Elon’s Out • Hacker News Board

Re: Elon’s Out

#621

Post by gimmeThaBeet » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

extheat wrote: post #579

nocoiner wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything in this comment is wrong or misleading. The point of an acquisition agreement isn’t to give the buyer optionality to acquire another company, it’s to ensure the buyer honors its commitment to acquire another company during the period between the time the buyer agrees to acquire it, and the time is it able to close on taking ownership. Maybe EM developed buyer’s remorse because of the decline in equi…

> Almost everything in this comment is wrong or misleading. Feel free to point out specific inaccuracies. I think it's pretty clear. > Just because EM wants an escape hatch, doesn’t make it so Yes, never suggested it's legally permissible. > affirmative obligation This is armchair speculation. Even if the text might seem to be clear in outsider interpretation, this is a matter solely for the courts to determine and b…

I think the concept of settling for a lower price is a bit misleading, I feel like you are implying a do-over, but really the prices have tended not to change much (maybe ~5%). Also, personally, I think he's actually trying to walk away.

One example I can think of is LVMH made an offer for Tiffany in late 2019 for like $16.2B. It appeared to be unhappy about that price a few months later for some reason, people didn't want high end jewelry or something... They settled for like 3% less, but was that worth the bitterness? That's assuming that Arnault actually did want to go through with the deal, which, there I also believe genuinely was having second thoughts.

The reason I think Musk is trying to actually walk away is that I feel the pushing the bot thing is a pretty double-edged tactic. A lot of LVMH's arguments were that Tiffany was mismanaging the business above and beyond the covid environ i.e. not necessarily that the business is flawed, but the seller stopped caring once they sold it. The bot strat is kinda riskier because it's saying, the business is actually flawed, and the seller is misrepresenting it to me.

If it gets him out great, but if not it could potentially be like buying a house and throwing a lit molotov through the kitchen window on move-in day.

Re: Elon’s Out

#622

Post by sangnoir » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:27 AM UTC

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…

> And wherever the price is between those two is a direct function of what experts believe[...]

I wouldn't call the hordes on Robinhood "experts": they are the marks that Elon plays like a fiddle on Twitter.

Re: Elon’s Out

#623

Post by sp527 » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:27 AM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #481

hedora wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your perspective. As far as I'm concerned the whole target advertising industry is a blight on society. The more click fraud undermines it, the better. On then other hand, bot accounts help get bozos elected, encourage mass shootings, etc. Come to think of it, I don't think it depends on your perspective. Bot accounts are a much bigger issue than click fraud.

But who does the click fraud ultimately hurt? It's not Googs. They get paid for the clicks. The people spending the money on Goog's platform are the ones hurt. Why would Googs want to put a stop to it?

> The people spending the money on Goog's platform are the ones hurt.

It goes deeper. The increased marketing costs due to the 'fraud tax' are passed through to customers. So it's we the people who are getting screwed by fraud.

Re: Elon’s Out

#624

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:31 AM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #556

selfportrait wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a little confounded that you suggest Elon believes shorting to be “morally wrong”. Why conflate his ego and financial stake with “morality”? Plus, Elon has proven himself to be morally nefarious more than anything. With the law and social expectations and plenty more. The only thing I can find about Elon and his utterance of morality is him saying it was morally wrong to ban Donald Trump. What a joke.

> I’m a little confounded that you suggest Elon believes shorting to be “morally wrong”. Why conflate his ego and financial stake with “morality”? Because in the over ten years I have of watching what he says and what he does I've found him to be a forthright person who says what he thinks. He's not the type to intentionally deceive others. He's often wrong, but he's upfront with what he thinks. Also he's shown many…

> He's not the type to intentionally deceive others.

Have you seen him tweet that he was in a deal to take Tesla private?

Have you seen his Solar Tiles marketing stunt, where he was claiming all of the houses around him had functioning solar tiles, when instead they were pure props?

Have you seen him sell FSD with a promise that it will work in 1 year, and that it will literally pay for itself by letting your car be an autonomous taxi while you are at work?

Have you seen him claim the Tesla Cybertruck will be available for pre-orders next year?

Have you seen him claim he is backing out of this Twitter deal because of the many bots on Twitter, when he was previously claiming that he is buying Twitter to fix the bot problem?

There are instances where he might have indeed believed the ridiculous promises he was making, but he has a long history of directly lying to consumers and investors to get his way or manipulate stock (or crypto) prices.

Re: Elon’s Out

#625

Post by thesumofall » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #619

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure that TSLA is overvalued? Right now they are performing pretty well, for their niche. I mean it will be overvalued if Toyota gets its act together - if the competition can produce reliable electric cars for the mass market. I suspect that this is not quite happening due to some real technical problems. A mass market electric car would need to handle some real problems with battery depreciation/range loss.…

It would be perhaps plausible for Tesla to be worth more than any other single car company. But it is patently absurd for them to be higher than all other car companies combined. By any possible measure, they are far far smaller, and have far smaller prospects for growth, than the rest of the card industry put together. The only place where Tesla has a lead is in sales of BEVs, where indeed they are selling more than…

Even their sales leadership is eroding (at least looking at global figures). The next biggest three combined (VW, Hyundai-Kia, Stellantis) have sold as many BEV cars as Tesla in 2021. And there are many big players on the following ranks that clearly have the money and willingness to grow

https://www.jato.com/the-global-electric-car-sales-2021-in-n...

// Edit: Added BEV

Re: Elon’s Out

#626

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:35 AM UTC

loceng wrote: post #260

petilon wrote: post #71

This 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…

I think there's an even better explanation, and liquidating $8.5 billion of Tesla stock may just be the icing on the cake: Elon despises the SEC and he's now has exposed that the "less than 5%" of accounts are bots, that the SEC should have verified and accepted their methods for determining that number - and it should be adequate and reasonable to give a grounded-in-reality output, and it seems like it's a total bul…

> he's now has exposed that the "less than 5%" of accounts are bots

He did the opposite of that. The Twitter CEO's explanations are quite believable, and Musk has not presented a single tiny shred of evidence against them. He hasn't even presented any methodology he used to arrive at the belief that the 5% is wrong - and note that his lawyers were careful to call it a belief only, since they know full well that claiming it as a fact would be indefensible in court.

Re: Elon’s Out

#627

Post by vba616 » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:36 AM UTC

extheat wrote: post #601

threeseed wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's the fact you think that Twitter has been misleading in how it communicates MAU and bot percentage to the markets. There is no basis to this. And even if there was it's such a grey area that they have plenty of legal wiggle room. So it's really to comprehend how Musk has any sort of bargaining position over this issue.

Going through court will lead to even more dragged out speculation and hurt Twitter more than any other party. They can't be 100% sure that they will win the case, and will also have to work to run the company on the side in a continuing state of limbo with the acquisition litigation. In the end, even if they win , and Musk must buys the company at the deal price, by the time that goes through the markets may as well…

>Going through court will lead to even more dragged out speculation and hurt Twitter more than any other party

>The winners at the end of the day would be the lawyers and millions of dollars dumped into fighting a case instead of settling.

I don't understand this popular hot take.

There's no rich egomaniac foil for EM, is there? There's just a corporate machine that he offered a piece of "candy" worth tens of billions and then tried to take back.

As many people have said, if EM just walks away and Twitter does nothing, the stock price is probably half of what it was supposed to be acquired for.

Ten billion dollars will fund a literal battalion of lawyers for a decade if necessary.

Re: Elon’s Out

#628

Post by tsimionescu » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

neither_color wrote: post #302

petilon wrote: post #71

This 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…

>Tesla's market cap is double of Toyota, VW, Mercedes, BMW, GM, Honda, Ferrari and Volvo all combined! This phrase gets thrown around a lot with dunning-kreuger confidence so I'd like to add context that it's not unusual for a market disruptor to be worth more than the sum of its legacy competitors - you are on a tech website related to startup incubator you should know this already.

That would be the case if they had disrupted some market, but Tesla has only succeeded in creating a new niche vehicle, and cornering that market to some extent. They are still bit players in the overall car market (and they are losing market dominance even in BEVs, mostly to Chinese companies).

Re: Elon’s Out

#629

Post by closedloop129 » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

How much is this beneficial to the Twitter brand?

Twitter gets free exposure from all the news and a boost in reputation if only 5% of users are bots. Is there room for growth? I have the impression that Twitter is for information junkies who all should already have heard of Twitter.

Re: Elon’s Out

#630

Post by cloutchaser » Sun, Jul 10, 2022, 6:49 AM UTC

extheat wrote: post #569

So much noise here and ill-informed comments fail to give a broader understanding of what's going on. Elon bought up Twitter shares early in the year for a reason, because he wanted more control over Twitter. He bought up so much Twitter shares that when it was announced via the SEC, Twitter offered a board seat under the clause that he wouldn't acquire too much % control over the company. He obliged, but then left w…

The sale will happen at a lower price. Even though Elon would probably be forced to do the deal in 3-4 years.

This whole thing actually creates a golden bridge eventually for the twitter board to retreat on.

The board now has an obligation to sue, otherwise they are breaching their fiduciary duty. However, almost all shareholders will realise that a 2-3 year litigation at the end of which Elon might be forced to buy, is a long way away. Better to settle for a lower price now. Both shareholders and Elon will see this. The board just needs to demonstrate they are fighting for shareholders.

I predict in 3-4 months the board will offer a shareholder vote with a lower price, and shareholders will realise that it's way better to take that deal than wait for litigation.