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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

#631

Post by mtnGoat »

dehrmann wrote: post #619
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.

Generally, things get harder as you scale because something that would have taken a new Postgres table has become a distributed systems problem. You also hit diminishing returns with new features and user growth, but when you have hundreds of ~~billions~~ millions of users, even marginal engagement gains can multiply out to something big, so you have a lot of teams working on features that might move the needle a bit…

Hundreds of billions? Is there a source to this idea that Twitter has these numbers?

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

#632

Post by robbomacrae »

rchaud wrote: post #441
robbomacrae wrote: post #355

Can't Elon just loan his money to some close acquaintances to buy 15% each in their name who will vote his way?

You can't press a button and buy that much stock. You'd likely have to buy from portfolios of hundreds of investor funds and family offices. Word gets around, and you'll have to jack up the bid with each successive call. You'd also have to buy in large volumes on the public markets as well, so that'll bid up the price,providing a rationale for the board to reject the offer as undervalued.

But that doesn't seem any different to the process he would have to go through personally if he was allowed to obtain more than 15% himself without triggering the poison pill. I'm sure this makes it more difficult I'm just wondering, given the stakes involved, what is actually stopping this work around?

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

#633

Post by dragonwriter »

neilpanchal wrote: post #628
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 analy…

> It has terrible UX, but I could 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

So, it's got lots of categories you can target. But...what evidence or guarantees are there of accuracy of the targeting?

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

#634

Post by iratewizard »

hooande wrote: post #546
psyc wrote: 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 is 4chan. Your recurring fantasy is 4chan

This is the sort of take you hear from a Reddit dopamine addict who's idea of 4chan comes from the losers on his favorite marketing platform.

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

#635

Post by throwntoday »

CompleteWalker wrote: post #624
hooande wrote: post #485

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…

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?

I think he's more interested in the power of twitter as the public square. There's no doubt Trump won his presidency through that social media presence (and his non-stop rallying of course). That kind of power is more useful than say buying the Washington Post.

I would be more interested in him implementing certain features like a journalistic credibility score for outlets and individuals. Base it on number of retractions, mistakes, and outright lies. Surely a score like that might put certain fake news propagators in line.

This is something he pitched before although as a standalone website. Integrating into twitter seems more useful.

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

#637

Post by anbotero »

bitwize wrote: post #629
Maursault wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!

I love these Office Space references

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

#638

Post by 1over137 »

mtnGoat wrote: post #631
dehrmann wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, things get harder as you scale because something that would have taken a new Postgres table has become a distributed systems problem. You also hit diminishing returns with new features and user growth, but when you have hundreds of ~~billions~~ millions of users, even marginal engagement gains can multiply out to something big, so you have a lot of teams working on features that might move the needle a bit…

Hundreds of billions? Is there a source to this idea that Twitter has these numbers?

Come now, it was surely a typo, there aren't even that many humans!

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

#639

Post by bjtitus »

mtnGoat wrote: post #631
dehrmann wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, things get harder as you scale because something that would have taken a new Postgres table has become a distributed systems problem. You also hit diminishing returns with new features and user growth, but when you have hundreds of ~~billions~~ millions of users, even marginal engagement gains can multiply out to something big, so you have a lot of teams working on features that might move the needle a bit…

Hundreds of billions? Is there a source to this idea that Twitter has these numbers?

Surely you aren't questioning that Twitter has users beyond our Solar System.

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

#640

Post by georgeglue1 »

FFRefresh wrote: post #242
axg11 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pushback is simple: Twitter stock price was higher than Musk’s offer for most of 2021. We are in a downturn affecting the entire tech industry, and it’s likely that prices will return to previous levels at some point. Elon’s offer is a lowball and Twitter can bring more value to shareholders with or without Elon.

I don't immediately buy the logic of "Stock A hit a peak of $X last year, therefore that is the correct price/valuation, and not the lower price it is right now" If Twitter was worth more, it'd be worth more. With that logic, you should put a huge chunk of your savings into Twitter to benefit from the insight, as it's currently trading at 39% below its 52-week high.

I think we have to tolerate a certain amount of irrationality from shareholders.

If you bought a $100k home which then dipped to $80k during Covid, would you accept an unsolicited bid of $90k?

It's reasonable for some people to take the bid, since you could arguably buy another comparable house for $80k and pocket the $10k difference, but I think a lot of other people would reasonably choose not to.

(I'm not totally sure if this logic scales to board rooms / billions of dollars, but curious to hear thoughts.)

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