Elon Musk

He thought he was king Midas but has seen his Tesla stock drop & his crypto stock drop so now he’s trying to back out after seeing (I presume) a lot of commercially sensitive details about Twitter.

This is/was a merger, not a takeover/purchase due to the share exchange. Tesla is overvalued, perhaps getting Twitter while those shares were overvalued was seen at the time as financially sound. Now that Tesla’s shares have dropped in value and the Twitter price is locked in, it seems like less of a good deal. Hence why he’s trying to back away from it. @$44bn and given Tesla’s recent stock fall, Twitter would need a substantially greater percentage of Tesla to complete the merger. That’s perhaps more percentage than Musk really wants to give.

It’ll be interesting to see if he can wriggle out of it.

This had the feel of the greatest showman in the world being the greatest showman in the world, but now there will be the nasty side of court battles, i believe there’s a huge back out clause that Twitter put in the contract, so guessing Musk will be trying to use some of that sensitive information he was provided to try and reduce any potential payments.

i believe there’s a huge back out clause that Twitter put in the contract

There is a billion due if it is cancelled for semi sensible reasons but the really problematic bit for him is in theory they can force him to go ahead with the purchase if he doesnt have those semi-sensible reasons.

Is “I was drunk and stoned and it was late at night and I clicked on ‘Buy Now’ by mistake” a semi-sensible reason for cancelling?

If he gets one (a free pass for being stoned) for purchasing Twitter, we should all get one for eBay.

He’s on the hook for about 25 billion $

Watch doge coin get pumped next week. There is already a lawyer from the US who is holding Twitter shares talking about class action litigation.

This sounds about as plausible as anything.

5/ the run up of Twitter stock. My own best guess is that it's nothing so direct and intentional – at least not only that. He was the richest man in the world, was surrounded by adoring press repeating endlessly that he could accomplish anything. He was in a perpetual …

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 9, 2022

7/ not working out.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 9, 2022

If he gets one (a free pass for being stoned) for purchasing Twitter, we should all get one for eBay.

Conversely I’m quite looking forward to demanding $7,000,000,000 in compensation from the next eBay buyer to pull out of a purchase claiming that they “bid by mistake”.

. As far as I know there is only one lawsuit against Tesla for the self driving allegedly injuring someone.

The dead have difficulty in attending court and giving evidence.

The fish rots from the head.

Later on, while the car is parked in his driveway, Tesla calls him to tell him that they found and fixed a configuration mistake with his car.

They remotely software locked the car to be a 60 again, despite having been a 90 for years.

He now has ~80 miles less range.

(3/*)

— Jason Hughes (@wk057) July 25, 2022

Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range

I’d be looking at/for whoever rebadged it

I’d be looking at/for whoever rebadged it

So first owner gets a free upgrade from a warranty mix up and keeps quiet about it. They or a subsequent owner rebadge the car and effectively scam the subsequent buyer who gets the mix up reversed when the company find out they’re getting something that wasn’t paid for. If I sell you fake tickets to a concert but you then get evicted by security when the people who paid for your seats turn up, do you blame the band for not letting you in?

The point is that telling customers that a software update is going to fix a problem but using it to remove functionality instead is pretty deceptive. They should have explained what was happening and given the owner a chance to sort it out. If the misconfigured battery reading was Tesla’s fault, they should have just sucked it up for goodwill.

The point is that rebadging then selling on a car when you’ve benefited from a mistake is pretty deceptive. If the current owner had been aware that ‘this is actually a 60 but has 90 range thanks to a Tesla cockup’ then they may have acted differently.

Mate of mine works at Tesla quite often. Says Elon is really **** odd.

He quite likes working there though. The upshot of Elon thinking he can do everything better than everyone else is that he refuses to hire people with any experience. So he hires a bunch of extremely bright, extremely motivated 20-somethings, who don’t know what they’re doing, but learn quickly and are fun to be around. It does sound quite a laugh sometimes

So he hires a bunch of extremely bright, extremely motivated 20-somethings, who don’t know what they’re doing, but learn quickly and are fun to be around. It does sound quite a laugh sometimes

Problem there is that they don’t have the experience or seniority to ask tough questions and point out when Musk is doing dumb shit. The Hyperloop was always bullshit, Musk was just making impossible promises, as usual. This suggest he knew that and was just using it to sabotage public transit plans in California. If Musk had hired engineers with experience on high-speed rail, they would have told him his dreams were just fantasies and then he would have had to sack them. Hiring kids straight out of school means it will take several years for them to see through the bullshit.

Musk admitted Hyperloop was about getting legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California. He had no plans to build it

Musk said public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you’re surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers https://t.co/4oFHohXs4E

— Alexander Demling (@alexdemling) August 10, 2022

It’ll be interesting to see if he can wriggle out of it.

Dusting this off. It would seem the answer is no he cant.
Announced he is going ahead now just prior to the case kicking off properly. I assume he was told he was going to lose badly quite possibly risking having some stuff out in the public domain he really would prefer not to be.
There were some rather embarrassing/sad messages about the financing side of things which didnt shine a great light on all those involved already.

Spinning it as a new ground braking app called X???
Realized he would be hung out to dry in court and his financial dealing being looked into via the SEC in the US

Musk said public transit was “a pain in the ass”

Man who has had wealth his entire life in “Not understanding how everyone else lives” shocker. Christ, rich idiots are such a PITA

Spinning it as a new ground braking app called X???

Which apparently is going to do everything. Ho hum.
Going to be some upset bankers at Morgan Stanley and a few other banks who had agreed to provide 13 billion of financing for it. Since if they dont find someone to see it to then they have to carry the cost themselves and not much chance of finding many people interested at least without a steep discount.
I guess they realised they were screwed back at the start of the lawsuit but still had a glimmer of hope remaining.

Seems he’s an apologist for Russian expansion:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/04/zelenskiy-hits-back-as-elon-musk-sets-up-twitter-poll-on-annexed-areas

The ****.

I’ve Never Met a Nice South African.

Anyone watched the Elon Musk Show on iPlayer? Worth watching? Is all singing his praises or actually more balanced?

My prediction on doge came true 10% rise before he needed cash for Twitter even though the banks look to have funded most of the deal.
I’ve not seen the been show I imagine he controls the output?

The Twitter hellscape seems to be turning things up to 11.

The extremist boards are absolutely giddy about this and are already using slurs. Massive accounts are already celebrating being able to push anti LGBTQ hate without accountability. It's going to get really bad. https://t.co/bLwp33R54O

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) October 28, 2022

It’s going to be amazing watching this absolute helmet do a Kanye and flush 44 billion down the drain.

I can not wait.

I’m going to miss twitter, could be a really good source of interesting opinions & expert knowledge
Monty Burns buying it marks it’s end, I fear, really hope I’m wrong

But the Kanye thing perfectly summed it up

Elon tweeted support to Ye right AFTER Kanye’s antisemitic tweet. #ElonMuskSupportsRussianAggression #ElonMuskIsAConman pic.twitter.com/MlnyxBUDfm

— @HeatherMoAndCo@mastodon.online (@HeatherMoAndCo) October 28, 2022

Has he turned it into 4chan yet?

He has sacked the top level exc team. I bet trump is back by the weekend’s cull of other staff.
Elon is a dangerous man

Someone said that the best thing Musk could do with Twitter was buy it and close it. Looks like he’s just going to let it burn itself down instead.

It’s going to be amazing watching this absolute helmet do a Kanye and flush 44 billion down the drain.

Elon’s going to soon discover the same thing the owners of Gab, Parler, Truth Social etc either knew from the start or soon found out, making any actual money from social media depends on having a huge user base with loads of ‘normies’ who actually buy stuff for your advertisers to market to.

Any corner of the internet that declares itself a ‘Free Speech Fundamentalist’ zone eventually ends up flooded with Nazis, Pedophiles and Scammers, basically the very worst people imaginable. As a result the ‘normies’ very sensibly decide they can’t be bothered with all this, leave and take their advertising dollars with them.

Then the trolls, with no ‘libs’ to ‘trigger’ eventually get bored and go elsewhere as for the average sadist it’s no fun when you have nobody to be horrible to.

It would all be very funny if the process wasn’t going to involve so many people from minority groups being subjected to a torrent of horrific abuse, intimidation and threats.

I’m sure the former CEO/CFO are delighted he didn’t try to keep them on. Over 100m in severance payments between them and no need to try to sit through the Russian botfest to come.

Caher
Full Member
I’ve Never Met a Nice South African.

Pretty poor post no matter the subject to group all South Africans together.

It is sad as I will probably just leave twitter. It is still my main news feed from local government, police etc. I’ve also tried Facebook for current news, but their algorithms are terrible so you keep getting things a day to 2 after it happens.

How much do we bet that tech nerds at Google/Apple/ Facebook are, as we speak, frantically writing code for a a “Twitter-alike” and are forecasting that it needs to be in place in this quarter.

Why would you? Social media companies sound like a absolute nightmare to run. Leave it to ByteDance while you sit back and enjoy the spectacle of watching Zuckerberg and Musk walk in ever smaller circles until they disappear up their own arseholes.

Facebook

dead in the water

Pretty poor post no matter the subject to group all South Africans together.

Not a Spitting Image fan then?

PS Thanks Caher for earworming me. This is torture.

Why would you?

Twitter earns something like $5B a year, doesn’t it? You have to understand that that’s how Silicon Valley works, it’s the Free Market capital of the world, it may have at one point been home to nerds and misfits, but those people are now chained to their desks making money for people like Elon. If something doesn’t work (Twitter) then the answer is not, rake over the coals to see what went wrong and do better next time, the answer is (according the Silicon valley executives) make another one, the first one made a shit tone of money.