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Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

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Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#891

Post by betwixthewires »

crate_barre wrote: post #833
gunapologist99 wrote: post #521

So Twitter was at $70 per share a year ago. So what? Jack Dorsey was CEO a year ago, too. The share price was $33 less than a month ago. But, despite an absolutely incredible roller-coaster news cycle, things have been definitely trending down at Twitter ($33/share last month), which was reflected in its share price. The current executive team (and Dorsey) had wasted time focusing on things that didn't matter instead…

Truth of the matter is before Elon ever gets Twitter another tech giant will buy it without hesitation. They should sell to him because all he is doing is either buying Twitter at fair value or doing pre-launch hype for a competitor which will include the accumulation of other platforms including Trump’s Truth social, shit like substack, which he can easily get for less than 10 billion, Mastadon, etc.

You can't buy mastodon, the software is licensed AGPL and the network is run by it's users. You could buy stewardship of the software and the trademark if it's registered, like google did with android, but you never own GPL licensed software, only the users do.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#892

Post by dang »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #561

> As an all-cash offer, this generates for the shareholders a substantial return with NO RISK, and so the board has a serious legal obligation to carefully review this offer and make a decision. What a gut check. I'm sure this is an obvious comment by now, but seeing the board's response to turning down something like this is going to be an olympic level display of mental gymnastics. Exciting times.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31028521 (not a moderation issue, just trying to prune the thread a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31027882)

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#893

Post by behnamoh »

qsdf38100 wrote: post #825
RustyConsul wrote: post #510

> "if my offer is rejected i will reconsider my ownership in twitter." Thats an immense amount of selling pressure on the stock... This is a threat. He's negotiating with a gun to their head.

I can’t see how his plan isn’t about getting trump back on twitter. He will do a lot of smoke screen speech, telling contradictions and unclear bold statements. But in the end I bet all of this will end in removing trump ban. If I’m right, it’ll confirm that musk is just a fascist greedy sociopath disguised as a tech enthusiast.

No post body was provided.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#894

Post by cwkoss »

tikiman163 wrote: post #821

I cannot think that Elon Musk owning/controlling Twitter will go even half the way he expects. He clearly only sees it as a potential platform for disseminating his opinions, which have regularly been wrong when it came to things like the pandemic. He's a potentially dangerous egomaniac and if he is allowed to own Twitter the best case scenario is that Twitter experiences a mass user exodus, worst case it turns into…

Both of your cases seem quite implausible to me. Sounds like cynical wishful thinking.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#895

Post by diebeforei485 »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #706
dgudkov wrote: post #661

I bet some of those who advocated "it's a private company, it can deplatform whoever it wants" are probably re-thinking their stance on deplatforming from a major social media.

Not really. When moderation goes away, platforms become rife with racism, spam, scams and less than desirable actors. We've seen this with Gab and Parler.

I think "moderation going away" is a gross exaggeration of what Musk has said he wants.

Twitter has had spam and crypto scams in replies for years now. Every tweet by Elon Musk has had scammy fake giveaways that steal people's financial info, from accounts that copy his profile picture and name. Anyone would agree Twitter's response has not been adequately effective, and he has complained about this for a while, and even said during today's TED event that he wants to stop this sort of spam.

If anything, I think it's more likely we'll see hardcore engineering efforts - I'm not sure why Twitter hasn't looked into some sort of perceptual hashing database for profile pictures of popular accounts, and hide replies from anyone who uses a similar profile picture.

This is obviously different from the political censorship, such as Hunter Biden's laptop, where I think Musk strongly disagrees with current leadership.

Parler/Gab failed in having approximately zero engineering efforts to prevent spam.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#896

Post by cwkoss »

jandrusk wrote: post #735

If the bid is accepted, he's going to want to build his own app store otherwise Google & Apple will kick the Twitter app off if his version of free speech doesn't align with their version of censorship. Gab discovered this early on and pivoted accordingly.

The twitter app is unnecessary - works fine in a browser.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#897

Post by catsarebetter »

LoveMortuus wrote: post #882

Two options: a) He buys Twitter for ~35.5bn (he already owns ~9.2%) IN CASH mind you. b) He's trying to sell all of his stocks without people saying he's manipulating the market.

Yeah I like this perspective I don't think it's anything more than that

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#899

Post by joshspankit »

RustyConsul wrote: post #510

> "if my offer is rejected i will reconsider my ownership in twitter." Thats an immense amount of selling pressure on the stock... This is a threat. He's negotiating with a gun to their head.

As another commenter pointed out: It’s Elon Musk.

While selling all his shares would make the price dip short-term, no one who knows his tactics will take that as a serious commentary on the viability of Twitter itself.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#900

Post by systemvoltage »

tikiman163 wrote: post #821

I cannot think that Elon Musk owning/controlling Twitter will go even half the way he expects. He clearly only sees it as a potential platform for disseminating his opinions, which have regularly been wrong when it came to things like the pandemic. He's a potentially dangerous egomaniac and if he is allowed to own Twitter the best case scenario is that Twitter experiences a mass user exodus, worst case it turns into…

He wants to make the Twitter algorithm open source. Complete transparency whether something is demoted or promoted.

Anything but is terrifying. The current status quo of few SF algorithmists controlling the world is far worse than putting up with Elon's bs.

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