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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

#801

Post by cloutchaser »

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.

Well, this is exactly what would be argued about in a shareholder lawsuit if this deal falls through and the stock is back to $30.

In that case I would be terrified as a board member, I've basically lost about $15bn of shareholder value for my shareholders.

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

#802

Post by caslon »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #730
tptacek wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

I think this is the first time I disagree with you. Bot problem, perhaps not. Spam problem, definitely. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1485588476057825290?s=21&t=... and https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1473752736537657349... https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/139902863019023…

The problem is false positives. Graham's experience of combating spam involved writing a Bayesian filter for his mailbox. That's fine. Somebody misses a message and one of the two parties feels bad, but they eventually either catch up or get over it. You can't "leave" that platform.

Twitter, on the other hand, is pretty sensitive to false positives, and the vernacular is so unique that naive Bayesian filtering would destroy a lot of communities with their own vocabularies and languages. If messages start arbitrarily dropping on it, its users won't stick around.

Sure, you could absolutely knock out spam. It wouldn't be that hard. Because fighting spam isn't the hard part. It's dodging the problem of firing on innocent people that the spam is using as body shields that's the hard part.

They already get incredible volumes of criticism for what little false positives they already have. Imagine if it was normal to be put in a time-out box by a Bayesian filter that wasn't tailored for your community!

Combating spam is something that has very few possible upsides for twitter, and a catastrophic failure case. Right now, spam mostly tends to effect larger accounts, who are going to stay on the platform anyway, because it's where the people are. What little spam small accounts see is manageable, and they won't leave because of it because it's so insignificant. If suddenly they couldn't send messages to others at random and without warning? Why would they stick around, then?

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

#803

Post by chippiewill »

prvc wrote: post #783
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…

Some scammers who appear in Musk's replies impersonating him use similar or identical avatars and screen names in order to perpetrate their fraud. Removing and preventing the creation of this type of account would not even require "AI". It hasn't happened yet because Twitter lacks the will to do it, for whatever reason.

> Removing and preventing the creation of this type of account would not even require "AI".

It wouldn't require _Machine Learning_, the kind of filtering approach you've just described would absolutely constitute AI.

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

#805

Post by Hypocritelefty »

darth_avocado wrote: post #706
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 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…

No post body was provided.

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

#806

Post by hwers »

darth_avocado wrote: post #706
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 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…

The spam scale problem should be solvable with a one-shot locally evaluated NN trained to classify behavior/tweets from their massive massive ground truth dataset. If it’s evaluated locally then I don’t see how scale is an issue.

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

#807

Post by opensrcken »

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&…

> 4. One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.

This a comment written by someone who is clearly not an engineer dealing with high-scale backends, and is definitely not an AI engineer.

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

#808

Post by atoav »

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&…

> The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression.

At which point in history could any person blurt out a brainfart and have thousands of people around the globe hear it and react instantly again?

When the printing press was invented ther was a backlash against it, because free speech was endangering existing power structures.

Nowadays we have it the other way around, powerful players use the accelerated chaos of social media to avoid any real discourse from forming — it is just very easy to manipulate just enough into your direction to hide behind "differing opinions" if you have a ton of resources — just like boulevard media has been for the past decades. Censorship and media control is one strategy to reduce the chaos by decelerating the spread of the most outrageous unfounded claims. Of course there can be such a thing as too much censorship (e.g. look to China and Russia), but this would be state censorship.

A billionaire does not want to buy a social media plattform because he cares about free speech — if that was the case he would have nothing about his workers discussing unions, post youtube videos he does not like or journalist writing negative things about him and still being able to buy a Tesla car.

I am not sure there is much wisdom in assuming we can have a world wide instant public microblogging platform without any moderation at all. Anyone who ever operated any public web platform knows the quality of the discourse falls drasticly if there is not at least some level of content moderation.

> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem.

You are heavily overexpecting what the technology can do. Differenciating satire from a threat with sufficient accuracy is not something machine learning ("AI") could do right now.

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

#809

Post by rosndo »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #481
rosndo wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think big ETFs just buy shares willy nilly without any due diligence on company charters and bylaws?

Index funds do, that's pretty much the definition of an index fund. ETFs are a different concept, but a good index fund will be structured as an ETF, and it looks like this thread is using "ETF" to mean "index fund"? If so, then the answer to your question is an unambiguous yes.

This is simply incorrect. Index funds still do basic due diligence, they would not trigger this poison pill.

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

#810

Post by mcintyre1994 »

cloutchaser wrote: post #799
rgbrenner wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s definitely just a stunt… he doesn’t have the money, and said he expects larger shareholders to sign on to the deal… so he can take the company private and do great profit-maximizing ideas like turning their office into a homeless shelter. He’s presented no ideas that would increase twitters profits or market share. What shareholder would sign up for this?

Wrong. He could probably borrow $43bn against Tesla shares in a few weeks at the most. He doesn't have to sell any Tesla shares.

Tesla has a rule that you can only borrow 25% of the value against the shares. From Money Stuff:

> Or Musk could borrow more against his Tesla stake. Tesla’s own policies prohibit Musk from borrowing more than 25% of the value of his shares, which is barely enough to buy Twitter, even ignoring the fact that he has already used at least some of that capacity. Of course he’s in charge of Tesla and its board is famously deferential to him, so I guess he could change those policies, but that still requires finding a bank to lend him $40 billion against his Tesla stake to finance this lark. Tesla’s stock has quadrupled since mid-2020; if it fell back to mid-2020 levels — say because its charismatic attention-seeking CEO found a new toy — then the loan would be underwater, and selling out of a gigantic Tesla margin loan does not seem like a lot of fun for a bank.

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