Actually, if you know what you are talking about, this filing actually shows Elon is about 21 billion dollars short. This is because 21 billion dollars of the commitment is coming from him and not from any financial institution. He is a very rich man but almost his entire wealth is tied up in tesla shares which he cannot sell in such large amounts and ownership of spacex which is even harder to sell.
If he tries to sell 21 billion dollars worth of tesla shares, the share price will collapse.
So no, once again he does not have funding secured. And once again he is trying to bullshit his way around the issue, although this time the bullshitting is a little more sophisticated.
It is still possible that he tries to sell a lot of tesla shares to get the cash to buy twitter, but it is unlikely.
He sold that over two months and the overall market was much stronger then. Also those sales were pretty much required for taxes and thus did not send a negative signal to the market. If he sells large amounts of tsla shares to buy twitter, this will be a negative signal -- any other tesla shareholder can sell tesla shares to buy twitter, and why wouldn't they when the tesla CEO is doing it.
It is still possible that he tries to raise 21 billion by selling stock but I doubt it. First if he actually wanted to do that, he would keep quiet while selling and then come out with the tender offer when he had the cash.
There stock is up because they just beat earnings [0] and TSLA has 24 billion dollars worth of volume per day [1]. I'm pretty sure he could raise the 21 billion given some time.
He can always borrow it, too. Tesla is a volatile stock, but if he's not borrowing a huge percentage of his stake, he should be able to use it as collateral. Then he can sell later to pay it off when the timing is right.
Bank: I see your net worth is far beyond what you're asking for and you won't have a problem making payments with your income. I didn't even know credit scores got as high as yours. Here you go.
> I didn't even know credit scores got as high as yours.
A bit of an aside, but the richest person I know (as in buys multi-million dollar cars on a whim and has many many of those) says his credit score is pretty mediocre because he's never had a loan. I'd thought having gazillion dollars in the bank would give you a good credit score but guess not.
The credit score system is really about incentivizing you to get, use, and keep credit cards, including retail credit cards, and loans, i.e. take on debt.
The fact that so many things require a high credit score is a forcing function for you to take on these debt instruments, and the credit score is a way for the system to optimize that it get its money.
The entire system is gamed against the consumers unwittingly or unwillingly forced to participate.
Your credit score is higher if you pay off your credit card in full every month. Although, yes, it does reward having multiple cards with a high limit.
As another side note, the richest person I know regularly maxes out his credit card so he can pay it all down and rake in the score bump. Every couple times he does this, they issue him an upgraded card with less limits: the cycle continues.
Not a bad way to buy stuff if you have the means to pay it off.
> regularly maxes out his credit card so he can pay it all down and rake in the score bump
Does it really?
I have a very high credit score but putting a large charge on one credit card (nowhere close to maxing it out though) dramatically drops my credit score for one month until I pay it off in full at the end of the month.
I pay my child's tuition in full for the year each August (school in California is way too expensive so it's a lot of money, but that's a different topic). I put it on the credit card to get some cash back. My credit score drops by about 150 points right away. Once I get the bill at the end of the cycle and pay it off, the credit score goes right back to where it was before. I don't get any bump though.
I imagine once you have a verifiable net worth over a certain amount (at least 10 million in near cash assets + a hefty amount on hand) you are able to bypass certain things the rest of us simply can't. This is what I've heard second hand anyway
Once you have a balance above a few hundred thousand your bank starts treating you differently. Sometimes you even get a different entrance to the bank, different tellers, so on.
I can only get loans from my private bank because my credit score is bad. I only borrow on margin foe trading I don't really need other debt but it's embarrassing
"If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
and comes from 1976 "As I see it: the autobiography of J. Paul Getty". There were no billionaires back then. When you owe a bank 20 Billion while being worth 260 you are still in the first category.
Having to find "other means" to reclaim is exactly what makes it the banks problem.
Do you think it's easy to get someone with access to billions of dollars (of your money) to do something they'd rather not? They can tie you up in the courts for years since they're basically equal powers: an $800 billion bank doesn't get better lawyers than a guy worth $1 billion. A bank vs someone with just a million dollars means the individual is at a major disadvantage as lawyer fees can easily exceed that amount in attritional lawfare.
Also, the reason the bank suddenly wants to reclaim that money might be that the wealth has vanished. If Tesla drops 99% for whatever reason, they will have a big problem getting their money back from stocks.
Musk's net worth his highly volatile. Telsa is trading at pretty high 200 P/e, one bad quarter could crater the stock price. Space X is private, which carries its own issues. Add to that the risk to these assets if Musk dies. Or hell, even it Musk merely "spooks" investors with his flamboyance.
No matter how volatile his worth is, it's just around a tens of the said worth and there's no way it loses 90% of its value overnight, even if TSLA's valuation is arguably nonsensical.
If he has it. At standard margin rates, he'd need to put up ~$140 billion in TSLA stock to cover his TWTR offer. How much can TSLA slide before he doesn't have that. Keep in mind, private companies (SpaceX, Twitter in this hypothetical) cannot be used for margin purposes.
You can still sell the rest of the stock and cover a majority of the loan. I still fail to see why you need way more money than the loan amount to pay it off.
There's a not totally unreasonable chance that tesla is 10x lower next year. That would mean his net worth is basically equivalent to the loan he would need. Seems pretty risky.
We don’t know the interest rate of that margin loan but you can be goddamn certain whoever underwrote the loan calculated that risk more precisely than HN crowd such that the rate justifies the default risk.
You can default on a loan regardless of your net worth; you can even default on a secured loan. The default is what triggers the civil proceedings for a judgement and forced liquidation of assets
I have to disagree. It is about the risk of his counterparties. If their risk is deemed too high, they will start liquidating assets to get minimise their risk.
Just look at what recently happened in the nickel markets on the London Metals Exchange when a Chinese Nickel Producer had a margin call against a $2bn short position.
Tldr: the brokers liquidated their position due to the unnecessary risk of having a margin call over a weekend.
The other half of the money was borrowed against his stocks already. He probably can't get a favorable rate on the other half so 21 million is coming out of pocket.
> (ii) A separate debt commitment letter, dated April 20, 2022 (the “Margin Loan Commitment Letter”), from Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. and certain other financial institutions party thereto as commitment parties (collectively, the “Margin Loan Commitment Parties”) pursuant to which the Margin Loan Commitment Parties have committed to provide $12.5 billion in margin loans (the “Margin Loan Facility”), the proceeds of which will be distributed or otherwise made available to Purchaser; and
One advantage of Musk's positioning as a "nutcase" is that him selling Tesla stock to buy Twitter doesn't signal "I believe Twitter is a better investment than Tesla" as much as it signals "Musk is doing Musk stuff"
This. He communicated his plan pretty overtly: He made no secret that his buy attempt is mostly for political reasons and that his selloff will be a means to the end of securing funding for the takeover. None of this has anything to do with actual investment decisions.
So maybe he hopes to sell his shares to "activist buyers" who want the takeover to succeed and therefore have no interest in dropping the share price.
Of course that is assuming any of the purported motives are real and not just an act.
As a TSLA holder I care that I've made 20x on my stock.
I care it's the best performing stock in the last 5 and 10 years.
I care that Tesla is growing revenues at 50%+ over more than a decade, and profits even faster. Which is a better financial performance than Amazon has at similar stage.
What I do not care is your editorializing of Musk's character of calling me a cult member.
I guess I should be offended but then I take a look at my bank account and it kind of makes me not care about what you think about me or Musk.
Your TSLA gains are nothing compared to what many people in here made on Ethereum.
Yet such people don't roam around screaming off the top of their lungs "Buterin is God!".
Ethereum, much like TSLA, much like betting on Trump back in 2016 are about calling an event and predicting what's gonna be the outcome of a socio-political movement.
Nobody is better prepared to predict such outcome than the guy who can keep his cool and openly admit that such social movement is really just BS and hot air, but that nonetheless it still has steam and room to grow among the populace for the time being.
What you don't want to be is a so called "true believer" as that would prevent you from jettisoning yourself once the movement runs out of steam, if you are a "true-true believer" you might find yourself storming the capitol...or in Musk's case the SEC building as that would be the aim of his rage when the socio-religious movement that he built runs out of steam as they eventually all do.
> It's normal, you give people money and they worship you.
You earn yourself that money by successfully making a prediction. By the same token when you win a poker game in Vegas you don't worship Steve Wynn for providing you the casino and a table. You gave yourself that money.
> Think of the "cult" of Steve Jobs linked to Apple gains.
Apple stock gains came as the product was becoming ubiquitous among the populace, matter of fact it slightly trailed the virality of the product. Same goes for Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook etc.
That is the normal financial trajectory of a company, which differs from a socio-religious movement such as crypto, TSLA, a political candidate etc. Those are all based on promises about the future and getting people galvanized without ever delivering any actual product improving people's quality of life on a scale comparable to the promises made.
> This is nothing new. It's also not a real cult, it's more as admiring successful entrepreneurs.
This is exactly what gets people burned when the socio-religious movement implodes and they fail to jettison themselves. Don't admire, limit yourself to gauge the level of admiration that other people have for the guy and try predicting if it will expand or contract. That's an indicator of the health of the socio-religious movement so that you know when to jettison yourself.
Can’t he borrow against his Tesla stock, and other assets including his ownership of SpaceX, and personal property, for cash to buy Twitter?
Depending on his banking relationships, and other assets that he can use as collateral for the loan, he might be able to borrow a fairly high percentage of the current value of those assets as cash (maybe 50 to 70 or 80% or more if the collateral assets are diversified or the bank simply has high confidence in his effective credit rating or ability to repay — and he may be doing other business with that bank incentivizing them to give him a favorable deal).
I’m not a billionaire but by establishing a strong relationship with a bank, have been able to establish a credit line with a limit that is a high percentage of my assets that are invested by the bank in a diversified portfolio, along with other assets, at a low interest rate (mortgage levels - a credit line at approx 2.5% interest of an amount almost equal to my total assets at the bank).
I also recently refinanced my house with this bank starting last winter and was able to achieve getting a 15 year fixed mortgage at a 2.125% interest rate - a huge reduction from my previous rate of 3.5% on a 30 year. I now pay less per month and will own my home much sooner, consequently paying considerably less in interest over the remainder of the loan, and building much more wealth in the process.
With some wealth and favorable banking relationships you can accomplish things that most ordinary people don’t know about and I myself didn’t know about until I started looking into the possibilities. I am sure a billionaire has access to even more options than I can conceive of.
Does the rule apply to all shareholders? I don't really see how a publically traded company can put an arbitrary condition on what can be done like that - any borrowing can be a totally private deal between you and a bank (or another private individual) - Tesla isn't even privvy to such deals, so how can they enforce any rules about them?
Large shareholders have different rules and restrictions. For example, you can go buy TWTR all you want, but Musk had to report when he had obtained a certain percentage.
Remember that Musk is not only a shareholder of TSLA, but also an employee.
No, Musk has an agreement with tesla that he can only borrow against a quarter of his shares. He's already borrowed against quite a few too. Musk could go to the board to get that number bumped up, but until then he can't just borrow the full $21 billion against his shares.
> If he sells large amounts of tsla shares to buy twitter, this will be a negative signal
Not necessarily. It's conceivable that TSLA shareholders could interpret Elon Musk acquiring more political influence as good for TSLA. The question would be whether Musk can use control of twitter to actually influence politics in favor of his other companies. I don't know if that would actually work, but I think it's conceivable that many of those who own TSLA might believe it will work.
Is Musk known really for his shrewd political skills and sharp maneuvers?
If I were a Tesla shareholder and this was his actual masterplan to maximize value for shareholders, I'd unload my stake in a heartbeat because I know his brand and business holdings will got tainted by his politics like what happened with Trump, and the plan will most likely backfire and decimate his business empire.
> Is Musk known really for his shrewd political skills and sharp maneuvers?
He should be. Solidly Republican-leaning Texans are buying and driving electric vehicles, in some cases believing that doing so is "owning the libs".
Tesla seemed like an impossible long shot 15 years ago, not just for the considerable technical and business challenges but also because most Americans were happily buying gas-gusslers and even fantastic hybrids like the Prius were still somewhat niche. At the time, not a single major car company was willing to invest seriously in building electric vehicles.
Now there's gigafactory right outside Austin. It's something I did not think would have been possible. Tesla has threaded a nearly impossible needle to get to where it is in 2022.
> He should be. Solidly Republican-leaning Texans are buying and driving electric vehicles, in some cases believing that doing so is "owning the libs".
Could this attempt at buying Twitter be part of the same vice-signalling[1] schtick, then?
> I don't dispute that he's a shrewd businessman and fancy visionary but when it comes to the world of politics, I have my doubts and reservations.
In this day and age you don't become a billionaire without being good at politics. Navigating the regulatory state is an enormous task even when you don't have people laser-focused on you like Musk would due to his wealth and size of his companies.
> If I were a Tesla shareholder and this was his actual masterplan to maximize value for shareholders
Doesn’t have to be either-or. Marketing strategy is an important part of running Tesla and given the empirical dislike of media establishment of him, ensuring Twitter won’t go against him on a whim of the board seems strategically important.
> business holdings will got tainted by his politics like what happened with Trump
Is there data on Trump businesses doing materially worse overall after the taint? I assume the half of US that like him bolster it and the other half see the taint but the vector sum is material here.
Alternatively he stops being the whimsical "fun" billionaire that people find amusing, and starts being the tyrannical billionaire that people hate. This results in political backlash and a massive boycott of Tesla's consumer products.
To be clear: Elon buying Twitter doesn't necessarily trigger any of this. Elon using that influence to actually push Twitter around in ways that are "useful" to Tesla shareholders potentially does. For Tesla shareholders I'd say the risk here is much higher than any possible reward.
I mean we could speculate at length but the condition you’re describing already exists. People have polar reactions to him. Some hate with a passion, some love him. As for boycott, I’m not surprised if a lot of people already feel like they won’t buy a Tesla. Hard to imagine it can get worse from here.
He could get indicted for the FSD scamming and bring the whole thing tumbling down. If he stuck to just selling battery powered cars I'd be a lot more bullish on TSLA, but he hasn't and I think his antics represent a serious threat to the company in the long run.
I imagine a lot of "save the earth" and "Let's go to Mars" people overlap with the "Fuck Donald Trump" people. So letting Trump back on Twitter may cause them to swear off Teslas and DogeCoin. Alternatively, not letting Trump back may cause a bunch of truck-driving Texans he's been targeting to convert to electric to tell him to fuck off.
Bottom line, it puts Musk in the unenviable position of having to piss off a third of the country by deciding if Trump has a Twitter account. And while I would still swap with him in a second, this is an additional burden he's putting on himself.
See this is precisely why I am bearish of Elon's companies, he's a savvy businessman, not a technologist, precisely why my opinion is that he is an idiot not a savant - PayPal is known for having been a flaming dumpster fire, it succeeded because of early market penetration (banks unable and unwilling to produce online payments systems in lieu of pushing credit cards). Ironically it is most useful now in traditional payment systems online, there are now reasonable more up to date payment systems available which largely supersede PayPal.
Again, Tesla is known for creating more hype fewer cars, expensive messes and underdelivering on promises - he has stimulated the market into considering alternative fuel sources, which is good but in a lot of ways showmanship not vision, more top down execution and spectacle than forethought or planning.
SpaceX is the most evident of these, Musk is busy taking tax dollars and building efficient rockets, which I guess is good but not about getting us to Mars.
So I think you are right to call out pandering for sales, it's what musk does best, not tech or vision.
It's like calling flappy bird visionary - popular yes but preceded by hundreds of sidescroller helicopter games with a single button controlling altitude. Difference being Flappy broke in on a verdant mobile market while the two color LCD version I played 25 years ago on a flipphone didn't even have Facebook to get popular on, while Flash versions of the same thing that had been out for decades suffered from anti Flash sentiment and a smaller mindshare.
> ensuring Twitter won’t go against him on a whim of the board
Can you tell me please what you mean by this?
AFAIK, Twitter is decentralized and fragmented for any actor to orchestrate an all-out political witch hunt where everyone on the platform goes against anyone in particular.
As far as Trump's business holdings go, Trump Organization runs like a brand management firm where they license and operate businesses with Trump name plastered on them, and I believe it's safe to say that the brand name's risk profile increased greatly due to the association with Trumpism from 2015 onward.
Twitter can find an excuse to ban his account (you can easily imagine this sort of risk exists after some of his recent meme tweets for example). I believe that is a single point of failure in Tesla PR strategy and a risk to be mitigated.
> brand name's risk profile increased
Risk profile sure but has the net value decreased or increased due to his presidency? I don’t have data to say it’s one way or another but looking at the downside without the upside as well is futile.
Well .. not really. Not at all. How could you even think it matters?
Musk could simply setup muskannouncements.com and blog his own tweets. No one may search for your announcements, but you better believe for his site he will still get full coverage.
ergo he's not doing it for his own announcements. it will be for a mix of media influence, and to address the bias in twitters 'fact checking'
> ergo he's not doing it for his own announcements.
I do agree he is doing things for reasons besides his own announcements, but I cannot agree that it's not part of it. Some people may simply not care enough about EVs to bother, as technologists we assume people see the world through our lens but I bet you many people have barely bothered to research his cars, they only know Tesla in a cursory fashion the same way you might know Nissan or Kia, or even computers (people exist who struggle to use anything more complex than a power button, these can be intelligent well read people even).
If you do use Twitter say, to follow XYZ (not even certain this is correct, I don't and struggle to use Twitter although I have a general idea how it works), if they see some promoted or retweet involving a Tesla, they are likely to learn more or investigate further. Owning this would be a non insignificant marketing advantage.
This is patently ridiculous—it's like saying since everyone can post on their own blog, why would anyone publish an OpEd in NYTimes? Obviously reach and distribution of the medium is fundamental. How would you notify 80 million people that muskannouncements.com posted a new entry?
You've missed the point here - it's not that EVERYONE can post on their own blog.
But Elon Musk is unique, HE would still get full coverage. Journalists and influencers and the fanboys and outrage crowd would post his stuff to twitter for him lol.
> Is Musk known really for his shrewd political skills and sharp maneuvers?
The question should be whether TSLA shareholders think he is, and I think most of them probably do.
(I don't own any TSLA, btw. But from what I've seen, many of his fanboys love him for being conniving while simultaneously claiming he's done nothing wrong. I believe this is an example of double-think. But the subject of this discussion is how these people might react to Elon Musk controlling Twitter, not whether their allegiance to Elon Musk is rational and rhetorically consistent.)
Is really the makeup of TSLA shareholders a bunch of WallStreetBets dummies?
I really doubt that this is the case. I know that there's some real retail investor interest in the stock price movement and for a minority the fundamentals, but I'm sure there's some institutional investors and smart money who are in it for the long run and who analyze the company's financial statements, and evaluate and scrutinize the founder's every move and decision and this Dr. Evil's scheme of taking over Twitter and turn the platform as a tool of propaganda for Musk's financial interests and self-aggrandizement looks very concerning to put it mildly.
> tool of propaganda for Musk's financial interests and self-aggrandizement looks very very concerning to put it mildly
How is it any different than Bezos buying WaPo, in principle? That does not seem to have been detrimental to Amazon shareholders. And how does having a propaganda arm detrimental to Tesla financial interests? Marketing is a euphemism for propaganda after all.
(I can see legitimate Tesla shareholder concern for Musk attention being spread too thin, but to claim having Twitter makes things worse beyond his existing presence as a user seems ridiculous.)
Bezos bought WaPo for what is (to him) a relatively small sum of money to be a hands off owner of something he thought should continue to exist and has potential for Amazon style economising. That's a bit different to Musk proposing to offload or borrow against a significant chunk of his TSLA shares whilst declaring winning an argument with the management of his favourite social media platform about rewriting Twitter's policies on controversial stuff is more important to him than making money. And yes, Musk's record of posting Tweets unhelpful to TSLA as a user is another reason for them to be alarmed at controversy on Twitter becoming increasingly important to him.
It's not just the inevitability of less time to focus on managing TSLA (though running Twitter being a full time job was an issue for Dorsey, and he was only running one other company and wasn't at war with the management) but also the hints that this is an obsession.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I have not seen WaPo pushing Amazon propaganda in their content.
I'd like to take this occasion to remind you that my first comment was a rebuttal to someone's argument speculating about the motive or rationale behind this acquisition and posited that Musk's control of the platform would afford him political influence to further his own financial interests, hence my opening reply.
> posited that Musk's control of the platform would afford him political influence to further his own financial interests,
Clarification: Positing that many TSLA shareholders presently believe Musk's control of twitter would afford him political influence to further his financial interests.
Well, I stand corrected then if that was your initial intent but the delusion with these folks is really strong to come up with such ridiculous scenarios to justify their unquestionable attachment to that online persona.
One thing I feel relatively sure of is that present TSLA shareholders are the sort of people who, up until the present, see fit to own TSLA shares. This despite everything that is already publicly known or said about Elon Musk.
If I keep myself in my personal mindset of a Musk skeptic and try to model the behavior of TSLA shareholders, I would anticipate TSLA shareholders selling immediately (today, and every day previously in the past several years), because that is what I would do if I were gifted TSLA. But that's obviously not what TSLA shareholders do, so my personal mindset evidently makes for an inadequate model of TSLA shareholders.
If instead I try to suspend my own beliefs and imagine myself as somebody who thinks owning and holding TSLA is a good idea, then my new assumed mindset says that Elon Musk getting more power, by hook or by crook, is a good thing for me.
> It's conceivable that TSLA shareholders could interpret Elon Musk acquiring more political influence as good for TSLA
For that they would have to see through Musk's grift. Most retail TSLA holders are Musketeers and they truly believe that he is a visionary genius. To them, fluff like Twitter doesn't matter when they have the real life Tony Stark at the helm.
> any other tesla shareholder can sell tesla shares to buy twitter, and why wouldn't they when the tesla CEO is doing it.
Because they wouldn't be taking control over the company... That's the purpose of those whole situation. Musk isn't just making a play on the basis of thinking "one dollar of TWTR is worth more than one share of TSLA"
It is possible. He has to file certain forms when he sells but the SEC often lets large buyers and sellers have a bit of a delay when making these forms public to avoid front running.
> Also those sales were pretty much required for taxes
His reason - or at least his public justification - for that sale was to deliberately generate a tax liability. If you recall people were getting pretty bent about him not having such a thing, as a zillionaire.
Yeah that's the story telling but not the reality, most of the sales were to cover taxes due on option exercise (had to do it in 2021 to avoid a tax regime change that was starting in 2022).
Typically these sales are scheduled and announced well ahead of time and then, like another user pointed out, may be solve over the course of months. So the market typically reacts near the announcement and it isn't much because it looks like business as usual. From the article you linked it specifically says that he was exercising options that would have expired. IIRC he also has another large stock allocation that expire in August of this year and so will be selling those.
I agree. But what I'm saying is that it will take a few months to execute. I was just trying to expand on the above discussion and why his sales didn't make Tesla stock crash but selling out of the blue would.
He bought ~9% of Twitter already. I'm sure his co-shareholders prefer that he takes control over companies he bought in, because he can then easily develop synergies (cf. Boring Co and Tesla, SpaceX and Tesla, SolarCity and Tesla, etc).
The problem with this idea is that nobody's really on Twitter for the free speech. He might take the company to new and exciting places, but it won't be with the current userbase.
This raises another issue, that is can he even sell that many shares of Tesla and still stay in control?
IIRC he made a comment about how he was "cash poor" a while back and it basically came down to he can't sell more of Tesla/SpaceX without dipping below 51% and loosing control.
"[Musk] lives at times below the
poverty line," Grimes said, per
Vanity Fair. "To the point where
I was like, can we not live in a very insecure $40,000 house? Where the neighbors, like, film us, and there's no security, and I'm eating peanut butter for eight days in a row?" [0]
In the same article Grimes complains Musk wouldn't replace a broken mattress.
No idea how Much this shows Musk is cash poor, and how much it shows crazy rich person, but it gives a glimpse either way
I have a difficult time believing Telsa couldn't put him up in executive housing and cover a security detail. Or, he couldn't send out a tweet and get a $50 million line of credit, uncallable line of credit to live on. Especially given that he can at get 13 billion dollars to acquire another company.
I think he likes bragging about being a homeless couch surfer.
Well if you needed further proof, look at the Tesla price action today. It is doubtful that Musk has even started selling, but the price is already collapsing.
There are limits to how much he can borrow against his assets, both due to banking risk models and Tesla bylaws. He's too close to those limits already to borrow another $20B.
You have no idea how much money he has, how much connections he has, how many VC's, bankers, nationstates are willing to put money behind him. you hve no idea how much Eth, BTC and DOGE he has. He's up at least %14,000 on Doge from when he started tweeting about it.
You have no idea how rich this man is, people need to stop acting like they do.
"Musk himself has committed to put up $33.5 billion, which will include $21 billion of equity and $12.5 billion of margin loans against some of his Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) shares to finance the transaction"
He just borrowed $25.5 billion[0]. So your assertion is false. The issue is coming up with $21 billion worth of equity which is contingent upon TSLA stock price.
> So no, once again he does not have funding secured
For the reader’s consideration: Musk’s TED interview [0], he claims (quite forcefully) that he did in fact have funding secured, but effectively “pled not secured” as to get a more favorable response from the SEC.
Because he keeps going around saying that in public, there was a recent request for a restraining order to stop him from repeating it since it poisons the jury pool. It quoted the US District Court's ruling from 1 April of this year[0]:
"the evidentiary record demonstrated that no reasonable jury could find Musk’s tweets on August 7, 2018 accurate or not misleading. Likewise, given that Musk was intimately involved with the facts leading to that conclusion, the Court also held that he recklessly made the statements with knowledge as to their falsity"
Which is to say, a federal judge has ruled that it was inaccurate, and he knows it was inaccurate.
Right, he denied the TRO, but that doesn't change the prior ruling regarding the accuracy of the tweet. Also "accuracy of the tweet" is a horrible thing to have to be debating in a court of law.
As someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about, I'm also wondering how he would be getting around the widely-reported "poison pill", even if he did have $21B more.
By asking the board to remove it. If faced with a serious tender offer backed by financing and accepted by a majority of shareholders, the board would find it difficult not to allow it to go ahead (by removing the poison pill).
That doesn't mean they couldn't refuse to remove it, but since they should act in the interests of the shareholders, they would need a good explanation (e.g. another better offer, or a plausible plan for extracting more value from Twitter than they currently do).
So, total noob here in that whole area, but I have a question about fiduciary duty.
The popular understanding seems to be that a companies' board is legally bound to act in the best (financial) interests of the shareholders - and only those. This is why hostile takeovers are a thing at all: If the acquiring company gets the majority of the target's shareholders on board (or becomes the majority), then the target's board of directors is legally bound to accept the takeover, even if it would be harmful to the company (nevermind the company's employees or customers)
How far does this go? If I'm a shareholder of McDonald's, could I sue them because they could have increased profits by lacing their burgers with cocaine but chose not to? (Or say some synthetic drug that's technically legal because it hasn't been banned yet).
If a company could make more profit but is kept from it by some regulation, could I sue them if they didn't try to lobby against that regulation?
My understanding is that courts and regulators give board members a lot of deference on their decisions, as long as they are well considered and not obviously ridiculous.
It's perfectly fine for a board to say that the legal and reputational risks far outweigh the benefits of lacing burgers with cocaine.
Most decisions, such as lobbying, involve complicated calculous and don't have a simple way to verify the ROI. The board can defend most positions (from no lobbying to lots of lobbying) by arguing that they believe it's the right decision based on their experience, judgement, and analysis of the situation; probably with some written analysis defending whatever their decision was at the time.
They don't have to make the best decision to advance the interests of the shareholders. It is impossible to know if an option that wasn't taken would have been better. They're require to act in a reasonable way that fits market norms and the data they had at the time. The decision of whether to accept Musk's proposal, regardless of how much he claims it to be the "best thing to do", is very subjective and complex. As long as they don't rely on immaterial facts (such as their dislike of Musk), it's impossible to prove that they made the wrong decision because we can't A/B test reality. They might still believe that Twitter can be worth $60B in a year and if they have enough data to support that, they can do whatever they think is right.
Could you sue them? Sure. Would you win? Probably not.
The board would likely make a compelling case that the long-term effect of lacing burgers with cocaine is a net loss for shareholders given the inevitable reputational harm, lawsuits, payouts, etc.
One key thing to know here, in addition to the replies you already received, is that the role of fiduciary duty is dramatically overstated by a lot of other HN comments.
The poison pill is there so he can't do it without approval of the board. If he comes in with a serious offer that the board decides is worthwhile, they can remove it just as easily as they added it.
Forgive my ignorance, but rich people routinely get access to cash secured with their assets though, so why can't he do that, pledging his huge equity ownership?
It is still borrowed, which means still needs paying back. If you don't care about the stocks (i.e. they are only an investment vehicle) this is fine.
Musk controls Tesla by way of owning more than 50% of its stock. He'd be trading Tesla for Twitter, which I think anyone would agree is a terrible trade.
What? He's the single largest shareholder, but even recently its approx 17 percent of Tesla he owns. Musk hasn't owned more than 50% of the stock anytime Tesla has been a public company.
The funding already includes a $12.5 billion loan against his tesla shares. He is limited by tesla by laws and banker risk aversion to how much loans he can take out against his shares. I would speculate that the $21 billion in his equity is there because he couldn't get more loans.
Sorry to respond to my own post, but after writing it I ran across and article in Bloomberg that basically confirms what I am saying. Apparently Musk is looking for equity partners to provide the 21 billion equity part of twitter's bid.
The SEC filing shows there's now a commitment to provide that equity investment. Elon Musk has formed a Delaware corporation which investors could invest into to provide the money behind the "Equity Financing". The article does not confirm your point and your top comment is misleading.
I wonder how Tesla shareholders feel about this situation. It seems like by leveraging with his Tesla shares, he's passing on the risk to everyone who owns Tesla stock. If they have a couple bad quarters or some kind of macro change happens and the price starts going down, Musk gets margin called and has to dump his stock on the market, which could start a spiral of panic-selling or even open Tesla itself to being corporate-raided.
Even though I'm obviously so much smarter than him on matter of acquiring public companies, I'll graciously allow him to do whatever he pleases as long as he continues growing Tesla at 50% compounded rate.
Which he did this quarter, and the one before that and the one before that.
I'll be concerned when that stops happening. Until then I give him my blessing to do whatever he pleases with HIS money.
And how can Tesla keep growing at a 50% rate, buy out all the other car companies in the world? There is a limit as to how many people can afford to buy $60k+ cars. The stock is already far beyond what the company profits will ever be worth. Today it seems like no one cares about profits, but will that always be the case?
Tesla is not about cars. It’s a marketing company and its product is the Tesla share price. This Twitter stunt is just one in a long line of stunts that Musk does to get attention for himself. People invest in Tesla because they want to invest in Musk as an individual.
This media hijacking is similar to the way that Trump got elected in 2016.
I bet that if SpaceX ever went public it would cause Tesla to fall as everybody who wants to invest in “Musk is a genius” would invest in SpaceX instead of Tesla.
Agreed. Also in other countries like mine where EV cars and the climate change issue and environmentalism movement that's being pedalled by the western media arent a thing, mostly Asian countries, Tesla here is more synonymous to batteries and sustainable energy. We've got a presidential election next month and some of the presidentiables, including the one who's most likely to win according to polls, are calling for more Tesla energy adoption for the country during their campaign. Musk diversified his company's products well
Well yeah, of course you would be concerned if that stopped happening, even more so if it means the CEO is suddenly compelled sell a bunch of his stock at a discount to avoid violating his debt covenants. You don’t get any upside from the twitter deal, so unless you think Musk will use Twitter to boost Tesla’s price (suppressing bad news?), it seems like all downside for current Tesla owners.
Read your post again. You talk like you have more money than Musk, which maybe you do but I doubt. You also have a huge ego. I know, I know “when I go look at my bank account I stop caring…”
The USA's politicians can stand to be bullied a lot more than they currently are. Many of them got to where they are now by being bullies themselves - Twitter bullies in particular!
They say the United States Congress is really just Hollywood for ugly people. In a sense, social media is really just Hollywood for smart people. Given Elon Musk's circumstances, and no matter what his motivations, they seem to be the correct ones to maximize his possible outcomes.
I certainly understand the schadenfreude aspect of it. But when I said bullying I mostly meant that as a euphemism for a sort of aggressive lobbying. For instance, manipulating politicians into supporting his companies by threatening to signal boost their opponents during the next election, or promising to suppress them.
Not in this case: this is a tender offer, and what you're describing is a merger. Which might actually make sense, but it would be something that goes through the TSLA board, and can't be done unilaterally by Musk.
Of course, he must be supremely influential with the board, but there is a governance structure that can't just be bypassed.
When you see "Acquired for 50% cash and 50% stock" this is a company "trading" x shares for y shares. So yeah this happens all the time not in the open market.
Some quick searching says TSLA is about $1000 and Elon owns 178M Tesla shares.
Assuming Elon owns all those shares free and clear, aren't there plenty of investment banks that would eagerly loan Elon the $21B if Elon pledges ~63M of those shares as collateral? (I got the 63M number from assuming the lender requires collateral value equal to 3x the loan to protect against price drops.)
Then presumably Elon would sell 21M TSLA over the next year or three to pay off the loan and get the other 42M of collateral out of hock, but sell slowly enough not to crash the price of TSLA.
Funding is secured via multiple strategies that best fits the case. How can you possibly think he does not have funding secured, when in fact he has more options than anyone private citizen in the world right now?
> How can you possibly think he does not have funding secured, when in fact he has more options than anyone private citizen in the world right now?
He’s already margined a lot of his Tesla shares. The rest is largely illiquid. Tesla shares are expensive to margin, especially for $10bn; we’re seeing an unusually-large consortium of banks assemble to provide that tranche of financing. That implies having to sell large, market-moving stakes in, all likelihood, Tesla and/or SpaceX. Something feasible, but unlikely pleasant for Musk or other shareholders in those names.
Also, Musk is someone who said “funding secured” without funding secured in 2018.
Most people, at this point, believe he has funding. When he first tweeted his bid, however, the stock dropped.
He still has to come up with $21bn. He’s tapped out on margin loans, so that will involve some selling of assets. And market conditions are volatile enough for those funding commitments to fall through.
> If he tries to sell 21 billion dollars worth of tesla shares, the share price will collapse.
Stock swap agreements are a thing. He doesn't have to outright sell them on the open market to get cash. Even if he did, it's not like the price is going to crater because he's losing confidence in TSLA or something.
An equity swap is a financial derivative contract (a swap) where a set of future cash flows are agreed to be exchanged between two counterparties at set dates in the future.
That kind of arrangement doesn't get you cash today, does it?
I thought that when you said that "he doesn't have to outright sell them on the open market to get cash" you were referring to an alternative way of getting cash - not to an alternative form of payment.
I'm not even sure that it would be really feasible, in any case it would surely be very unusual.
As that link says, the way it goes normally is: "A stock swap occurs when shareholders' ownership of the target company's shares is exchanged for shares of the acquiring company." But here people would not be getting shares of the acquiring company, they would be getting shares of an unrelated company. There is no reason why they would want to keep those shares, so they would quickly flood the market.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about. A holding company is responsible for the 21 billion. Elon happens to have created & owned that holding company. It's a perfect vehicle for him to allow private investors
For far less than $21 billion of investment I, or many other people, could redevelop and scale an entirely new social platform that would outpace Twitter, and I could probably do it multiple times over until it succeeds... The goal seems rather "Captain Ahab-ish" in nature...
I think the story is quickly turning into more of a hype effort than actual advancement.
Twitter would still need time and labor to be re-worked, which in itself is a massive undertaking. It looks like Twitter has multiple problems in scaling beyond it's current state, and that's why it has only made gradual changes over time for many years.
This is pretty misleading. Don't you think the government's forcing "income" to be defined as w2 salary has a lot to do with why this happens, and is therefore an important qualifier? They literally invented a new industry by arbitrarily restricting terminology. Those loans would never exist if we did not pray on individual earners to "fund" the government's "services."
once again HN demonstrates how much it does not know anything . he does not need to own 100% , 51% is well and good. musk + jack + ark invest + JPM already have 25% they need to get the other 26% which should be very achievable with tesla stock . All SEC fillings aside this is pretty much a done deal .
This brings about an interesting question. If I've got $1000 in cash, that's valuable because I have it now and I can spend it now without many strings. When we talk about billionaires we look at the 21 billion musk has in Tesla and just extrapolate that $1000 in the pocket but to $21 billion in elons pocket. But in reality, he doesn't REALLY have 21 billion because he can't actually spend it all.
He is trying to take out a loan here as well. One of the letters included in the story is actually a margin loan commitment from morgan stanley. But that was for only 12.5 billion. This was all he could get against his shares.
It does seem low in comparison with the value of his shares, but banks are well aware of the self reinforcing negative spiral a margin call can have on a share price and will not give out massive margin loans.
My point is that even after he got the maximum loan he could get, and then got the maximum margin loan against his shares, he is still 21 billion short.
The loans have different risk characteristics than his equity stake, he balances risk by deciding how much of his own money to put in vs. how much borrowed money to put in. (There is no doubt a ceiling — how much of his own money he is able to put in — but there's no reason to assume he wouldn't invest less than that ceiling.)
If you have enough cash to buy a house, you might sensibly still take out a mortgage, and you'll need to decide how much cash to put down as a deposit vs. how much to borrow. (The bank will likely set a lower limit for the amount of cash, but you might choose to put down more.) Someone could ask you "why did you choose that number", and you'd give a similar answer.
You don't know that there is a 21 billion shortfall. The source of funds for his intended equity stake is unknown to us at this point. It could be his imagination (especially given his history with the phrase "funding secured"!), or it could be something we are not aware of.
Elon Musk needs about $46.5 billion to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share: about $39.4 billion to pay for the 91% of Twitter’s stock that he doesn’t currently own, about $4.3 billion of debt to refinance and various miscellaneous costs. To pay that, he has:
A letter from his banks offering to lend $13 billion to Twitter, if he buys it, with $7 billion of that coming in the form of senior secured bank loans and $6 billion coming in the form of junk bonds.
A letter from his banks offering to lend him $12.5 billion personally, secured by $62.5 billion worth of his Tesla Inc. stock. At yesterday’s closing price, that comes to about 64 million shares, or about one-third of his Tesla stake.
An agreement with himself to put up the other $21 billion, give or take.
Looks like Alphabet owns ~7.5% of SpaceX. Alphabet is worth $1.67T; SpaceX is worth, say, $150B. This means ~$11B of Alphabet (~0.66%) is SpaceX. That is an extremely dilute method of gaining exposure to SpaceX!
(Disclosure: I work for Google, which is part of Alphabet)
Dilute is better than zero I suppose. Presumably the play is that SpaceX might end up controlling an extremely profitable Mars colony, creating the ultimate gigaunicorn, and making that 0.66% seem much bigger. This influx of cash will also allow Musk to become President of Earth, at which point even those with dilute indirect holdings in SpaceX will be sitting pretty. It's a classic long-term play really.
Well, he's just following the American model. Leave, displace and colonize, rebel, and declare sovereignty.
To those who would follow him on such a mission? Sayonara. He's spoken about how it would be mostly work for those living there, and I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to implement a 9/9/6 schedule.
I would trust Weyland Yutani with a Mars colony before I would trust EM.
Call me a nerd, but that's be an acceptable cost to being a colonist on another planet for me. 9/9/6 would be a cheap cost for insuring the success of the human race.
The point is that 10% swing in Google's performance (in either direction) has much bigger impact on stock price than 1000% swing in SpaceX performance.
Amdahl law applied to company performance.
Don't buy Google to own SpaceX.
Wait until Starlink IPO and buy that (if not too expensive).
He can easily get a loan against the value of his shares for this, combined with his own personal wealth (he recently sold a huge amount of stock, he has lots of cash on hand). It's not bullshit at all.
Personally, I think Musk is having a bit of a laugh. This will never happen. *
Twitter operating income for 12 m/e 31 Dec 2021 was negative. For the q/e 31 Dec 2021 it was $0.167B. Why he thinks Twitter is worth $45b is beyond me. What would Warren Buffett do? Well, he wouldn't buy Twitter, that's for sure.
* Time will tell, of course. I've been wrong before. But the whole thing seems like madness to me.
“What is the point of fuck you money if you don’t get to say fuck you?” is the turn of phrase I believe. (Or in the case of Musk, meme lord when you’re not on the factory/star base floor)
Wealth has diminishing returns; he’s just trying to get more value for his exceptional personal wealth (and remember, he plans on dying on Mars, he’s playing a different game than typical billionaires). Status is his drug of choice, Twitter his platform. If you crave validation (Biden admin not mentioning him until recently, people buying ads in time square “say their [Tesla] name”), buy it if it isn’t given freely.
(observations as someone with years of therapy and a scholar of the human psyche)
Couldn't he have more noble causes in mind like trying to do the right thing for humanity (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX)? Social media is a cesspool right now, they seem to have a negative impact on democracy and humanity in general, and public social media companies have no incentive to clean themselves up because that will hurt shareholder value in the short term. Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.
> Social media is a cesspool right now, they seem to have a negative impact on democracy and humanity in general, and public social media companies have no incentive to clean themselves up because that will hurt shareholder value in the short term. Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.
AFAIK, his publicly-stated plan is to not "clean [Twitter] up," but rather turn it into more of an un-moderated cesspool.
The perspective of "un-moderated" equaling "cesspool" is entirely based on whether or not you hold any opinions which are unpopular with the powerful.
I had an account I created in 2009. I had a modestly decent number of followers due to some past blogging on data science and DIY electronics. My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.
Maybe you hold some opinions that will also one day be unpopular with The Good People™. If you do, you'll soon find out that censorship is a very clumsy tool.
> The perspective of "un-moderated" equaling "cesspool" is entirely based on whether or not you hold any opinions which are unpopular with the powerful.
Eh, no. It's more about signal to noise ratio. Because if recent history has taught us anything, it's that crowdsourced lies are often at least as compelling as the truth.
> My account was suspended because I talked about the lab leak hypothesis before it was decided that it was ok to do so by The Good People™.
Realistically, "un-moderated" will be 99% Qanon and Stop-the-Steal and 1% the kind of stuff you say you posted. The most obsessive have the loudest voices in those spaces, and people who believe wacky things seem to be more obsessive than those who don't.
I'm with you, but should a person who holds no forbidden opinions today really feel worried that one of their opinions will be forbidden in the future?
You've got to think, if someone has the exact set of approved opinions today, that's almost certainly not a coincidence, but a sign that they form their opinions based on what is approved. And in that case they're at no risk of ever having a meaningfully unpopular opinion.
Unfortunately, you make an excellent point. And yes, I do think that the majority of people, when given the choice between what they know to be right and what they know to be popular, will choose the latter. Additionally, they will aggressively attack those who hold the unpopular opinion to buy themselves protection from the witch-hunters going after those with unpopular opinions.
The lab leak stuff gave me whiplash for sure. Early on, if you had the audacity to suggest that a coronavirus came out of a coronavirus lab, people would unironically call you a racist fascist right-wing lunatic.
Now it's officially a credible theory[1].
This is exactly why moderating "The Truth" is so dangerous. The people claiming to be the arbiter of the truth are politically motivated and self serving.
Additionally, most of them were utterly innumerate. There's nothing more infuriating than the "I'm not a math person" folks sitting there gleefully pretending to understand data as they disseminate mass panic.
Maybe he thinks an unmoderated cesspool is better than a moderated cesspool. Either way, you're swimming in shit. Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.
> Maybe he thinks an unmoderated cesspool is better than a moderated cesspool. Either way, you're swimming in shit.
I'm sure he thinks that. Apparently he's a "free speech absolutist."
> Twitter not being a cesspool is an appealing fantasy, but only that.
It's not a binary condition. Twitter can be a cesspool with relatively more or relatively less shit. I'm sure his preference will result in relatively more shit.
Personally, I've appreciated a having society that lacks the shit Donald Trump created on Twitter.
> Buying the company and taking it private will give him the ability to make those hard choices and try to make a social media company that is positive for humanity.
If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Surely he has the means to attract tech talent to do it, the means/message to attract users to a new platform, and presumably if he knows what's bad about Twitter and how to subtract it and make it good, he could do this greenfield.
This would result in increased platform diversity, too. And I'll bet you it's cheaper.
Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.
Because this isn't really about building a neat social network, it's about power.
People have tried to do what you said. Let's make a Twitter that's not controlled by the hard left! The result was Twitter's ideological allies at tech firms immediately banned them from every platform they controlled, and other allies ganged up to hack and destroy them.
You cannot start a Twitter competitor today, it's impossible, because:
1. The sort of people who found companies tend to be pro-free speech because their economic survival depends on having risky but correct ideas, and that naturally leads to a sympathy for free speech.
2. The sort of people who hate free speech are obsessed with Twitter/tweeting platforms specifically.
3. They are exceptionally aggressive. They will do anything, including damaging their own companies and even breaking the law in order to stop any other platform from becoming popular. They've managed to take over tech firms to a sufficient extent that they will destroy any attempts to replace Twitter, which they see as a key pivot point in their power over society.
The obvious solution: buy Twitter and fix it. It's too big to ban. This also has the major benefit of really, really upsetting Musk's ideological enemies. They'd hate him anyway and many are in powerful positions in politics and the media. Even the thought of losing Twitter to Musk has very conspicuously driven them into a frenzy in recent days, and such frenzies discredit them in the eyes of the general public, thus weakening their ability to move against Musk.
> If that's the goal, why not simply found another social media company built around those values?
Twitter is one of the few social networks that actually has a network. A lot of social media failed because the cold start problem is a very hard problem to solve at this point in the game. Elon probably knows it and I would bet that this is why he is looking to buy an established social network rather than creating a new one.
> Imagine if Musk had tried to buy a big three automaker in order to make electric cars happen.
Bad analogy. Social media platforms are natural monopolies. The utility of a car doesn't grow with how many other people own that model. By contrast, Twitter's utility is basically just a function of the fact that all the relevant players use it.
If this was the case, Facebook wouldn't have needed to buy Instagram and Whatsapp. Or hell, there wouldn't have been FB because MySpace would have been king forever.
Network effects are real and they can help sustain engagement and mindshare but given how easy it is to move fluidly between multiple forums (social or no), the next competing platform is one compelling reason for engagement away.
> Couldn't he have more noble causes in mind like trying to do the right thing for humanity (e.g. Tesla, SpaceX)? ...
> ...Social media is a cesspool right now,...
He would have greater impact if he used his account to not add to the cesspool, then. Much more than if he bought the company and kept tweeting like he does.
So.. what, we just let the dumpster fire continue on unabated and do nothing? I would argue his tweets are a lot less harmful than those that push false news in an attempt to change the route that democracies are following.
Jeez, he's already launched Tesla and SpaceX, why's he gotta solve every problem under the sun before he does something not quite so clear cut.
And haven't we already established that no amount of money thrown around is going to actually fix "hunger around the world" or "health care around the world". How many billions have already been dumped down that hole to little effect?
Musk doesn't control society, neither does twitter. If electrifying the cars of the western world affords someone the insane wealth required to... buy an internet forum... that seems like a fairly reasonable level of control over capital allocation to me.
I never stated anything about "complete control of society", I am merely making the point that money is essentially an abstraction of power and that modern society does nothing to prevent that, maybe it even is built to amplify that. Accordingly, to say "it's none of your business what others do with their money" is to say "it's none of your business how others use their power", and if you can't see how it's pretty directly everyone's business what everyone else does in our shared world, I think you and I understand ethics a little differently.
Edit: parent comment cleanly and completely changed due to my response, what a world. Cowards.
If controlling twitter means literally controlling society, then I hope he crashes and burns that whole affair. That much power should never be concentrated into a single corporation.
I'm more talking about lobbying and the pernicious effects of a legal system modifiable by the elites. You can surely see that the rich and elite in society have written tax laws, property (IP, copyright) laws, employment laws, and complicated everything enough that the legal system is pretty directly pay to win.
I think the online giant platforms are another problematic avenue of control, I don't object to that characterization, but I'm really saying that saying "other's money is none of your business" can't be a good-faith statement in a world where money can control livelihoods and laws with such ease.
> but I'm really saying that saying "other's money is none of your business" can't be a good-faith statement in a world where money can control livelihoods and laws with such ease.
It absolutely can. I have no problem with the fact that money can buy politicians.
I have a problem with the fact that politicians can be bought in the first place.
Which are 2 completely different issues. If you had loads of money, you’d play the game too.
Then we’re “playing the game” by caring how he spends his money and trying to use social pressure to force changes in law. You can’t simultaneously say Musk should be able to do what he wants because he can, and then tell others that they need to behave differently.
Well, you can, but it’d be massively hypocritical and an opinion that’s easily dismissed
Oh, come now. It’s not our business if he uses his money to outright purchase a politician? It’s not our business if he uses his money in pursuit of The Most Dangerous Game? It’s not our business if he uses his money to run disinformation campaigns via social media? Of course it is very clearly our business what he does with his money.
If anything, we should not only be scrutinizing the hell out of Musk’s stated intentions, but also scrutinizing those people in the Twitter organization who have the power to manipulate the public message, and ensuring that there are checks in place to keep falsehoods and anti-democracy messaging out of social media.
I mean, really, “mind your business!”? So let’s pretend it’s some other mega-billionaire, shall we? We sure has hell don’t want the likes of Putin purchasing twitter, do we? Give your head a shake.
Edit: ah, shit, I see later in the thread you double down. What a waste of my time. Don’t bother responding, IDGAF.
Musk have a case against him by the SEC (tweeting about taking tesla private), it seems like they can win it, and he might be forced to stop using twitter.
Now I can imagine it hard for the SEC to enforce such a role if it's his private company.
So in a sense he's using that money to secure his best tool to marketing / growth which is definitely worth 50Bn$ for tesla alone (then add all his other ventures now and in the future)
The SEC doesn't need to persuade Twitter to enforce anything and it would make a difference if Twitter is public or private. The SEC can sanction Musk as an individual and officer of Tesla. As such insider trading rules (and whatever?) apply to him, no matter what medium he uses to break them.
(And please explain how publishing stoner and dogecoin memes is worth $50billion to Tesla... ;)
SEC already punished him by making him step down as chair of Tesla for 3 years, plus a fine. And I doubt that curtailing anyone’s first amendment rights is a punishment the SEC is legally allowed to enact.
The SEC “curtails first amendment rights” all the time. It’s arguably one of their most effective means of enforcement: an order or agreement to stop lying.
I am not a lawyer, but restricting Musk from being able to speak publicly seems an overly-broad way of restricting him from lying about market-related things, given that the latter is a small subset of his overall speech.
I don’t think it’s likely the SEC would prohibit him from using twitter altogether but I don’t think it’s entirely beyond their ability, either. Especially in the context of a settlement agreement.
Don’t think for a moment that he does not pay a team of promotionists. Every public forum is monitored and “influenced.” He is not a completely stupid person and he obviously understands social media. Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces. It is very much in his best interests to spend pocket change amounts to counter all criticism. It is absurd to think otherwise.
moistly, I think you are in an epistemic pit because you think misleading others is smart. Notice that you don't present evidence that everything is monitored and influenced, because it isn't an evidence rooted belief. Notice that you think that influence on social media is intelligent, that misinformation is clever, and that countering criticism rather than entertaining it is wisdom - you call it absurd to not counter criticism at the end of your post. On the basis of these things you think that smart people must be doing it and since you consider Elon smart you think he is doing it.
The problem is, being smart and thinking misleading people via online influence is smart aren't the same thing. moistly, in mistaking intelligence for oppression, I think you are dooming yourself into accepting a potentially false belief. Many very intelligent people value integrity.
You asks us not to think for even a moment. Fuck that. What happens when we do? The finances at Tesla are public knowledge because it a public company. They don't have an advertising department. It seems reasonable that Elon might not believe in paid promotions as much as some people. So a reasonable person might entertain the thought that -- and now we've transgressed your command to not think for even a moment.
> Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces.
I'm not being paid by Elon Musk to post this. I publicly declare right now that I will retract my assertion that you are trapped in an epistemic pit and give you one hundred dollars if you can prove that at least four people in this thread are being paid by Elon Musk to counteract criticism. I will welcome this public disgrace if you teach me better, because I strongly believe that accepting criticism from you so that my beliefs are more accurate is not absurd, but of great benefit to me.
You're retreating from your original claim that Musk specifically pays people to "monitor and influence public forums" and in particular this forum. Now someone else pointed out that this is nonsense, you're retreating to the bailey of "wealth people manage their public image" which is a much weaker claim.
It’s the same claim! Since the time of pharaohs those with power and money have paid informers and influencers to keep their ear to the ground and to promote their benefactor. It’s a well-established industry. Hollywood makes extensive use of it, Scientology infamously so, politicians the same, and sure as god made little green apples, Musk’s cult-like evangelists are helped along their path by the ministrations of professional influencers. You can’t say Musk farted without some toady sycophant popping up to say that it smells like roses. It’s bizarre and unnatural, and Occam’s razor says that it’s hired help.
> Of course many of those in this very thread that argue against those who say “bad things” about Musk are being engaged by his paid mouthpieces.
Claim 2
> More the fool you, though, if you naïvely believe that the ultra-wealthy don’t manage their public image!
In one you claim that people in this thread are doing it. In the other you claim that it is a thing which is done. These are two different claims.
You think people who disagree with you are fools, because you think misleading others is wisdom. I think you can escape, because I think you know that Putin is a moron. Do you agree that it was stupid of him to spread misinformation, ultimately resulting in deception prospering so much so that he lost sight of the truth, leading to ruin? If it was stupid for Putin, then why can't it be stupid for others? Look, you point to Pharaoh. He is dead, his empire is dead, and his fancy pyramid didn't help him. You point to politicians - Hitler killed himself. You point to Scientology - do you think them clever and wise, that they have the truth; I don't. Why are you pointing at idiots? Why are you pointing at dead men? Why do you think they are so clever?
If you had evidence that people were being paid, you wouldn't need to point to unwise dead men! Get out of the pit. Where is the oppression you claim? Where are the people being paid? Where is your evidence? Show me a check. Show me a paystub! Show me an account name which can be hired through an online service. Show me that I'm wrong that your beliefs are not rooted in your preconception that it is wise to mislead. I confess that I believe that it isn't absurd to be corrected. Criticize me! Point out my flaws! I will be better for it.
I am not talking about claim 2. I am talking about claim 1.
Also, from the Hacker News site guidelines:
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
You mock attempts to share critical feedback with you. It is clear you don't value criticism. It is plain to see why someone who doesn't value criticism wouldn't understand why someone else would value it. Nevertheless, plenty of intelligent people consider soliciting critical feedback of their ideas to be among the most important things they can do.
I eagerly await the day you present concrete evidence of your claims that many here are being paid by Elon Musk to promote him, but I grow more and more certain with your every reply that you have no such evidence. If you did have the evidence, you would collect a hundred dollars quickly. Since you don't, you call me a fool and pretend I speak drivel. I could call you a liar for that, but I won't. I think you are confused enough that you believe your own false claims. I completely forgive your insults.
However, I must insist you not see yourself as wise in your own eyes. You who proclaim that others should not "think for even a moment" have no place whatsoever mocking at cultists.
I would spend 15% of my net worth on free speech. Wouldn't you?
A lot of people downvoting, so I'll expand; It's fair to give the benefit of the doubt given that Tesla is helping combat climate change and SpaceX is about becoming multi-planetary. These are civilization level problems and solutions.
The idea is to make twitter a TRUSTED public square. He suggests open sourcing the algorithm and making all moderation actions visible to the public. Makes sense as transparency is needed to rebuild trust in the platform.
Tesla has replaced two million gasoline cars with electric cars, and given its current growth rate, this number will likely be massively larger in a few years.
Musk has since long ago pursued a publically disclosed plan for Tesla, for the company to release progressively more affordable electric vehicles, so the current growth rate in number of vehicles sold could very well be sustained for years to come.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. There is no reasonable case to be made that Tesla has not had a massive impact on pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. And most people consider that to be good for the environment, even if you now don't.
If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants, the break even point for a Model 3 to gas cars is 80,000+ miles [1]. EVs aren't some magic carbon-negative solution, and the politics Musk plays to get raw materials are a net negative for the planet as a whole.
> If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants
That's a rather extreme assumption. The article you linked to also gives the more representative figure of 14,800 miles for "U.S. average energy mix (23% coal-fired, plus other fossil fuels and renewables)".
To put things in perspective there are only 12 states that are majority coal powered (according to 2017 numbers[0]):
Also, it's not unrealistic for a Model 3 to do 80,000+ miles. Some have already managed 100,000 miles[1], which is apparently the minimum warranty period too.[2]
> If you live in an area that primarily gets electricity from coal plants, the break even point for a Model 3 to gas cars is 80,000+ miles [1]. EVs aren't some magic carbon-negative solution, and the politics Musk plays to get raw materials are a net negative for the planet as a whole.
Do you have a bone to pick with EVs? This seems cherry-picked/straw man to me.
The 80k+ you refer to assumes electricity is sourced 100% from coal, which happens never in the US.
Even West Virginia, a haven for coal, it’s only 88%. Wyoming is also in the 80s. There are a few in the 50-70 range, but most states are sub-35, with many being 0.
[edit] For our most populous states, CA checks in at 0.1%, NY 0.1%, FL 7%, and TX 16%.
Contrary to what you state, I would say that EVs are doing a good job at lowering overall emissions from passenger vehicles, and this will become more true as renewables increase their percentage in our electricity production mix.
Even if that 80,000+ miles point is true it’s still better than a gasoline car over its lifetime and completely dishonest because who the hell is buying a Tesla and living in an area with 100% coal fired power? Germans?
The “U.S. average energy mix” comparison of 14,800 is much more accurate.
Not to mention the equation gets more and more favourable to EVs with each passing year.
I really don't appreciate people on HN posting wildly inaccurate links, I think that's something we need to be discouraged from doing. Second, are you unaware of solar panels?
A lot of assumptions there that things will continue to get cheaper, cost in manufacturing will drop, battery range will continue to improve, charging stations continue to proliferate, the grid respond to the burden, and no missteps in captialization and expansion cause it all to collapse.
Extremely safe assumptions given the investments being made by Tesla, not to mention other carmakers. The electric grid responding to the burden is almost certain as well, given the history of the grid handling decades of rising year-over-year energy usage in most localities.
As for mistakes, the company can afford many small to intermediate missteps and still accomplish what I described, because the company's momentum is already pushing it to accomplish these achievements.
The grid has not responded well, that is history. Fast Charging stations are a huge draw, and home recharging raised the bar for substations everywhere. It will take decades to respond.
Battery advances - well that's a crystal ball I don't care to gaze into.
And company momentum is a myth. Cash flow is king - the day you don't make payroll, you close. It's a markov chain with a terminating condition. Play any markov game long enough and you reach that node and its all over. So a gamble every time.
I have seen no numbers to support the claim that mass installation and employment of charging stations will have an extraordinary impact on electricity usage, beyond the normal annual increases that the grid has been able to facilitate.
As for batteries, you don't have to bet on battery advances, just the scaling up of manufacturing, which is already underway.
Do you have data supporting that Tesla replaced 2 million gasoline cars? Selling electric cars does not mean that the buyer has gotten rid of their gasoline-powered cars, and it's not uncommon for one person to own multiple cars.
I have no reason to assume Tesla encouraged more people to become car owners. That would be quite the expensive status symbol for a non-car owner to take up. And those who own a gasoline-powered car buying a Tesla as a second vehicle would still reduce usage of the first vehicle.
So assuming that most of those two million sales weren't in lieue of the sale, or at least use, of gasoline powered cars, doesn't seem reasonable to me.
But let's be extremely conservative in our praise of Tesla, and say that the company took one million gasoline powered cars off the road and replaced them with electric cars. That is quite the accomplishment if you accept the premise that electric vehicles are better than gasoline-powered ones for reducing the impact on climate.
> It's fair to give the benefit of the doubt given that Tesla is helping combat climate change and SpaceX is about becoming multi-planetary
I don't think it's reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt to [highly debatable claim] based on uncritically accepting other [highly debatable claims].
Replacing gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles is potentially part of combating climate change, but this depends a lot on the specifics of manufacturing etc. [1]
Regardless, "helping combat climate change" is at best an incomplete description of Tesla, in the same way that Nestle is not perfectly captured by "Good food, good life" ; these are potential side-effects, rather than inarguable core missions.
We should be wary of accepting the slogans of profit-driven organisations as the truth. Wendy's is focused a lot more on selling than locating beef, for example.
It's a very significant part of combating climate change, without which there is no hope of achieving zero carbon, and no company has done more to make that happen than Tesla.
One can praise Tesla while still acknowledging that it should not be blinded trusted to always work in the public interest, and also while recognizing Tesla's contributions alone are not enough for human civilization to get to zero carbon.
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, the vast majority if not all other companies in general, is not an honest way of addressing these inadequancies and challenges you highlight, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
Replacing a gas powered car with an EV in an area served by coal power is definitely not helping either air pollution or climate change. It's only moving emissions from the tail pipe to a smoke stack. An EV is only a net negative CO2 producer if you charge it from renewable sources. Even then it'll only be a net negative only after the break-even point for the CO2 produced by the construction of the EV and charging system.
It's widely understood that switching to EV is part of a larger package of policies that can get society to zero carbon but it is nonetheless an absolutely necessary part of any zero carbon future. Tesla's role in pushing that forward is highly commendable, by any reasonable standard.
I think a couple million gives you more than plenty to create as many WWW platforms for promoting as much free speech as you want. No need to burn so much money to also buy the brand name of one specific ISP.
He didn't misunderstand the analogy, it's obvious what was meant. He's pointing out that comparing Musk's intentions to slavery is absurd, which it is. It's a crap analogy because:
a. Nothing Musk is doing or wants to do with Twitter is immoral.
b. Even if you disagree the scale is totally wrong, but in analogies the sense of scale matters.
The majority of US citizens agree with the very narrow limits on free speech defined by the Supreme Court. Only a fringe minority want much stricter limits, or no limits at all. Twitter could potentially align their content policy to match US law and stop censoring legal content, although that would make it less valuable to some advertisers.
> The majority of US citizens agree with the very narrow limits on free speech defined by the Supreme Court
Do you mean to say that the majority of people believe this is how private companies should operate? If so, Id love to hear your reasoning for thinking that, because I would disagree heavily.
Saying racist stuff is legal, but its still going to get you kicked out of almost every bar, with few to no complaints from other patrons.
Not really, most of 4chan is moderated (albeit inconsistently and often capriciously.) I think the defining characteristics of 4chan are anonymity (from other users anyway, with some caveats) and the culture/reputation of the website.
>I would spend 15% of my net worth on free speech. Wouldn't you?
I totally believe that you would do that, I don't believe that Musk would do that, a guy so petty he once cancelled someone's Tesla order after he dared to make a 'rude post' on the internet, with an interesting justification about the nature of private businesses' ability to discriminate:
Let's not forget the time Musk tried to get a guy to take down a Twitter account that tracks Elon's private jet. If Elon owned Twitter he would just close the account himself.
Imagine someone stood outside your house and tweeted every time you left your house. They're not doing anything wrong, anyone can walk down the street and see if you leave your house.
Would you be happy knowing that all the criminals in your area now have easily accessible information on when you're home or not?
There's nothing stopping someone doing that. It's only someone gathering information that anyone else could and tweeting it. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
> Would you be happy knowing that all the criminals in your area now have easily accessible information on when you're home or not
I would gladly accept that in return for hundreds of billions, with which I could afford some former special forces bodyguards. And house guards for when I'm not home.
Publishing his location in real time affects his safety in a country where any whacko with a prior criminal history can get a gun. There certainly are plenty of people with serious grudge against Musk.
The data isn't "completely public". It takes non-trivial skill and effort to access this data.
I sure don't know how to do it.
It significantly rises the bar from "a whacko" to "a whacko with technical skills to access FAA monitoring system"
ADS-B is literally public data. There are several public exchanges that provide feeds without filtering and any person with one hour of time can access this data in real-time.
When some billionare buy private jet he is aware about fact that his jet can be easily tracked. If person decide to be a public figure he have to deal with fact that he'll be tracked around.
If he closes that guy's account, that would be egregiously hypocritical. But I don't see anything wrong with merely offering somebody money to shut up.
There's no reason Twitter can't hypothetically make a lot of money.
> While Twitter does not report its average revenue per user, one independent analyst pegged Twitter’s ARPU at about $17 in 2020, around one third of Facebook’s.
Twitter is being mismanaged or at least not living up to the theoretical potential when compared to its peers. It might never get to facebook ARPU levels, but it can approach it
Toss away ethics and sure, it can reach the same nefarious levels of facebook. but as it stands, Twitter is a place of morals and that is their undoing. Twitter has barely if ever been profitable.
A place of morals! Well, lots of other people think Twitter is a place of immoral 1984-esque dystopianism that they want no part of. Those people have money too, and if Musk takes over and cleans house they might well turn up and start doing things that can be exploited for profit, like making interesting tweets about things.
Oh absolutely. Morals are mostly cultural. if we decided that it was moral to sacrifice humans, then it would be. What Musk plans and is doing however, is entirely unethical.
It's also possible that Twitter could easily make money and the company is intentionally avoiding that, for tax purposes or whatever.
If you are holding yourself out as a growth company but also paying dividends, it creates a mixed message, because if you are growing shouldn't the money be better spent on growth than just giving it back to the shareholders?
Twitter is not a growth company by any metric: Users, revenue, or stock price. If they could easily generate lots of revenue right now with their current management, they absolutely would already be doing it.
If Twitter is losing $180 million per year, and they have 7500 employees, and each employee costs on average $100k [0] fully loaded ($750mm/yr), you could become profitable by reducing your payroll by 50% (laying off half their employees).
My guess is layoffs aren’t considered as an option since it would signal that they’re throwing in the towel and don’t believe in their own growth trajectory.
He made an offer in modest excess of the book value for a company that is probably overvalued to begin with. He knows this. The board knows this. Every investor with half a brain knows this.
It makes it impossible for the board to say no without having a good reason. They have a fiduciary duty to examine the offer and determine if it is best for shareholders to cash out at this price. And the answer to that is it probably is because Twitter has never had a good path to long term profitability.
So yes, he is having a laugh. I am sure if they agree he will find the money. He just doesn’t care. He sees a poorly run company that is making decisions against his freedom of speech ethos. It is an easy target.
This freedom of speech angle is such a crock. How is the world richest man setting the rules of discourse on someone else's platform freedom?
It's akin to buying your way into the opinion section of every newspaper if not in magnitude, certainly in direction.
If he really cared about freedom, he'd just make a new platform with the $54B. But it's not about that. At best it's a laugh, at worst it's about control.
How do you equate "freedom of speech" with "publishing Musk's physical location in real time" ?
In general we have laws against tracking individuals.
What he does seems legal but it doesn't make it good or ethical.
FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time. It's a legitimate security risk for those planes and people who use them. It's an abuse of the system.
The twitter account published the location of the plane using publicly available information. It could have also published the information of one of Virgin Atlantic's plane.
In fact it's not even Musk's plane, he just owns the company that owns the plane, Falcon Landing LLC. The twitter account didn't actually know if it was Elon Musk being flown or a bunch of burros being ferried back and forth between US states.
>FAA didn't create a plane tracking system so that a kid can put this info on a map in real time.
You're right, the FAA made the system open so that anybody could do this, not just this kid.
If you recognize something is a weapon, you will want to prevent it being used against you, AND potentially want to use it yourself against someone else. They usually go together but not always. You could want people to not have guns without yourself wanting a gun, for example, but still feel "if there's a gun, I want it to be in my control."
Yes, and it's a special weapon such that the more successful one operates it, the more revenue ot generates. A lot better than say missiles for a non violent option.
Twitter is not a weapon. Most of the world does not give a hoot about anything that is going on twitter. You might get some new come up in celebrity gossip but that's really about it
Most people in the world don't have subscriptions to the NYTimes, but the influence of that newspaper seems undeniable. Percentage of the global population paying attention seems like a poor measure of influence, not least because actual influence is not fairly distributed through the global populations. Influence over 100 US senators counts for much more than influence over 100 US plumbers.
Correct, but journalists, politicians and companies do, which is all it needs. Twitter has been way more influential than it deserves to be for a while now.
It does matter. A lot of people live in a bubble in which Twitter’s loudest voices are a reflection of the “common sense”. That is why so many governments monitor it.
I don't think Musk is the guy that cares about making more money with a business. 20 years ago anybody would have told you that the odds of being successful starting an electric car company or a rocket company are 0.
With Twitter all he seems to care about is the idea, the name, the userbase and some of the technology. I don't think turning $45b into $100b is a top priority, there are easier ways doing that.
> If you remove the ads and the surveillance, Twitter is 60 lines of Perl.
If you remove ads and surveillance Twitter isn't 60 lines of Perl. Just their frontend, without even getting into problems of scale, is already much heavier than sixty lines. It also happens to have been an influential technology export [1].
You can find more than sixty projects, not just sixty lines of Perl, open sourced by Twitter. While some of them are related to ad tracking and surveillance not all of them are [2]. Although I haven't checked, I would be shocked if any of them are below sixty lines.
The idea that modern tech companies can be replaced with sixty lines of code is exceedingly naive. There are certain problems that naturally come up at scale like the regular failure of hardware, hot users, persistent dedicated attacks by intelligent malicious actors, and regulatory requirements around data handling which, even taken alone rather than together, demand more than sixty lines of code to adequately address.
Twitter may be simple in theory, but you are quite clearly provoking a straw man conception of the value of Twitter's technology. If you weren't, you wouldn't need to lie or exaggerate to the point of absurdity.
> What, pray tell, other than ad tracking is their technology?
The person you are responding to is largely repeating first-party accounts of motivation - Elon says he believes that producing greater transparency in algorithmic moderation and active moderation at Twitter, understood as a technology owned by Twitter, is a core ideologically rooted reason for the takeover. You can get this first party account of motivation by listening to the TED interview with Elon Musk which covers the topic of why he feels Twitter should be taken private and why he feels it would benefit from having its moderation practices be incredibly transparent to the point of open sourcing the entirety of Twitter and making their moderation process public.
I can't think of better way to diminish one's own technical skills than to make a claim that twitter is '60 lines of perl'. Let's see, let's even take one tiny component of twitter, realtime push notifications across a distributed system, can you do that in 60 lines of perl?
It's less about the number of lines of code to replace/replicate it, more about the existing user base size & the fact that Twitter is _the_ place where conversations about any topic happen these days.
The world being as unpredictable as it is, the conversation may also move to another medium tomorrow.
It’s funny that Musk explains specifically why he is doing this - just like he always does - but people are so deeply cynical they don’t even realize they are ignoring it and coming up with more Machiavellian explanations.
Probably because "just like he always does", he is probably lying.
He lies quite a lot about his business intentions and reasoning. It's not surprising that people don't trust him and wonder what the real reason is, since no one believes the reason he's giving (other than uncritical Musk fanboys).
Musk literally published the "master plan" for Tesla over time, and has largely executed on it, and described the goal of rocket reusability for the purpose of colonizing Mars forever ago.
Are you sure that you're not confusing failed predictions with malevolent lying?
I'm talking about specific statements that claim things that end up being entirely false. His claims about Tesla full self-driving and taking Tesla private in 2018 are pie-in-face obvious lies Musk has told, but there are any other number of half-truths, exaggerations, and misleading statements he's made over time that make me confident that yes, Elon Musk is a malevolent liar.
"I think we will be ‘feature-complete’ on full self-driving this year, meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up, take you all the way to your destination without an intervention this year. I am certain of that. That is not a question mark." - Elon Musk in 2019
Lie. Full self-driving is not feature complete in 2022, and won't be for years.
Lie. Funding was not secured. Musk is still doubling down on this one.
There was an incident where the EPA gave the Model S a range of 391 miles, and Musk got upset and claimed the left the key in the ignition overnight, which the EPA denies. Musk provides no evidence, but neither does the EPA, so I guess this one is "Makes weird claim contradicting a government agency that has no reason to lie", but I am inclined to believe the EPA over Musk. (https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/1/21244556/elon-musk-lie-epa...)
These are a small sampling of examples, you can look at Musk's statements over time about Tesla, the Hyperloop, and his future intentions regarding the various bizarre whims he adopts monthly, and there's tons of stuff where exaggerates and overstates, but also plenty where he straight up lies and completely misrepresents the truth. Particularly with anything Tesla related, he's actually more straight up about SpaceX capabilities, for whatever reason.
Your first example is just him being wrong, not lying. The second example is him being an idiot, I would not class it as a lie. Perhaps he thought he had secured funding and/or was high. Why is it so trendy to hate on musk? Just because he has money?
Exactly. There are a lot of things to critize about Musk - but it's also undeniable that he has done very impressive and useful things. Lately, dunking on his every move has become somewhat of a folk's sport (or easy clicks for "journalists").
The other way around seems very common too. Autistics trying to understand the behavior of NTs by implicitly assuming the NTs think in ways similar to themselves, then expressing frustration when the observed behavior of the NTs doesn't match the inaccurately modeled expectation.
In fact I'm not sure this really has much to do with NTs and autistics. I think this sort of dynamic occurs all the time even between people who are very similar (but never identical!) to each other.
The twitter buy isn't about money its about power. Money is only a proxy for power. Controlling the largest distribution source of worldwide news is a pure power play.
>>...the largest distribution source of worldwide news>>
That's not really true is it? My understanding is that it's actually the smallest of its immediate peers in social media. And perhaps the same in the field of the broader definition of media.
As a separate issue, my personal sentiment on social media, like a number of others I know, is that it has all become a steaming pile of toxic garbage, not unlike the pile of junk mail I dutifully retrieve from my physical mailbox once a month (and even then only so that the mail person has room to add more). My concern on a deal like this is that if that sentiment takes off in the mainstream a property like Twitter could experience a MySpace style collapse overnight.
This is what I was referring to. Sure there are infinite other sites but Twitter is where it is being broken and where majority of all the journalists live. It is currently the site with status and clout for important news. Will that change? Always possible but it is the site du jour.
It's also the site for the unimportant news that journalists decide to transform into "important" news. Too many "click bait" news stories end up being "xxx is outraged" and the story links to 3-4 random twitter comments
Yes, social media has become toxic but a lot of people use it to get their news and information.
Twitter is a great way for Musk to get into social media without having to get users and build the infrastructure. He can compete at a worldwide level with Facebook on day one.
How much global news comes out of either of those? That's the point of the parent comment.
Weido and Wechat may have more users, but they aren't newsmakers. Just like there's more people at a Def Leppard concert than in the White House, but the White House makes news.
They are largely irrelevant to the rest of the world as a source of news except to see what the government line is and as a pulse taker of Chinese population tolerance to policy. They are a propoganda news source controlled by the Chinese Government for the Chinese population. Large population for sure, and highly impactful to controlling that population but only viable for the CCP.
My rebuttal was to this comment, which implied that size was an overriding factor of importance. That comment was a rebuttal to you. So I'm not sure what you even want to argue about.
If he was simply a finance guy, then yes, it wouldn't make sense.
However he is into multiple businesses that are deeply embedded with politics and governments. Electric cars, space program contracts, telecommunications - all need the right kind of governments to succeed. Twitter has shown to have large effect in politics, it makes quite a bit of sense to own and control that thing if you like to own and control the government.
If his motives are purer, it also makes sense to try to improve the society with a portion of your wealth. You don't have to donate your money to the cancer society, you can engage in philanthropy through building something good instead.
I mean, arguably, most of the valuation of his companies are dependent almost entirely on his presence on social media -- Twitter being an essential piece of that.
I mean Tesla P/E is like 209. 209!! GM PE is at 6.
Where does this tremendous difference come from? A Tesla evangelist would say, well Tesla is doing self driving, Tesla is doing electric cars, it's the future of technology! Then they go buy shares. Or join Tesla as an engineer and work 90 hour weeks.
Where does this enthusiasm come from? Surely it isn't from the actual technology in the cars, which is and has never been distinguished to such a degree from competitors. Before you go and say that Telsa had electric cars first, go look at how many units they shipped: while they were making promises, they were not physically manufacturing or delivering that many cars; by the time Tesla did ramp up production to the scale promised by their media image, consumers could buy electric cars from Ford, Toyota, GM.
Simply put, most of this stellar valuation is based entirely off of the media sensation of Tesla, which is completely and inextricably bound to the media sensation of Elon Musk. This $50bn or whatever Elon is paying for Twitter is basically fabricated from whole cloth not by technology or fundamentals -- but from Elon's Twitter itself!
This is a common pattern to Elon's business ventures, and I would argue, it's the primary reason for the success of Musk companies. The playbook is simple:
1. Be Elon Musk
2. Make an insane promise, probably on Twitter
3. Convince redditors to buy shares in the venture;
4. Meanwhile, convince redditor STEM people (engineers, programmers, and so on) to work like dogs to make the venture possible;
5. Stay in the news cycle [Post on Twitter] about the venture.
6. Keep doing (5) until the technology is possible (this can actually happen sometimes, because of step 4!). If it's not possible, extend the hype cycle due by doing more of (5); if it's never possible, either bail out the venture using shares from a different venture, or shutter it -- and make sure Elon newswire isn't paying attention to the fact that it failed, by doing another (2)!
If you can do a few of these things at once, you can get basically all redditors to give you their money to hire all redditors to attempt this insane shit (Mars? Humanoid Robots? Brain Computer Links???). I'm thoroughly convinced that nobody on planet earth except for Elon Musk can do it. It's actually incredible what he's able to accomplish. And no, I'm not talking about the technology.
All essential parts, but I guess the really key part that makes this okay is #4 - 'make the venture possible'.
I don't buy in at those PEs, but I clearly should have as the track record has shown has shown. The future remains uncertain, his goals are still incredible to the point of being uncredible, and his delivery on those goals has been real and incredible. What a conundrum, no wonder people are talking about it so much. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the meantime we have reusable space rockets and actual progress on a process of transformation away from ICEs.
On the one hand, my god what they are doing at SpaceX, Starlink, (and even some parts of) Tesla are incredible! And I suppose without Musk playing carnival barker, these things aren't possible.
On the other hand... the approach is so slimy and really should not be celebrated the way it is.
It's a similar feeling with Martin Shkreli. He did some fraud, but he also gave all the money back to investors and started the ongoing conversation about Rx pricing.
Everyone talking about "free speech" is buying the spin hook line and sinker.
Anyone remember the Musk tweet about how his AI is so much better than anyone in the market realizes?
Did no one notice that this is all happening within a month or so after Twitter added a dislike button?
Would both positive and negative sentiment data for one of the largest under-monetized repositories of social data have any value to an eccentric billionaire with some major AI R&D focus?
He's not buying Twitter to defend the first amendment.
He wants the data for his AI stuff. That's just not nearly as popular a PR slant.
Thinking what would Buffett do in this situation is relevant misunderstands (tho perhaps just tongue-in-cheek) both Buffett's managerial and investing approach as well as Musk's.
I suspect Elon wants Twitter data to train an AI/GPT-3. Also if you look at how he uses Twitter, he believes in the tweet resonance idea of being able to signal certain group or individuals with memes. He thinks that may be a key element in the future of human collective consciousness.
> Personally, I think Musk is having a bit of a laugh.
He's definitely demonstrating how toothless the SEC is. It's just good at empty threats. I'm not sure what the bigger joke is: the SEC or the financial industry's multiple private watchdog corporations like FINRA which masquerade as public regulatory bodies.
I think it’s a legitimate point. If something is a public square, banning certain viewpoints from it is a huge deal.
Either Twitter is a private company and they can ban whoever they want for whatever reasons they want, or they’re a public square and we need to make sure that everyone can read the tweets they want to read.
I’m fine with either option, but I’d prefer a little less hypocrisy from everyone who praised Twitter when they banned certain accounts. You can still follow terrorist groups on Twitter but the previous US president is banned. That is insane, and I don’t care how many people disagree with that statement. It’s still true.
I'm just afraid he's gonna let Trump back on and start the gear up for 2024 and continue that craziness in the US of what I though was settled in 2020.
Some things are actually more important than money -- Twitter can offer enormous power in setting a national narrative even if little economic benefit for Musk.
> Twitter can offer enormous power in setting a national narrative
I'm always skeptical about this. Twitter is dominated by journalists, celebrities, and tech people. Only about 23% of American adults have twitter accounts. Only 46% of those even open it daily. Of the active users 10% account for ~95% of tweets. Among those, ~70% identify as Democrats, and certainly aren't going to be swayed by Trump getting back on twitter.
It just isn't clear to me that twitter even matters in the realm of US politics. Voters just aren't really there, and when they are they predominantly aren't engaging. When they do, they're mostly democrats tweeting at one-another.
Well, since you asked I think they probably have less influence than they would like to think.
Now they are syndicated in a number of other papers, discussed broadly on social media, cable news, local tv news, and across a number of new podcasts. Their reach is probably a good bit greater than the ~5 million subscribers. I would also note that 100% of subscribers are getting news from the NYT, because well obviously, so that's something. They do seem to have some sway on Democratic primaries sometimes, and do seem to shape opinions among a certain class of people. What does that all add up to? I don't know. Do they matter in the realm of US politics, probably, but I'm no sure how to quantify it.
I'm not sure I buy the manipulation line either. People seek out information that fits their overall world view. It's hard to grapple with anything that challenges your beliefs. Insofar as people engage with bullshit on Facebook its probably because they already believe a particular thing, or it fits their existing beliefs. I highly doubt that facebook posts are changing a lot of minds. I'm also skeptical that it spurs very many people to actions they wouldn't otherwise take.
A lot of the news articles talking about the effects of facebook focus on how many people "saw" a particular post. Given how those impressions are gathered, I'm no convinced that a significant percentage of those impressions resulted in people actually reading the post or even the headline, let alone that resulting in any real world outcomes.
I think the people that build social media applications want everyone to think that they have the power to shape discourse and outcomes, and newspapers who's ad revenue is undermined by social media also want us to believe social media is dangerous. Those two things do not make it true.
There are ~260 million adults in the US. That gives 60,000,000 Twitter users and 28,000,000 daily users. (I don't think "active users" is useful---it's about readers, not writers. Further, many of the important writers are not from the US.)
In 2020, Biden received 81,000,000 versus Trump's 74,000,000; the difference is 7,000,000.
Facebook may well be more powerful, but Twitter is still matters.
I REALLY doubt it. Of the 28,000,000 daily users, mind you that means they open it once a day, 70% get news from the app. Of those only 37% say it increases their political engagement. This is roughly 7 million people who report any change in political engagement in the US as a result of looking at twitter. These people are overwhelmingly democrats living in big cities. I'm just not convinced that such a narrow, concentrated slice (2.7% of adults) of the the US population is really that big of a deal.
Now you could make a case that twitter maybe matters more in other places outside of the US, but that's not really related to the trump/no trump issue that I was replying to originally.
Isn't this whole thread whataboutism? The claim is the world will go back being as crazy as it was in 2020 (but OP gave a 2021 example) if Trump was let back on Twitter.
The counterargument was that the example given was actually in 2021, and the given example of crazy (Jan 6 2021) was less crazy than 2020 (BLM protests).
I agree it won't happen, but not because Musk isn't serious. This filing is dated April 20. It is a holy day for Musk — that's not a joke, only an exaggeration. I think we can take as a given that anything Elon Musk does on 4/20 which is serious on the face of it, is serious absolutely.
At the point where he's at, what exactly is rational? It's all up to what he wants to achieve. Money is not the end goal for anyone. It's what you want to do with the money. What does he want to do? Only he knows but my guess is influencing the world towards what he believes is better. Twitter seems like a interesting tool for that.
I think it's very interesting that the subtext is that no one believes he will run Twitter at a loss; it's not his nature. If making Twitter better while making money is possible, Elon's the one who could do it.
Trump didn't own any media back in 2015-2016. He won because he sucked the air out of the room by making hyperbolic statements and riffing off the huge news cycle generated by his hyperbolic statements.
A good and effective PR team and a charismatic deliver is all you need and it comes for much less than 40B.
This is what kids learn in nightclubs fairly early: if you want to command the club you want to be a DJ. Owning the club will leave you with both a huge hole in your pocket and in the shadow of the DJ every given Friday.
The answer to Musk "problems" is to become a good public speaker and work on his in person social game, not monopolizing an online platform on which he has by far the biggest account already. Pushing on a string that's what it is. That's about the only thing he can do to expand his virality, owning the platform is kinda redundant.
But what if the DJ convinces his audience to invest in a much larger and more expensive night club at an extraordinary premium. Then it might make sense to buy the original night club just to protect the DJ’s scheme.
My math is that Musk’s twitter activity very reasonably increased Tesla’s market cap by more than 5% which is what he is offering to pay.
Going back to Trump I think that he going quiet after losing was not an effect of him being banned from Twitter as much as it was about the post defeat depression, mixed with fear of retribution for Jan. 6th now that he was out of office and also a part of him wanting to be Presidential and not critique his successor.
There are no rules in Twitter that prevent Musk from engaging in Pumps&Dumps so he'd have to do something Trump-esque to be banned. Spending 40B to secure the capability of inciting violence and unlike Trump avoid getting banned seems way out of whack. Besides inciting violence doesn't pump a stock.
If he tries to sell 21 billion dollars worth of tesla shares, the share price will collapse.
So no, once again he does not have funding secured. And once again he is trying to bullshit his way around the issue, although this time the bullshitting is a little more sophisticated.
It is still possible that he tries to sell a lot of tesla shares to get the cash to buy twitter, but it is unlikely.