Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

991–1000 of 1001 posts

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

#991
post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't press a button and buy that much stock. You'd likely have to buy from portfolios of hundreds of investor funds and family offices. Word gets around, and you'll have to jack up the bid with each successive call. You'd also have to buy in large volumes on the public markets as well, so that'll bid up the price,providing a rationale for the board to reject the offer as undervalued.

But that doesn't seem any different to the process he would have to go through personally if he was allowed to obtain more than 15% himself without triggering the poison pill. I'm sure this makes it more difficult I'm just wondering, given the stakes involved, what is actually stopping this work around?

What's stopping the workaround you suggest is that the element of surprise is gone. Nobody knew that he was building up a 10% stake to take an activist investor stance, because he built up the stake slowly. But now we know.

And we know that for him to buy up enough shares to override the poison pill vote, he has to act much faster than he did the first time around. But the markets would be aware that he's looking to buy a much bigger stake, so existing holders can set whatever price they want.

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

#992

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of billions? Is there a source to this idea that Twitter has these numbers?

Nice catch. Yes, millions.

No worries. I figured it was, but thought maybe Twitter was making up numbers somewhere.

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

#993

Every company I know of that did a poison pill to prevent a takeover wound up tanking within a year or two and the shareholders wound up with sand. As a Twitter shareholder myself, the board is making a big mistake. As a legal matter, I don't understand how a board could sell shares to other shareholders at a lower price than to the entity wanting to buy shares to gain control.

> Every company I know of that did a poison pill to prevent a takeover wound up tanking within a year or two and the shareholders wound up with sand.

Which companies are these?

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

#994

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Many, many people are absolutely arguing that zero moderation is appropriate. Anyway, you also acknowledge that some moderation is both appropriate and necessary. So, now we know your opinion of a private company’s moderation is different from the parent commenters, but you both believe moderation is necessary — and then you call them an authoritarian fascist. Your comment is incredibly inappropriate.

Hardly.

Moderating bot accounts and frivolous antagonists (by virtue of repeated defamation/inflammatory speech) is appropriate. Those are not in the same vein as restricting speech. If a bot account is openly listed as such with links to show it is not a human agent, then it can be openly suppressed.

This isn't a similar argument nor a difference in degree of the same position.

But I don't take your statement with any credulity based on your handle

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

#995

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...

1) I think Elon Musk's angle on Twitter spam is rather different than ours. Look at replies under his tweets.

2) I am not an ML engineer, but still a software engineer and in my opinion the problem of self driving cars is at least two orders of magnitude harder than the problem of Internet spam. Maybe even three orders of magnitude.

3) We actually know that the problem of spam is successfuly solved by Google. When was the last time you saw a spam message in Gmail? I am seeing them in my inbox approximately once a month. There are about 8 messages in my spam folder per day, so it is about 0.4% false negatives. This is a great result.

4) Social networks are not interested in fighting spam. It just will make their metrics worse. All they need is to keep it at moderately acceptable level, so users won't flee in bunches.

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

#996

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90% of Twitter stock is held by institutional investors. Feel free to sell your shares. No one will notice.

This POV needs to shove it, because even those institutions can have their resources revoked by people waking up and accepting capital allocation is their responsibility. This is the toxicity that has younger people rightfully angry at how the system works, and how it is "rigged". People just haven't had the info bandwidth previously to even contemplate these problems. So no. WalterBright should absolutely do with hi…

Institutional investors are the backbone of municipal bonds that help small towns borrow and build. They back all of the retirement vehicles in the U.S.

They give a financial stability to places that need them.

One of the reasons Twitter is stable is because of those types of investors and is not subject to the whims of individual shareholders.

No corporate leadership wants to be subject to the whims of the stock market if they can avoid it. Twitters board and its institutional investors the firewall against such things.

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

#997
post #977

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, the american dream being "born rich" is the postmodern satire re-enactment of the original. It features a white african for diversity.

I don't understand why there would be something ironic, postmodern, satirical, or unexpected about a relatively privileged white South African who grew up in the era of apartheid being associated with space travel or other technology that is considered futuristic. Nothing has changed. It is still as it has always been. The US space program and the Moon landings can be traced directly back to Wernher Magnus Maximilian…

Okay i explain the joke to you: First and foremost note how the comments upthread used the term "the american dream". Second note that "the american dream" is a media trope, a literary device and story we tell people to inspire them to follow certain ethics.

The traditional american dream is about social upwards mobility from rags to riches, about a promise that all that is needed to become wealthy is hard work, determination, a bit of ingenuity and puritan virtues. In its classic version it often features an immigrant family who comes to america with nothing but worn out clothes, works hard jobs and long hours to create a livelihood, overcomes hardships and struggles so their kids can get an education and better jobs. It often also calls out oppression, poverty and war in the old world as reasons for migration and to further highlight the ideals of liberal society in america.

The modern version ignored the generational aspect and instead focused on individuals becoming millionaires. Entertainment loves extremes, the lower the start and higher the end, the better. The quicker the journey, the better. And this became accelerated to the absurd. Be poor, wash dishes, millionaire. Since this is so very unlikely, and real people who fit it, like Rockefeller, became so unpresentable, media turned more and more towards fictitious comedies. Yet this version is still very dominant in culture, because it calls out a truth: when asked what the american dream is, many will say it is about becoming very rich. That is, what the modern american dreams of.

Now in contemporary media we see a return to the original idea, but with twist lampshading its problems. Migration is no longer a central topic, america no longer the beacon of hope for the tired, poor, huddled masses. Instead we see a focus on the disenfranchised and marginalized within american society. The post-modern MTV generations version of the american dream is B-Rabbit living in a trailer park with his alcoholic mom, making it as a rapper despite his peers attacking him for having the wrong skin color. It plays the core straight about making it with hard work and being virtuous, but it doesn't only look at materialism and individualism, as it also expects society to hold its promise of being liberal. The postmodern loves to play with dualities and reversing structures.

Lastly the post-modern satire version instead picks up the part that got dropped, the dream of becoming very rich. It teasers a protagonist from an african minority and reveals a wealthy and well educated white man from south africa. It shows upwards social movement from upper class to ultra rich, subverting the idealistic to instead highlight the reality that those who start well have more opportunities to venture and do even better. It holds up "being born rich" like Diogenes holds a plucked chicken, and calls out "behold: the american dream"

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

#998
post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Tesla FSD is level 3. You still need to be fully aware and hands on the wheel. Level 4 is when no one needs to be at the driver seat, which is what Cruise and Waymo are doing. Quantity != Quality. Just because McDonalds serves billions of people doesn't magically make it good food.

Does make it safe food though

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

#999
post #129

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 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.

> and it’s likely that prices will return to previous levels at some point

Wow, that's great news for Velodyne Lidar -- currently trading around $2 and was $28 less than 2 years ago. (Why bother with paltry 2x return on Twitter when you could get a 14x return?)

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

#1000

My prediction is that Elon will have sold a majority of his stake in Twitter soon, netting him a huge gain before the dust settles. And he’ll likely get a small symbolic fine again for his blatant market manipulation.

That's a ridiculous claim. The SEC would first have him disgorge all profits before heavily fining him.
Post reply on HN