Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company • Hacker News Board

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

#861

Post by chippiewill » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:51 AM UTC

memish wrote: post #729

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".

Why? You don't have to agree with everything. That's fine. It's a separate point from the others.

It's not just that they're wrong, it's that they're talking nonsense. An ML engineer working on perception models can't be trivially retasked to an NLP spam filtering problem.

If they're obviously talking out of their arse on one point then it definitely suggests they're talking out of their arse on the rest of it.

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

#862

Post by dmix » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:52 AM UTC

9935c101ab17a66 wrote: post #762

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&…

I'd never heard of All in Pod, and so I listened to the section from 43:00 on about this being a 'free speech' issue. Quick takeaways: - The frequent pejorative use of the term 'elites' as a catchall for literally anyone they disagree with is hilarious. Their explanation of Musk being the iconoclastic 'anti-elite elite' sounds like Ayn Rand fan-fic written by a 14 year old who just read the Wikipedia plot summary for…

> Voicing your opinion in public has always carried the risk of being shamed or shunned

This is an argument in favour of a more liberal model is it not? Just not a centralized system that takes a dictatorial role in socially isolating people for having bad ideas. The analogy would make more sense if there was a benevolent gatekeeper blocking you from coming back into the public square (or even all big public squares) because you said something controversial.

Otherwise cultural free speech people want ideas to be openly challenged, not efficiently silenced by the system.

Harassing people is something I think most people agree crosses a line, in the same ways it’s a criminal act. But even here Twitter does a poor job at that by taking a very broad interpretation, for example it punishes people for publicly disagreeing with someone while also being popular, because their fans decided to brigade a person, then banning the parent for ‘causing it’ (without ever directly encouraging or supporting such a thing).

There’s a hundred ways to do this better than Twitter/Facebook/Reddit without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Trying to accuse every person who wants a very limited scope for wanting Ayn Rand style anarchy is disingenuous.

Otherwise I’m not a fan of “All in” pod’s analysis.

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

#863

Post by chippiewill » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:53 AM UTC

supernes wrote: post #793

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&…

I don't mean to sound rude, but Tesla engineers can't even distinguish the moon from a stoplight. Human interaction and defending against a naturally intelligent adversary are not so simple.

It doesn't even matter if their perception models _were_ that good, NLP is a seriously different problem.

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

#864

Post by ransom1538 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

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&…

"5. 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."

Yes. Gaslighting crystalized. We are now to believe free speech is bad. Authoritarians know auguring against logic is hard.

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

#865

Post by ransom1538 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 11:00 AM UTC

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).

"Is there a NON-culture/political reason for all the push back against Musk buying Twitter?"

Power. One side wants to have a safe garden where all their thoughts are heard with the other side silenced.

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

#866

Post by base698 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 11:05 AM UTC

4khilles wrote: post #764

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The employee’s RSUs?

Good point! I wonder what happens to unvested RSUs in an acquisition like this.

Went through a similar situation where a company was taken back private. The RSUs converted to cash value day of deal close and had a staggered payout with roughly the same vesting schedule.

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

#867

Post by atoav » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 11:08 AM UTC

fblQ wrote: post #835

atoav wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peo…

> 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? Usenet, for several decades already. Good NNTP servers had nearly perfect spam filtering and the trolls were handled individually by each user in killfiles. If Google had kept the simple original web interface from around 2004 we might not have had all these issues. GPT-3…

Usenet was much, much smaller and quite certainly not a statistical representation of society (people who could afford, access and understand the thing).

Most modern problems with social media started emerging when the general public started using it.

Specialist communities like IRC channels, Hacker News, certain subreddits or webforums still work quite well, because let's face it: It is not the general public there.

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

#868

Post by ajsnigrutin » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 11:11 AM UTC

emodendroket wrote: post #728

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. It feels a little silly to act like the guy trying to spend billions of dollars to get his…

So what? .... if we, normal people get more free speech, and a few billionares swap some money around, it's still better then them just swapping money and we not getting any free speech.

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

#869

Post by chalst » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 11:56 AM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #842

nowherebeen wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s important to also note that one of Musks strengths is marketing. He makes bold claims that makes headlines. We should be all used to his charade by now. A lot of the stuff he claims that actually works has teams of people supporting him. Those weren’t one man efforts like this.

> one of Musks strengths is marketing I don’t deny that, but it is not what he is doing here. I am not sure why people shy away from the obvious: another of Musk’s strengths is market manipulation. On 4 April, the announcement[0] of his becoming the largest shareholder jumped his Twitter stock[1] from a 73486938×33.03 = $2.4B purchase to a $3.7B asset, a $1.2B gain. He sold 371900 stocks, for a $6M gain. His 14 April…

> He will still make half a billion

These paper profits are hard for him to realise, since he has to sell 9.2% of Twitter's stock without the price falling. Given the current price depends on his claimed intent to takeover, the market will react swiftly to any evidence that he is in fact reducing his stake.

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

#870

Post by dm319 » Sat, Apr 16, 2022, 12:05 PM UTC

nowherebeen wrote: post #830

not2b wrote: 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…

It’s important to also note that one of Musks strengths is marketing. He makes bold claims that makes headlines. We should be all used to his charade by now. A lot of the stuff he claims that actually works has teams of people supporting him. Those weren’t one man efforts like this.

I would upvote this as insightful if we were still on Slashdot. These one-man pioneers like to further the impression that they are the sole reasons for their success, but the reality is that we all build on the shoulders if giants. I am not shitting on his ability to make his endeavours successful - I am just saying that the proportion of his responsibility for it is much lower than most people think.

I'm not sure what it is about some societies that like to make a single person out to be an idol. We see it in team sports, scientists who work in large teams, businesses where CEOs are deemed several thousand times more of a factor than other workers, medicine where doctors are placed on pedestals. I guess people like a hero, and the alternative explanation, that hundreds of hard working and bright people came together to make something happen, is less compelling.