Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525049369552048129

by palebluedot • 4 years ago

650 1150 4 years ago

Mindwipe• 4 years ago

Elon found his out then when he realised this deal was insane.

lvl1022• 4 years ago

Elon backing out because he realized he will lose a lot of money on this because his TSLA shares are also plunging as a _direct_ result of his actions.

jamesredd• 4 years ago

The whole stock market is plunging, is this also a “_direct_ result of his actions”?

fxtentacle• 4 years ago

Some people seem to think that Elon == "The Market". I wouldn't be surprised if you'd get a "Yes!" as the answer.

str3wer• 4 years ago

tesla stocks are crashing way more than all the other stocks tho

sschueller• 4 years ago

"_direct_", Tesla is way overvalued and we all know it. Where is the cybertruck, roadster, semi and FSD? All promised years ago and the only real progress seems to be on a nutured cybertruck.

lvl1022• 4 years ago

It’s direct because (1) he is selling and collateralizing his shares, and (2) he is also taking on a role to overhaul Twitter that’s going to take time away from Tesla.

encryptluks22• 4 years ago

LOL... I called this on here a while back while all the Elon worshipers told me how Elon was a great man that would fix Twitter and bring about world peace.

Inu2• 4 years ago

Have you read the article?

rvz• 4 years ago

I really hope you have read the guidelines: [0]

Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

t0mas88• 4 years ago

Many people predicted a couple of weeks ago he would wiggle out...

vmception• 4 years ago

The implied volatility of those twitter option remained at 99%

66% across expirations

People were betting

usrn2• 4 years ago

I still have my puts.

TheHypnotist• 4 years ago

The whole thing was a pump and dump. He sold billions in shares weeks ago.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-sells-billions-of-dol...

zydex• 4 years ago

In order to fund the Twitter deal. They were Tesla not Twitter shares.

bigbillheck• 4 years ago

The odds have always been good for the 'Musk talks big, doesn't follow through' outcome.

fredgrott• 4 years ago

most of the sane one's here called his including me.

Tis is a way for Elon to back out by saving face since he did not notify Twitter upon the 9% threshold which would oopne himself to lawsuits from investors.

mikkergp10• 4 years ago

Did Twitter stock price just drop 20%?

koolba2• 4 years ago

Which direction of this is meant to be the “better”?

Is it too high and it’s not worth what they say?

Or is it too low and there’s not much room for improvement through better tools to remove them?

petesergeant• 4 years ago

I'd like Bezos to buy it and then stay out of it (editorially) like he did WashPo

cdot2• 4 years ago

I hope everyone gets that this is a joke

hef1989824• 4 years ago

I'm still waiting for proof that Bezo's is inluencing WP's editors.

LeicaLatte2• 4 years ago

All tweets in STAR answer format only

smrtinsert2• 4 years ago

Bezos is clearly the smarter oligarch. He just wanted to buy an outlet on the cheap (several hundred million or so?) just to soften the bad press but generally stay out of it.

BigJ1211• 4 years ago

I really dislike using the phrasing oligarch, when you can compare it to actual oligarchs. People like putin and his close ‘friends’ who use and force economic downturns so they can buy up national companies and markets so they own most of it.

Musk/Bezos can’t ring up Biden and develop a scheme with him (or orchestrated by him) to seize more of the market and dictate politics. They have to use more subtle means.

This doesn’t mean that they have no sway, or that they’re not far more powerful than the average citizen. They just aren’t buddies with a dictator that enriches himself and them.

pdevr• 4 years ago

>Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users

He is asking for proof that spam and fake accounts are less than 5% of total users. He obviously believes the number is much higher[1]. This does not seem to be a deal killer - he is just calling their bluff[2]. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. We will see. Interesting times!

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354

[2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fa...

onion2k2• 4 years ago

This does not seem to be a deal killer - he is just calling their bluff

What does he gain by calling their bluff?

rendall2• 4 years ago

Maybe negotiating tactic?

RF_Savage• 4 years ago

Parhaps a lower price?

ceejayoz• 4 years ago

Getting out of the deal after the recent stock slump? Without the $1B penalty fee?

basisword3• 4 years ago

Reduction in price.

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

I'm always amazed when that kind of question pops up. Because it shows how knowledge of basic business practices is less circulated.

If you're selling me a house and saying it's one size but in practice it's another you bet I'm taking it up with you! I can be happy to buy it as is (depending on the case) but this says a lot about the seller.

JohnJamesRambo• 4 years ago

It feels absurd for this to come up at this stage in a deal.

throwawaylinux4• 4 years ago

Why? What is the deal and what stage is it up to?

Naga• 4 years ago

Agreed. This sort of issue has been public knowledge about Twitter for a long time. This sounds to me like an excuse to delay or get out with plausible deniability.

cm2187• 4 years ago

Or perhaps it is linked to the firing of executives, that seemed to puzzle people.

RivieraKid5• 4 years ago

OMG. I'm astonished that people still can't see through his lies and BS.

It took me about 3 seconds to realize that after the stock market crashed, Elon wanted to get a better price. The 5% stuff is just a random excuse.

ohgodplsno• 4 years ago

Also, his collateral for the buyout is Tesla stock, which took a 20% dip. If people believed he would truly buy at $54, they would let the deal go through and make bank. The fact that they are still selling down to $34 means that everyone is seeing through Elon's bullshit.

sidibe5• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure he never intended to buy it to begin with. He was just using it as a convenient excuse to sell some TSLA

Hackbraten2• 4 years ago

Not everyone is interested enough in the US stock market to keep an eye on it. I haven’t even heard about a stock market crash before you mentioned it.

exodust4• 4 years ago

OMG. I'm astonished...

Why is wanting a better price such an issue? "The 5% stuff" is like when information surfaces about a faulty or inaccurate odometer reading on the used car you're about to buy. If tampered with, let's negotiate a new price.

throwawaylinux4• 4 years ago

You mean to tell me there are some unscrupulous people out there who want to pay less money for things rather than more? The horror!

Msw242• 4 years ago

Lies and BS?

If you could save a few billion wouldn't you?

It's a negotiation, and with the markets turning, he's got all the cards.

The cost of reneging is only 1bn, and the company would probably lose half it's market cap if the deal fell through

koolba2• 4 years ago

IIRC, the breakup fee if the deal does not go through is $1B. Given the massive dive in the market, that’s peanuts compared to the drop in the “fair” price.

abofh2• 4 years ago

He doesn't want a better price, he wants to get out of a serious case of buyers remorse. The play has so far gone like:

- "I'm going to buy twitter", buys a bunch of shares, has to report it

- Board says "No", adopts poison pill

- "Fine, I'll make you let me buy you" submits a contingent but binding offer to the board.

- Board says, well, our duty is to the shareholders, you're offering a big premium, we accept, here's a bunch of terms to keep you from backing out without paying them something.

- "Ha Ha!" shouts Elon, "I've proven I can buy anything now!"

- Yes, yes, say the banks as they bind him and his companies stock to the tender offer, you can buy that, we just want TSLA stock, that's fine.

- Stock market looks at the situation and says "wat", down-values TSLA because their CEO is spending his time buying... a social media platform?

- Musk starts to see the writing on the wall and realizes if he can't make twitter substantially more valuable in the short term, he's on the hook for a large chunk of his personal wealth (which hurts) but also a large chunk of his company (which hurts the ego) and starts to suffer buyers remorse.

- "Ha ha" says the board, you can get out any time you'd like, we'd just like our 10-digit check.

- looks for an escape clause - maybe you committed securities fraud Mr. Twitter? Check again for me would you?

I mean, broad strokes, this has been the saga in front of us - rich man wants to do something silly, gets told no, gets more determined, and fights tooth and nail, and finally, regrets his decision.

So now, _either_ he was short-sighted and wanted to buy a company he'd failed to do due diligence on and is trying to get out of the purchase that way, OR he has heap big buyers remorse, pays a billion and gets out of it that way, or he becomes the proud partial owner of a social media company with limited network effects. Who knows, but he had already staked up 7% or so beforehand - so 3B give or take, didn't back down looking into their numbers then, and only _after_ ponying up another 35B did he think, you know, maybe this is a bad idea.

But I just got an air popper, so please, let the show go on.

SheinhardtWigCo• 4 years ago

Here's a fun and somewhat believable conspiracy theory:

What if there's internal data indicating that it's closer to, like, 30%?

In that case, a buyout offer conditional on a DAU audit is certain to expose that data, and that's checkmate for TWTR.

Musk can then either buy it at a massive discount, or use the enormous amount of free press to launch a competitor with mandatory device attestation.

mlindner3• 4 years ago

I'm astonished that people still can't see through his lies and BS.

Almost everything people believe about Musk is lies and BS. Do you have anything to back up what you're saying? Otherwise you're just adding more lies and BS on to the pile.

kmos17• 4 years ago

Yes he just wants an excuse to exit the deal because Tesla’s stock is tanking.

itsoktocry6• 4 years ago

He is asking for proof that spam and fake accounts are less than 5% of total users.

Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase, you'd think the world's smartest man would have had his team do this due diligence?

Instead, he mad an offer on a whim and put the deal together in a couple days. Brilliant.

XorNot2• 4 years ago

Unless the contract had a clause requiring this to be demonstrated if requested. In which case it's a good way to get out of it at to he last moment: activate the clause and put Twitter in trouble if they disprove their own statements.

micromacrofoot• 4 years ago

he knows it’s higher than 5%, everyone does

user_78322• 4 years ago

the world's smartest man

Did you mean the richest? Or do you actually think he's the smartest?

bogantech• 4 years ago

Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase, you'd think the world's smartest man would have had his team do this due diligence?

How would he get access to that data beforehand?

rdtsc6• 4 years ago

Considering he said this was a big reason for his purchase

I guess that would be a function of how much Twitter had told everyone their percentage was. Improving Twitter’s 5% bot problem is different than improving it with 30% bots.

But, since we consider him the smartest man, he might actually be playing a game. He knew they would lie, or were for years, and put a clause in the contract about it and they fell into a trap.

Not sure who gets to pay the contract breakup $1B fee? It may be Twitter. That would be embarrassing. But then, they shouldn’t have been telling lies, if it turns out to be the case.

mpweiher• 4 years ago

would have had his team do this due diligence?

What makes you think he didn't? So his team has a number, their team has a number.

The numbers diverge wildly.

nailer9• 4 years ago

Instead, he mad an offer on a whim and put the deal together in a couple days. Brilliant.

Do you think smart people don't make decisions quickly?

That is interesting.

paulcole• 4 years ago

If this guy’s such a genius why didn’t he ask for proof sooner? He’s looking for any excuse to pull the plug.

tmaly• 4 years ago

By what criteria can you determine an account is spam/fake?

That seems like a difficult thing to determine.

piva00• 4 years ago

Solving to detect the signal and solving to resolve the problem is the same solution... Paradoxical engineering.

jonny_eh2• 4 years ago

We will see. Interesting times!

I'm sorry, but what a worthless thing to say. I can't stand it when pundits say this.

spiderice2• 4 years ago

The irony of this comment..

nailer9• 4 years ago

He obviously believes the number is much higher[1]

That reference - "If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!" - does not assert your claim.

not2b4• 4 years ago

He's not entitled to such proof. It isn't a condition of the purchase agreement.

His choices are: pay the original price, or pay the $1 billion cancellation fee. There might be a third choice: Twitter could offer to renegotiate, but they aren't obliged to. They could take the $1 billion instead.

AshamedCaptain• 4 years ago

You can estimate yourself from the comfort of your own home how many accounts are spam. Just make a list of 100 random accounts. Truly random, not just "followers of X" or whatever. Then manually look each of them and classify as spam or not. There's your percentage.

If you want more accuracy, hire some people from say Amazon's Mechanical Turk and do 1000. 10k.

madrox• 4 years ago

I used this exact method a decade ago (thanks statistics 101) to estimate and got 10% with a minuscule margin of error. That was a decade ago though.

outworlder8• 4 years ago

Some data here: https://botsentinel.com/

phailhaus• 4 years ago

Elon already signed. There is literally no such thing as "putting it on hold." See Matt Levine's latest column, he can't even back out if it turns out there are more than 5% spam/fake accounts. [1] He's playing games because he's the richest man in the world and if you try to hold him accountable he will make your life hell. He's really shown his true colors these last few years, absolutely no respect for him anymore.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...

xenospn• 4 years ago

I came to the exact same conclusion. He's turning into Gru, with his own little army of sad minions.

ryzvonusef2• 4 years ago

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-estimates-spam-fa...

    >Twitter Inc(TWTR.N)estimated in a filing on Monday that false or spam accounts represented fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

    >The social media company had 229 million users who were served advertising in the first quarter. read more

conradfr• 4 years ago

Funnily enough, Elon Musk's tweet does not mention "monetizable".

WJW• 4 years ago

It seems evident that a bot user is almost never monetizable, so you'd think the amount of bots in Twitters monetizable user base would be very close to zero even if the total amount of bot users is 90% of the total user base.

ryzvonusef2• 4 years ago

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

    > Still committed to acquisition

christkv2• 4 years ago

He can back out let the market slaughter twitter and buy it for a massive discount right down the road.

hef1989824• 4 years ago

Wouldn't be the first time Musk is manipulating stock prices with a tweet.

christkv2• 4 years ago

Considering the blood bath in tech stock I recon is actually more of a case of him badly timing the bid. Had he waited a couple of weeks more he could have picked it up for 1/2. The price will plunge today. My bet is 25% or more.

findthewords• 4 years ago

Hypothesis: The deal will go through once his stock price goes back up - if this were to occur it would be strong circumstantial evidence to suspect he is timing the market.

soumyadeb4• 4 years ago

The two twitter exec firings yesterday must be related to this. Musk must have asked for proof which the product team could not produce.

rendall2• 4 years ago

What is your thinking behind "must be"?

moralestapia• 4 years ago

Those exits were not planned, one guy was even on parental leave, so it was definitely a rushed thing. That always stinks when an acquisition is taking place.

soumyadeb4• 4 years ago

One person (their VP Product) was on paternity. You don't fire people like that unless they did something very very wrong.

Misrepresenting spam/bot accounts would fall under that bucket. If the number of spam accounts is like 20% (instead of 5%), not only would the deal fall through, other shareholders would sue twitter.

Not sure this misrepresentation would count as financial misrepresentation (which results in jail etc under Sarbanes-Oxley)

dewey• 4 years ago

That makes no sense, especially because on of them was on paternity leave and is probably not involved in getting some numbers from the database.

bluelu• 4 years ago

The guy had 5 years to get the numbers right, but didn't. (if that's the cause)

darkerside• 4 years ago

You don't think a high level exec is on the hook to pull a few numbers during their paternity leave to help seal a multi billion dollar deal?

soumyadeb4• 4 years ago

Its more about the process of how that number was derived.

Dwolb2• 4 years ago

An alternate explanation is Parag knows this is going to get ugly and is sparing his exec team from going through this with him.

boeingUH60• 4 years ago

I used to like Elon circa 2018 up until he started acting up (pedo guy, et al), but the main thing that soured my opinion of him lies in being -- don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged.

I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel. What I can't really tell is if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

I just listen to the space stuff and tune everything else out.

ctvo2• 4 years ago

Same here. SpaceX does impressive work. The rest of Elon's companies? Not so much for me.

He's such a polarizing figure folks can't seem to detach the worthwhile things he's done from all his other flaws. Elon isn't particularly impressive as an engineer or scientist, but incredibly impressive as a product and business person. Realize that he's a brand, and try not to fall for the marketing.

RivieraKid5• 4 years ago

He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

I can't believe that so many people still haven't figured him out (which is also true for the previous American and current Russian presidents, who have similarly repulsive personalities).

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

That only makes it even more impressive that he has managed to accomplish truly world-changing things like building reusable rockets or practical mass-market EV's. Most "narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged" folks wouldn't manage to do anything even marginally worthwhile, even in such a key position as, e.g. being president of a large superpower. (Also, let's give the previous U.S. president credit where credit is due; he might have a repulsive personality, but at least he didn't start any foolish wars! So there's that, too.)

andrepd5• 4 years ago

It's precisely this narcissistic personality which some people love about him.

Personally I blame marvel movies. Many immature people think the world is a superhero flick and Elon Musk is a real-life Tony Stark: arrogant billionaire genius who is going to fix the world from his superlab.

Chazprime• 4 years ago

narcissistic, manipulative, dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, unhinged.

It sounds as if Musk and Twitter are a match made in heaven.

chrisseaton2• 4 years ago

People love a charismatic narcissist though.

aaa_aaa• 4 years ago

Previous and the current presidents are far worse evil people. They first destroyed lives with meaningless lockdowns then pumped trillions of dollars which destroyed economy and impoverished people. Musk cannot even come close to these.

JohnBooty• 4 years ago

    He's always been like that - narcissistic, manipulative, 
    dishonest, hateful, lacking empathy, attention-seeking, 
    unhinged.

    I can't believe that so many people still haven't 
    figured him out

Many of their fans love them precisely because of those "negative" qualities.

hartator2• 4 years ago

don't know if this is the right word -- unhinged

[my bad misunderstood what unhinged means.]

mikeyjk• 4 years ago

That is not a clinically recognised term.

itsoktocry6• 4 years ago

He said that he has Aspergers.

People are often looking for explanations for their personalities or interests. Look at how many people claim to be "on the spectrum" on HN underneath any article on the topic.

shakna• 4 years ago

Most people go to some lengths to ensure that their health doesn't present in such a way that it needs to be an excuse for their behaviour. Especially in autistic communities. A certain amount of masking seems to be a requirement to function as a responsible adult.

TazeTSchnitzel• 4 years ago

I and lots of my friends have that or equivalent diagnoses. It doesn't make you unhinged.

hnbad• 4 years ago

I wish people would stop excusing bad behavior with "oh they're autistic". It just makes us autistic people look bad by association.

Avicebron2• 4 years ago

I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

I remember listening to someone describe a conversation they had with him or where he was speaking, and he relayed that Elon was telling them that in his world he can't relate to people because to him its like everyone is a toddler mentally and he has to go down to their level....now, I just fully don't believe that, that sounds like the most contrived "I'm a genius peasants" story imaginable, something out of a movie.

smt883• 4 years ago

This comes across in his public persona too. Elon's entire vibe is like a 14 year old who thinks they know everything and everyone else is stupid.

zozbot2345• 4 years ago

It's not that uncommon among people with Asperger-like traits, which Musk has publicly acknowledged in 2021.

rayiner5• 4 years ago

Do you know engineers? I’ve had this conversation I can’t count how many times in my life.

kibwen7• 4 years ago

It feels like Elon Musk read that anecdote about how von Neumann spoke with three year-olds as equals, and somehow managed to conclude that the lesson was about expressions of superiority rather than about expressions of empathy.

kortex5• 4 years ago

He seems to open up more when talking to people he considers "on his level" or at least deeply interested in what he is interested in. Take for example photographer and journalist Tim Dodd. Since Tim has a huge passion for rockets and actually wants to dig into the details of rocket engine cycles, manufacturing scale up - all the stuff Elon finds interesting - he really opens up.

That's actually pretty common among those "gifted with mild ASD/ADHD" types, they can't be assed to talk about anything that doesn't pique their interest. I struggled with it a lot until I learned to be more social with other folks' topics of discussion. I think Elon is the logical endpoint of what happens when you have zero pressure to socially accommodate.

It does seem like he's increasingly emboldened to act an ass since being crowned world's richest man.

alasdair_2• 4 years ago

I also used to like him or at least respected him a bit more, I think the best way I can put it is that he seems lost in his own sauce.

Agreed. Musk has gone full Assange.

reacharavindh• 4 years ago

I would have genuinely laughed out loud if someone said that to my face. My reaction would have been to give him a reality check - "My man, you may know some things, but definitely don't know it all!". Perhaps, also ask him - "Have you considered that some of those people considered talking to you as dealing with a toddler who thinks he knows it all?"

weego2• 4 years ago

He's just a Steve Jobs who doesn't know to keep his worst traits hidden from the public eye.

bko3• 4 years ago

How has he lost his sauce? He's actually delivering on his two major companies. He's shipping electric cars at an insane growth rate. He's doing what car companies had 100 years to do and still can't get right in the US. All the other electric car companies are basically vaporware VC money pits. He's also delivering on SpaceX. I get it, you don't like his politics or share his sense of humor but don't pretend like he's some unhinged twitter personality.

Tesla revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2022 was $18.756B, a 80.54% increase year-over-year.

Tesla revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2022 was $59.810B, a 74.73% increase year-over-year.

Tesla annual revenue for 2021 was $53.823B, a 70.67% increase from 2020.

Tesla annual revenue for 2020 was $31.536B, a 28.31% increase from 2019.

Tesla annual revenue for 2019 was $24.578B, a 14.52% increase from 2018.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/revenue

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

My thoughts on this are that extremely smart, hard-charging people with heavy narcissistic traits are "constrained" in their earlier years by:

1. They still need to follow the basic rules of society, i.e. people haven't started "God-Emperor Elon" memes yet, so not every single person is going to bow down.

2. Before they've achieved amazing success, they aren't 100% confident in their other-wordly abilities. Now, given his success with PayPal, Tesla, and Space-X, it's easy for him to believe his own press.

Thus, Elon is now at the point where all of his negative traits are essentially allowed to "run wild" because they are constrained neither by society at large, nor his own doubts.

unsupp0rted• 4 years ago

I still respect him, probably more every year.

I never liked him before and probably won't in the future. I doubt I'd like anybody who's literally dragging humanity into the future, but he is doing that.

Whether he's doing it right, or whether he's doing it well is an open question, but no other single person is to this degree shoving humanity forward this often and this much, as far as I know.

hericium• 4 years ago

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

There are other similarities - impulsiveness in business, Twitter obsession, strong COVID downplaying...

exodust4• 4 years ago

Isn't the deal on hold because the price might be too high for a bunch of spam accounts? If so, I'm not sure what you're on about.

Sounds reasonable to confirm the actual number of spam accounts before spending 44 billion. Likewise I double check the service history of used cars too.

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

Do you think it is reasonable to do your due diligence after you made an offer?

mupuff12342• 4 years ago

Isn't that something he should've done before making an offer? It's not like he just discovered that bots are a thing.

fijiaarone4• 4 years ago

Yes. Like when you make an offer on a house but then your inspector finds a crack in the ceiling and you back out because the bank promised you 3.5% with no points and nothing down but when the paperwork is done you’ve got a 6% interest rate with $10,000 in fees, property tax assessment tripled, your parents who were going to help out suddenly don’t want to gift you $75,000 for the down payment, there was a murder 2 blocks away and the housing market just collapsed so paying 100% over the asking price (which was already twice what it’s worth) doesn’t sound a good idea.

In other words, have you seen what tech stocks have done in the last week?

Elon doesn’t have the money to buy Twitter, and his lenders are getting nervous that it’s a bad investment for a juvenile prank.

pyb• 4 years ago

As Benedict Evans said, Elon breaks our mental model of productive people because he is a bullshitter who delivers.

andrepd5• 4 years ago

Delivers? Hardly. Autonomous driving? Hyperloop? The tunnel thing?

smt883• 4 years ago

He delivers very little of what he promises.

Most of his ideas aren't even something anyone should deliver. Hyperloop and Boring Company are terrible ideas.

Meanwhile everything else is over-promise/under-deliver.

noufalibrahim• 4 years ago

While you've described his behaviour quite accurately, I don't believe he's a fool. This could of course be due to the marketing buzz and fanboyism around him which I might have imbibed myself but I don't believe he's a fool.

Squaring his public behaviour with his presumed intelligence suggests that he's doing all this for some specific purpose. Either it's marketing to a certain contingent that he's interested in selling to. Perhaps it's brand building to help hiring or something else for one of his companies. His movie cameos, shitposts etc. all seem to be calculated to create a connection between him and a younger demographic. Or maybe, I'm over intellectualising and he's just drunk on his own image or power. Can't really say.

I don't particularly "like" the guy. But then again, I make it a point to try not to have an emotional opinion about any public figure. The default position is "ignore" and that's where I'm still at.

cyco130• 4 years ago

Some years ago a friend suggested someone should make a browser extension that replaces the text of every Elon Musk tweet with “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!” and I made a quick MVP: https://gist.github.com/cyco130/d96f678d41fd7acfe4ac6c4e01d2...

Edit: Alas, it doesn't work anymore. Updates are welcome. Edit2: Updated!

situationista• 4 years ago

I have the distinct feeling that Elon's motives are genuine, that he genuinely believes he is on a mission to save humanity, and is genuinely convinced that he is the only one who is able to do it. The problem is the last point - he's developed something of a saviour complex, and has convinced himself that if what is at stake is important enough (reverse climate change, become interplanetary species, restore free speech) he somehow has a moral obligation to take it upon himself. Whereas earlier in his career financial constraints might have hemmed him in, not that he's the richest man in the world he's becoming tempted to use that power in an Emperor of the Universe fashion, attempting to fix everything he believes important. If he stuck to solving just one existential problem, such as electrifying transport, he'd probably be quite well respected in the long run. The richest man in the world, who already holds massive power, also buying up the "de facto town square" was never going to go down well. We need more people with Elon's vision, drive and determination, not one Elon with more and more power.

rez9x• 4 years ago

I agree with you on this and think his savior complex is likely compounded by things like the potential Twitter buyout. There are a lot of people who view Twitter as a extremist echo chamber and want to see it change, so they're treating Musk like Twitter's savior now. Anecdotally, I've seen as much support for Musk's actions accidentally destroying Twitter as 'fixing' it.

When I see how small of a subset of the population actively use Twitter, or have even posted once, compared to the political power it has, it's hard for me to argue we're better with it around.

memish11• 4 years ago

This makes much more sense than calling him a fraud and projecting one's envy onto him. Frauds don't build and they don't solve problems.

His fans are supporting the savior complex because he's virtually the only one who is actively making a better future in a significant way. While everything else is crumbling. They forgive the mistakes he makes given that context.

rayiner5• 4 years ago

You dislike someone who built multiple pioneering tech companies because of mean tweets and a vague resemblance to Trump’s demeanor? Being a bit of a blow hard isn’t exactly unusual among CEOs of multibillion companies! Does anyone remember Steve Jobs?

Heck, narcissism is currency in Silicon Valley. I don’t know what else I’d call the whole “we’re changing the world through Ad Tech” shtick.

tptacek2• 4 years ago

He doesn't just write mean tweets. He broadcasts to an audience of 90 million people that a cave diver who was critical of him (correctly so, as it turned out) is a pedophile. He attempts to get a lawyer fired from a firm working with his companies because she happened to work at SEC on enforcement cases related to his companies. None of this is news to you, which is why I'm wondering why you would be so glib.

feintruled• 4 years ago

I think the word that might fit better than unhinged is 'capricious' - given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour.

version_five• 4 years ago

The overall sentiment on HN is pretty clear from the replies here. And I agree with a lot of it, he seems to do and say a lot of things impulsively without thinking them through, that often tend to be dumb.

The one thing I respect though (and expect most people here won't) is that he appears to have the "nouveau riche" disrespect for the establishment, and doesn't feel he needs to kiss anyone's ass or play by the rules in a system that is already rigged for rich people. The fact that he has annoyed so many, especially elite/establishment figures, is a good thing. I'd much rather see him use his wealth to piss off the establishment than just to grow richer safely, which he could easily do. So maybe his annoying behavior is at least partially by design, and the fact that it bothers everyone is exactly what he wants, which I think deserves some respect.

basisword3• 4 years ago

What anti-establishment stuff has he done? All of the negative things I see people mention about him are just general asshole behaviour rather than things that annoy the establishment.

hooande10• 4 years ago

This is exactly what people said that they liked about trump. Essentially he isn't polished and says stupid things, "just like regular people!"

Is this the new trend? Whenever a wealthy person turns out to be stupid, a certain group of people say "he's sticking it to the establishment"?

themitigating5• 4 years ago

Attacking the government also gets you tons of attention and adoration since it's such an easy target. It's like making an airline food joke in the 90s.

manmal2• 4 years ago

I have similar feelings as you do about Elon, and take anything he says with a grain of salt. But, he’s in some (not all!) aspects the world’s most successful company leader, and he got there with exactly this behavior. Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

hef1989824• 4 years ago

Musk is the best, or at least among the best, marketers currently alive. That's it. Let's not make more out of this than it is.

basisword3• 4 years ago

> Evolutionary pressures in our society and markets seem to favor this behavior (also keeping in mind the last US president).

Trump was the first president since the 80’s/early 90’s not to get a second term. Acting like an asshole only gets you so far maybe until people grow tired of it.

Bud3• 4 years ago

No, he didn't "get there" with this behavior. Elon's unstable erratic mini-Trump phase is relatively recent. Tesla and SpaceX were well-established on their current paths well before then.

nabla92• 4 years ago

He seems to know his limits in the public. He throws low blows to US politicians, but if he has nothing but good to say about China or Xi Jinping he stays silent. He likes to punch down. That's a behavior Twitter and his supporters rewards. He is the second most effective Twitter user after Trump. It's indecent and disgusting behavior but it works.

His business process is to try many things and fail a lot, nothing wrong with that as long as some of them succeed. He jumps into very hard challenges, then fails or iterates until there is success. His full automation of of Tesla factories with robots attempt cost Tesla several years, but Tesla is still success.

His marketing is full of bullshit. He he has at least 4 vaporware announcements for each real product. For example, that dancing robot man and self-driving cars “Next Year” every year since 2014.

inglor_cz10• 4 years ago

Do you realize that the Russians are literally threatening him openly because of the Ukrainian Starlink operation? The Kremlin mob has a lot of assassinations behind it, so their threat is absolutely credible, not a random brain fart on the Internet.

pontus• 4 years ago

I mostly agree with you. Just to play devil's advocate though, I wonder if this is just an artifact of him being overly open / verbose. In other words, I suspect that all this stuff would normally happen behind closed doors anyway during due diligence. Similarly if you look at his performance in Tesla / SpaceX is terms of hard metrics I guess he's doing pretty well even though he might be talking about self driving being a year away all the time.

xattt• 4 years ago

It would sure be ironic if he followed the genius-to-madman trajectory of Nikola Tesla.

shapefrog9• 4 years ago

Influencer attention seeking has broken people brains. The troll is fed, and for some there is an infinite loop of getting attention from certain acts leading to more extreme acts.

Its just a prank bro.

themitigating5• 4 years ago

I have no evidence but was thinking about his work schedule, which by his own omission is insane, and he is running multiple companies. Along with his outspoken nature and need to insult people publicly makes me wonder if he is using some amphetamine or similar. Erratic behavior seems to be a side effect that comes with all that energy. Again, no evidence just throwing it out there

danjac• 4 years ago

Best nickname I heard for him was "Phoney Stark".

We want to believe in the cool, if a bit unhinged, hero-engineer that builds all the cool stuff we were promised in all the sci-fi movies as kids but failed to materialize, such as Mars colonies and self-driving cars. A lot of that failure is due to some things being a ton harder in reality than fiction, but a lot is also due to a managerialist, short-term culture that no longer seems to be thinking big and taking risks. Musk is the avatar for those who want these cool things and kicks back against the prevailing culture - a real-life counterpart to the billionaire genius in the Marvel movies.

The problem is, of course, that Tony Stark is a fictional character and Musk is not. Not only has he been drinking his own kool aid of late, but he's not much of a hero either, rather a spoiled bully who punches down.

elorant2• 4 years ago

The dude built a rocket company, an automotive juggernaut, a brain implant research company, and a few other things. I wouldn't call these "phoney".

typeofhuman• 4 years ago

It amazes me how easily you cast aspersions onto someone you don't even know. To go so far to accuse someone who leads massive innovations and organizations and still has enough time to share his thoughts on Twitter as someone who's "disorderly".

What would we say of you, if your life were so public?

TimPC• 4 years ago

The main thing that soured my opinion is that he supported Bitcoin and other crypto. The environmental damage from crypto is larger than the environmental savings for all electric cars. Elon Musk went from being one of the best things to happen to the planet to someone doing less than nothing for it.

alex_duf• 4 years ago

Same here, for me I started to lose interest for him when he started to sell the boring company as a solution to traffic jams.

The solution already exists and it's called "public transport".

I suspect this might be due to being surrounded by people who are too impressed by him to called out an idea when it's not sound.

Then the memes, then the crypto tokens, then it just got all weird so I stopped listening.

yangikan• 4 years ago

unhinged is absolutely the right word to describe him. Not just in terms of acting up, but also in terms of testing the boundaries of lawful behavior. A kind of behavior that can only be explained by the assumption that he thinks he is above the law (probably because he has a large number of fanboys and money). This is also similar to the behavior of the US politician that you are alluding to.

treeman79• 4 years ago

Funny how many smear articles against him are going on. Because he wants to stop online censorship of conservatives.

How many here would do what they consider right knowing they will be vilified for it.

itsoktocry6• 4 years ago

Funny how many smear articles against him are going on.

He was The Left's darling, now he's The Right's darling.

Personally, I think he made a mistake. I feel like Elon wants to be liked, but the celebrity/media left are now going to have their go at him.

vmurthy2• 4 years ago

I can't vouch for everyone supposedly writing smear articles/commenting on Musk but my own problem is that there is a public cost to his antics like "Going private" , "just bought 9% of TWTR" , "won't buy TWTR" etc. There's a reason SEC has rules around these. If Musk had done it once, you could call it eccentric or just plain stupid. If there's a pattern to it, perhaps his intentions aren't really to save the world or even noble. I'd trust someone who is openly greedy than someone who claims to do virtuous things while doing shady things.

MichaelMoser1236• 4 years ago

Unhinged? It is possible, that Musk didn't expect the twitter deal to become as politicised, as it did. Maybe he just got afraid of getting into the center of politics in the US. For example the state is a major customer, and they could just stop buying launch services from SpaceX for example, as the president might not agree with the politics of Mr Musk.

I mean look at Bezos, he got into a fight with Trump, and the pentagon preferred Azure to AWS, all of a sudden. Yeah, and a year later that deal got cancelled too, by the next administration [1]. I mean Musk has a lot of business with Uncle Sam, he really can't play his own game, in terms of politics.

I mean, i mean, they really have a lot of 'leverage' with Musk, to begin with. I would guess that Musk would be looking for a way out of the twitter deal, in order to protect his business. Also the economy is going into a recession, therefore his deals with the various governments are going to be much more important. Look, there is even talk of Musk building an e-tank with a German firm, Rheinmetall [2]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDe7OGpPodM

inglor_cz10• 4 years ago

After this war, Musk is probably in no danger of losing federal contracts just because of his free speech politics.

The Russians knocked out the entire Ukrainian SATCOM infrastructure at the start of the war, plus quite a few stations elsewhere in Europe; AFAIK none of them went online again. Electronic warfare at its finest. Once this happened, Starlink was used as a drop-in substitute and defeated all Russian attempts to knock it out too. The Ukrainians coordinate their artillery, drones etc. over Starlink and the Russians can ... gnash their teeth.

This is an impressive capability and it gives the U.S. a huge advantage in any potential future military conflict with a near-peer power. Advantages like that aren't discarded just because of random culture war flare-ups.

memish11• 4 years ago

He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

When there is distance he'll be able to be viewed with a dispassionate lens. Historians and future generations will put the mistakes in their proper context as they benefit from sustainable transport, reusable rocket ships and free speech in the public square.

hn_throwaway_992• 4 years ago

He's autistic and a genius. That combination is typically misunderstood and derided in their time.

Going to call bullshit on that one, because it's an easy way to discount all the downright shitty crap he's done.

I think it is amazing what Musk has accomplished, and if you look throughout history most hard-charging folks that get shit done tend to have a ton of narcissistic traits and are not really folks you'd want to be friends with. Both Newton and Edison were legendary assholes. Many of "... The Great" leaders throughout history achieved their "greatness" by mass murder.

So it's not incongruous at all to call out Elon for being a giant narcissistic, lying dickhead, and to also be in awe of his accomplishments.

demygale• 4 years ago

It all makes sense if you assume he’s a dumb guy who got rich by accident.

alex_young• 4 years ago

Isn’t trying to reprice a shrewd move at this point? The market has taken a huge hit since he made his move and the options for Twitter haven’t exactly improved.

phyalow• 4 years ago

I absolutely agree. He will save himself $5-15 billion depending on the new offer price, a total no brainer. A big short selling hedge fund came out 4 days ago and laid this exact scenario out on the table https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

hooande10• 4 years ago

No. A shrewd move would have been to not do a fumbling hostile takeover. Everyone knows that tech stocks traditionally take a hit when the fed raises rates. He could have done this in a slower and more traditional way instead of attempting the largest leveraged buyout in history on a whim.

Now he has to work with a ton of contractual and legal issues, up to and including twitter being able to force him to go through with the deal, unless he can find clear evidence of fraud in their user numbers.

ryandvm• 4 years ago

Couldn't agree more. I think "unhinged" is the perfect descriptor. I like a lot of what he proposes and how he thinks (when he's not attention seeking), but I absolutely cannot stand the pathetic meme crap and shit-posting he does. Sadly, he also reminds me of the failed coup guy, but I honestly think he might be more dangerous. Because not only is he desperate for attention, he's also pretty clever. That's a bad combination and I fear old age Elon is going to be even more trouble...

causality0• 4 years ago

Same. It was the saga of the media talking about poor working conditions and safety at Tesla, then his response by making an anti-media media site, then the fallout from that, then his decision to use those trapped kids as an opportunity to publicly virtue-signal by "building a rescue submarine", and his infantile tantrum when he was told that wasn't useful.

If Elon Musk had shut the fuck up in 2010 I'd probably be calling for statues to be built of him.

mungoid• 4 years ago

Elon is acting like the weird kid in school who accidentally did something that kinda made him popular and thought he could do it over and over but everyone just got tired of it after the first couple times

nailer9• 4 years ago

indecisive and disorderly. This deal is a perfect demonstration of how I feel.

Why is it disorderly to not want to acquire a company that may be lying about their figures?

nailer9• 4 years ago

dang can we flagkill this entire thread? The thread is mainly unsubstantiated character attacks with no supporting arguments.

rdelpret• 4 years ago

I think he’s always been like that to an extent. In his biography there are stories of him staying up all night and re-writing everyone’s code in his earlier days.

zosima3• 4 years ago

Elon gets attention because he is doing absolutely astonishingly amazing things.

The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before. And that's how that sort of thing looks.

boringg5• 4 years ago

I agree with this too. It's like everyone on this thread wants Elon to be a perfectly manicured fully formed opinion on everything and that he needs to be batting 1000. He's batting far beyond anyone else that's try to move the needle - don't forget that. I don't pretend that I agree with a lot of what Elon does but I recognize someone who is fundamentally changing the planet.

To the comments of him not wanting to talk to the press most of the time because it's boring ... do you guys know how boring talking to the press is? You get equal parts adoration and pot shots without actually gaining anything but trying to get a message threw. There are very few enlightening moments in dealing with press and podcasts and you are constantly guarded about some asinine sound byte taken out of context. It's not like the podcast/press corps are typically deeply knowledgeable and are going to bring up some new idea to help you out. It's about getting a message out to different groups of people and it is really boring/wearing if you don't like saying the same thing over and over again.

I guess the saying goes - haters are going to hate as is deeply visible on the thread.

FartyMcFarter• 4 years ago

The appearance of indecisiveness and disorderliness is because he's doings things nobody has done before.

Indecisiveness and disorderliness are the least of his problems, at least as far as the public is concerned.

He's a bully and he's untrustworthy.

syndacks• 4 years ago

I lost all respect for him when he seriously posited that life is a simulation.

koheripbal• 4 years ago

Why are we so obsessed with loving or hating him.

Both amount to celebrity worship. We enable the drama which feeds off both the love AND the hate.

I posit that mature intelligent people don't care about Elon.

Our rallying for or railing against him, is an expression of our own narcissism, as if our individual opinions of him change literally anything in the world.

People need to grow up and focus on their own lives and changing things within their power.

ausbah• 4 years ago

musk is kinda the closet thing to a celebrity there is in the tech scene

Bubble_Pop_2213• 4 years ago

I very much agree with all you said, but it's also a way to find likeminded people.

If I discuss with somebody and they agree with me that Musk is a conman and a cult leader, chances are they have the same mental framework around other broader things such as how SV has become a hotspot for cults.

How maybe it's time to get out of such hotspot for cults, how maybe the template for success isn't inflating a financial bubble such as Tesla but going old school like Microsoft, without raising any money, going straight to building products and attack Goliath without fear like they did with IBM, not in the press but in the marketplace.

Jach2• 4 years ago

I mostly agree with this, and would add that thoughts on Elon make a great Rorschach test (and a less great but still interesting test on what bits of misinformation have stuck to a person). But I disagree with the "enlightened disinterested middle" prescription. A mature intelligent person can love and hate and be disinterested in things (and people), too, and regardless of how other people think (or don't think) about the thing or person. There's an old copypasta going around again that implicitly makes this point at least for liking -- https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/if-x-has-a-million-fans-im-on... -- a mature intelligent person should be able to have their likes and dislikes be mostly independent of what others think. (My own bias is somewhat contrarian, I notice myself irrationally starting to like something less if it becomes more popular. Sometimes I can justify it more rationally by saying that popularity changed the thing -- our opinions are part of our brains and thus are part of the world and can indeed sometimes affect the world even beyond our brains, effects are more likely when more brains share opinions -- and I like the thing it became less, or even actively dislike it, without having to diminish my liking of what used to be. Sometimes I realize I'm being irrational, notice my feelings aren't what I want them to be, and attempt to correct them (sometimes towards disinterest!). Sometimes I don't care. But the correct thing is not necessarily disinterest, nor a more extreme stance I once thought which was abandoning my likes and other emotions altogether.)

IAmEveryone• 4 years ago

I think what’s worst is how boring he is in all these shenanigans. Peter Thiel invents a method to sue your business out of existence. Evil, yes, but also smart. Musk? Calls people he doesn’t like pedophiles. Like some schoolchild, or Republican House candidate.

And Musks politics are similar: dumb, but also dumb in exactly the same half-informed wannabe libertarian 20-year old American guy way as half the people on Reddit.

It’s really rather strange, because Musk isn’t anywhere close to normal in many other ways, and good ways, too. Making five or six businesses work, some at the same time, with only two or three duds along the way, is far ahead of anyone else and can almost claim statistical significance.

unclebucknasty9• 4 years ago

Seems a lot of what drives Musk is a need to feel that he's smarter than everyone else, even (or especially) if he suspects it may not be true. So he takes the position that the minions of the world are unworthy burdens to him. This includes governments, other organizations and anything/anyone he perceives is attempting to regulate or otherwise "constrain" him.

There's an obvious immaturity there too, wherein he responds to any criticism, hint that he may be wrong, or regulatory effort with the equivalent of a childish "you're just stupid!"

His battles with the SEC are a classic example, and it would be on-brand if this Twitter deal was as much about thumbing the eye of regulators as anything else. His announcement today had at one point caused a 20% dip in Twitter's pre-market price and 5% bump for Tesla's. The entire ride has been an exercise in manipulation.

So, I've wondered at times if a lot of this superiority act is really just deep insecurity, and he needs the world to constantly reassure him that he's as smart as he needs them to believe he is. When you look at the attention-seeking behavior you mentioned, it definitely aligns.

boringg5• 4 years ago

You've got it wrong - the tumbling today was because Twitter was artificially inflated and being held on the hopes of a deal. As soon as the market tanked, the price of twitter still held out hope on a deal. Elon isn't about to pay full freight in a sinking macroeconomic environment.

In terms of his behavior you speak of - could be right, could be wrong. I don't think he needs the reinforcement at this point. He's already proved himself - he now just needs to keep executing. My concern is that he doesn't have the energy, focus and clarity of thought to make it happen.

Also I do have legit concerns on the mental health of our older twitter guys (> 50 ) as I have noticed there has been a lot of trolling poor behavior in that crowd and a turn to the hard right. Maybe it's the social validation needed at a later age?

mzs• 4 years ago

Parag Agrawal warned us all more than a month ago, "There will be distractions ahead…"

https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1513354622466867201

ur-whale• 4 years ago

he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

Think of it as simulated annealing [1].

Usually finds pretty decent extrema

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

ineedasername12• 4 years ago

if he was always like that or grew into it at one point.

He went from being wealthy growing up, to being very rich after Paypal, to being an extremely rich billionaire, to being the most richest person in the world (maybe ever?). And now a single utterance of his can shape markets or otherwise influence millions of people.

I think it would be difficult to go through the above and not come out the other end without it impacting your behaviors & world view. At a minimum, before he was this wealthy & influential he didn't have as much margin for error. A single bad decision might have tanked Tesla or SpaceX when they were getting started. It would have required Musk to be a lot more careful & deliberate. He also had to care a bit more (or at least pretend to care) about other people's thoughts/ideas etc. These days he can lose $1B in a twitter acquisition breakup fee and it barely matters. And he has enough "f*ck off" money (the amount required to tell someone to "f*ck off" with no significant consequences) to tell anyone to f*ck off. The need to adhere to social niceties is greatly reduced.

This is all on top of the fact that the average person's behavior is usually going to change at least a little as they get older.

All of which is to say that I think there's an excellent chance that he's grown into his current personality. If so, I think it's very possible that it's a mixture: He grew into where he is now, but the seeds were always there & his track in life has amplified or caused those seeds to take hold.

zionic2• 4 years ago

He went from being wealthy growing up

This most definitely is false. Elon grew up middle class at best.

fartcannon3• 4 years ago

That's a long way to says he's a bit of a dick.

croes2• 4 years ago

Richest person ever? Not even close https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/people/954992/who-is-the-rich...

carlivar3• 4 years ago

His bad decision (to migrate to Windows) at PayPal caused an engineering mutiny and led to the board firing him as CEO. So I think he has always been stubborn and impulsive.

mlindner3• 4 years ago

He went from being wealthy growing up

He wasn't especially wealthy growing up, to be clear. Upper class yes, but no more "wealthy" than a successful silicon valley engineer's child.

kaczordon• 4 years ago

Source that he was really wealthy growing up? People seem to say this all the time but he says he worked his way through college without any help from his dad: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211071324518531072

ALittleLight• 4 years ago

To me this seems more like - with the stock market down Elon figures he can get a discount on Twitter and so will now try to renegotiate the price.

If you were buying a house, and had already made an offer and put down 3% earnest money with your offer, but then realized you could probably get 30% off the purchase price by backing out and offering again - would you?

zarzavat2• 4 years ago

There’s been a huge stock market crash since he first initiated the buyout. It would have been unhinged if he didn’t try to renegotiate the price or otherwise pull out.

It can be argued that the whole idea of Musk buying Twitter is unhinged, but it doesn’t seem much different to Bezos buying WaPo, it’s simply on a larger scale. Media companies provide good political power/$ value to billionaires.

tasty_freeze• 4 years ago

I get the feeling he is a lifelong nerd with poor social skills, but after his success and wealth he is now perceived as an interesting person with high social status, and it just isn't in him to deal well with it.

He divorced his wife, starts dating actresses and musicians, the latter turns him on to smoking pot and he thinks to himself, "Hey, I'm now a cool guy who smokes pot. I need to show people I'm a cool guy who smokes pot" and goes on Joe Rogan and shows off his new coolness. Same thing with his twitter antics.

The first time I heard him speak was watching clips from his solar roof announcements. He had the charisma and presentation skills of a 4th grader giving a book report.

brentm2• 4 years ago

This + the bro cult around him on Twitter certainly make him hard to stomach sometimes. But still, when I see he is on a podcast or some other media it is usually worth the listen.

duxup• 4 years ago

I wonder how different I would be if what I did was highly successful and I had the money to do what I want / indulge myself at my whim... I worry it wouldn't be pretty...

dcow2• 4 years ago

Is it not possible that Elon is acting in a perfectly rational way based on information that has come to light during diligence? Or am I missing something more subtle between the lines? It seems at least possible that Elon or Twitter’s board or both hold inaccurate views about how valuable Twitter actually is…

turtledove2• 4 years ago

No? Have you seen his communication style? It's not one of a person acting "perfectly rational".

seshagiric• 4 years ago

He does not look indecisive :), to the contrary seems to be jumping to action without bothering much about consequences. For example, why make acquisition bid without checking on spam accounts first? IIRC his offer letter to the Twitter did not carry this condition about spam bots.

rland• 4 years ago

The foundation of Musk's wealth, above all else, is that he operates as a one-man marketing machine. The funding for all of his ventures depends on Musk. The magnet for ravenous, loyal, intelligent nerds (and thus, the ability to eventually deliver on his promises!) is powered by Musk. The ability for any of his ventures to cover a failure to deliver with a PR/controversy storm -- yup, it depends on Musk.

I like your comparison with Big T. He is, in some sense, a sleeker and more savvy Trump. Trump does have a similar psychic energy to Elon, but he's an older model. He came from the TV world. Now, the TV world was pretty powerful -- it got DT elected president! But Americans are not living in the TV world this century; they're living in the social media world.

This is the origin of the Twitter thing. It's not about Twitter's profit, or free speech, or anything as lofty as that. Here's what happened with Twitter:

Trump got elected based, in part, on his statements on Twitter. Around the same time, Elon was astroturfing Reddit, Twitter, etc. to build the hype machine that eventually became the $1T social media product, Tesla.

Elon, consciously or not, came to realize that simply by his statements on Twitter, could manipulate the world to his whim. He fired the entire corporate PR team at Tesla. He realizes, why do I need a PR team? I can shape the narrative just as well with my social media account!

Then, BOOM! Trump gets banned from Twitter, and immediately disappears completely from discussion. Just like that, in the blink of an eye -- erased from public imagination. Do you remember how quickly this happened? He was black holed from the public imagination in a couple days. As soon as the trending hashtag disappeared, Trump was gone.

Elon saw this happen. He made the connection between his valuations and his Twitter account. And remember, at this point, Elon's compensation is basically tied entirely to the stock price. He realizes that leaving his podium on someone else's property is a mortal risk. And... here we are.

Twitter is pretty stupid not to have banned Elon as soon as he left the slightest hint of acquisition.

Musk does not come from a scientific or technical lineage: his father wasn't a geotechnical engineer, a computer programmer, or a physicist. He was a chiropractor. A chiropractor! This is the essence of Elon. He is the greatest influencer of our time.

belter3• 4 years ago

Elon Musk did this recent keynote for the FT. "Future of the Car: Elon Musk Keynote Interview" https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc

Said he will have full FSD in the next 6 months: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=3107

Will be landing uncrewed Starship on Mars in 3 to 5 years: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=2444

Most ironic of all is the talk about Tunnels: https://youtu.be/VfyrQVhfGZc?t=4000

It was a shame that the FT, with a London based journalist, forgot to ask the question if he has ever heard about this Sci-Fi tunnel transport system called the London Metro :-)

DrBoring• 4 years ago

unhinged

I have this speculative theory that Elon Musk's public behavior is a complex long term ruse. I suspect his odd behavior is intentionally designed to get other to underestimate him. Consider it a mental form of the drunken fist martial arts style [1], where a fighter will use unpredictable body movements to confuse the opponent.

I use the word "theory" intentionally. I have explainable reasons for how I formed this theory. But now is not the place for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_boxing

api• 4 years ago

The only reason Elon looks superhuman to so many people is by comparison to our worthless decadent elite. He's a decent engineer with a strong work ethic and resources who actually does do things, making him look like a comic book superhero. That's because the rest of his class is mostly jacking off on yachts, sponsoring bullshit politics of various flavors, posturing at glorified overpriced TED sessions (Davos etc.), or running companies whose products and market they don't understand full of people who have meetings to discuss the meeting schedule.

If our elite really were a meritocracy Elon would be average among his peers, if that.

philliphaydon• 4 years ago

I’m not a fan of Elon, would never buy a Tesla. But Vernon Unsworth was worse in the whole incident. He started the whole argument. Elon was asked for help. He tried to help. Vernon threw his toys out of the cot. Elon responded like a child. Vernon sued and got laughed out of court.

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike Elon. The ‘pedo guy’ thing isn’t one of them.

filoleg• 4 years ago

To add details, Elon's sub prototype seemed fine, and his team worked with Thai authorities to evaluate its use to resolve the incident. It was deemed they didn't have enough time (given the constraints) to actually finish it, and diving was a more practical option given the entirety of the situation.

Thai authorities told Elon as such, boys in the cave were already saved by the time he brought over the sub, and everything was fine.

Then that one specific diver comes out of nowhere and tweets that it was all just a PR stunt and that Elon could "shove that sub up where it hurts". While Elon's response was an immature retort, it is a bit disingenuous how people seem to imply that he lashed out at the diver out of nowhere with that insult just because his sub wasnt used for the incident. That wasn't an issue at all, and he took the rejection from Thai authorities just fine. It was one of the divers that decided to throw this random insult at him, and Elon's retort (no matter how appropriate or inappropriate it was) was just a "one-up" response. Immature and inappropriate response, sure. But let's not act as if he decided to lash out on some innocent guy out of nowhere.

Direct quote[0]: "Just as I didn’t literally mean he was a pedophile, I’m sure he didn’t literally mean shoving a sub up my a--".

0. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/national-international/elon-...

peterth32• 4 years ago

I started to become concerned about Elon when I read his 2017 interview with Rolling Stone[0]:

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence. Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters…

He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

brtkdotse2• 4 years ago

He is one of the most brilliant men alive

I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

It could be what drives him and if he goes to therapy it might ruin that, I believe this is a common reason why people like that don't go to therapy. I don't know if he needs therapy or not by the way.

usrn2• 4 years ago

Honestly going to sleep alone is awful. My SO is in another country right now and I think I understand why old people tend to die shortly after their partner does.

status200• 4 years ago

This is strong evidence that you can have it all financially and still be a miserable human. The most valuable skills are recognizing when you have "enough", and being content with keeping yourself company.

hunterb1236• 4 years ago

I started becoming concerned about peterth3 when I read his HN comment in 2022.

He’s been in desperate need of therapy for a long time. It’s sad in some ways. He is one of the most brilliant men alive, but he would be 10x happier and more effective if he worked on himself as hard as he works his companies.

He started diagnosing people online either without meeting them or knowing them personally. It's sad in some ways. I'm sure he's a decent engineer but he'd be 10x happier and more effective if he focused on himself and not trying to find fault in others.

Jach2• 4 years ago

The word you're looking for is eccentric.

mlindner3• 4 years ago

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician...Something turns me off from these types of people.

Elon Musk isn't an attention seeker and never has been. I don't get how people make this argument. Every chance he gets, he redirects praise to the people of his companies.

danans3• 4 years ago

He is the kind of person one has to maintain complex opinions about.

He didn't create the first mass market modern EV (that was Nissan), but he did what the rest of the auto industry could have but refused to do: Reverse the polarity of the desirability of EVs.

His views on metropolitan public transit and car facilitated sprawl are backward, but I doubt most traditional auto executives think any differently (just look at the amazing metro system in the Detroit area! /s), they just don't voice it as openly.

He has tons of money and power but feels little accountability to anyone, not even his shareholders, much less any community, country, or society.

You might say that's great, that it frees him to think "outside the box". That is true, but societal obligations are not all bad - they ground a wealthy and powerful person in the reality of people who have far less power than them, and temper some of the blindness brought on by their narcissism.

Mezzie• 4 years ago

He was always like this, from what I remember. Then again, I was put off of him back in the 90s because it was just kind of embarrassing to watch someone who was (at the time) 2-3x my age be so desperate for validation.

Elon was bullied pretty heavily, and I think he clung to the nerds as his social savior in response, but he still doesn't have the self-confidence/spine to let his ideas stand on their own. It's kind of sad: He basically has a parasocial relationship with the geek/nerd community (and probably the rationalists too) and he thinks it's real, but it can't be when Elon brings his resources to bear whenever he's losing an argument.

ARandomerDude• 4 years ago

Also, the guy is always going to extreme lengths to seek attention, just like one certain US politician

Take it easy on Biden. Many geriatric patients act strangely because their sense of self awareness has faded with age.

rednerrus• 4 years ago

The problem is reward this kind of behavior. Trump became president by be the most outlandish buffoon. Kanye is a billionaire for his antics. It's all free advertising for their brands. Probably 100s of millions of dollars worth of free advertising.

rhacker• 4 years ago

One thing I really like about this new Elon is, while he is liberal, he's more real. There are a lot of liberals playing a part - like towing the liberal line. However a lot of ACTUAL liberals in person might be like, shit let's stop abortion or lets stop illegal immigration or lets cheer black people but I don't want everyone on TV to be black (I'm not saying all of them - but real people have actual opinions like that). There's too much focus on hyper liberalism or LEFTism right now and I rather think the word is not unhinged it's REAL. Same REAL that elected Trump.

saila• 4 years ago

In the United States there is very little leftism. If you think there is, point to any major party etc that is advocating to dismantle the existing power hierarchy and transfer ownership of the means of production to workers. The most "radical" mainstream advocacy we typically see is around reform, which really isn't radical at all.

It's true that there are pockets of leftist activism here and there, but said activists have very little power or influence. There's no communist bogeyman waiting round the corner to redistribute your wealth (or whatever else it is that people imagine communism to be).

It's important to reiterate that liberal and progressive are not synonyms for leftism. Advocating for social change in and of itself is not leftism. More Black people on TV isn't leftism, and the notion is quite absurd, especially since it's far from true that everyone on TV is Black now.

The reason this is so important IMO is that we can't have productive discussions about social and political issues if we don't understand the basic terms and concepts under discussion.

As to Musk, I don't know what to think. He's certainly made some good business decisions, but he also goes off the deep end on occasion. I don't think calling him liberal really makes much sense. When you're one of the richest people in the world, your world view is undoubtedly much different than that of an average person.

And just in general the labels "liberal" and "conservative" aren't very meaningful, especially in that most people could be considered either depending on which issue you're looking at. And when you look at how people actually live and what they prioritize, the lines become even blurrier.

dqpb• 4 years ago

I just can never trust anything he says because he has a significant history of being indecisive and disorderly.

All agents have two modes: exploiting and exploring

Indecisive and disorderly are the qualities of exploring.

Joeri• 4 years ago

The thing with Elon is that he has no respect for rules. This is what makes his companies successful. His company will zag when everybody zigs, because he will say “zigging is stupid, and only an idiot would do it that way”, after which he will be mocked by all the zigging rule-followers, and ultimately either be proven right, or dead-wrong.

This lack of respect of rules brought him to the top, and somewhere along the way he seems to have forgotten how to turn it off. So now he does whatever he wants whenever he wants and who cares about the consequences because why should he follow someone else’s rules? This greatly offends many people, while simultaneously attracting a fan club who love his rogue character.

goshx• 4 years ago

I’m a fan of Tesla, SpaceX, etc. but I think Elon has been acting a little off lately. It feels like he started acting like any other rich guy who is more concerned about his own money than anything else.

If Trump is reelected this year, Republicans can thank Elon. He’s campaigning against democrats, wants Trump to be back on Twitter, said banning Trump was morally wrong (I guess letting the incitements of violence, lies about election fraud while committing the fraud himself, was morally acceptable to Elon).

leobg3• 4 years ago

This is exactly what Charlie Munger said when asked why he and Buffett invested in BYD and not in Tesla. He said Elon was a certified genius and a lose cannon. (That was before TSLA did 20x. And also well before Musk teased them about their love of moats and candy.)

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

There's a lot of talk about how Elon is weaseling out of this. That may be true but you should know something about acquisitions. Typically there is a termination or breakup fee that one side has to pay for walking away or if the deal falls through. AT&T paid billions for the failed takeover of T-Mobile [1], for example.

The Musk Twitter deal has a $1 billion termination fee [2] on both sides. Now it's unclear on what conditions would trigger this exactly. In Twitter's case, it at least includes accepting another offer. On Musk's end, it includes if financing falls through.

So here's the $1 billion question: what happens if (as Musk might argue) Twitter made material misrepresentations about their business, specifically to do with how many users they actually have? This might be an out for Musk or it might not.

Personally I've long thought there are a huge number of fake Twitter accounts and Twitter is actively disincentivized from ever finding out if that's true or not. Put another way: they like their big numbers for active accounts, DAU and MAU.

But if Twitter is found to be materially misrepresenting those numbers, they have way more serious problems than if the Musk deal falls through. They've then opened themselves up to litigation by the SEC and investors that they materially misled investors.

Things could actually get really ugly for Twitter here regardless of what happens with the Musk deal.

If you think about it, this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter. Make a buyout offer, get access to the books, prove they're lying about DAU/MAU, walk away with no termination fee paid, watch the executive team get sued into oblivion and the company tanks.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2011/11/24/technology/att_t-mobile_bre...

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/26/elon-musks-twitter-deal-in...

nicce3• 4 years ago

I am curious how they prove either of the arguments about fake accounts precisely. What is the definition of fake account and how to prove them? If they can prove some self-evident cases, it could be just the tip of the iceberg.

mikkergp10• 4 years ago

It seems like there are 4 categories of Twitter users:

1. Blue checks

2. People who are “obviously” people (PII listed)

3. “Anonymous people”. I see a lot of theses, people with the name “iluvcrypt0” and an emoji of a Pokémon.

4. “Obvious” bots.

From looking at thread responses on twitter I think group 3 is probably the biggest, On the Luna thread someone posted to a link of posts that were implying they lost all their money due to Luna crashing, and it was a lot of group 3 posters. but of course each of these categories has a certain percentage likelihood that they are a bot. Im sure there are a few blue checks that slipped through and there are probably a few “obvious bots” who manually post.

The question is really the makeup of group 3. How many people who seem like anonymous users are actually bots, and can they prove that (when of course Twitter is incentivized to err low)

Also, either way, group 3 doesnt seem like they are contributing to the marketplace of ideas, they seem more like trolls/shit posters.

mbesto• 4 years ago

Also, if they already know there is X amount of bots, why don't they just...ummm...delete those accounts already?

itsoktocry6• 4 years ago

But if Twitter is found to be misrepresenting those numbers, they have way more serious problems than if the Musk deal falls through. They've then opened themselves up to litigation by the SEC and investors that they materially misled investors.

Well, yeah, this goes for every single public company (including Tesla).

samwillis• 4 years ago

this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter

Interesting idea, albeit very high risk, however what's the motivation? Say he's right, sure he walks away with $1B minus his legal fees. But if he looses, he own Twitter... but wanted to "mortally wound" it.

Not sure he needs to do something high risk like this for the potential of $1B, and based on how much he uses Twitter I'm not sure he wants to take it down.

jmyeet2• 4 years ago

To be clear, I'm not even suggesting this is what Musk is doing. It's just an interesting thought I had about what someone could do.

But as for motivation for someone doing this, people have egos and when they have this much money, it essentially costs them nothing to exact revenge for no other reason than a bruised ego. Musk in parituclar is notoriously thin-skinned.

Remember when those boys in Thailand were being rescued from a cave following a flooding? Musk offered a submarine. One of the rescuers said something dismissive about it. Musk responded by calling him a "pedo guy" and then won the defemation suit by lying and saying it was South African slang, not an unfounded allegation the guy was a pedophile [1].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50695593

fijiaarone4• 4 years ago

Not every cunning idea has to be thought up in advance, and not every aspect of it needs to be devised by one person.

Perhaps some of Musk’s advisors dreamed up this strategy on realizing the dangers of “plan A” or even after the decision to back out was made.

amsilprotag• 4 years ago

I don't know how well this would hold up in arbitration, but he has repeatedly cited the existence of bots as a reason for buying and fixing twitter.

If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!

April 21 900K likes

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354

londons_explore• 4 years ago

4% of users could be very vocal and annoying bots...

Sebb7676• 4 years ago

If you think about it, this could be a relatively cheap way of mortally wounding Twitter. Make a buyout offer, get access to the books, prove they're lying about DAU/MAU, walk away with no termination fee paid, watch the executive team get sued into oblivion and the company tanks

That's true, but what does Elon gain from destroying Twitter?

I'd argue that Twitter actually was (and still is) a big part in building his cult of personality. Sure, it has its problems, but I honestly believe that he thinks he can improve Twitter.

_fat_santa• 4 years ago

I remember a few weeks ago when the deal was first announced. A bunch of folks reported that conservative accounts were gaining followers while liberal accounts were loosing followers. The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.

This led to the theory that Twitter might have way more fake accounts then it's leading us on to believe. There was some speculation that the "Less than 5% figure" would come to bite them in due diligence so they were panicking and dumping bot accounts. Now this...

I'm not saying these two events are related, but there does seem to be something fishy going on. My gut says it will come out in the next few days that Twitter has something like %10-15 of their accounts being bots rather than the initial "Less than 5%" figure.

gruez• 4 years ago

The analysis back then is this could not have simply been organic because of when the followers picked up and dropped off, basically looked like a script doing the work.

Is there a link to this analysis?

pyinstallwoes3• 4 years ago

Imagine if the old law of 1% applied here. That is on the internet, 99% of all content is generated by 1% of the users.

Now if we include "users" as "content" (bots, ai, scripts), we have a very brooding fringe theory similar to "dead internet theory."

In my experience... it's pretty obvious and prolific how much automation is in Twitter. It's basically a public cyber-war; you have state actors and non state-actors using military grade propaganda tools for 'reality framing' between military interests, government interests, and corporate interests.

JohnWhigham• 4 years ago

1 billion to just to say "nah I actually don't want to do this". 1 billion for, after all is said and done, nothing to actually materially change. Does that sound supremely fucked up to anyone else? All that fucking money...and it just goes to whomever bank is financing this because nothing happened?

What a massively fucked world we live in.

Sebb7676• 4 years ago

Absolutely not. Imagine I want to buy your house for, let's say, 200k$ and sign the contract. So need to quickly find a replacement, move out, clear the legal stuff and probably miss work. Then, at the last moment, I back out. Don't you think 5k$ would be appropriate for all the now useless work and money spent on your side?

It's the same number with Twitter, just scaled up to the actual offer.

interestica2• 4 years ago

I mean a lot has happened because of it. It's been a top news story across fields. It's affected Tesla stock. It's affected public perception of Musk. It has caused deeper analysis of the financial viability of Twitter. It has allowed new parties to get closer looks at Twitter's books. It may have left to the ousting of several Twitter execs. It has normalized a return of Trump to the medium.

dabinat• 4 years ago

I interpreted this comment as not saying a $1 billion penalty is necessarily inappropriate for this particular deal, but it’s a waste of money in general to pay $1B to achieve nothing when that money could have been put to better use or donated to charity.

sepiasaucer• 4 years ago

I don’t think you could easily prove Twitter is materially misrepresenting the number of bot/spam accounts. Presumably, it is just an estimate based on some combination of assumptions and statistical analysis. You might be able to create a significantly higher estimate, but that seems different than proving material misrepresentation.

moduspol3• 4 years ago

It's rampant tin-foil hat speculation, but the ordering of events may not be what we've seen.

Yesterday the big story was that two higher-ups in Twitter were fired unexpectedly, one of whom was on paternity leave at the time. Some amount of shake-up is normal in these kind of conditions, but that doesn't rule out something more. Today Elon's pushing back, suggesting the 5% bot rate may be inaccurately low. It's possible the events are related, some misrepresentation was found while investigating the figures, and that's why the firings happened yesterday.

If that happened, it'd be in Elon's interest to draw attention to it and that the deal is "on hold," as Twitter will be on the hook for that $1 billion breakup fee unless they can renegotiate terms favorable to Elon. And even if the deal dropped completely, now Twitter implicitly will be on the hook for misrepresenting to existing investors the percentage of bots for however long they've been doing it.

I guess we'll see. The truth will probably be more boring.

dlp211• 4 years ago

Bots probably seem like they make a bigger part of Twitter's population b/c they will simply tweet more than the median user. I imagine that the majority, and perhaps the vast majority of Twitter users are mostly passive users, ie: they mostly consume tweets and seldom actually tweet themselves. In other words, high D/MAU, ~5% bots, but bot tweet volume makes up 30+% of actual tweet volume.

_u• 4 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding his reasoning.

Musk refers to an article which claims that false or spam accounts represent fewer than 5% of its monetizable daily active users during the first quarter.

In his Tweet, he suddenly wants to know whether spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.

Aren't these concepts (percentage of users and percentage of monetizable daily active users) something totally different?

kragen• 4 years ago

Maybe this is performance art designed to demonstrate the menace of communication media that require you to strip out crucial qualifiers from your claims in order to fit into an artificial character size limit?

gerikson• 4 years ago

You have 260 characters, and can create threads. I've read plenty of Twitter threads that are at least as persuasively argued as a similarly long blog post.

moduspol3• 4 years ago

Do they even define "users"?

I'm a lurker on Twitter. I follow people but don't tweet. Do I count as a user? My behavior is probably difficult to discern from a bot (using a third party app).

The bots everyone is concerned about are the ones tweeting, but there are probably all kinds of "legitimate" bots, like the ones that tweet when Apple pushes a software update, or something goes on sale on Steam.

That 5% number may be describing the "legitimate" bots, while what everyone cares about is the illegitimate ones.

firstSpeaker• 4 years ago

I bet twitter stock price is gonna take a dive!

fatih-erikli• 4 years ago

"Spam/fake accounts do represent less than 5% of users" This claim raises lots of open questions. If they are able to determine the fake users, why they did not just delete these users? Don't they have such an spam detection and prevention process?

Also I think it is a lot more than %5. Also, again, I think it is still OK only if the half percent of the users represent the real (not-spam) users. The spam users are increasing and becoming much harder to determine when the user base grows. Even if you're running a simple blog and you notice lots of spams in your comments when you get some traffic. %5 is just not a realistic value.

Also lets not forget about "the paid" users. There is such a thing behind the scenes and they are not spam/fake.

jmalicki• 4 years ago

If you can do a statistical sample of a very small number of users, say 0.1%, and do very expensive detailed investigation of them that determines 5% are fake, you can easily extrapolate that 5% to the entire userbase with small confidence bounds, but have no idea which of the rest of the users are fake.

tsimionescu• 4 years ago

You can in principle conduct user interviews to determine the likely percentage, without having a clear way to ide tify every individual account. Similar in principle to how you conduct pre-election polls.

chrisweekly• 4 years ago

5% of monetizable users - a crucial distinction, since it completely ignores bots which might represent 80% of the accounts while not being monetizable

seydor2• 4 years ago

This is more sane than if it went through. If he really wants a microblog he can build it for $1b or buy substack.

I guess we'll find out more at 6/9

gregoriol• 4 years ago

The guy has mastered the art of stock price manipulation

oneeyedpigeon• 4 years ago

Has he really? a) it's really obvious that he's doing it — I cannot believe he hasn't fallen foul of regulators yet b) he hasn't gained anything from this particular deal yet, as far as I can tell

xuki2• 4 years ago

He used that excuse to sell 9B of Tesla stocks. It's pretty hard to justify selling that much as a CEO of the company.

togaen• 4 years ago

Looks like someone got in over his head and is looking for an excuse to back out of the deal.

RichardHeart• 4 years ago

Hackernews is the best. Hates crypto check. Hates Elon check. Hates longevity check.

vmurthy2• 4 years ago

HN has its fair share of cynics. Just like in a stock market you need bulls and bears , you need people to peek behind the stories and tell whether there is substance or full of shit. It's up to us (the other readers) to be influenced or learn or tune out, isn't it? You don't buy a stock or sell one because someone yelled something, do you?

paulgb• 4 years ago

HN prefers nuance to personality cults. When Elon does something good, he tends to get praise here; when he’s in chaotic neutral mode he gets the eye-rolls he deserves.

the_doctah2• 4 years ago

Anyone trying to stem the tide of censorship on social media platforms would be chaotic good in my book.

ckastner3• 4 years ago

I strongly feel that the spammers thing is smoke and mirrors.

The deal at $54.20 was maybe OK for him a month ago (it was great for Twitter because nobody else was interested at that price). Since then, Twitter reported disappointing numbers for the past quarter, and the entire market took a nose dive, with tech hit especially hard.

TWTR stock price was in the mid-30s before Musk's offer. Without the offer, and with the disappointing numbers, and with the recent market development, one could reasonably assume that the stock would be below 30 today.

Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

nicce3• 4 years ago

You always need to pay much more on payouts than the current stock price. There is no chance he could buy it for $30bn. Unless history and future predictions suggests that there is no chance for stock to grow in foreseeable future.

zerocrates• 4 years ago

Feels like you'd have to offer substantially more premium, or more breakup fee, or (probably) both, if you've intentionally broken your last deal and then you turn around and propose another.

Now that's premium starting from a lower base, but...

Also, it does feel a little "manipulation"-y to tank the price on news of you yourself trashing your deal, then taking advantage of that to make the same deal but cheaper?

Of course any analysis is assuming Elon actually means it and didn't just tweet this as a joke or on a whim.

kibwen7• 4 years ago

Also, it does feel a little "manipulation"-y to tank the price on news of you yourself trashing your deal, then taking advantage of that to make the same deal but cheaper?

Elon Musk's past behavior has shown him to be extremely comfortable with this tactic.

itsoktocry6• 4 years ago

Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

Perhaps because the board and shareholders will be far more inclined to reject an offer from Musk after he feigned buying it one time and backed out?

ckastner3• 4 years ago

Perhaps because the board and shareholders will be far more inclined to reject an offer from Musk after he feigned buying it one time and backed out?

He didn't feign anything. On the contrary, he's proved that he was dead serious about it.

All he'd be doing would be renegotiating the price, which is something that any reasonable person would do when the circumstances change so drastically (assuming, of course, that a renegotiation would be possible).

Don't think for a second that Twitter would walk away from Musks's offer if someone were to offer $60 a share.

thedufer2• 4 years ago

Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

That's not really how the break fee works. There's a specific performance clause that allows Twitter to force Musk to go through with the deal as long as he has the money (which, shockingly, seems to have come through). They'd only give up on that and take the break fee if the deal was truly over and they were prepared to say no to a lower offer.

throwawaylinux4• 4 years ago

Interesting. Is this deal public somewhere? Does it include any clauses relating to Twitter misrepresenting of their userbase?

Flankk• 4 years ago

I looked it up and the news seems to be reporting what you said, but it is not true. Section 9.9 of the agreement is contingent on a bunch of conditions being met, after which the deal is forced through if it is also funded. For some reason the media misreported it out of context. The break fee is paid by either Twitter or Elon, depending on who cancels the deal.

ckastner3• 4 years ago

I admittedly haven't checked the full agreement, but if that is the case, then the angle over the less than 5% spammers/bots makes even more sense, if that number was indeed part of the agreement.

dragontamer14• 4 years ago

When Musk started selling his TSLA shares to buy Twitter, TSLA fell by like $200 or like 20%.

It was becoming obvious that to buy Twitter, TSLA value would have to decline severely. IIRC, Musk only got around to selling $8 Billion pretax before quitting.

Musk thought he could afford Twitter. He sells some TSLA and the market collapses, and he suddenly decides against it.

Everything else is smoke and mirrors. Musk doesn't have the cash for the deal anymore (maybe he never had the cash for the deal). I guess Musk is looking at the $1 Billion ejection clause now and trying to weasel around it.

But at this rate, it looks like Musk owes Twitter $1 billion cash for this broke deal.

loceng2• 4 years ago

It will be hard to know how much TSLA's current value is due to this vs. how much is the current climate of the whole market.

shmatt2• 4 years ago

This is the pretty good point to all the "richest person" "net worth XX Billion" lists and calculations.

Most if not all of these people can't liquidate even close to their "net worth"

noelsusman• 4 years ago

I would be more inclined to believe this if every other similar company wasn't also taking a 20%+ hit right now.

heartbreak2• 4 years ago

To further compound the problem, a significant chunk of Musk’s financing for the deal relies on leveraging (some of) his TSLA for a $12b or so loan. The loan mechanics require TSLA to maintain $740 or higher. When the deal was announced, it was $1,026. It has closed below $740 for the past two days currently at $728.

RustyConsul2• 4 years ago

Every step of the way some armchair comes up and concludes that Elon is broke and this deal won't go through.

Why wouldn't he put up more Tesla as collateral? How do you know he can't get more financing? How much BTC, Doge and eth does he have? No one knows how rich this man is, people need to stop acting like they do.

hathym• 4 years ago

I tought Elon is much smarter thatn that, he could have purchased twitter with TSLA stocks in an exchange deal without dumping them on the market.

coding123• 4 years ago

Well if his only goal was to get Trump back on the platform, perhaps it's better he loses 1bn and fail instead of 42b and Trump back on? - and even if he loses the billion, Trump might still get back on.

mediaman3• 4 years ago

The $1b is not a simple breakup fee. He can't just say, "I've changed my mind, here's $1b, the deal is off." It's not a $1b option to walk away.

The merger contract provides the option to pay $1b to walk away under only limited circumstances: either the acquisition is blocked by a government, or Musk fails to get financing for the deal. The latter can't really be easily faked: if he said 'sorry, I thought I had the money, but I checked my couch cushions and it turns out I don't,' and paid the $1b to walk away, Twitter would sue and this assertion that his financing broke down would be tested by the courts.

In fact, out of those limited allowances to pay the $1b and walk away, Musk is bound by the contract to 'specific performance'. That is, he's bound to actually do it. Pay the $54.20.

A good M&A analysis of the situation is below.

https://yetanothervalueblog.substack.com/p/quick-twtr-though...

belter3• 4 years ago

This is the agreement:

PDF: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e437...

I don't see mention of the number of Twitter users and investigation on fake accounts. I guess that falls under the misrepresentation of accounting section. It looks like a fairly standard acquisition/merger contract.

The mention of the 1 Billion penalty is however pretty easy to find.

anonu2• 4 years ago

It seems like he only needed to put up $4bn of his own money. The rest of the financing was leveraged with loans. And some investors would also keep their shares (like the Saudis)

I'm pretty sure "funding secured" in this case.

jollybean3• 4 years ago

It would be utterly, glibly and completely insane for Musk, or anyone, to buy Twitter outright with their own money.

Musk should be in for several billion, surely, but the rest of the money should have come fro Private Equity / Buyout partners.

I assumed that this was the case, not just him putting up Tesla stock as collateral.

jjcon• 4 years ago

TSLA fell by like $200 or like 20%

Everything is down this year - TSLA isn't down as much as Ford in 2022... I'm not sure twitter had tons to do with TSLA stock being down.

caycep2• 4 years ago

i mean...that's one way to get the next round of VC funding (or equivalents...)!

newaccount2021• 4 years ago

Damage to Twitter is terminal even if Musk walks

The board and execs consented to a takeover by an ideological adversary...the company culture is smashed and will never return

If he walks, the stock craters and employees know the board is no longer invested in the future...if the deal goes through, employees will have to March to Elon's beat or be fired. Either way...bye Twitter

nickthegreek• 4 years ago

plus they just fired 2 high level employees yesterday.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

This sounds like some kind of ancient samurai lore wrapped in traditions of sacrifice and nobility.....instead of a business deal happening in the United States of America.

"Consented to takeover by an ideological adversary" -- why, because Trump is banned? Is Musk going to try to bluff Facebook with an offer too?

What if the deal fails? How will Musk ever live down the dishonor?

abofh2• 4 years ago

Twitter would pocket a billion dollars - ~5x its net cash flow for last year - why on earth would it sell for _less_ when it can invest that cash in just about anything? He'd be buying the company years of runway to build... whatever it wants - at that point I'd invest in twitter as soon as Musk's check cleared.

This isn't a renegotiation, this is him paying points on his mortgage for a lower rate - but where the points paid go towards the previous owners either way.

amptorn• 4 years ago

The offered price to buy Twitter is ~220 times its net annual cash flow? Something about that does not compute.

brentm2• 4 years ago

Without this deal TWTR could easily be $15-$20 right now.

mannykannot• 4 years ago

I am not a lawyer, let alone a securities lawyer, but from what I have seen over the years, I suspect that if he just backed out but did not renegotiate, or did not do so with a plausibly-acceptable offer, he would likely be sued by Twitter stockholders claiming his actions had done harm to Twitter's valuation - a claim which can at least be made even though the market is falling broadly. If that puts pressure on him to renegotiate, that pressure would seem to strengthen the Twitter board's hand in seeking a considerable premium over whatever the then-current valuation of Twitter will be.

It is not clear to me that the personal cost to Musk would be less than what he initially expected it to be, measured in units of Tesla stock, though I agree it could be less than if he completes the current deal.

As for the spammers thing, Musk waived an extensive due-diligence investigation, and now he is complaining about issues that should have been covered by that investigation.

JeremyNT• 4 years ago

Musk should just pay the break fee of $1bn, and renegotiate for $42.69 or whatever meme number he fancies. Why pay $42bn total for something when you can get it for $30bn.

I just assumed this is his plan here? He manipulates the market with his shenanigans and trash talking, lowers the price of Twitter by a massive amount, then buys it for a bargain.

fullshark3• 4 years ago

He breaks, says his independent investigation says 5-30% of Twitter is bots. Price tanks even further than natural market would dictate. Buy at a much lower price.

gordon_freeman• 4 years ago

He specifically said this is his final offer and he does not want to do back and forth to negotiate the deal. Then why would he do it now? It would look like he is not keeping his word/promise by not respecting his "final offer". He should just admit that he paid too much for the deal and just pay up and move on.

rtkwe3• 4 years ago

Yeah and he's said for half a decade now full self driving was coming next year. Never believe a Musk timeline.

gizzlon• 4 years ago

Did Hindenburg call it a few days ago? :

As a result of these developments, we believe that if Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter disappeared tomorrow, Twitter’s equity would fall by 50% from current levels. Consequently, we see a significant risk that the deal gets repriced lower.

https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

dkjaudyeqooe2• 4 years ago

Musk didn't really think this through before he acted.

A great way to spend a billion!

dylan6042• 4 years ago

Does it stipulate that the billion has to be in cash? What if he trades rides to the ISS for the board members? If it doesn't have to be in cash, then it could cost Musk less than the number of the contract.??

JYellensFuckboy• 4 years ago

Is this legal? It seems like such a devious exploit.

1. Announce buyout (priced at a premium, of course) is "on hold"

2. Stock drops due to bad news

3. Re-negotiate for lower buyout after manipulating the stock to a lower price

542458• 4 years ago

No, that's not legal. Trying to back out of this deal because market fluctuations caused the company to be worth less than he wanted would be very, very much against his contract.

He can only back out is Twitter's securities filings are so wrong that profit projections are more than 40% off (MAE standard) or he was unable to secure financing. Spambots being a bit higher than projected is not enough to break the contract, especially given that Musk waived due diligence and that the Twitter filings have always said that the bot number is an estimate. Elon Musk's lawyers are probably more than a bit panicked right now.

pyinstallwoes3• 4 years ago

It's probably with this highly evident fact: https://bird.trom.tf/elonmusk/status/1524909413462573058#m

pclmulqdq2• 4 years ago

The break fee is not an option, it's a penalty. Twitter can sue him to force the deal to go through unless it's off for a specific reason.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

Musk is worth 2-3x Twitter. I'm guessing he can afford better lawyers to win this case. He also has much more at stake.

Saint_Genet• 4 years ago

I mena, he’s obviously rich as hell, but the imaginary la la land of his reported net work isn’t real. When it comes to actually forking over real money he can’t afford to buy twitter

myko2• 4 years ago

It's more likely Musk never intended to go through with it but got caught up in his own bravado. Now reality is coming in hard. He was going to lose a lot on this deal.

throwaway4good• 4 years ago

The whole world knows that there is more spam than 5% (depending on how you measure it).

This is just a way of getting out of the deal and/or negotiating a better price; in particular now that general market valuations have changed.

dzdt• 4 years ago

Musk is already locked into the deal. If it is possible for him to back out he will have at least one billion dollars in breakup fees. [1]

This could be a setup to give him an reason to cause a breakup of the deal (he can't just walk away!) but there are real money consequences.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-02/twitte...

kibwen7• 4 years ago

Whether or not Elon Musk is worth $42 billion or $41 billion is completely immaterial to his quality of life. This is why gonzo-extreme wealth inequality ruins the power of markets: once the marginal value of a dollar falls to zero for any given actor, they can keep a market irrational indefinitely with no penalty.

If you're the sort of person who wants to believe in the power of markets, then you need to make sure that every participant has actual skin in the game, which means stopping people from accumulating so much wealth that they render the market permanently irrational, and the irony is that fomenting runaway wealth inequality is a natural tendency of markets.

SantalBlush2• 4 years ago

This is why gonzo-extreme wealth inequality ruins the power of markets: once the marginal value of a dollar falls to zero for any given actor, they can keep a market irrational indefinitely with no penalty.

This is an excellent point. Our assumptions of rationality don't hold up as well with this amount of money. One billion dollars means something totally different to him than it means to the average person.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

After the market crash a day ago, there was a joke on Twitter about Musk cancelling the offer, burning a billion and buying Twitter later at a half price.

Conspiracies and jokes aside, how one determines(at contractually acceptable certainty) what accounts are absolutely fake or bot account? It's not like they ticked the checkbox saying "I am a fake account".

If the sellers and buyers are not on the same page here, wouldn't that drag in court for years maybe?

After all, maybe Musk will actually burn a billion only to buy Twitter later at a half price or less and save $20B+. Twitter might end to be much more cheaper after a stock crash due to the bearish markets and that fake users scandal(?) that Musk exposed(?).

matwood• 4 years ago

Except when the market as a whole goes down it impacts everyone who was bringing money to the table in this deal. I wonder if the financing he's gathered is getting nervous. It might be harder for him to raise the money again, even if the price is better.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

Tesla stock also suffered quite a lot, AFAIK that was how Musk was going to finance the deal.

That said, Tesla doesn't have "more than %5 fake users" problem that came out just as the deal was closing. I guess Musk is a luck man.

seydor2• 4 years ago

bots are not fake, they can be useful accounts. I have one that still works, another kept being taken down so i stopped reinstating it. To say that twitter is ran by schoolchildren would be understatement

once_inc• 4 years ago

how one determines(...) what accounts are absolutely fake

Right now, Twitter's ability to ferret out fake accounts is just completely ineffective. In the communities I follow, I see literally hundreds of reply posts under each tweet of certain people, all with the same profile picture as the OP, all tweeting about giveaways.

Twitter should be focussed on cleaning up their product, and one of the variables required for that is knowing what amount of users are being used to spam scam messages. The fact that they can't means twitter's development isn't prioritising it. A ballpark estimate of the order of magnitude of that figure should be possible for them if they were in any way actively trying to solve the problem, which they are obviously not doing.

can16358p2• 4 years ago

They can do much better if they wanted to. They don't.

There are very obvious patterns that I as a single person can see about fake accounts.

Twitter, a huge tech company with access to a lot of engineers and AI, can probably do much better than me.

They don't because they don't want to.

fijiaarone4• 4 years ago

Here’s a program that can detect bots

  For user in Twitter:
    Confirmation = random(number)
    Send user message(“if you are not a bot reply with”, confirmation)

Variations can be devised but the real risk is that it also identifies inactive accounts.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

You know how iPhones can extract verification codes from SMS? The botmasters will simply create a regex to extract the number and reply accordingly.

g_sch4• 4 years ago

Aren't you just suggesting a very simple CAPTCHA challenge? This is an area that has seen an arms race for over a decade of platforms coming up with increasingly complex "human-intelligence" challenges, and botmasters coming up with increasingly ingenious ways to bypass them (including, sometimes, using real human intelligence)

shmatt2• 4 years ago

As a private company, Musk can also set his own management fees / owner compensation / call it what ever

1) Pay $1B fine to Twitter

2) Buy cheaper

3) Get a $1B chairman first year bonus from Twitter

He'll probably find a way to write it off on taxes as well

closedloop129• 4 years ago

The $1B are lost in (2). He will have to pay about $1B more if he has to pay the fee to twitter because then the company is worth $1B more.

It's not $1B exactly because he already owns some shares so he doesn't have to pay extra for those.

LZ_Khan2• 4 years ago

I could see the captcha solution someone mentioned being possible.

Take a randomly selected group of 10,000 active users, show them a captcha, and look at the percentage of respondents.

blisterpeanuts• 4 years ago

Random captchas ("We need to re-confirm you're a human") sounds like a great idea, although annoying to someone just wanting to post a quick 20-word tweet.

But it would have the useful side effect of slowing people down from tweeting impulsively, a practice that demeans the conversation and sometimes ends careers.

mrtksn7• 4 years ago

This may work

paulpauper• 4 years ago

this would not work well because the sample would be biased

newer accounts are much more likely to be bots compared to older ones

you would have to sample IDs by age and create a distribution based on ID age

And then you can extrapolate how many overall are fake

yakubin• 4 years ago

Twitter Incestimated [...]

That's an unfortunate bot error from Reuters. For a moment I thought I was mistaken about what "Inc." should expand to.

zxienin• 4 years ago

is this what legally valid, openly public, stock manipulation looks like?

anonu2• 4 years ago

Pretty sure the SEC is going to love this one.

Aillustrator• 4 years ago

Is there a reason that when you are not logged in, the comments below a tweet are sorted by time rather than upvotes?

This makes it pretty hard (in case of a popular tweet like this one impossible) to find the more important replies.

keiferski3• 4 years ago

I don’t understand how an acquisition offer that takes months to finalize doesn’t account for changes in the stock price. Is that standard practice?

FabHK4• 4 years ago

yeah, apparently. If the market collapses, or Twitter collapses due to bad earnings, that is not enough to walk away, according to Matt Levine:

Much of the negotiation in a merger agreement is over what might go wrong: How could the deal fall through, and what would happen if it does? We talked about the main issues yesterday, and let’s go through them again.
1. Can Musk just change his mind? The short answer is no. If Musk changes his mind without a good reason, Twitter can force him to close the deal, as long as his debt financing is available. That is, if all of the conditions to closing are satisfied, and if Musk’s banks are willing to fund the $13 billion of Twitter debt and $12.5 billion of Tesla margin loans that they’ve promised, then Twitter can force Musk to put up the $21 billion of cash that he has promised and close the deal. (Section 9.9(b).) Short of that, though — short of actually forcing Musk to close the deal, which is tricky — Musk’s liability is limited to a reverse termination fee of $1 billion.[7] This is exactly what I laid out yesterday, except that I assumed the reverse termination fee would be $1,420,690,000, because Elon Musk loves meme numbers and Twitter seems willing to play along. The $1 billion breakup fee, while pretty standard for a deal of this size, is bizarre for an Elon Musk deal. Not a 420 in sight! (420 is a weed joke.)
2. What if Twitter’s business breaks? Musk does not have to close the deal if there has been a “material adverse effect” at Twitter. (Sections 4.9 and 7.2(b).) “Material adverse effect” is defined on page 5 of the agreement and it is long. Actually the definition doesn’t say much; it just says, tautologically, that a “Material Adverse Effect” is “any change, event, effect or circumstance which, individually or in the aggregate, has resulted in or would reasonably be expected to result in a material adverse effect on the business, financial condition or results of operations” of Twitter. All the action is in the exceptions to the MAE. As I suggested yesterday, there are lots of them, and it is somewhat difficult to think of an event that would cause a material adverse effect on Twitter’s business but not be covered by an exception to the MAE. If Twitter does badly due to all sorts of general conditions (changes in law, general economic and financial conditions, pandemics, etc.), that does not count as an MAE. If Twitter fails “to meet internal, analysts’ or other earnings estimates or financial projections or forecasts for any period,” that doesn’t count as an MAE; just having bad earnings isn’t enough. And, as usual, bad effects that result from “the negotiation, execution, announcement, performance, consummation or existence of this Agreement or the transactions contemplated by this Agreement” do not count as an MAE, though here they felt it necessary to spell out “including (A) by reason of the identity of Elon Musk, Parent or any of their Affiliates or their respective financing sources, or any communication by Parent or any of its Affiliates or their respective financing sources, including regarding their plans or intentions with respect to the conduct of the business of the Company.” If Elon Musk breaks Twitter by tweeting his plans for it, he still has to buy it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-27/bill-h...

keiferski3• 4 years ago

Strange. Makes the whole thing seem more like a theatrical bid for attention than a serious acquisition offer.

danaris3• 4 years ago

But, as various people are pointing out, if Musk has to pay the $1B penalty, that's hardly going to hurt him...and if Twitter's stock price drops by, say, 30%, that gives Musk a clear opening to save over 10x that penalty on a future offer.

Now, there's still a reasonable question as to whether the board would be willing to consider a second offer if he does something like that with the first one, but it's certainly not a guarantee that they'd turn up their noses.

shapefrog9• 4 years ago

doesn’t account for changes in the stock price

It does.

keiferski3• 4 years ago

So then the theories about Elon wanting to get out of the deal (because the shares have lost value) are incorrect?

FabHK4• 4 years ago

The inimitable Matt Levine in his Bloomberg Money Stuff column, two days ago:

As I have said before:

"Uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past."

Perhaps he has decided that the joke would be even funnier if he signed a merger agreement, lined up billions of dollars of financing from banks and equity partners, committed to a $1 billion breakup fee and a specific-performance right in the merger agreement, got through antitrust review and a shareholder vote, showed up at the closing and said “nope, just kidding!” I mean, that would be very funny.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-11/terra-...

aliswe2• 4 years ago

It wasn't a joke though, the Saudi Investment Fund made the promise to back it up, which was allegedly witnessed by the Tesla CFO as well.

shapefrog9• 4 years ago

Musk had one 30-minute conversation about potentially taking Tesla private with the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund (“Saudi PIF”) on July 31, 2018. No price was discussed, no structure for the transaction was proposed, no amount of funding was agreed.

That is the full extent of the promise to back it up.

If it wasnt a joke or stock price manipulation to stop loans against the stock from triggering, then Musk is retarded. Its pretty obvious he isnt retarded so it must be one of the other options.

hooande10• 4 years ago

I started reading this column to follow this saga, and I have been delighted so far. He has a way of explaining very complex financial topics in a way that's easy to understand. And his writing about the twitter deal is full of wit and personality.

It's a great tragedy that his column is off today. Cannot wait to see what he has to say on Monday

abawany• 4 years ago

He sometimes makes an exception to his day off if the events merit it, in his opinion. There might yet be a column today.

Dwolb2• 4 years ago

Has anyone here done this calculation before?

How hard is it to reliably spot fake accounts across millions of users for SEC-level reporting fidelity?

dools3• 4 years ago

The craziest thing in this world is that there are more conspiracy theories about Bill Gates being a super villain than Elon Musk.

Talk about the opposite sketches!

mikkergp10• 4 years ago

It seems like there’s a growing distrust of seriousness lately. Caring isn’t cool or whatever.

headsoup2• 4 years ago

If you look into What Bill Gates' attention is focused on (massive landholder, wants the world fed synthetic beef, hopes the next pandemic will be centrally managed and controlled, ownership stakes in media, connected to Epstein), regardless of intent these things have 'scarier' implications than Musk's electric vehicles, rockets and Twitter ownership.

danaris3• 4 years ago

Indeed; Musk just looks like a cartoon villain.

Gates walks the walk.

dools3• 4 years ago

Gates’ attention is focused on solving problems for people in emerging economies.

What you’ve quoted are the types of batshit crazy conspiracy theories I’m referring to.

patrec2• 4 years ago

Are there plausible links between this announcement and the recent Twitter firings?

strogonoff• 4 years ago

I doubt the Twitter acquisition by Musk will go through, regardless of stated reasons.

China is the second biggest market after the US for Tesla sales—meaning CCP wields the power to decimate Musk’s wealth, which Tesla stock is the main source of. Musk knows Tesla’s position in China is fragile (like that of any Western company), and the Chinese government knows he knows that; it seems unlikely they will pass on newly found leverage when it comes to influencing discourse on Western social media.

By owning Twitter, Musk risks having to choose between his image as free speech maximalist and a large part of Tesla’s sales. From the outside, he doesn’t strike me as someone willing to sacrifice either. (He could implement some mechanism that gives CCP direct or indirect influence over Twitter without the public finding out, but that seems a bit far-fetched.)

So far there seems to be no mainstream Western social platform that stands to lose anything by ignoring CCP’s censors. We don’t see YouTube videos, Facebook posts or tweets taken down due to requests from Chinese government. Revenue from China is not a factor for any of their mother companies. I think that’s a good status quo to maintain.

LeicaLatte2• 4 years ago

How is this not hypocrisy? Isn't all social networking spam? Elon would do well to embrace the strengths of the medium rather than run away from it. I expected his amazebrains to understand this but maybe he is getting too old for modern tech.

RivieraKid5• 4 years ago

Tweet from 3 days ago by Hindenburg Research:

NEW FROM US: We Are Short Twitter
Musk Holds All The Cards. We See a Significant Risk That The Twitter Deal Gets Repriced Lower

Space Karen's reply:

Interesting. Don’t forget to look on the bright side of life sometimes!

https://twitter.com/HindenburgRes/status/1523677782211186690

xuki2• 4 years ago

On the bright side they can probably get out of their position today for 15-20% profit. Not bad for a 3 days trade.

philosopher1234• 4 years ago

Space Karen! That’s good

TrispusAttucks• 4 years ago

I don't get all the hate here.

If Twitter lied about spambot counts that violates the deal.

Bubble_Pop_2213• 4 years ago

Hindenburg Research (which is notorious for unmasking frauds, stock promoters and market manipulators) called it on May 9th:

https://twitter.com/HindenburgRes/status/1523677782211186690

Musk tried to use all his 90M followers weight and his snark belitteling them into closing the short :

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1523693971842957312

Good on them for not listening to the noise and making bank.

In many years of watching sports, politics, business, culture I have seldom seen a more distasteful character than mr. Musk.

Back in my ignorant days I couldn't stand shortsellers, I considered them to be haters.

Oh so little did I know. They are the custodian of market sanity and also the saviors of the American consumer, they keep in check these megalomaniacal cult figures such as Musk, Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Adam Neumann who enrich themselves by inflating financial bubbles of epic proportions while providing little to no quality of life to the consumer

mcintyre1994• 4 years ago

Dumb question, do you know why he’d care about shorts? He’s already agreed a price, does it really matter if people are buying and selling it way lower than that before he buys it all? Is it just an appearance thing?

polygamous_bat2• 4 years ago

Short sellers push the price down, so on the chance he does go through with the purchase, he is seen like a fool who overpaid for the stock. And we all know how much narcissists like looking like fools.

Traster3• 4 years ago

I don't think he was pressuring them to close the short, I think he was hinting that it'd be good for him if he could reprice the deal.

zionic2• 4 years ago

No one takes short-n-distort crews seriously after the 2016-2018 disaster.

leobg3• 4 years ago

If you equate Musk with Holmes I cannot take anything you say seriously. Wishful thinking at is finest.

marban• 4 years ago

“Puer aeternus is Latin for ‘eternal boy’, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young”

drumhead• 4 years ago

Elon Musk overpaid for Twitter, he knows it and it looks like he's trying to knock the price down or exit the deal entirely

netfortius• 4 years ago

Shorting Twitter, out of the public eye, on the other hand, is perfectly Musk-like approach (see previous Tesla stock manipulation). Simple and efficient

blantonl• 4 years ago

Elon Musk is the Donald Trump of market manipulators. Is there a formal term for this type of leadership that both exhibit? Rapid ready-fire-aim comments and actions? Constantly keeping everyone involved laser focused on what could be coming next, scared to death.

Is this what the future of executive and political leadership looks like? The bull in the china shop?

Both personalities will be graduate level studies of sociology and phycology for years to come. And the crazy thing is that this stuff resonates so well with so many people (read: the cult of Trump and Elon)

marstall• 4 years ago

Can some explain what the spam/fake accounts are? In my little corner of 4 or 5 accounts with 2500 followers total, and a dozen or so hashtags I check frequently, I really rarely see spam or bot accounts ... I mean they pop up but its not a major aspect of twitter for me in my daily experience. And I use twitter a LOT.

Are they counting my +1 accounts as fake? they're not, they each represent a different side of myself that's real, even if they don't bear my name. one for a site I created, one for a particular community I participate in, etc...

fleddr• 4 years ago

If Twitter is true to their word that bots are less than 5% of the user base, then they should not have a problem providing evidence for that. It's an entirely valid question not just in Musk's interest, it's in the interest of every shareholder.

The only questionable thing here is that Musk either does not grasp (or care) how influential his tweets are. He's tweeting as if he's just a random person with an opinion, but in reality his tweets tank stocks, pump (or dump) crypto, and activates a lot of harassment towards anybody he criticizes. With this in mind, the question about bots should have been asked behind closed doors.

Usually, I don't at all have the impression that there's some evil master plan behind it, they are spontaneous clumsy tweets based on whatever is bothering him.

Which in this case are bots that make Twitter unusable for him, or anybody else with a large following. Twitter very much deserves scrutiny and heavy criticism as it comes to bots. Look at Musk's tweets, within seconds there's hundreds of bots replying all with the same avatar and a slight misspelling of a user they're trying to mimic.

It's a stunningly primitive pattern, and yet still Twitter is entirely incompetent or lax to address it. For years. These bot replies come in from their API and work based on accounts or simple keywords.

Don't try this on somebody else's tweet, but you can test this yourself. Type "I need help with my metamask password". The moment you hit send, the notifications come rolling in.

Setting aside Musk's intentions with Twitter, I am fully in favor of the wake-up call. The bot problem. A mysterious verification protocol. Weird boosts and declines in followers. Unclear censorship and shadow banning protocols. Twitter has some explaining to do.

chewbacha• 4 years ago

Could it have to do with the recent stock/crypto slump? Perhaps he doesn’t have the cash any more because his assets have rapidly diminished in value since he begun the take over.

It’s not clear to me why the calculation over bots and spam would threaten the deal.

imron• 4 years ago

Twitter Inc estimated.

Oh the difference a missing space makes.

schmeckleberg2• 4 years ago

I think the (TWRT_T) link in the press release got removed by a summarizing bot or a summarizing intern. Thus, through chance and endless change, the English language has again been improved. I do believe I will now add "incestimate" to my personal lexicon for any assessment of an entity's value that comes from that self-same entity.

arrakis2021• 4 years ago

This could be why senior execs were let go yesterday. Heavily inflated numbers putting the deal at risk of a significantly lower price.

irthomasthomas• 4 years ago

Don't believe it. Twitter made this filing May 2, and it took Musk 11 days to respond?

MichaelMoser1236• 4 years ago

It is possible, that Musk didn't expect the twitter deal to become as politicised, as it did. Maybe he just got afraid of getting into the center of politics in the US. For example the state is a major customer, and they could just stop buying launch services from SpaceX for example, as the president might not agree with the politics of Mr Musk.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pentagon-terminates-controvers...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDe7OGpPodM

elliekelly2• 4 years ago

If Musk wasn't aware of the political, contractual, and regulatory implications of the twitter deal then he wasn't listening to his legal team. It seems to be one of his favorite business strategies.

MichaelMoser1236• 4 years ago

Interesting perspective. Actually the US government payed for the service:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/08/us-quietl...

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/spacex-ukraine-elon-musk-...

MichaelMoser1236• 4 years ago

I think that Musk is not very good at politics, However I might be wrong.

hristov• 4 years ago

I hate to point to my old posts and say I told you so but ... actually now that I am doing it, I am not hating it that much. Anyways, Elon did not have the money to buy Twitter, he had to sell a bunch of Tesla stock to do so, he tried to sell some stock and then the price of Tesla stock collapsed and there you have it. Just as I said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31109355#31111059

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

I mean he was literally buying twitter? How did he not have the money for it? Now that new information has come to light the deal is on hold. Maybe he came to his senses and realized twitter isn't worth what he's paying for it and that it will probably become a wasteland if he succeeds in making it "absolute free, short of violent threats, speech" friendly.

outworlder8• 4 years ago

the deal is on hold.

The deal cannot be put on hold. It's either moving forward or it isn't.

LZ_Khan2• 4 years ago

If twitter could detect what accounts were spam/fake accounts.. wouldn't they just.. ban them?

The number of spam/fake accounts depends highly on the accuracy of your classifier. Twitter's classifier could just be: "This account is not fake" and there's nothing Elon could say. He can't even sue because for all intents and purposes Twitter is not lying, the classifier is just wrong.

FYYFFF2• 4 years ago

No, they need to show user growth. This is the problem with the public markets. Companies must grow, QoQ or they are a failure. Its at the root of so many of our issues. Some businesses should not grow, or need not grow. Stability is good for the market, but not good for today's Wall St pump and dump where the goal is to fleece others, not to build a viable, reliable business.

Traster3• 4 years ago

Well this certainly makes what Parag did make sense. The market conditions have essentially dictated that Musk is now massively overpaying for twitter, and he's doing it from a weak position with the value of Tesla dropping. It would be insane for him to close at this price, and the other people who bought in to finance it will also be very hard to keep on board. So Musk needs to walk away at this price. The question is whether he can either find an out that doesn't involve paying the break up fee, or bully Twitter's board to accept a lower price. Given how Parag is behaving I think that's unlikely.

It's important to remember though, if Musk walks away and then comes back with another offer it's going to be extremely hard to convince of a new deal, since Musk no longer has any credibility.

The other thing to consider is that no one else wanted to buy Twitter for $45Bn. But let's say Musk walks away and Twitter drops back to where it should be at around $25 per share. Now you could easily see someone coming in and picking it up for $35-40 per share.

boringg5• 4 years ago

I think that's why he's hunting for the less than 5 % spam accounts. If that isn't accurate I bet you it allows them out of the breakup fee.

Also probably difficult for Musk to go in at a lower price if the deal falls apart. Best and most likely only route forward for twitter ownership by Musk is probably board agreeing to a lower price but prices are sticky in peoples mind so might be tough times ahead.

minsc_and_boo6• 4 years ago

If that isn't accurate I bet you it allows them out of the breakup fee.

Not really. There's nothing in the deal contingent on this and Twitter has no fiscal or regulatory responsibility to report which accounts are fully human or not human. Having APIs and allowing bots shows that Twitter is open about having bot accounts.

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

To further expand on Parag: he might’ve fired his political enemies who expressed support for Elon.

Or at least that’s my theory. What was yours?

Traster3• 4 years ago

My theory is that he is actually just acting like the deal won't close. The plans they put in place after the activist shareholder have largely failed and now the market conditions are way worse. So he's going to bring in some new people and make a big pivot to some other revenue streams. I don't know what that is yet, but I think that'll emerge over the next 6-12 months.

mikkergp10• 4 years ago

Yeah this is the main question in my head Im curious to see how it plays out. Assuming Musk comes back at a lower price that may be shrewd negotiating, but once he buys they’re out right? Taking a 20% haircut on your investment seems like something a lot of people may not swallow, especially if they think the market will turn around and trust Parag. Heck, there stock was like at 65 a year ago.

Tycho• 4 years ago

This takeover attempt carries a similar world historical significance to the Girardian interpretation of the Crucifixion.

Jesus exposed the underlying collective violence, the scapegoat mechanism, that holds society together. Exposing the hidden mechanism weakens it, its psychological efficacy. And so of course the powers that be reacted, trying to silence Jesus and suppress his movement. But in doing so they only proved Jesus’s point, turning him into the ultimate example of the scapegoat and ensuring his message would echo through the ages.

In the Information age, Musk is exposing the informational violence, censorship and propaganda, that power relies upon. And so of course the powers that be conspire to thwart his takeover attempt of the world’s most important social network, pulling the levers of law and regulation and politics to stop this simple business transaction, while running defamatory stories about him in the press. But in doing so they only reveal the true extent of their lies and deceit, ensuring Musk’s message reverberates through the public consciousness. The moment of revelation is inescapable.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 4 years ago

Is this a joke?

schmeckleberg2• 4 years ago

I think it's art and, as the youths are wont to say, I am here for it!

pram• 4 years ago

Musk is Christ is the hottest take I’ve seen in this thread so far, thanks!

roamerz• 4 years ago

Elon is a smart guy and while this may seem knee jerkish to some and attributable to mental characteristics by others I’m pretty certain it will work out for him. Why? Look at his past accomplishments. This guy is a visionary and isn’t afraid to take risks to get’r done. Disclaimer: Not even close to smart enough to judge this guy.

frob• 4 years ago

Disclaimer: Not even close to smart enough to judge this guy.

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all.

FYYFFF2• 4 years ago

Toxic hubris. The man is high on his own supply and he's acting like a spoiled child. I have no respect for this kind of stuff from a mature, capable person. Its trolling and it's destructive.

dcow2• 4 years ago

Curious why this is immediately about Elon and his psyche? Is it not possible that Twitter may have/be wildly understated/ing how many fake accounts are present on its platform in an effort to stay above water and such information is coming to light during diligence? Wouldn't that type of discovery put any “normal” deal on hold? It’s usually not great as a buyer when you discover the item you just bought or are looking to buy isn’t actually worth what you perceived or were lead to believe it is which is why these deals involve diligence in the first place.

mirceal2• 4 years ago

It's because of his way of doing things in the past and his credibility. Why does he even need to announce this on Twitter if this isn't another one of his schemes.

If this was anyone else we wouldn't bat an eyelid.

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

People on HN really despise him. I think I saw someone call him Space Karen.

This entire comment section is frothing with hate, and not much objectivity.

bambax• 4 years ago

Uniquely among public-company CEOs, Elon Musk has in the past pretended he was going to take a public company private with pretend financing! I am not saying that he’s joking now; I am just saying he’s the only person who has ever made this particular joke in the past.
Perhaps he has decided that the joke would be even funnier if he signed a merger agreement, lined up billions of dollars of financing from banks and equity partners, committed to a $1 billion breakup fee and a specific-performance right in the merger agreement, got through antitrust review and a shareholder vote, showed up at the closing and said “nope, just kidding!” I mean, that would be very funny.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-11/terra-...

rossdavidh• 4 years ago

Score another one for Hindenburg, who predicted something like this (and bet on it) less than a week before it happened: https://hindenburgresearch.com/twitter/

mupuff12342• 4 years ago

Are there numbers/estimates for % of bots in other social media sites?

sysadm1n• 4 years ago

https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1525049369552048129

gigatexal• 4 years ago

Anyone else laughing maniacally? I am. This is so great. Tesla is tanking. Twitter is, too (and so is the market in general but if the Twitter deal were a sure thing it’d be trading at near 54.20 but it’s not…). I think the market is finally figuring out that Musk is a smart guy with no filter and says anything he wants to because he was given a platform because Tesla’s stock has 10x’d.

livinglist• 4 years ago

Hopefully those Tesla/Elon Musk fanboys finally realize that Elon musk is just another capitalist with some sugar coat lol

Vladimof• 4 years ago

Only one top level comment visible on the first page ...

Underphil• 4 years ago

You have to hand it to the man. I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, and have zero interest in Twitter, yet I'm drawn to this comments section like a moth to a flame.

He knows what he's doing.

xlpqt• 4 years ago

I guess Twitter can ban Musk now for not going through with the deal. If that happens, where will he get all the attention?

shapefrog9• 4 years ago

you have to delete your twitter account

The deal break clause should have been this...

alkonaut• 4 years ago

The wording of the contract had lots of text describing the various ways in which either party could become liable for backing out of the deal.

If I was to ever make a deal involving Elon Musk the first thing I’d make sure is to have paragraphs making it clear that Elon doesn’t open his mouth about it until the deal is either completed or cancelled.

FollowingTheDao• 4 years ago

Who deserves this much attention? Elon or the countless people with mental illnesses living on the street?

Invictus0• 4 years ago

There's no one in finance on HN and it shows. Elon can pay the $1Bn breakup fee and renegotiate the deal at a lower price, given the current market conditions. This is completely reasonable and rational, and Hindenburg called it days ago; but the top comment right now is arguing that Elon is "unhinged".

greenglass2• 4 years ago

Surprised that people know so much about Musk and claim they don’t like him. I can see nerding out on your hero or whatever, but to be motivated to research his personal upbringing out of disdain for the man strikes me as a bit unhinged. As someone who is 60/40 pro musk it’s bizarre the emotions he triggers in certain types of people. If we could somehow harness that energy…

flavius296632• 4 years ago

If we could somehow harness that energy…

I think Musk already figured this out: he's overworking his employees and overselling to his customers. He's a marketing genius, better than Steve Jobs

systemvoltage2• 4 years ago

Did you ever wonder that employees wanted to work for Steve Jobs and Elon Musk?

From my experience, and personal contacts that have both joined and left SpaceX, this is the case.

These comments never made any sense. A job at Tesla is not akin to Slavery. But most people act like it is. Why?

tombert• 4 years ago

I don't think it's weird. I know a lot about the life of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy and Bernie Madoff, but that doesn't mean that I like them. Not trying to compare Musk to a serial killer or a Ponzi schemer, but my point is that I think most of his critics will acknowledge that he's an interesting person, even if they think he's a douchebag.

greenglass2• 4 years ago

I think he is interesting. The details of his father’s financial transactions feels a little bit obsessive but yeah, obviously if you are the sort to spend time studying Ted Bundy, I guess Elon’s father isn’t totally off brand. Who am I to judge. I find a lot of things interesting myself, though less often people, more often ideas. To each their own!

reducesuffering• 4 years ago

Musk really brings out some of the worst in this community. I suppose many have subconscious jealousy, because there's the delusions of grandeur types that "just know inside" that eventually they will be huge founder/CEO's of something, and yet no matter what it is, it will never live up to what Elon has done having success after success of the biggest kinds, fucking starting electric vehicles tackling climate change (!!) and the world's premier rocket (!!) company.

Not only that, but he really has the adulation of normies. I mean, this is supposed to be a community of builders, "definite optimism", that we can work hard and will good things into the universe. And yet, I have the most "degenerate" type people on Instagram posting clips of Elon speaking how we need to not get caught up on the doom mongering, it's not going to help us move humanity forward and actually do the things we need to do. Yet here, it's mostly negativity, "we're doomed and everything is shit".

I also frequent a forum about sport X. It's a young man's game and most spend tons of hours practicing it. So who frequents this forum? Generally, all the people who have aged out of it, unable to play all the time like they used to, and they are just shitting all over anything any professional does. I mean they are vicious on the slightest technical things, and yet they're all much worse, sitting on a forum criticizing it, instead of doing it. This thread reminded me of that so much.

LightG• 4 years ago

What's "funny" (sad/tragic not haha) is that his cult will have bought into this on the 'anything he touches turns to gold' tip.

RustyConsul2• 4 years ago

It's interesting that people are using this moment to fault Elon, when it's one of his finest moments. Making an 'offer' on what you believe to be good faith. Hidden in your pocket, you know the other party is acting in bad faith. (Twitter says 5% of the DAU is bots) Elon calls them out on that ridiculously low number, says the deal is on hold until this fraud is verified.

Obviously the bots on twitter account for more than 5%, and will be at the detriment of the biggest KPI that twitter touts. He's given them a taste of what will happen if they walk away from the deal by 'putting it on hold' and watching the stock lose 10% in precisely the same day as a general market recovery.

He now has the ability to renegotiate below his 'best and final offer'.

mikkergp10• 4 years ago

Seems like a risky move but this whole thing is high risk so, it’s not out of the question.

teachrdan5• 4 years ago

it's one of his finest moments

What if he dedicated this energy to reducing homelessness or slowing climate change? Showing up a tech company for having a lot of fake accounts seems more like a dick measuring contest than a fine moment for anyone.

pb7• 4 years ago

It's not his job to reduce homelessness or slow climate change. Dedicate your energy to getting your elected representatives to do their jobs. They have orders of magnitude more money and power.

mitch3x3• 4 years ago

So nothing Tesla has accomplished so far has helped toward slowing climate change going forward?

outworlder8• 4 years ago

Ah yes. Great securities fraud moment indeed.

9935c101ab17a663• 4 years ago

Elon calls them out on that ridiculously low number, says the deal is on hold until this fraud is verified.

This is a fantasy because that's not how any of this works. He can't put the deal on hold, the number of bots on twitter doesn't give him an out, regardless of wether it's five percent or 35 percent — in short, he doesn't have a position of leverage if twitter wants to pursue it legally. Read Matt Levine's latest columns for a complete and thorough breakdown.

This whole debacle is not some kind of '5D chess' move from Musk, it's just the inevitable outcome of a fickle, ego-driven billionaire throwing his money around, and possibly (deservedly!) losing a huge amount of his fortune.

leobg3• 4 years ago

That is your working hypothesis? A fickle, ego driven person gives the world the first reusable rockets and electric cars? I hope you’re just speaking like this out of anger.

hunterb1236• 4 years ago

ITT: conspiracy theories and personal insults

SantalBlush2• 4 years ago

Elon Musk called a guy a pedophile. He deserves to be insulted.

the_doctah2• 4 years ago

Don't care about the reasons, but finally one of these platforms are getting called on their BS.

MAU has a large impact on valuation, all of these platforms are filled with spam bots, and they are allowed to flourish because it pumps up those numbers. The platforms content suffers (Instagram comments anyone?), but they reach higher valuations because of these nonsense MAU numbers. They are all guilty of fraud. It's well within their ability to combat bots, but they have zero motivation to do so.

Eager to see what comes out of this.

floatinglotus• 4 years ago

The guy is a clown. Don’t trust what he says.

StillBored2• 4 years ago

I can't imagine any state, where this "deal" was anything other than a "I'm a bigger man than you" kind of thing. Probably fueled by some mind altering substances. All fine and dandy as long as its like a billionaire throwing a $100 bill at a bum, but when it turns out that it could sink his ship, or at least put him in serious financial trouble and threaten things he actually cares about, then he needs to find a way to get out of it.

I've been sorta a musk fan because he was willing to risk everything to pull off things that no one else was willing to take a risk on. OTOH, its patently obvious that he isn't some kind of genius, more like a gambler who managed a winning streak and somehow thinks its because they have a lucky charm. Maybe his biggest strength is that he is such a fine bullshitter he can detect it in others a mile away.

mrguyorama2• 4 years ago

Maybe his biggest strength is that he is such a fine bullshitter he can detect it in others a mile away.

Bullshitters who succeed have a strong tendency to start smelling their own farts and drinking their own koolaid

memish11• 4 years ago

Why do people think they have a better idea of his abilities and contributions than those who know him personally?

John Carmack: "Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so."

Here's Kevin Watson, who developed the avionics for Falcon 9 and Dragon and previously managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division at NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory:

"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.

He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.

He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."

Garrett Reisman, engineer and former NASA astronaut:

"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."

azemetre2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't it be better to ask people who have quit Elon's ventures rather than people that rely on him for employment or those that rely on his services? Seems heavily biased.

belter3• 4 years ago

If you are curious to see if he knows what he is talking about or not, you can hear it directly from him instead of from employees:

"Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI | Lex Fridman": https://youtu.be/DxREm3s1scA

My take after hearing the interview? Alex Fridman knows what is talking about, Elon Musk no.

teachrdan5• 4 years ago

Why do people think they have a better idea of his abilities than those who work with him?

It appears your argument is, "Elon is a great engineer, therefore he can't be messing around with his Twitter acquisition deal."

Your mistake is assuming that a great thinker cannot be mistaken, even outside his domain. A counterexample is the scientist who pioneered PCR. Kary Mullis won a Nobel Prize for his efforts! And yet he also believes in astrology and that HIV is not the cause of AIDS.

There's no reason to think that Elon Musk (who appears in no danger of winning a Nobel Prize) does not have his own goofy thoughts and actions, one of which appears to be making an insincere bid to buy Twitter just to make himself look big while weakening them. Time will tell whether that's the case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kary_Mullis#Views_on_HIV/AIDS_...

StillBored2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure any of those prove he is a genius (SD>>4 say). Why does every successful person have to be a super intelligent person? None of the quotes, the interviews I've heard, etc put beyond what I would expect of a reasonably intelligent engineer. Engineering/Science/Math attract "geeks" sometimes with frightening Jeopardy levels of breadth in general science/engineering/etc fields.

And given all the batsh*t crazy, conjecture, etc one hears from him, i'm inclined to believe its less unstable genius, more lucky nerd. That doesn't mean he isn't smart/driven/etc, it just means he isn't this big brain who can predict the future and knows the secret formula to living on mars. In some ways the successes are logical steps. AKA, the tesla manufacturing problems, translate to knowing how to avoid similar issues when building rockets. Most of what has been accomplished looks like well applied engineering, which is more about sweat than genius. So from the outside it looks more like a mix of gambling + luck + solid management skills + ability to avoid technical dead ends. Does that make him a genius, or just someone with tenacity? Given the failures and close calls, I'm included to believe its less genius, more tenacity and just enough luck. Both tesla and space-X have been one bad day away from not existing. The fact that they are still around is luck as much as skill.

CPLX2• 4 years ago

What's even more remarkable is that there's basically no tradition of rich and powerful people in business slapping each other on the back and praising each other in public, giving each other awards, going to the same parties, and doing favors for each other. Which makes these notable people praising the richest man in the world really stand out as obviously authentic.

misiti3780• 4 years ago

it's super simple, they're jealous.

mrtranscendence4• 4 years ago

Eh. He sounds like someone who has a breadth of interests, but that doesn't necessarily make him a genius. Obviously you'll find complimentary statements regarding the world's richest man, and if he's a fairly nerdy one such compliments will often take the form of "oh he's so smart". Maybe he is super smart. But it's not clear to me how someone with a deep knowledge of the matter could've said, in 2015, that 2018 would bring cars with "full self driving", nor how he could have made similar dead wrong forecasts in the years following.

At the very least he's lucky with respect to how he's never faced significant consequences for his great number of mistakes, boneheaded statements, and arguably criminal behavior.

ineedasername12• 4 years ago

Pure speculation: Musk still wants Twitter and doesn't care about the money that lawsuits or a breakup might cost. What he cares about is looking foolish for buying Twitter at a premium to it's stock price right before tech stock prices tumble even further.

In short, it's not about money, not about new information (% spam accounts), not about cold feet, it's about what he thinks would be seen as an embarrassingly bad business decision.

scollet• 4 years ago

Twitter is about to become a marketing platform.

rasz• 4 years ago

Its never to late for due diligence

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252512620/British-court-...

https://www.cio.com/article/304397/the-hp-autonomy-lawsuit-t...

In best case scenario might end up like this with Twitter CEO (which one) facing securities fraud charges.

wnevets• 4 years ago

Alwaleed bin Talal and the folks from Qatar are gonna be upset

tptacek2• 4 years ago

As Matt Levine points out in today's Money Stuff: no, it's not. There's no such thing as "temporarily on hold". Musk is obligated to buy Twitter. He can't just pay a break-up fee; Twitter can compel him to complete the deal. Musk's only "out" is that a Delaware court finds a "Material Adverse Effect" occurrence. They (1) never do, (2) there's a rule of thumb for the magnitude of an effect to qualify as "Material" (something like 40% off revenue), and (3) the bot-user thing he's talking about was specifically disclaimed by Twitter in their filings, and likely can't be the basis of an MAE claim.

None of this is to say the deal will go through; Musk can just ignore the law, as is his wont.

Tehchops• 4 years ago

It was as if millions of twitter trolls with a distorted idea of free speech suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

idoh• 4 years ago

Elon's comment is just as likely to have been made in jest as serious, which is not a take I've seen in these comments. If you follow his Twitter account then it seems in line with his sense of humor.

A lot of people get pretty riled up over his tweets it seems. If it brings you joy then follow it. If it messes with your mind, then maybe just unfollow it. He's rich, mercurial, sarcastic, and a lot of other things, but ultimately you can just disconnect from it and go about your life.

daanlo• 4 years ago

Taking an absolutely wild guess here, but the reasoning sounds like a Due Diligence finding by one of the financing partners to me. E.g. one of the banks that would loan some of the money hired a commercial DD team. The 5% fake accounts was a red flag raised by them and the bank is making their financing subject to an explanation on the 5% fake account topic. Maybe the bank is also only pushing this „finding“, since they want weasel out of the deal, but can only due this for legitimate DD findings. The business plan probably has 5% fake accounts as an assumption in it and if this is 15% the economics would change. /End of wild guess

yumraj2• 4 years ago

Looks like a repeat of the "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured."

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

Just an excuse. Either he actually has changed his mind, or other people, possibly government, made him change his mind. I can definitely believe that the U.S. government does not want to allow just anyone to wield something like Twitter to their liking.

alaricus• 4 years ago

with the market taking a nose dive, elon musk probably doesn't have the money he thought he had.

memish11• 4 years ago

Here's what prompted this. Yesterday Elon saw a bunch of obvious bots[1] and asked "If Twitter can tell the difference between real and fake users, why does it allow these in our comments?"

That's a good question. Anyone have a good answer?

1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524909413462573058

yumraj2• 4 years ago

So you're saying that Elon Musk made an offer to buy Twitter without knowing about the above issue

I'll say that makes him look like an amateur ..

scotuswroteus2• 4 years ago

I'm more interested in the slightly less snarky question of what led Elon to believe the number was <5%

daenz4• 4 years ago

How is he expected to know whether Twitter knows if their bot% number is accurate? You're suggesting he should know more than Twitter does about their internal data. And it's the internal data that is being disputed.

bsder• 4 years ago

Tech is down and Elon now wants out. Musk knew the numbers and didn't care before everything started crashing.

Bend over, Elon. Pony up the gigabuck and go home.

memish11• 4 years ago

"Still committed to acquisition" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525080945274998785

He probably wants to save $10bn on the price and stick it to the board that originally tried to block the deal with a poison pill.

yupper32• 4 years ago

It's not really a good question, and I suspect he knows that. Twitter can simply:

1. Sample x twitter accounts

2. Have humans review the accounts manually to determine if they are bots. This isn't perfect but can be good enough.

3. Extrapolate.

You'll come up with a reasonable percentage with this method to share with shareholders, but you can't use this method at scale to actually fix the issue.

Twitter Deal Temporarily on Hold

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