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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

#671

Post by [deleted] »

jpcfl wrote: post #567
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…

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

[deleted]

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

#672

Post by dtjb »

jpcfl wrote: post #567
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…

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

Does free speech require a company to give me a megaphone to their private platform and users? Does twitter not have a right to exercise their speech?

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

#673

Post by ComputerGuru »

kingcharles wrote: post #265
mike_d wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%. You might want to speak with a lawyer who is familiar with inchoate crime. What you publicly proposed to Elon is a crime, since you intend to conceal beneficial ownership of shares.

And inchoate crimes don't require the person to do as you commanded them. Just the statement above would probably be enough to charge someone. And even if the crime you are encouraging someone to commit is impossible (for instance, asking Musk to buy 110% of Twitter through you), it is *still* a crime for you to have asked him.

I’m not sure how the second part of your claim holds up if you treat your first contention (with which I agree) as a precondition. In particular, I think it wouldn’t be possible to prove mens rea, which you’d have to do if no crime ended up being perpetrated and you’re charging someone only for the alleged solicitation of an inchoate crime?

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

#675

Post by Jensson »

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…

Yes, things gets harder at scale which is why he said 50 and not 5. Depending on how much infrastructure code you do inhouse you add another 50 for managing that. If you have your own datacenters add another 100 or so if you have a few around the world. If you want world class recommendation add 100 or so data scientists.

That gets us 300 tech people to run the service.

That is for engineering, those numbers are roughly what I saw at Google for these kinds of things. Then Google typically has 1 non tech person per tech person, so add in at least as many people again. Then since Googles customer support and community management is hardly world famous for being good, rather it is infamous for being bad, you probably want even more non tech people than that. But still, do you really need 8000 people for it?

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

#676

Post by [deleted] »

elif wrote: post #268
hedora wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, if some ETF accidentally exceeds 15%, then what? First of all, that'll screw over a bunch of small investors, right? Second, could Elon swoop in at that point? Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.

X AE X-12 buys 15% triggering pill, X sells shares immediately to drop price, elon purchases 42.0% equity by minting new discounted budget shares?

[deleted]

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

#677

Post by rcpt »

tag2103 wrote: post #522
tehwebguy wrote: post #490

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)

I hate to disagree with you but when was the last time you checked your MySpace page?

Voat or diaspora are better comparisons

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

#678

Post by donio »

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.

If you are genuinely curious and not just throwing around cheap jokes then you could check out their engineering blog to get a glimpse:

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us

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

#679

Post by tonguez »

dtjb wrote: post #672
jpcfl wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does free speech require a company to give me a megaphone to their private platform and users? Does twitter not have a right to exercise their speech?

Are you capable of talking without regurgitating propaganda buzzwords like megaphone?

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

#680

Post by extheat »

ergocoder wrote: post #670
extheat wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> falsely accuse British diver as a child rapist Let's be specific, "pedo guy". And that was an insult in response to an equally profane insult from the other guy. Two wrongs don't make a right, but he apologized and people who have said equally bad or worse things also occupy high places...

This is not insult. It is malicious intent. Weeks later someone talked to musk about it, and he replied "Bet ya signed dollar it's true". Elon also hired private investigator to dig dirt on the diver but found nothing. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/15/elon-musk-tweets-hell-bet-... Musk also emailed BuzzFeed reporter suggesting that the diver was a child rapist. Source: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/el…

I think you again have missed the point that it was not an unprovoked comment. It was in response to another insult. I don't know how betting money on an insult makes it not an insult. It's one thing to attack someone because they dislike you or it's not provoked at all. It's another to respond to an ad hominem with another. Nobody is disputing he went far overboard than he needed to, and that his position gives him dangerous influence (as with many celebrities). In the end he deleted the tweets and apologized. Unless you have reason to believe that it's insincere, I'm not holding weight on a war of words.

What it emphasises is the need for self-moderation especially when your state of mind is in fight mode. The mistake here is Elon's stream of consciousness doesn't stay off of twitter for his own determent. That is not an inherently malicious thing. People get into arguments all the time and say stupid regrettable things in the moment. Playing out on the internet--especially with a big power dynamic at play no doubt is bad. But let's not forget we're not robots here--hence we're not sending people to jail after arguments.

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