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Elon’s Out

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Re: Elon’s Out

#521

Post by balderdash »

Victerius wrote: post #465
colechristensen wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Order the legal entities which possess the shares to transfer ownership of them. Actually keeping track of stocks is complicated but ultimately a boring bureaucracy.

Thanks. Further questions: (1) Would it be legal for someone to own the legal entity owning their shares of publicly traded companies? (2) What if he moves all of his stock in offshore accounts?

He (or an entity he owns and controls) owns the shares, and and another company (computershare in the case of Tesla) maintains a list of all the shareholders (registrar and transfer agent). No one else “owns” them

He may just own the shares directly with the company (we’ve largely done away with paper share certificates). Or he may have transferred them to his broker (Morgan Stanley?) (who in turn might custody them with a custodian BNY Mellon?) who holds them on his behalf. If he then transferred those shares to say DBS in Singapore MS/BNY is going to inform computershare “fyi we just sent all those Elon musk shares to DBS in Singapore” and DBS is going to say (FYI we know have custody of all those Elon musk shares)..,and when you go looking for those shares all you have to do is go to computershare with a court order and say where are Elon’s shares, and they’ll be like, oh over at DBS in Singapore… and for all I know the registrar can probably just send a note to DBS in Singapore and be like (ahh we got a court order to transfer these shares to some other guys so we did, subtract $44b from his account)

All of this is a long winded way of saying that “shares” are just entries on a ledger maintained by the company or someone else on their behalf, which makes seizing them, typically pretty easy…

Re: Elon’s Out

#522

Post by hotpotamus »

ByteJockey wrote: post #507
hotpotamus wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anytime the idea of a wealth tax is brought up, I see commenters coming out of the woodwork to say that it would be impossible to actually collect it from the wealthy. Though I will note that it seems like we are able to collect yachts and planes from Russian oligarchs now, so perhaps our techniques have advanced in the last few months.

Wait, is that what you always see as the argument against it? Whenever I've seen it brought up it's always that it would require a constitutional amendment (specifically in the US). The federal government isn't allowed to do taxes that way under the current system (Article 1 Clause 2 Section 3). Hell, the feds weren't even allowed to do a straight income tax until the 16th amendment.

Washington thought it was fine https://www.npr.org/2019/09/12/760148148/episode-956-the-car...

Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point. Who knows, perhaps that's astroturfing by troll teams employed by billionaires to try and discourage the masses. As you said, they've already got plenty of lawyers to work on it from the constitutional end - including 6 of the lawyers on the Supreme Court.

Re: Elon’s Out

#523

Post by mr90210 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #501
ethagknight wrote: post #276

I find it amazing that not one of the top comments gives Elon ANY consideration that maybe, just maybe, he has a legitimate case against Twitter. We don’t know what he’s found, what he was told, what he was promised, what changed on Twitter’s side. Some very top level people bailed or were fired shortly after Elon’s acquisition proposal was announced. It sure appears that Elons is just balking, but what is far more l…

Maybe, instead of the "Elon is a genius playing 4D chess" speculation, we can simply look at his actions and conclude than no reasonable person would seriously go about buying Twitter the way he did. Given this and previous behaviour it seems pretty reasonable to assume that Musk was doing it for the lolz and to get attention as "the savior of free speech". It's useful to note that after he signed the contract the ma…

Some people are just delusional, at this point Elon could shoot a Panda just for fun and there would be people stating that it was self-defense.

Re: Elon’s Out

#524

Post by vehementi »

ethagknight wrote: post #276

I find it amazing that not one of the top comments gives Elon ANY consideration that maybe, just maybe, he has a legitimate case against Twitter. We don’t know what he’s found, what he was told, what he was promised, what changed on Twitter’s side. Some very top level people bailed or were fired shortly after Elon’s acquisition proposal was announced. It sure appears that Elons is just balking, but what is far more l…

> what is far more likely is that he has uncovered some deep Twitter bullshit

What is your calculation/reasoning that that is far more likely? How did you come to that?

Re: Elon’s Out

#525

Post by vehementi »

mabbo wrote: post #265

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 functi…

Yes, this is how it has been the entire time since Musk's offer. You'll see that the stock price was pegged at $54, and then when he started talking shit, the price went to some weighted average of the true FMV and Musk's offer, depending on confidence levels

Re: Elon’s Out

#526

Post by vehementi »

jmpeax wrote: post #295

> Twitter has said in its SEC filings that it estimates that fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users are “false or spam accounts” Is this different to total percentage of false or spam accounts? The monetizable daily active users seems like a very specific subpopulation of total twitter accounts.

Yes, it is crucially different. mDAU is defined in the SEC filings which you can easily check. Basically it boils down to, there's say a billion twitter accounts. A shitload are inactive, or obviously bots, or joke accounts, or actual alts (don't double-count), or API users, or people using Tweetdeck, or doing all sorts of other things that Twitter can easily detect are not resulting in eyeballs on ads. Twitter boils down the number of "users that use Twitter clients that display ads" down to "just" 230M/day. Twitter then claims that, of those users, who are mostly just every day people logging in, maybe liking a post, scrolling a bit, seeing an ad on a real Twitter client -- of those users, when they sample them, they find that Musk knows this but still knowingly confuses them to try to trick people into thinking Twitter is lying about that 5% number (since it's pretty obvious there are many bots on twitter)

Re: Elon’s Out

#527

Post by encryptluks2 »

b112 wrote: post #479
phrz wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression that judges presiding over civil cases cannot exercise their inherent power (in some jurisdictions) to jail those in (severe) contempt of court?

To both replies, I agree contempt of court is a thing. I misspoke. What I mean is, the remedy for non-compliance with contracts, is fiscal, seizure, penalties of thus nature. The goal of civil court is not the state punishing, but instead, laying out compensation, for damages, to the harmed. There is no contempt of court for not paying these damages.

If there was then a lot of America would become slaves by not paying their debts. There may be contempt here though if Elon does something to really piss off the courts.

Re: Elon’s Out

#528

Post by SamReidHughes »

KVFinn wrote: post #515
saurik wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, minus a discount for however long you think it will take before that actually happens, taking into account such things as inflation, interest rates, and market performance (due to the opportunity costs of holding this stock until then).

>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. How do I bet on no outcome one way or another for many many years? If there's one thing I know about the US legal system it is giant corporations battling each other takes years and years to resolve.

You can make that bet with options.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR/options?date=1674172800...

Re: Elon’s Out

#529

Post by z3phyr »

b112 wrote: post #479
phrz wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you under the impression that judges presiding over civil cases cannot exercise their inherent power (in some jurisdictions) to jail those in (severe) contempt of court?

To both replies, I agree contempt of court is a thing. I misspoke. What I mean is, the remedy for non-compliance with contracts, is fiscal, seizure, penalties of thus nature. The goal of civil court is not the state punishing, but instead, laying out compensation, for damages, to the harmed. There is no contempt of court for not paying these damages.

> There is no contempt of court for not paying these damages.

Then how does the civil court function? If nobody follows the courts order, the court is redundantly illegitimate.

Re: Elon’s Out

#530

Post by silisili »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #478
HWR_14 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cash rules everything around me. Serious question: Are you in the US? Any Western European country? There's a tendency for people in corrupt areas to assume the whole world works like that.

I’m in a white and homogenous area of the us. Cash does indeed rule every thing around me. There’s not a problem that can’t be solved with cash. Kill a few kids drunk driving or shooting recklessly? Cash in the right pockets and the evidence will be inadmissible and the case goes kaput. Want some more privacy? Your neighbors might suddenly find the neighborhood inhospitable with cash in the right hands. Want your kid…

I'm not sure how much the first line really matters, as I grew up in a rather diverse top 25 city, but yeah, experience was about the same.

In high school, everyone knew exactly who to call if you got a DUI. 10k was the going price to get a certain lawyer who gets the case in front of a certain judge and however that worked, the charge was dropped to a moving violation. Kinda sick how the system works.

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