be evenly divided nor distributed. That’s why the vast majority of taxes in the US comes from the middle class, they usually sit on piles of cash and have salaries from which to levy fines to.

Most of the middle class in America has a salary, or at least a paycheck, but distressing little cash saved. But they do pay the taxes that pay the bills.

Re: Elon’s Out

#445

Post by XorNot »

codesections wrote: post #382
throwaway09223 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose. If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his…

> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond. If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning. (Here, Levine is making a specific cla…

This is an appeal to authority that is not valid: there are plainly a lot of lawyers out there who's legal opinion leaves a lot of daylight against the actual law. Rudy Giuliani took a long time to get disbarred.

Re: Elon’s Out

#446

Post by [deleted] »

dehrmann wrote: post #364
ta8645 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about a villain, but he definitely isn't a saviour. Was hoping he'd follow through in reforming Twitter. But it turns out, even with all his resources, he's actually pretty weak in comparison to the forces set against him.

Imagine a five-year-old with billions of dollars. He'd build electric cars (aren't they s3xy?), tunnels, trains, rockets, and flamethrowers, all while having playground spats.

[deleted]

Re: Elon’s Out

#447

Post by phendrenad2 »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #140
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…

> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose. If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his…

I can't believe people are looking at this from such a silly angle. It's obvious that no court can order you to buy something. That goes against the personal freedom we have in this country, and if a court tried it, it would be an easy appeal. But that misses the point, because nobody is going to order Elon to buy Twitter. What MIGHT happen is, a court declares "Congratulations! You already bought Twitter! It has nothing to do with us, we just interpreted the contract. Again, congrats on your purchase, don't go getting buyer's remorse now winky face"

Re: Elon’s Out

#448

Post by mlindner »

raziel2701 wrote: post #353
kcplate wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This to me seems the most reasonable explanation and explains most of the behaviors involved on both sides. I don’t buy into “it was just a joke that went too far” theory. Musk doesn’t want a turd. Twitter, essentially made a deal with the devil (from their perspective). Despite being initially opposed to this deal, they now has to sue to try and make it happen, because I suspect if it doesn’t “south of $30” is going…

Musk decided to pay $54.20/share (because weed joke) for twitter under the guise that he was going to fix the bot problem. Now he wants to back out of the deal because of the bot problem. He makes no sense.

His reason for buying it was never the bot problem. Where are people inventing this reasoning from. His reason for buying it was to create a public square, which he stated multiple times.

He hardly mentioned the bots at all before setting out to buy Twitter.

Re: Elon’s Out

#449

Post by scaramanga »

bandyaboot wrote: post #395
scaramanga wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they know he has absolutely no ability to do so. They are simply trying to collect legal fees at this point.

I mean, he does though right? It’s just that doing so at this point would cause a world of hurt for Tesla and its shareholders?

I don't think so, I mean, you are not just going to place a single market order for $44bn of stock, you are going to have liquidity problems because there is not that much buy-side volume in the market, so the price must fall drastically to attract new buyers. Also I assume musk has legal obligations not to do stuff like that to begin with, as an executive with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. If Musk can tank Tesla, Exxon execs can dismantle Exxon to save the environment. But there's also the fact that a lot of his Tesla shares are already leveraged on loans. The most likely course would be for him to take out loans on the remaining unleveraged stock, but he doesn't have enough of that at the rates the banks are offering.

Anyway, I'm no expert on Musk, and I have almost zero interest in Tesla, or Twitter, or any of this clown show. So maybe my ballpark guesstimations of all the relevant numbers are way off. So take it all with a huge pinch of salt. I am just some uninformed spectator watching two lizards fight in the dust and speculating who will win or whatever :)

Edit: leveraged -> unleveraged, woops

Re: Elon’s Out

#450

Post by iab »

jjav wrote: post #372
throwaway09223 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose. If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his…

> There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. There are remedies for people like you and me and most people who disobey court orders. You can observe time and again that for those who are well connected and have some billions, the concept of law is far more malleable.

More malleable, or just literal putty
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