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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#591

Wow, my prediction is Musk will walk away, Twitter stock price will tank, and Twitter will be flooded with thousands of shareholder lawsuits (for breaching their fiduciary duty).

Why will the price tank? None of this changes the value of Twitter if he walks away.

1. The possibility that Musk would bid for the company, nonzero before all of this, goes to zero.

2. The market observes a very capable businessman, after discussion with management, deems it incompetent and value-destructive.

3. Said businessman, with a track record of remarkable success in a variety of ventures and demonstrated skill with social media, may launch a competitor service.

All three of these are bad signals for Twitter's future cash flows.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is detailed by many smart people below, fiduciary duty lawsuits are difficult to win. They'd pretty much have to have board members emailing each other saying "This would be in the best interest of shareholders, but let's screw them over instead" This was an epic debacle. Musk invested 4 BILLION dollars in an asset of questionable value, because "free speech". If he times it right he could come out ahead financial…

> I have no idea what he was doing Would it be illegal for him to launch a Twitter competitor, take 40 million followers with him, and sell all of his Twitter shares on the same day? Perhaps that is the strategy? A 1-2-3 punch to launch his own network.

Who would join his new network that isn't already on gab, parler, gettr, or truth social besides Telsa fanboys and a bunch of crypto enthusiasts?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#594
Twitter has around 8,000 employees. I fully understand and respect the high level of technical skills needed to operate and manage such a highly available service, BUT I still can't for the life of me figure what the other 7,950 employees do.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#595
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this recurring fantasy in which some Satoshi figure creates a decentralized global bulletin board, such that anybody can post and view anything anonymously and untraceably, and nobody - not the U.S. government, nor the CCP, nor the Mossad, nor the NSA - can stop it short of dismantling the whole Internet and starting over. Nobody can blame anybody, because nobody can stop it. Not because I think such a thing i…

This already existed, it was called Freenet[0], and it was just as much of a trash dumpster as one might imagine. I have no idea if it still works. The fact of the matter is that such a system absolutely would not scale. USENET crumbled under the weight of early 90s AOL subscribers; imagine even a fraction of today's Facebook or Twitter users moving to a similarly open system. It would be absolutely unusable chaos. T…

No, it isn't impossible at all. However, it would be very subjective- like that Freenet overlay software that eliminates SPAM and child pornography with ease, such a system would be more based on subjective webs of trust and optional lists people could subscribe to, used to determine what you see.

The sender anonymity part could just be having every node act as part of a mixnet- wait until you receive X messages and/or Y time has elapsed, shuffle messages, send them out to randomly chosen nodes, repeat this for 3 hops and then your message is propagated.

I've wanted to make something like this for ages since 4chan has gone so downhill. Perhaps it should happen then. It would probably be easier to adopt than something as complex as Freenet FMS for sure.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#596
post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody will switch from Twitter to some knock off he or anyone else makes. (By “nobody” I mean both nearly 0% of users and only people who will not be missed on Twitter)

Loads of people said that about Twitter in 2006 when it was a "knock off." It's been proven wrong again and again. And Musk is the kind of guy who can create significantly large network effects and economies of scale.

Twitter has never been a knockoff experience, it was as different from the social media that succeeded before it as TikTok is from YouTube.

Meanwhile any number of near-exact replicas of it exist with a different flavor: freer speech, paid service, decentralized, specifically for particular political affiliations to name a few. None of them have made a dent.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#597
post #552
post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this recurring fantasy in which some Satoshi figure creates a decentralized global bulletin board, such that anybody can post and view anything anonymously and untraceably, and nobody - not the U.S. government, nor the CCP, nor the Mossad, nor the NSA - can stop it short of dismantling the whole Internet and starting over. Nobody can blame anybody, because nobody can stop it. Not because I think such a thing i…

It breaks immediately. Somebody writes a unlock euqivalent and maintains ban lists. Everyone subscribes, because otherwise it's full of ads, spam, and edgy 14 year olds repeating slurs like it's Xbox live.

That doesn’t break my vision. It’s not the whole Internet, it’s just one bulletin board. People can not go there at all if they don’t want to. If Twitter’s moderation was chosen by each user, for themselves, we wouldn’t have this conversation (though no doubt we’d be having a different one). People filtering for themselves doesn’t touch on what I’m getting at with this thought experiment.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#598

Twitter has around 8,000 employees. I fully understand and respect the high level of technical skills needed to operate and manage such a highly available service, BUT I still can't for the life of me figure what the other 7,950 employees do.

> I still can't for the life of me figure what the other 7,950 employees do.

Management. Hey, it's important. They're people-persons.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#599
post #535
post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from what i understand it's a matter of ideals combined with the technologist's desire to see the machines (all types, including sociopolitical) work correctly. he wants to see the first amendment function with autistic precision. he wants to remove any messy personalization because it interferes with that purity. he wants fully transparent moderation and proof of fairness. he doesn't like the idea that one organizat…

I have this recurring fantasy in which some Satoshi figure creates a decentralized global bulletin board, such that anybody can post and view anything anonymously and untraceably, and nobody - not the U.S. government, nor the CCP, nor the Mossad, nor the NSA - can stop it short of dismantling the whole Internet and starting over. Nobody can blame anybody, because nobody can stop it. Not because I think such a thing i…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#600
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will the price tank? None of this changes the value of Twitter if he walks away.

$TWTR has been trending down over the last year. When he bought, the price went up 27%, signaling that people thought his involvement would be positive for the company. If he says "twitter is hopeless" and pulls out, the sentiment will be that nothing can save twitter.

I keep seeing this sentiment, and it seems like wishful thinking.. The paper is out there on how to defeat the poison pill: trigger the pill, let the stock tank, offer at a lower price per share but at the same market value plus what was put into the company to acquire the new stock by the diluters. Full market price is full market price. Look at Musk's investment in automation at Tesla he knows how to play the long game. ttps://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1102&context=law_faculty_scholarship
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