Chanakya
,
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- Messages
- 5,811
Ah yes, the pedo comments, from back then. We're seeing crazy here, with Twitter, sure; but that one was completely crazy, as well, and entirely reprehensible as well.
Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....
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Ah yes, the pedo comments, from back then. We're seeing crazy here, with Twitter, sure; but that one was completely crazy, as well, and entirely reprehensible as well.
Aridas
Crazy Little Green Dragon
I'm somewhat inclined towards this suggestion, but... I would dare say that it's probably a bit more complicated. Either way, Musk's swing to the right is fairly certainly not actually sudden. I happen to remember his version of the Democrats running far to the left while he and the Republicans just stand in place, though, too, from a fair while ago. It was one of the things that pretty much gave away that he is absolutely not to be trusted.
The Great Zaganza
Maledictorian
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2016
- Messages
- 29,881
Musk was all for Dems as long as they gave his schemes massive subsidies. Now that they dare to ask for taxes from this self-made man, he calls them tyrants and becomes a Republican.
He is predicably boring in this.
He is predicably boring in this.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
Well, he did start the company...
jeremyp
Philosopher
Yes they have shares but they can't necessarily be sold. I am a shareholder in the private company for which I work but I can't just go out and sell my shares. For one thing we have a shareholders' agreement which means nobody can sell without the approval of the other owners. This restriction may not apply to all privately owned companies.
Another problem is there's no mechanism to determine what the company is worth. You have to come to an agreement with the buyer somehow. So how could you sell shares to a buyer and then hope to buy some back later at a lower price when there is no price? Assuming the shareholders' agreement allows it, you have to borrow some shares off one of the owners (if that even means anything in a private company), negotiate a price with somebody who wants to be an owner and then later buy some shares off another owner to pay back the first owner and you need negotiate a lower price.
Then there's the problem of transferring the ownership rights. In a public company that happens automatically when you buy and sell shares. In a private company, you may have to create legal contracts to make it happen. In my company, there are no share certificates or anything like that, only a contract (not sure if that's the right technical term) with a list of names and numbers in it where the numbers are the shares owned by each person. In order to transfer shares from one person to another, that contract has to be amended. So even if you could somehow short sell shares, you couldn't do it secretly.
jeremyp
Philosopher
My problems with that are several.
Firstly, Musk doesn't run SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell runs SpaceX. Musk provides some vision and helps to raise capital but the day to day running is done by her. The engineering, on the other hand, is done by talented engineers, of which Musk isn't one.
Secondly, we don't know how successful SpaceX really is because it's a private company. It's doing very well in the space launch market in terms of volume but we don't know how profitable each launch is. Musk says that Falcon 9 is very cheap, but we only have his word for it that that is true. There hasn't been a year since its founding that SpaceX has not sought external funding, sometimes to the tune of billions of dollars. It seems suspicious to me that a profitable company would need an injection of a billion or two dollars each year.
Thirdly, there are two current projects that each may sink SpaceX: Starship and Starlink. Starship is currently going nowhere very fast. They were supposed to be sending two of them to Mars in 2022, but so far, it hasn't even flown. The business case for Starlink was always questionable and if the numbers Musk gave to the government with respect to the Ukraine dishes are correct, there's no way it is remotely profitable.
If Twitter fails, there is a scenario that bankrupts Musk. His unimaginable wealth is just a number based on the stock price of Tesla. If he is forced to start selling Tesla stock (say because of a margin call on a loan taken out to buy a failed company), its price will tank which means he'll have to sell even more stock. Quite a lot of Musk's stock in Tesla is already leveraged for personal loans. He may find he gets to a point where he can't service his debt. It's unlikely, but not impossible. Then there's Saudi Arabia. If Twitter fails, he might be called to an embassy meeting.
I think Musk knows he made a big mistake in agreeing to buy Twitter. That's why he spent so much time trying to get out of the deal. This is not some genius move or even a vanity purchase (although it may have started that way). This is Musk being cornered into following through on a purchase he didn't want. This is Musk panicking because he is screwed.
jeremyp
Philosopher
Some people on here are theorising that Musk has relatively recently become a victim of his own ego or he bought into the man of the year hype.
No. Musk has always been like this.
Susheel
Illuminator
He reminds me of a caricature of a Bond movie villain. While I think he may be trying to emulate the persona of a Bond movie villain, the final rfesult might be more like Dr. Eevul....
Matthew Best
Penultimate Amazing
I'm still stunned that it turned out to be legal.
catsmate
No longer the 1
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2007
- Messages
- 34,767
Twitter is no longer a publicly traded company. It's Musk's problem and he's having to sell tracts of Tesla to fund things.
More evidence for my speculations being true - he really had no idea how Twitter operated the authentication of accounts and what the Blue subscription service was meant to offer.
They are now back where Twitter was before he bought it - “authenticated” accounts being highlighted at Twitter’s discretion and a subscription service.
And he hasn’t brought any new or clever ideas to the table. Blue was launched to try and generate significant revenue and it flopped because there wasn’t really any great advantage to it for most people. The new subscription is being described exactly as Blue was, with the same vapourware promise of “more” features to be added as it goes on but with no great advantage for users. I’ve seen some people running the numbers on potential revenue from a subscription service at $8 and even really generous estimates for take up only get it to 5 to 10% of the current (or rather past) advertising revenues. We know that ad revenue going into the next year is starting with the booked advertising for 2023 already wiped out. So perhaps the subscription service will in percentage terms account for more revenue next year! Yeah look a success!!
Yes the defence that it was a common insult in South Africa seemed implausible when he had hired private investigators to try to substantiate the claim.
I still think he should have paid damages
TragicMonkey
Poisoned Waffles
I think he's more like Will Ferrell's character in "Zoolander".
jeremyp
Philosopher
Yes, Vernon Unsworth's lawyers must have been pretty bad to lose that case. Either that or, as the trial took place in LA, the jury was stacked with Muskrats.
I'm also pretty surprised that Musk won the Tesla/Solar City fraud case. It seemed open and shut to me.
I Am The Scum
Philosopher
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2010
- Messages
- 5,796
We can also say for sure that he didn't run even a tiny bit of market research to figure out a good price point. He just went with a combination of his gut, Stephen King's reaction, and whatever his weird nerd fans are saying to him.
I Am The Scum
Philosopher
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2010
- Messages
- 5,796
An update on this, based on personal anecdote:
The "Official" grey check is now appearing under screen names, so people don't have to click profiles to see it. That's good.
But I'm only seeing them on verified (blue check) accounts. I have not seen one outside of a blue check, nor am I seeing them on all blue checks. It has mostly been present on news orgs.
It really does seem to be an $8/mo sticker.
lobosrul5
Philosopher
Elon's latest tweet is hilarious:
Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.
We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.
Yeah OK, we'll find out if you can keep servicing all the loans you took out while you just flail around with Twitter and see what you can and can't get away with. What a way to run a business that you paid more for than the yearly GDP of many countries.
Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.
We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.
Yeah OK, we'll find out if you can keep servicing all the loans you took out while you just flail around with Twitter and see what you can and can't get away with. What a way to run a business that you paid more for than the yearly GDP of many countries.
Musk's changes following the takeover of Twitter are turning into the most interesting business case study since Blofeld steered SPECTRE away from its outdated model of "making absurd amounts of money from arms dealing, commodity market manipulation, and extortion" to focus instead on "psychologically ******* with James Bond."
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