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

cnbc.com

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

#621

Post by sweetbitter »

psyc wrote: post #535
a-dub wrote: 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…

Preventing SPAM requires a lot of subjectivity, so particular people who download certain sets of posts are more like to be senders. Perhaps retrieval of messages could be routed over something like I2P.

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

#622

Post by samsin »

geeky4qwerty wrote: post #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.

Surely the legal department alone requires more than 50 employees, considering all the countries they operate in I imagine there are many legal requests.

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

#623

Post by roughly »

saalweachter wrote: post #603
roughly wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An ETF isn’t going to “accidentally” exceed 15% ownership of Twitter. No, but an ETF has a defined investment strategy, and if enough money comes into the ETF, it could potentially trigger this.

... wouldn't that imply the ETF was 15% of the market or market segment overall?

Yes, which is excessive, I agree, but there’s nothing mechanically preventing it.

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

#624

Post by CompleteWalker »

hooande wrote: post #485
toephu2 wrote: post #457

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).

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…

In the recent Ted talk Musk talked about needing AI-complete solutions for projects like full self-driving and Optimus (tesla bot) to succeed. He also wryly mentioned that there was a plan b if his Twitter bid wasn't accepted.

He's heavily invested in AI and machine learning, could he be interested in twitter's data?

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

#625

Post by hyperhopper »

the_only_law wrote: post #574
burnished wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not getting the impression that his actions are the result of a highly polished corporate public personna, I think his actions make way more sense if you imagine that he's just some regular, kinda bright, really eccentric asshole with more money than god. Like, you can probably imagine at least one person you know acting this way if they discovered a genie.

> I'm not getting the impression that his actions are the result of a highly polished corporate public persona. This has been my thought for a while. Dudes is a character, playing a part.

You missed the "not" part of the sentence.

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

#626

Post by natpalmer1776 »

PeterisP wrote: post #539
codedokode wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you are right, but the instant price of stock will probably fall down after "dilution", so for example if you had $10 000 worth of stock before dilution, and you want to sell it the next day, you probably will get less than $10 000 because now there are more shares available in the market (more supply, but the same demand as yesterday).

No, it is wrong to assume that the instant price of the stock will probably fall down after the dilution. It might fall, but it might as well increase, which often is the case, since the company as a whole literally become more valuable (influx of new cash on the balance sheet for the issued shares) and it just gained significant extra working capital that it can use to expand operations.

In this case you rely on a functional rational market in ideal business operating conditions.

If I issue more stocks for a meme stock at the height of it's popularity it will likely go up in price for reasons completely disconnected from the balance sheets and future revenue.

Conversely, if I recently started the process for bankruptcy and issue more stocks to cover the liabilities on my balance sheet, the stock could very well decrease disproportionately to the number of issued stocks.

Stocks at the end of the day are based on the market's perception of the stock's worth. The market is not a single rational actor, rather numerous small irrational actors and a few very large highly rational actors. Obviously there is a spectrum in between, but the ratio of buyers on a given end of the spectrum will influence the behavior of a stock to either align or diverge from the fundamentals of the company, and not always in the way you would intuitively expect.

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

#627

Post by [deleted] »

bmlzootown wrote: post #602
jpcfl wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is a futurist, and believes that without free speech, human kind is doomed. I agree.

The important question is this -- why does he believe those things? This is the same man that at one point tried to say that he was the founder of Tesla. Saying things that I agree with doesn't mean that I should inherently be in favor of said person doing X, Y, or Z.

[deleted]

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

#628

Post by neilpanchal »

geeky4qwerty wrote: post #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.

I gave a try to Twitter's Ad platform recently. Mother of god, they've built a giant machine behind the curtains. It has terrible UX, but I could, if I wanted to, target a U.S. Military retiree that likes creole food, located in Boston, enjoys watching Golf and uses iPhone 11 Pro with an older iOS version 14. The profiling of users, and the ad-tech machinery is insane. There is a auto-bidding machine, detailed analytics, website tracking scripts, conversion metrics, the works. I had no idea. Imagine you build something amazing, but no one knows about it – how do you get that thing across people that actually want it? It is a hard problem and from my little experiment with their advertisement platform, it is miraculous. Surprisingly, I've not seen any article from mainstream newspapers that exposes what kind of a goliath Big Tech's ad platform is.

You ought to sign up and see it for yourself. Meta & Google's Business Platform is similar if not more powerful.

After this revelation, 8000 people entirely makes sense.

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

#629

Post by bitwize »

Maursault wrote: post #598
geeky4qwerty wrote: post #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.

> 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.

They talk to the customers so the engineers don't have to!
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