Riod

Ever heard of Xiaomi?

I think everyone is ignoring the fact that he really wanted to work there. If you're in that boat then yes this makes sense. But if like most people you're not exactly gaga over the company but value other factors like pay and lifestyle then the traditional approach could yield more dividends. Return on time invested after all is important.

What? You can't be serious..

I think ^^ is the guy who wrote the post. But he is still off the mark.

It would most likely not get past Google's board. And investors would crucify them for paying that kind of premium for a stalled social network (aka don't get the incremental benefits of growth via network effects). They would be left with 1) increase revenue/user or 2) cut costs.

Periscope doesn't fulfill the "toothbrush" principle, aka stuff that you use every day. That's how Google does M&A. Their corporate development people have talked about it publicly.

Also, the shares turnover every 26 days given that about 26MM shares trade every day. Hard to say that a majority of the shareholder base would not accept a 40% premium.

I have. Gives me a bunch of bs I have no interest in. How about ask me/infer from who I follow, what I'm interested in? Google now does that and blends it in with more general stories; simple and useful. Not intrusive and useless like moments.

If it is an early stage company that has the ability to not just increase revenue/customer but also total number of customers.

Also the competition in the bidding process matters. There are a limited number of players who can/will swallow an acquisition this size. Public companies never get bought for these numbers. Why would Google bid that when a 30-40% premium would be enough for most shareholders to vote yes?

On twitter itself, I feel the quote, "clown car that fell into a goldmine" attributed to mark zuckerberg is pretty appropriate.

Honestly even the changes twitter has made have been poor. Moments should ask you, like Google Now, what you're interested in. What use is a random burst of stuff if you're interested only in big basketball stories? It should blend what you want with what's going on around you in an artful manner. Google even showed the way with this.

Good idea. Actually moments should ask you what you're interested in. Kind of like Google Now. I don't need a feed full of celebrity news

Even assuming everyone bought in at today's low cost base; who would agree to this? Would you voluntarily lose $15+/share for...for what exactly? Greater good?

If they cared they would have done it long ago. They chose to make money off those listings instead

Because they were making good coin from those listings

He's actually pretty much spot on. It's not a coincidence that Twitter has 5x less users than Facebook after so many years.

Bernanke and treasury alone could not have done it. The government could have. What he left out was that they never considered nationalizing the banks. No narrative here; just pointing out what a Nobel prize winning economist laid out.

Roger that. Cheers.

Yes they did. They were stopped by their ideology. The government could have easily nationalized it.

Here's Paul Krugman talking about it right after Lehman went under: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html

I think China has learnt from the US example that letting big banks fail is a stupid thing to do..

Krugman on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html

Bass was kinda wrong on his Japan trade though. Doesn't work every time. Also the big issue with 2008 was that the government led Lehman fail; a huge mistake. They should have nationalized it or taken a majority equity stake in it at punitive terms.

? The whole company = the enterprise value of the company. Maybe you didn't understand what buying all of twitter meant. My point is if you bought twitter for $1 and with their XBN revenue, all you'd have to do to earn a 100% return on capital is make sure you get back a $2 after tax dividend. This illustrates why price matters in investing. But I'd suggest reading Seth Klarman and Buffett for further reading on the relationship between price and value.

Another way to think of it is, forget about speculating and expected price changes. Think about at what price you would be comfortable buying the whole company and taking it private and harvesting cash flows from it. At $1 for an XBN revenue company that's a no brainer. I'd earn a 1000% return in a year just by cutting some costs and making sure capital is allocated in a manner that generates a return.

Lol "We actually don't know if India would have been worse or better off without Britain's influence, and we can't possibly know"

See my other statement: Honestly I think this reflects a fairly common sentiment amongst westerners. Not the first time I've heard this; doubt it would be the last. I've even heard white south africans in the west say that south africa would have been better off under apartheid, to be greeted by a chorus of nodding heads. Scary people actually think subjugation is a good thing.

Proving my point. It's clear you're British and shamelessly defending oppression, for what reason I don't know. If I had to guess I'd say, unlike Germany, Britain never had a process of de-empirification akin to the germans realising they as a nation committed a crime and that it was unacceptable.

Exactly. Plus buffett came with a hugely successful track record from his partnership days and bought Berkshire outright. What the hell has anyone on Yahoo's current board or Marissa done in terms of earning a return on capital?

Actually the worst part of twitter is that things disappear so quickly (till recently). 320MM MAU doesn't mean everyone sees that. A TV ad can 1) be sent to any station, 2) has a good chance of being seen by a large % of people tuned into that station at that particular time.

Neat, me too.

No. Really depends on the price of B. If you could buy all of twitter for $1 now, you wouldn't?

Maybe that was how he was thinking about it. Hope it works out for them. Cheers.

Talk about straw men and a lack of facts. Nobody said India would have "kept up" with the West or was on the verge of an industrial revolution. I am merely saying that the British miracle was less because they were so smart and more because they had an entire subcontinent, and later vast empire, at gunpoint. Without which they would have had to trade on equal terms in a global market.

Point is Britain would done worse (along with the rest of the west), and India would have been much better off. How much? Who knows. Note that Germany with its industrial prowess only caught up in the 2nd half of the 19th century. They coincidentally had little in the way of colonial assets. Coincidence?

I have provided lots of sources pointing at data. You just say "because your belief flies in the face of near any widely accepted understanding of history."

Widely accepted where? Britain? Because that's whose opinion matters, not economic historians who dedicate their lives to understanding these things right? Like I said, reddit with you. Hope you are a troll.

Let me also give you a modern example so it makes sense. China didn't invent the smartphone; IBM did. But there's a transfer of technology that allows chinese manufacturers to import/figure out how to make smartphones. Now they start manufacturing smartphones but are low in the value chain. Xiaomi comes about a few years later, climbs the value chain and takes the low end of the market in Asia. Awesome!

Now imagine an alternate scenario where America comes along and says, no China, you can only make plastic and metal parts. I have the machines that can make components. You have to sell these parts to me at fixed artificially low prices. I will then finish them in my factories and sell them to you. No other country can sell in your market. Suddenly you have 1BN people you can practically shoot smartphones at and make money.

70 years later Brazil starts making tons of smartphones. Great. They still can't sell in China. Brazil wins, America wins, China loses.

Point is they climbed it by having a subjugated captive population who were not even allowed to make salt let alone textiles[1]. That population was forced to plant cash crops (primarily cotton) that could then be exported to Britain at fixed prices and sent back as textiles.

There is about 70 years from the start of company rule to the 1830's. If you're not allowed to manufacture textiles in that time period, what exactly do you think would happen? You'd maintain a comparative advantage?

On opium: In India, its cultivation, as well as the manufacture and traffic to China, were subject to the British East India Company (BEIC), as a strict monopoly of the British government.[7]

Opium, like most industries, only benefited the British. So it would be more accurate for you to say the British used the Indians to start exporting opium.

So lets recap. People that mostly export textiles suddenly finds themselves 1) unable to make their own textiles, 2) forced to plant cotton and other crops for sole benefit of the British. So you have a whole civilization barred from selling finished goods. Gee wonder what happens to them.

[1] Taxation of salt has occurred in India since the earliest times. However, this tax was greatly increased when the British East India Company began to establish its rule over provinces in India. In 1835, special taxes were imposed on Indian salt to facilitate its import. This paid huge dividends for the traders of the British East India Company. When the Crown took over the administration of India from the Company in 1858, the taxes were not replaced.

The stringent salt taxes imposed by the British were vehemently condemned by the Indian public. In 1885, at the first session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay, a prominent Congress Leader S.A.Swaminatha Iyer raised the issue of the salt tax.[1] There were further protests throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries culminating in Mahatma Gandhi's Salt Satyagraha in 1930. This sathyagraha was followed by other sathyagrahas in other parts of the country.

After the arrest of Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu lead the sathyagrahis to Dharasana Salt works in Gujarat and was arrested by the police. C. Rajagopalachari broke the Salt Laws at Vedaranyam, in Madras Province in the same year. Thousands courted arrest and were imprisoned in large numbers. The administration eventually relented and invited Mahatma Gandhi to England to attend the Second Round Table Conference. Gandhi's Dandi March got wide news coverage and proved to be a turning point in the history of India's independence movement.

The salt tax, however, continued to remain in effect and was repealed only when Jawaharlal Nehru became the Prime Minister of the Interim Government in 1946.

I think reddit is more the space for you; hacker news tends to be for people who like data; not arguments plucked from your brain. From wikipedia:

Number of Looms in UK Year 1803 1820 1829 1833 1857 Looms 2400 14650 55500 100000 250000

Tell me how increasing your manufacturing base 104x in 50 years is possible without above average returns on capital in textiles? Were the British industrialists stupid? Did they just want to compete each other out of existence? Or perhaps they had a captive subjugated market where people were not even allowed to produce salt, let alone textiles.

Your argument that India would not have "kept up" is based on pure conjecture. Also, every respected economic historian writes that India would have been better off without colonialism. Transfer of technology doesn't have to coincide with being invaded. Eg. Japan.

Wrong. From wikipedia: Company rule in India (sometimes, Company Raj,[1] "raj," lit. "rule" in Hindi[2]) refers to the rule or dominion of the British East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. This is variously taken to have commenced in 1757, after the Battle of Plassey, when the Nawab of Bengal Sirajuddaulah surrendered his dominions to the Company,

Also India pre 1947 was a civilization; a 2000+ year old one. Closest analogy is Europe. Do people vex about the existence of Belgium (a small country)?

India went from exporting finished goods to exporting raw materials from the 1780's to the 1860's. Coincidence?

To repeat what I said below:

the industrial revolution in textiles kicked into high gear in England in 1822, a good 50 years or so after India was under effective company rule. And textiles was an industry where India had a comparative advantage before company rule. Wonder where Britain got all that raw material to make textiles from?

From wikipedia: During the period, 1780–1860, India changed from being an exporter of processed goods for which it received payment in bullion, to being an exporter of raw materials and a buyer of manufactured goods.[20] More specifically, in the 1750s, mostly fine cotton and silk was exported from India to markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa; by the second quarter of the 19th century, raw materials, which chiefly consisted of raw cotton, opium, and indigo, accounted for most of India's exports.[21]

Starting in the 1830s, British textiles began to appear in—and soon to inundate—the Indian markets, with the value of the textile imports growing from £5.2 million 1850 to £18.4 million in 1896.