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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

#751

Post by mike_d »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #395
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.

> since you intend to conceal beneficial ownership of shares Promising voting rights doesn't change beneficial ownership. Twitter would have precedent, however, to find "conscious parallelism" and thus "a de facto control bloc" between the commenter and Musk, and thus bundle them for purposes of the poison pill's activation [1]. Still, not a crime. Civil dispute under corporate law. [1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org…

As of January 2021 there is a whole bunch of new reporting requirements for beneficial ownership to combat money laundering and hiding assets. Structuring a stock trade to conceal the actual owner of securities (note the parent poster didn't offer to vote HIS shares) and failing to file disclosures is absolutely criminal.

The Yale Law article you cite is just about groups of investors working together, which is within their rights.

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

#752

Post by chx »

tenpies wrote: post #708
rufusroflpunch wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this seems obvious. No reason something this fateful shouldn’t be put to shareholder vote. No good reason, at least.

Quoted post unavailable.

Yishan Wong , the CEO of Reddit until 2012 have tweeted a long thread about how Musk doesn't understand the current state of moderation necessary because he was much more involved with an earlier Internet. But I am of opinion that Yishan is also behind as one half of the debaters simply left facts and reality behind. This post here is an example.

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

#753

Post by mavhc »

ehsankia wrote: post #716
darth_avocado wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem I think you underestimate how hard the problem is or you don’t fully understand how it works. The scale at which Twitter operates makes it near impossible to take down spam in real time. You don’t think Twitter is working on it, but they are. What you see is a much smaller percentage of the actual spam generated, and the reason you see it is beca…

To think that a company that has failed to create self-driving for nearly a decade could solve "content moderation", one of the hardest problem on the internet that every single of the big companies (who btw hire the best talent) have been struggling with, is truly a shocking statement to me. If all Google and Facebook couldn't solve it, why could a Tesla engineer of all people...

60,000 people have FSD beta, they've got further than everyone else.

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

#754

Post by Hermel »

nickysielicki wrote: post #29

I don’t understand how any board can implement a “poison pill”, not just Twitter but Netflix and others, and not be found working against the interest of shareholders. Can anyone help me understand? You’re categorically changing the profile of the stock. This has a chilling effect on large investors, including but not limited just to Musk, right? Vanguard, for example, has just had its range of further investment lim…

In most other countries, such a poison pill would be illegal as it violates the principle of equal treatment of all shareholders. Also, in most other countries, the decision to issue new shares requires a shareholder vote and cannot be done by the board alone.

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

#755

Post by sfmike »

People arguing about one ai engineer point are missing the philosophical premise that spam and bots to some extent help with free speech and thwarting them are a form of censorship. Which would be antithetical to the argument of taking over for reasons of free speech.

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

#756

Post by onefuncman »

soperj wrote: post #736
viraptor wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative take: there's spam that's trivial to spot and spam that's hard to spot. Twitter is ignoring both. I can give you both searches and keywords to post which will return lots of spam ready to block. Not everything of course, but let's not post the "spam is a hard problem" excuse until they nuke every account responding with "metamask" and a link to Google forms.

You don't nuke the accounts, you make it so no one can see their posts and they don't realize. Make them waste their time instead of creating a new account.

Whoops! As a result of your action, your userbase has now hyperfixated on follower counts as a proxy for status.

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

#757

Post by pennaMan »

ehsankia wrote: post #717
memish wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have solved much harder problems than spam bots.

You mean self driving, which they promised would be ready over 5 years ago and still barely at L3 level? Meanwhile Google engineers have actual L4 level self-driving in both Phoenix and San Francisco (by your logic, they are better than Tesla engineers), yet have not managed to solve Youtube's spam problem.

>Meanwhile Google engineers have actual L4 level self-driving

They don't have L4 self-driving they just made a contrived railway system for their cars. The second the car is out of the hardcoded route it's not a self driving car anymore.

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

#758

Post by LMYahooTFY »

tptacek wrote: post #721
memish wrote: post #696

Some points from the All in Pod. 1. The Twitter board of directors has become a status thing. It's like a country club. They don't have real skin in the game; they don't own much stock. They're not aligned with the shareholders. It's about status and cultural power. 2. Why should we believe that the company will become more valuable when the stock price is where it was way back in December 2013? Compare to how the S&…

"One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem." It's hard to take any of the rest of this seriously after that "detail".

How? That point is distinctively an engineering/technical assessment whereas the others are very much not.

I doubt any of them can speak with much weight on AI. That hardly means they can't make serious points about censorship, or corporate finance.

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

#759

Post by aaronblohowiak »

systemvoltage wrote: post #281
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #105

So, I'm not very corporate savvy and this might be a very stupid question. Is there a NON-culture/political reason for all the push back against Musk buying Twitter? From the read, this just seem to be opening the door for someone else to try and take majority control and pining away for the days of Dorsey (which, if looked at objectively, weren't great... just filling an opportunity).

The sad truth is that this is an intense political battle. I would personally favor Elon Musk taking over and shaking things up, any other position is untenable. And, I am saying this as a progressive. I think an open and transparent social platform would be great for the society. The issue is that managerial class of America, both in private and public sector, are in bed with each other. The government cannot suppre…

Even aclu doesn’t believe in free speech anymore, at least not like they used to

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

#760

Post by captainmuon »

I wonder what stops Musk from buying 14.8%, and then lending money to a few friends who each buy 14.8% and agree to vote in his interest? If there is just a gentleman's agreement between them, then he would not be considered the beneficial owner?

Then they could replace the board, repeal the shareholder rights plan, and the friends would pay back Musk's debt in Twitter shares.

This is such an obvious loophole, surely there is a legal provision against it?

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