Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement • Hacker News Board

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#961

Post by freemint » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

smaryjerry wrote: post #928

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is nonsense, since the numbers in question are not verifiable. How can you identify a "spam account"? It's not possible to definitively determine the intent of someone opening or using a new account. So the numbers are arguable either way. Musk is using this fact to try to wriggle out of a disastrous impulse buy.

It’s not that subjective anyone using twitter still sees spam accounts promoting a website, business, product, or scam on every post. Twitter just said they remove 1M spam accounts each day. Their mDAU is claimed to be around 200M. This means they are deleting around half a percent of their users every single day. That seems like a lot to be identifying to me, but doesn't really determine if they are deleting enough…

Why do you think Twitter list accounts it knows to be bots as mDAU? Those are very different categories.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#962

Post by rafiki6 » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

partloyaldemon wrote: post #691

Chancery courts will compel performance of this transaction absent a showing of an material adverse advent. Very, very high bar. The buyer is a highly sophisticated investor and the grounds that he is alleging form the basis of the breach of contract were and are public information that has not materially changed nor been alleged to have materially changed since the signing of the merger agreement. Moreover, and most…

Yes, but even if they take him to court, it's highly likely that Musk and his legal team drag this out. It's not going to be a simple case. No contract law case ever is. And at that point, Twitter's business might keep suffering, to the point that their fair market value plummets, and they enter a very difficult financial situation. Then Musk can swoop in with a much lower price offer and they will accept simply due to their financial position and not being able or willing to continue the case in the courts. I think Musk will end up buying Twitter but at a much lower price.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#963

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #719

rocqua wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX is actually doing great things. Tesla was very innovative 5 years ago. These two, especially spaceX, are quite impressive.

Tesla is stolen and only saw success because of endless amount of government subsidies and a tremendous amount of fraud on Musk’s part and SpaceX was a shitshow until he went hands off.

Comments like this break the site guidelines. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful. We want thoughtful, curious conversation here, not flamebait, fulminating, or name-calling.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#964

Post by freemint » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

timsneath wrote: post #17

It seems apparent to this observer that he developed cold feet pretty fast after an impetuous decision, and has been looking for any reason to back out of it since then. The spam accounts angle seems like a convenient scapegoat, rather than a real surprise to him. He's clearly eccentric in his approach to decision making: I don't think any Harvard Business School course will teach "the Musk Principles". But it's uncl…

> I don't think any Harvard Business School course will teach "the Musk Principles".

Well history is not yet written. They could be taught as negative examples

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#965

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #656

> I have enormous respect for his engineering and business skills, he's accomplished some remarkable things. But he doesn't seem so great as a dealmaker. Perhaps he's badly advised, but hey, he chose his advisors. There’s no evidence that he’s a good engineer or a good businessman, save if committing fraud or stealing the accomplishments of others is in the list of things that qualifies one of either. It’s beyond tim…

We detached this flamewar tangent from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32028410.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32039467.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#966

Post by freemint » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 9:43 PM UTC

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #528

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's another belief floated by Josh Wolfe (an investor with Lux Capital) who claimed it was a ruse to liquidate Tesla stock en masse without Tesla hodlers getting suspicious and tanking the inflated stock price. https://twitter.com/wolfejosh/status/1545387947578597376

I also read somewhere that if Elon ran Twitter into the ground in the next decade, using it just to advertise Tesla cars, he would have paid an amount in line with what GM pays for advertising their cars (at least what they paid pre-pandemic) https://www.statista.com/statistics/286522/general-motors-ad... . It blows my mind how much (non Tesla) car companies spend just on advertising.

Well he pays for advertising. Tesla flame throwers, Tesla whistles and so on are campaigns.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#967

Post by pea » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

In this sort of deal, is it common for the buyer (or whoever is leveraging them) to purchase some sort of hedge to protect themselves from the stock price diving during the DD or legal process? For instance, if I agree to buy company for $X but buy LEAPS to protect me if it dips below X*0.75.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#968

Post by onelovetwo » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 11:24 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #702

lettergram wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely scenario is a settlement at a lower price imo. Musk was never going to pay the original offer because it was / is well known Twitter has a bot problem. He surfaced the issue and is threatening to scuttle deal based on twitters throttling the API. Which is limiting the due diligence ability of Musk’s financiers to appropriately evaluate their investment. Now the negotiations will take place and I suspe…

Musk did not 'surface the issue'. He was complaining about bot numbers being higher than Twitter said looong before he ever signed the merger. Musk does not have a right to due diligence. Just a right to 'information reasonably relevant to the business'. And he has no right to terminate the merger based on that information.

This thread corrects your misconceptions[1], you might also be wrong about the first part.

[1](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027341#32027416)

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#969

Post by Lazare » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 11:44 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #942

Lazare wrote: post #898

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting story, but irrelevant to this. Twitter claims that That there are a lot of bots on Twitter is well known, and clearly true. That Twitter happily leaves most of them alone to do their own thing as long as they don't abuse the service is also well known, and quite sensible. The question is whether Twitter is good about flagging them as bots . You could have a million bots following you, but as lon…

I’m reasonably sure that these fake user bots that were created for the “buy followers” industry aren’t picked up as bots by Twitter. There’s no reason to allow such users.

It's generally much easier to detect a bot than to detect the purpose an account was created for, so I wouldn't be so sure myself.

Also consider that there's also no reason not to allow such accounts. From a business point of view, Twitter exists to sell advertising. Accurately counting the eyeballs (aka mDAU) they have to sell to advertisers is important, but policing the site otherwise makes sense strictly to the extent that failing to do so may drive some of those eyeballs away.

Consider: No real human beings are likely to quit because of fake followers being left alone, but a few vain people might quit if their fake followers were removed. Further, an overly agressive ban wave targeting bots may well remove some bots people actually like which again, on the margin, may drive some real people away. Like any large company, Twitter will inevitably feel the pressure to play it safe, and in this context that means never banning an account that isn't clearly driving real users away - which means that very passive bots that don't do anything are unlikely to be banned.

Of course, none of that gives us any insight into how accurately (or not) Twitter is counting mDAUs.

Re: Notice of termination of Twitter merger agreement

#970

Post by everforward » Sat, Jul 09, 2022, 11:45 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #480

h2odragon wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk's misguided approach to free speech, which says anything that is not explicitly illegal is allowed, would have made Twitter an open forum for spreading lies and hate. Twitter is of course currently known as a source of Truth and Harmony. "anything not illegal is allowed" sounds decent to me; if you want stuff illegal, make it illegal. If you want unwritten laws dreamt up by anonymous elites and enforced for ra…

Have you spent much time on "anything not illegal is allowed" forums? Try to talk about popular movies are TV shows and you get things like this on such sites [1]. Want to discuss an episode of PBS Space Time such as this one [2]. Don't be surprised if this is the discussion you get [3]. What almost always happens on such forums is that the people there who aren't racists, sexists, antisemites, inane conspiracy theor…

I don't think Voat is really a fair comparison.

Voat suffered from a flood of toxicity caused by Reddit banning toxic behaviors. From what I could tell, it was practically uninhabited before.

Reddit itself was largely "anything not illegal is allowed" at the time (in part due to lax enforcement of the few rules they had), and was largely fine. The toxic communities sequestered themselves for the most part.

Twitter would probably be much the same. The greater issue they'd have is the same Reddit had; it's hard to sell any advertising on a site where you can't guarantee ads won't show up next to racist/sexist/etc diatribes.