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Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

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catsmate said:
So Musk has lost most of the remaining senior management, including his mouthpiece Roth. Advertisers are "pausing" their use of Twitter, and "Twitter Blue" is a debacle.
So, what happens next week? It's like UK politics.....
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There's an idea: put Liz Truss in charge of Twitter. I understand she's an ideas person.
 
Is it true that he's scrapped that mad blue-tick scheme already?

I do feel sorry for the Americans who really believed Eli Lilly had announced that they were making insulin available at no cost though.
 
Twitter has now "suspended" Twitter blue. My understanding is that sign-up is still technically possible, but they removed the sign-up link, so it'd be a bit of a hassle.

Grey checks are back, but only for advertisers.

If only someone had warned Elon that this was a bad idea...
 
You don't need to be a genius-level IQ to understand that identity verification of the accounts of people with a public profile is a good idea, and that allowing anyone to pay to be verified as anyone they like is a bad idea.
 
It's hilarious how stupidly Musk has handled this. Had he done the minimal due diligence up front he would have known that, like most popular tech stocks (including Tesla), Twitter was way overvalued. Their board must have been pinching each other when Musk made his offer, then laughing themselves hoarse when he signed and made the offer binding.

Now, instead of paying the billion-dollar kiss-off penalty to abort his terrible deal, Musk has to service loans at what is reportedly a rate of a billion dollars per year.

I think when people blame his ego for this debacle they minimize the role his stupidity plays. Musk is a ******* dummy.
 
Babbylonian said:
It's hilarious how stupidly Musk has handled this. Had he done the minimal due diligence up front he would have known that, like most popular tech stocks (including Tesla), Twitter was way overvalued. Their board must have been pinching each other when Musk made his offer, then laughing themselves hoarse when he signed and made the offer binding.

Now, instead of paying the billion-dollar kiss-off penalty to abort his terrible deal, Musk has to service loans at what is reportedly a rate of a billion dollars per year.

I think when people blame his ego for this debacle they minimize the role his stupidity plays. Musk is a ******* dummy.
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You know, I did see a tweet that made a pretty good point. Yes, Twitter was silly overvalued... but Musk bought is using Tesla as collateral which is even more overvalued! He was only worth 300 billion or whatever at the start of this year on paper. If he tried to sell off all his shares the value would drop enormously.

I'm also seeing that the banks that funded the loan cannot offload it into CLO's (or whatever) at more than 60 cents on the dollar.
 
He's certainly behaving as if he is very stupid. I don't know much about the guy other than some stupid stunt where he wanted to send a submarine to rescue some trapped miners. The dimensions of the submarine would have ensured it got stuck, it couldn't have been built fast enough anyway, and a successful rescue by another method was already well underway.

And wasn't he sued for defamation by someone he lashed out at after his stupid idea had been criticised?

But that is literally all I know about him. How did he get all that money, being that stupid?
 
Rolfe said:
He's certainly behaving as if he is very stupid. I don't know much about the guy other than some stupid stunt where he wanted to send a submarine to rescue some trapped miners. The dimensions of the submarine would have ensured it got stuck, it couldn't have been built fast enough anyway, and a successful rescue by another method was already well underway.

And wasn't he sued for defamation by someone he lashed out at after his stupid idea had been criticised?

But that is literally all I know about him. How did he get all that money, being that stupid?
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The TLDR version: to start with he is the son of a wealthy mining operator from South Africa. He saw the value in a startup electric vehicle company called Tesla. He bought a controlling stake in it. They were way ahead in technology and the market valued it at many many many times over its actual earnings. So the value of his share of the company went up thousands of times over what he bought it for.
 
Rolfe said:
And wasn't he sued for defamation by someone he lashed out at after his stupid idea had been criticised?
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Unbelievably, despite calling the hero of the operation a pedo, he won the case.

Rolfe said:
But that is literally all I know about him. How did he get all that money, being that stupid?
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His seed capital came from PayPal.

What a great place that was - Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Yay for tech billionaires!

Edited by sarge: 
edited to correct quote attribution
 
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Nothing I've read attributed to him suggests he's the sharpest tool in the box.

There appear to be reports that he is detail-orientated, a micro-manager, but to be fair, I haven't examined those myself.
 
Good Lord. I just sent a tweet with the word "bitch" in it, in the context of a female hyena. I got a po-faced message telling me that most people don't post tweets with words like that in them.

Was it ever thus? How do dog breeders communicate on Twitter for goodness sake? What on earth is wrong with the word?
 
Rolfe said:
Is it true that he's scrapped that mad blue-tick scheme already?

I do feel sorry for the Americans who really believed Eli Lilly had announced that they were making insulin available at no cost though.
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Cost of a fake verified account $8 (possibly not even that if you cancel within the month)

Cost of the tweet by fake Eli Lilly - $16Bn

Partly because their price gouging is now under scrutiny.
 
Babbylonian said:
It's hilarious how stupidly Musk has handled this. Had he done the minimal due diligence up front he would have known that, like most popular tech stocks (including Tesla), Twitter was way overvalued. Their board must have been pinching each other when Musk made his offer, then laughing themselves hoarse when he signed and made the offer binding.

Now, instead of paying the billion-dollar kiss-off penalty to abort his terrible deal, Musk has to service loans at what is reportedly a rate of a billion dollars per year.

I think when people blame his ego for this debacle they minimize the role his stupidity plays. Musk is a ******* dummy.
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To give him his due, he DID try to back out of the deal after he realized he screwed up. But since he couldn't, and can't admit he screwed up, he's all in.

Rolfe said:
He's certainly behaving as if he is very stupid. I don't know much about the guy other than some stupid stunt where he wanted to send a submarine to rescue some trapped miners. The dimensions of the submarine would have ensured it got stuck, it couldn't have been built fast enough anyway, and a successful rescue by another method was already well underway.

And wasn't he sued for defamation by someone he lashed out at after his stupid idea had been criticised?

But that is literally all I know about him. How did he get all that money, being that stupid?
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He's not stupid. He's sometimes extremely foolish, but not stupid. Brilliant, in fact. And like many brilliant people, weirdly foolish.
Musk has essentially single-handedly transformed space flight. His company has done more orbital launches than any single nation this year. He's taking people into space, where my former employer Boeing has failed over and over. His other company has made electric cars something to be aspired to, instead of just a joke. Every other car-maker is trying to emulate his.
 
Trebuchet said:
To give him his due, he DID try to back out of the deal after he realized he screwed up. But since he couldn't, and can't admit he screwed up, he's all in.





He's not stupid. He's sometimes extremely foolish, but not stupid. Brilliant, in fact. And like many brilliant people, weirdly foolish.

Musk has essentially single-handedly transformed space flight. His company has done more orbital launches than any single nation this year. He's taking people into space, where my former employer Boeing has failed over and over. His other company has made electric cars something to be aspired to, instead of just a joke. Every other car-maker is trying to emulate his.
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Except he's such an incredible liar, manipulator and grifter. His MO is flat out "overpromise and underdeliver" and gish gallop on to the next impossible deadline. All the while letting his ego make fantastical claims
Seems he shares a fair bit in common with another supposed "genius".
 
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