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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

#651

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'd imagine that they have to handle all the censorship requests made by governments, shareholders and paying users.

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

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I also believe that Musk will walk away and the stock will tank. Musk’s recent stock purchase and discussion about joining the board made the price jump significantly. You’re right that there’s no obvious reason that his involvement should change Twitter’s value, but the market appears to think otherwise. If he walks away, at a minimum, I would expect that the stock price will drop to what it was before he started pl…

They might sell 100% to someone else before that happens, like Microsoft or the Saudis.

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

#653
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…

It wouldn't be any kind of transparent window into the human mind.

It would be like any other lightly-moderated or unmoderated spaces we've seen before: the wildest days of 4chan, etc.

It would quickly be dominated by niche individuals and clumps of people who are good at attracting attention because they yell the loudest, are the most outrageous, tell the most compelling lies, etc.

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

#654

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?

He could just give them money for it. I'm sure they'd love having a multibillion dollar customer.

It's very possible that his AI investments have yielded developments that we can't imagine. But it's hard to see the value of twitter's data over that of, say, the internet cache that gpt-3 uses.

I have no idea what the plan b he alluded to is.

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

#655

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.

One interesting point here. I noticed that Twitter bought a design agency a few months back [1] who themselves claimed to have dozens of employees. It made me wonder. Why would Twitter need dozens of designers on top of the designers they already had? I would have assumed they likely had a 10-20 person design team. One designer and a few managers for the handful of features they have. But then I read a post online that even back in 2014 they had north of 59 designers. And given their growth since then, they likely have hundreds of designers.

As a founder, engineer, and designer myself. I cannot fathom what 100+ designers do all day for an app like Twitter. They have to be working on so much overlap, and busy work.

1. https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/06/twitter-acquihires-creativ...

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

#656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that analysis downplays the shareholders’ thoughts about the future. If they largely feel like Twitter’s real value is $100B, that it just hasn’t been realized yet, and that they think it can be realized, then it totally makes sense to turn Elon down. In reality though, the shareholders are a giant mob of people with wildly varying views about Twitter’s place in society, its true value as an asset, its abili…

It is the _directors_ making decisions here, not the shareholders. Those directors were chosen by management, and -- newsflash! -- they are beholden to management. They must jump through some legal hoops to discharge their fiduciary duties and protect themselves from lawsuits, but at the end of the day they'll do what management wants. Does management want to maximize the value of Twitter? Er, no. Management wants to…

Generally the board of directors is voted on by shareholders and supervises management. Is Twitter structured differently somehow?

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

#657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 retrac…

> 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.

Which then raises the issue of who scores the scorer. You already have people throwing fits because the garbage they post gets labeled as misleading or not true. So how would this be any different besides you liking the person in charge of the scoring?

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

#658

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.

they're the ones who figure out how to make it make money.

Easiest way to make money would be to fire 90% of them. 800 people is hardly a skeleton crew for running a service like Twitter, even at global scale, and then you would have plenty of profits.

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

#659
post #184

Even before the poison pill was adopted, the evidence is the market wasn't taking Musk's offer seriously. That's because he was offering $54.20 per share (ha ha, 420), but the stock price never closed higher than $48.36. So almost $6/share was left on the table. Part of it is that Musk doesn't have $43B in cash, he'd have to raise it or borrow it. He's worth more than that but it isn't liquid; as an officer of Tesla…

No post body was provided.

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

#660
post #184

Even before the poison pill was adopted, the evidence is the market wasn't taking Musk's offer seriously. That's because he was offering $54.20 per share (ha ha, 420), but the stock price never closed higher than $48.36. So almost $6/share was left on the table. Part of it is that Musk doesn't have $43B in cash, he'd have to raise it or borrow it. He's worth more than that but it isn't liquid; as an officer of Tesla…

The whole thing seems like a stunt by Elon. I don't care either way, but it would have been interesting for the board to call Elon's bluff and watch him back out at the last minute. Elon should really focus on his unfulfilled promises to folks he already took money from, not playing immature games to keep himself on the front page. I don't know what drugs he did with his ex-girlfriend, but they don't appear to have h…

No post body was provided.
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