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Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

• jrochkind1 5y ago
  > The sale would represent an admission by Twitter that its new chief executive Parag Agrawal, who took the helm in November, is not making enough traction in making the company more profitable Is this so? Or just that the offered price is too good to pass up? Real questions.
• macspoofing 5y ago
  How did it go from hostility to acceptance so quickly? I understand playing hard-ball to negotiate a higher price, BUT why play hard-ball and just accept the initial offer? Or is there something else at play (maybe expectation is that shareholders reject it?) and this is just a PR ploy.
  • TigeriusKirk 5y ago
    It seems very likely to me there's a whole backroom drama at work here that we're just not hearing about. I strongly suspect the full story involves Jack and his departure, for example. Maybe someday it will all come out.
    • im3w1l 5y ago
      He said previously he had no confidence in Twitter management. Implication: Heads would roll like crazy after his purchase. Maybe he did something to reassure them.
  • gmm1990 5y ago
    possibly the actual financing details made the offer seem real, recent market downturn makes the value of twitter less, or they didn't get any other better offers.
  • ldiracdelta 5y ago
    Pure speculation -- Lawyers are scary. Someone with an army of lawyers is a formidable opponent.
• mullingitover 5y ago
  I feel like we’re going to look back in a couple years and mark this as the beginning of the collapse of Tesla. Musk is already spread thin, now he’s so unfocused and undisciplined that he’s unable to stop himself from buying an irrelevant social media company as an expensive hobby. It’s the height of hubris.
  • marban 5y ago
    Imagine Tim Cook were to take a loan on his Apple stock to take over Whole Foods because he doesn't like their avocados.
    • sixQuarks 5y ago
      Cant imagine Tim Cook doing that, but sure sounds like something Steve Jobs would do
      • marban 5y ago
        Since Avocados are fruits you're technically correct
    • natch 5y ago
      Free speech, avocados… slight difference, wouldn’t you say?
  • typeofhuman 5y ago
    How could you possibly know the personal limits of another person? How do you know he's unfocused and undisciplined?
  • sixQuarks 5y ago
    So are you admitting that Elon musk is solely responsible for Tesla’s success? Because whenever Tesla has a huge accomplishment, people always come out of the woodwork and claim Elon is Not the founder and all he does is take credit for everyone else’s work.
• UmYeahNo 5y ago
  For all the Free Speech posturing Musk has put out around twitter, it will be very interesting to see if @ElonsJet account gets banned.
  • thepasswordis 5y ago
    The guy who made a bot to copy data from adsbexchange has almost half a million followers, and is a public figure. I wonder if he would enjoy getting harassed in the same way or not.
  • incomingpain 5y ago
    Just because people are watching this and how newsworthy it would be, it won't happen.
    • philipov 5y ago
      The public's memory is short, while spite's memory is long.
    • sigmar 5y ago
      He talks a lot about crypto scams as one of the reasons he is buying twitter, I'm willing to put money that he tasks someone or a group to develop 'review' mechanisms for any account with the name 'elon' or 'musk'
      • trothamel 5y ago
        I suspect that it'll be for replies from accounts with substantially the same name and avatar as the original poster, and that it won't be just for him. And that's good, I think - a better investment direction than NFT avatars.
  • Fargoan 5y ago
    The owner of the account is a stalker attempting to extort his victim. Why hasn't he been banned? If I were to make an account tracking a random person's movement I'd likely be banned. Why should it be treated differently when the stalking victim is a celebrity?
• mmastrac 5y ago
  Part of me hopes this is the end of the social media age. I've been on twitter since the very beginning and lately it feels like it's a toxic cesspool on all sides. I say this as a twitter addict and prolific poster over more than a decade.
  • School-Cotton 5y ago
    What stops you from deleting your twitter, regardless of whether Musk buys it?
  • rvz 5y ago
    Hardly. What happened to #deletefacebook in 2018, #deleteinstagram? Nothing happened. Billions are still using it regardless of that. We also still have billions addicted to the new digital crack / cocaine called TikTok. So this is far from 'the end' of social media. In fact, it is the start of the increasing echo chambers and the ills of social media being used for disinformation campaigns.
    • Victerius 5y ago
      I agree. Elon Musk taking control of Twitter won't spell the end of social media. Social media fills the intrinsic human need to be connected to others and recognized by others for a lot of people. Network effects make it very hard for a competitor to dislodge the incumbents, but as TikTok showed, it's not impossible. Social media is here to stay indefinitely.
      • robbedpeter 5y ago
        It mimics the satisfaction of that intrinsic social need. It's the high fructose corn syrup of socializing, only more toxic.
  • jdrc 5y ago
    It's not , but now social media is mainstream media and can't pretend to be cool anymore
  • 5y ago
• rvz 5y ago
  Twitter was dying anyway and it needed to be saved from itself. With Jack leaving, earnings around the corner and with this final offer. It was exactly what they needed as if they rejected this only offer, it will certainly crash the stock anyway with little room to recover. As much as the rats don't know where to jump for alternatives perhaps it's better to just sit on the sinking boat to see how far it goes before it has completely sunk or whatever refloats their boat.
  • Jyaif 5y ago
    Here's a different perspective: With Jack leaving 6 months ago, the company finally had a chance to thrive.
• afavour 5y ago
  I feel for the employees of Twitter. Years with a part time CEO whose time was dedicated elsewhere… now they’ll have a new part time owner whose time will be dedicated elsewhere and has a propensity to do weird things for the online lulz.
  • mardifoufs 5y ago
    An owner is not a always the CEO. If anything he will make sure that the CEO that will actually focus on twitter. Also, If they didn't feel bad about creating value for Saudi royalty shareholders they probably won't feel bad about doing random stuff for the lulz
    • JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Should they feel bad for creating value for Saudi royalty?
      • onychomys 5y ago
        Yes, in general you should feel bad if your job makes it easier for murderous despots to murder and be despotic.
        • JaimeThompson 5y ago
          It didn't seem to bother Musk when they invested in Tesla. https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/saudi-arabia-invests-2b-in-tesla-report https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/saudi-arabia-invests-2b-...
          • onychomys 5y ago
            He should feel bad too. He doesn't, because even the cool billionaires are somewhat sociopathic, but he should.
        • robbedpeter 5y ago
          Living in America entails your daily expenses and significant portions of your tax money go to China and other dystopian dictatorships around the world. It's implausible to live ethically - like the meme of personal recycling, the problem is corporations and regulatory capture. Citizens don't make a dent.
• vincentpants 5y ago
  Gilded Age 2.0
  • slackfan 5y ago
    We've been there since the late 90s.
    • JohnWhigham 5y ago
      I'd argue it started with the PC revolution and the lionization of CEOS in the 80s
  • panick21_ 5y ago
    The fastest age of economic and technology growth of any country in the history of the world?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • AlgorithmicTime 5y ago
  • shusaku 5y ago
    It’s interesting to me because someone like Trump gets frustrated with Twitter, and the best he can do is raise capital for a social network which seems doomed to fail. Musk can just buy twitter. Trump was the president and one of the most influential political figures in the world, but in this regard Musk dwarfs him in terms of power.
    • notacoward 5y ago
      Speaking of Trump, what are the chances he'll get un-banned?
      • 5y ago
• mikevm 5y ago
  What about that poison pill?
  • danadannecy 5y ago
    The poison pill prevents Musk from taking over by simply buying 51% of stock, and allows him to proceed only by giving the board an offer they agree to, in which case they'll remove the poison pill.
  • LegitShady 5y ago
    It activates when someone gets 15%...but musk will acquire the entire company at once effectively bypassing it.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• jdrc 5y ago
  Next stop Reddit
  • marban 5y ago
    Fun to own, terrible to operate, even harder to sell.
  • Victerius 5y ago
    Hacker News when? /s
    • jdrc 5y ago
      It's already private , sadly no chance of drama
      • moffkalast 5y ago
        Someone needs to buy them and shelf out for up a second Raspberry Pi so they can double the amount of comments they can process per minute :D
    • georgehill 5y ago
      Hacker News is already a good place to speak freely.
      • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
        I'm so confused why people think this. There are countless things I could put as a direct response to you that would have Dang letting me know my behaviour is uncalled for, and I would agree that they are, but uncalled for speech is still speech. If you have to choose your words is it really speaking freely?
        • xdennis 5y ago
          That's true that HN is moderated, but when people complain about free speech, they care more about banning content that's inconvenient vs content that's off topic or in a bad tone.
• pyaamb 5y ago
  I feel like people have invested in Elon in large part because of his alignment with i) moving humanity away from fossil fuels and ii) making life multi planetary. He is obviously free to do as he pleases with this new wealth but I cant help but feel this as a huge redirection of resources (in terms of both capital and focus) from those goals
  • coffeeblack 5y ago
    A necessary one. The ideologues among the Tw leadership were doing a lot of harm to Western society (and therefore more generally to democracy and the rule of law). I hope Musk will be able to fix it now.
    • JaimeThompson 5y ago
      In instances where Musk has power to make speech more open and free when has he done so?
      • coffeeblack 5y ago
        Every time.
        • JaimeThompson 5y ago
          I can't find any reporting to support that position, can you provide hints so I can review it?
          • coffeeblack 5y ago
            When didn’t he?
            • JaimeThompson 5y ago
              One would think that you, having made the claim, could provide supporting evidence of said claim. He didn't make speech more open and free when he canceled a car order because someone pissed him off nor when he tried to get that flight tracker shut down.
• altacc 5y ago
  He's already said that he'd follow all local laws so it would be interesting to see if he can find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your "side". Personally my reservations are because I think running a social media site is a lot about understanding people and defining a healthy culture for your elusive market place of ideas. Musk has admitted he doesn't understand people, is a self-confessed troll & edgelord and and Tesla's culture seems less than ideal. So lacks any of the qualifications I see as being needed to run something like Twitter. Maybe there's some other Musk magic that will do what so many others have failed to do.
  • hyperpallium2 5y ago
    It will be an interesting foreshadowing of how he will govern the Mars colony.
  • hef19898 5y ago
    >> He's already said that he'd follow all local laws Is Twitter available in on of the following countries? China, Saudi-Arabia, Russia, Turkey? Since we know the answer I'm looking forward to see how helping those local governments go after "dissidents" will be aligned with Musk's high ideals of free speech.
    • hickimsedenolan 5y ago
      It is available in Turkey.
      • hef19898 5y ago
        Exactly! And in Turkey people get charged with supporting terrorism by tweeting negative stuff about Erdogan. On the surface of it, Musk should be against that, free speech and all that. Supporting local law would mean supporting authorities in finding those users. One way out would be to just retreat from, in this example, Turkey. But since this whole affaire started with "ElonsJet" refusing to shut down, and Musks reaction was a teenagers "Then I'll buy this company and fire you", I'm inclined to believe free speech is going to be ok as long Musk is criticized.
• McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
• crmd 5y ago
  Less than three years ago, Mark Zuckerberg was giving speeches[0] on the importance of freedom of speech on social media. I like Elon but don’t think this will end well. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerberg-standing-voice-free-expression/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...
• Sol- 5y ago
  Kind of weird to sink such a significant chunk of his wealth into a toy for his libertarian whims (where it's hard to tell how serious he even is about them), but I such squandering of wealth is nothing new for billionaires. Guess this will put a dent into the whole "limit fake news on social media" push we've had recently, at least in the US (which some people will of course argue was ill-fated to begin with).
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Sink? Twitter is ripe for growth. He’s going to 10x his investment and make the last 10 years of Twitter look like Apple’s slow decline in the 90s.
• lvl102 5y ago
  I am going to guess Elon brings back Trump back on Twitter with Thiel’s push. That could be the end of Twitter.
  • snowman-yelling 5y ago
    I think Trump is what kept Twitter relevant for the better part of the 2010s.
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    Trump is nothing but good for Twitter. He generates tons of engagement from his fans and his haters
• endisneigh 5y ago
  Crazy that musk will spend billions on something I can get on the App Store for free. On that note excited to see if ads go away.
• josefresco 5y ago
  How long before Trump is allowed back? I'm not joking. Elon has said several times his "line" for what is acceptable speech is different than what Twitter has now. My guess is it will be timed to happen after the "dust settles" but within a few months of the US 2022 midterms. This will give Trump enough time to gain followers back, and start to use the platform (again) to regain power. Thoughts? Anyone else on the shortlist for re-instatement?
  • tootie 5y ago
    I think it would spur a revolt. Too many users were begging for it. This would confirm their worst fears about what Musk wants for the platform and take it as a sign to leave. Related note, Truth Social (Trump's semi-abandoned competitor) is rumored to be merging with Rumble. Rumble being a more established social network with Trump-friendly content. Trump going back to Twitter would also mean he admits defeat on his attempt to defeat it.
    • CydeWeys 5y ago
      > Trump going back to Twitter would also mean he admits defeat on his attempt to defeat it. Trump has only ever posted a single time on Truth Social, a generic coming soon message, and it probably wasn't even him. He doesn't give a shit about it. He doesn't even know its name, apparently: https://www.businessinsider.com/video-shows-trump-struggling-to-name-his-truth-social-platform-2022-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/video-shows-trump-struggling... It's best to think of Trump's role with Truth Social as a disinterested mascot. Even your basic paid shill would be doing a much better job of promoting/using it. Trump loves Twitter, and would be back on it in a flash if allowed to do so.
    • overthemoon 5y ago
      Maybe, but I kind of doubt it. Trump is a black hole of attention. He warps the discourse around himself. If he's on Twitter, people have to go there to find out what he says. Moreover, Musk is a bit more immune to public outcry on the Trump axis than previous owners, in my opinion. It doesn't seem hard to brand it as a triumphant return, and distance himself from Truth Social. His fans will happily eat that up, the people who hated him will keep hating him, and Musk will enjoy making people mad. He's coming back for sure, if only because it's going to juice Twitter's numbers. There's no leaving Twitter, in my opinion. Its the only game in town. That said, I sincerely hope there is a fracture here. An ecosystem with many smaller platforms seems far healthier to me.
• ABraidotti 5y ago
  I welcome this. Twitter is overrun with bots and anonymous shitposting. He's either going to make it better or invigorate the competition.
  • tootie 5y ago
    In related news, there is a rumor that Truth Social is "merging" at some level with Rumble. How Musk's Twitter responds to that will be, uh, interesting.
  • Retr0id 5y ago
    Isn't anonymous shitposting kinda the point of Twitter?
  • CydeWeys 5y ago
    Elon already is a big shit poster himself. You think he's gonna make this better? I think a lot of people will follow the owner's example and make things worse.
  • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    Given that bots and anonymous shitposting would both fit the ideals of free speech, why would a champion of said free speech do anything to make it better?
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    It’s almost too obvious what needs to be done. Elon is going to make the last 10 years of Twitter look embarrassing.
• WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
• JaimeThompson 5y ago
  Since he is using a chunk of Tesla stock to secure loans to fund a large portion of this deal what happens when, not if, Tesla stock falls to more rational levels?
  • brasic 5y ago
    Presumably this possibility is part of the risk the lenders are taking into account and charging for. If loan collateral was subject to constantly being marked-to-market and lenders could “margin call” to get more in scenarios like this, lending would be quite a bit safer.
    • JaimeThompson 5y ago
      In very hot markets such as the one we are currently in rational long term thinking is brushed aside rather more often then is responsible so the assumption they correctly quantified the risk in this transaction isn't fully supported by their past history of actions.
• scop 5y ago
  I wish him and the team the very best. Social media is an incredibly hard problem that by no means has been solved. I raise a glass to a man who has successfully tackled hard problems and seeks to make the future better.
  • hooande 5y ago
    I'd be surprised if there's anyone here who thinks he'll succeed
    • fullshark 5y ago
      Define success? I think he will help twitter a lot cause they have been suffering from a leadership void for years. I don't think Twitter will become a trillion dollar company but they will be around a long time and be profitable, and there's a decent chance Musk could go public again and recoup some of the acquistion price and remain in control.
  • ausbah 5y ago
    that's an optimistic take, as much as I dislike Musk it would be nice if he managed to make Twitter a better experience for the average user. given that social media is more of a people problem than a engineering problem, I'm not as hopeful
  • defterGoose 5y ago
    The idea that a social media company is capable of making a dent in "making the future better" is kind of laughable if you have any sort of rational ideas for what makes a good life...
    • bluescrn 5y ago
      Maybe they could make the future slightly less worse, though. (Just turning the thing off would do that)
    • gallerdude 5y ago
      I think that saying social media can't make the future better is like saying the internet itself can't make the future better. It seems obvious to me that both can improve humanity.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  flood of "what will/should happen to twitter now?" bloviation incoming. So here's mine: Musk should make Twitter a public utility. Nominal fee for an account, anyone can have one (or many!); they can be removed for actual illegal behavior (with reference to some government authority for redress) or technical TOS reasons, and thats it. Let the 4chan bloom.
  • philliphaydon 5y ago
    God if I could pay $2/m for Twitter with an option to only see tweets from people who pay. Twitter would be the best social media experience by a long shot.
    • misiti3780 5y ago
      I completely agree!
  • Ar-Curunir 5y ago
    Elon Musk, that famous lover of public goods, will totally make his $43 billion investment a public utility.
• sidcool 5y ago
  I m a Musk fan boy, but I feel Twitter should remain public and not under Musk. He's brilliant but a private company cannot be claimed as a bastion of free speech. Even if it's my idol Musk.
  • esarbe 5y ago
    No company can ever be a 'bastion of free speech' since it's always beholden to the interests of the investors.
• dboreham 5y ago
  The sound of thousands of gallons of Kool-Aid being slurped.
• parenthesis 5y ago
  I will become a Musk fanboi if he reverts twitter to allowing unlimited reading without being logged in.
  • Retr0id 5y ago
    Maybe I'm just in the lucky A/B cohort, but I haven't seen any auth nags for a while now.
    • nicce 5y ago
      They come constantly atleast for me. Better use lightweight alts such as nitter.eu
      • LegitShady 5y ago
        On desktop I use an extension that redirects everything to nitter but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be a functioning extension for firefox android.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    This, holy shit. I only click on a Twitter post like once a month, but every time I have in recent months, I usually X right out of it because of the login prompts. I despise this walled garden bullshit.
    • l33tbro 5y ago
      Use the Nitter extension. Or browse private mode. Problem solved.
  • doom2 5y ago
    Bring back the chrono-sorted timeline while he's at it. The algorithm sorting is a big reason why I use tweetdeck and FB purity to keep it as it was.
• rappatic 5y ago
  Incidentally, I'm guessing this will cause a rise in Trump's popularity again. There's a decent chance he gets unbanned by Musk (who is strongly in favor of unregulated speech on social media), and Twitter was how Trump garnered much of his base.
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Wild guess is that under Musk's ownership, Twitter will be a more open platform but a far less anonymous one. You'll be able to post more than you're allowed to now but it will be attached to your real identity. Should be interesting to see how that pans out. Investing in better filtering tools so users can decide for themselves what they want in their feeds will change the nature of the platform too.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    How would that improve anything? Some of the most toxic users are people like himself and formerly Trump where everyone already knows who they are.
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      • bmitc 5y ago
        Where did I say anything about me? I really don't know what you're talking about.
      • Arcsech 5y ago
        My concerns about toxicity on Twitter are less about what I want to see (I don’t use Twitter anymore myself, even), and more about the incitement to violence we’ve clearly seen is possible on the platform. Twitter should not be a platform for organizing a mob to invade the capitol and attempt to execute the Vice President, for example.
        • bobsmooth 5y ago
          Incitements towards violence are already illegal.
  • Kye 5y ago
    My real name is not my legal name, so I would have to stop using Twitter.
• V__ 5y ago
  Looking at the problems Twitter has, why does anyone think Musk can even solve one? If one believes Twitter has a free speech problem: Musk shouts about free speech but shut down Teslas PR department, lashes out against any criticism against him, canceled a preorder because he didn't like a journalists' article etc. Musk is great at self-promotion and this often helps his companies in some sense, but what else does he bring to the table?
  • nova22033 5y ago
    Looking at the problems Twitter has, why does anyone think Musk can even solve one? He's solved the full self driving problem. He has more time on has hands...
    • ttttttthu66ttt 5y ago
      /s ?
      • qgin 5y ago
        Has to be
    • cosmic_quanta 5y ago
      The Tesla engineers have solved 95% of the self-driving problems, perhaps. The remaining 5% is, of course, much harder to solve
      • JacobThreeThree 5y ago
        If the remaining 5% is much harder, wouldn't that mean they haven't really solved 95% of the problem?
        • cosmic_quanta 5y ago
          Good point, I was thinking about 95% of the problem in terms of time spent on the road
• dghughes 5y ago
  Twitter is real-time and the voice of the Internet I think Musk just wants to control that. There's no free speech aspect to the purchase it's just pure spite. Trump will be back within a week and I think the overall Twitter experience will degrade even more.
• dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  > Musk, the world's richest person according to a tally by Forbes, is negotiating to buy Twitter in a personal capacity and Tesla is not involved in the deal. Wasn't ~half of the capital coming from margin from equity Musk has in Tesla? I wouldn't count that as "not involved in the deal" although I see how it could be construed that way.
  • nicce 5y ago
    That is kinda different thing. Musk owns shares personally and can sell them as he likes. Tesla as company is not funding anything. But I guess you meant that.
    • dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
      Technically speaking, true. If Musk's margin was called though and he was forced to sell shares in Tesla to cover, that would most definitely have an effect on the Tesla stock. In a way I see that as Tesla being involved, also since it is value and trust generated by Tesla that Musk is bargaining with.
• TimPC 5y ago
  Musk branded Twitter. He can rename it the warning company.
• dkjaudyeqooe 5y ago
  Once Musk lets Trump back on and is freed from all restraint with his and his alone god-mode account, Twitter will surely see an exodus and it'll fill up with "like minded" people. Together with his "subscription model" ideas, Twitter is toast. This is a great business opportunity for someone who wants to put together an alternative. Maybe a micro-blogging protocol open to all instead? Usetwitnet?
  • mellifluousbox 5y ago
    It already exists and is called Mastodon.
    • themusicgod1 5y ago
      Mastodon is only one server of a whole network of twitter alternatives - the fediverse. Pleroma is just fine, too. https://jointhefedi.com/ https://jointhefedi.com/
• nova22033 5y ago
  What if the Chinese government forces Elon to ban criticism of China? Nice EV business you have there in Shanghai...be a shame if...you know..
  • throwaway_1928 5y ago
    A very good point and a likely scenario.
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
    I'm sure China got Apple to give them all their users' data, then /s
    • dymk 5y ago
      Apple hosts Chinese user data in China, yes.
      • rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
        Sounds good to me. As a European, I wish my data was hosted in Europe, too.
  • programmarchy 5y ago
    Just to play devil's advocate, he could also reverse that and threaten to promote criticism of China if they don't play ball.
    • throwaway_1928 5y ago
      Elon: "Maybe the CCP should be worried. About me." Carson Wells: "They aren't. You're not cut out for this. You're just a guy that happened to start an electric car company."
  • cmckn 5y ago
    Twitter has not been available in China since 2009. I think the CCP is much more interested in controlling what Chinese citizens see than what foreigners say in other countries. Still, interesting to think about.
• nabla9 5y ago
  His offer is funded as follows (from Matt Levine):https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-21/elon-got-his-money https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-21/elon-g... 1. A letter from his banks offering to lend $13 billion to Twitter, if he buys it, with $7 billion of that coming in the form of senior secured bank loans and $6 billion coming in the form of junk bonds. 2. A letter from his banks offering to lend him $12.5 billion personally, secured by $62.5 billion worth of his Tesla Inc. stock. At yesterday’s closing price, that comes to about 64 million shares, or about one-third of his Tesla stake. 4. An agreement with himself to put up the other $21 billion, give or take. Musk is the man of leverage and likes to live on the edge. Loans with junk bond rates, his stake on Tesla, Levine: >... So Musk will be paying his banks, personally, about $1 billion a year for the privilege of owning Twitter. It is possible that Twitter will be paying him $1 billion a year of dividends, after its own debt servicing costs, but it is, uh, unlikely in the near future. It is more likely that running Twitter will be a continuing expense for him. But, again, he has said that he’s not in it for the money. Spending $33 billion to buy Twitter, and then another $1 billion a year to own it, is I suppose in a way a kind of philanthropy for Musk?
  • InTheArena 5y ago
    He is. Tesla, SpaceX, etc all play to win, but they did it by almost going bankrupt and out over and over and over. Im not sure I can sit here and say that it wasnt needed, but people need to remember that 4 years ago, Tesla was at deaths door trying to scale up, shorters were doing everything in their power to maniuplate the stock, and no one thought they could pull it off the way they have.
    • nabla9 5y ago
      He is like a modern Icarus. Just replace wax with leverage. Fortunately technology in SpaceX and Tesla will not cease to exist if Musk goes personally bankrupt and loses these companies. If he burns and falls, all the good stuff he made is left behind.
      • InTheArena 5y ago
• boredumb 5y ago
  People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over... he could see that revenue rise quite a bit through people actually seeing value in advertising on twitter again. If he can keep operating costs down and get the ad revenue up further, he'll be repaying his initial investment within a few years, and if he takes this private he can IPO it again or sell it to someone else privately. I wish him the best and hope he truly makes twitter somewhere that you visit that isn't just rage bait again.
  • jmeister 5y ago
    Man, another million comment thread wit the same arguments. Of course it can turn into a cesspool. Of course there are ways around that problem. Like allowing more customizability for users. Like a ‘old Twitter’ filter that would allow only content compatible with the old moderation norms.
    • throwaway82652 5y ago
      The "showdead" option on HN does something similar and it's truly truly awful, I can't imagine why anyone would want to apply that at scale.
  • data-ottawa 5y ago
    I find it strange that people assume Elon will get rid of bots as though Twitter weren’t already trying that.
  • cainxinth 5y ago
    >I wish him the best and hope he truly makes twitter somewhere that you visit that isn't just rage bait again. You think "Lord Edge" is going to make Twitter less of a cesspool? Everything he's said and done indicates he wants the limits Twitter currently has on speech to be removed.
• wnevets 5y ago
  RIP Twitter 2022
• Linda703 5y ago
  [dead]
• qgin 5y ago
  “Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a distance. Just let people say what they want to say, right? Unfortunately the result of that is a place that very few want to spend time in.
  • pyaamb 5y ago
    Absolutely, well put.
  • natly 5y ago
    Elon has never said this is what he wants to do with twitter. This is just something people keep assuming.
    • api 5y ago
      He said that moderation is working well if "the most extreme 10% of the left and the right are equally frustrated." That actually kind of mirrors my politics. I think freedom is what you get when every movement, crusade, and ideology simultaneously fails. This isn't nihilism. It's a belief that problems are best solved without force.
      • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
        > said that moderation is working well if "the most extreme 10% of the left and the right are equally frustrated." The problem occurs when those ten percents use the ensuing outrage to recruit.
        • hef19898 5y ago
          And those 10% are the most vocal and loud ones. So if your platform has those 10% on both sides pissed I don't want to see the results...
• xwowsersx 5y ago
  I'm confused about the series of events here. What happened to the poison pill?
  • dahfizz 5y ago
    The poison pill only takes effect during a hostile takeover. Elon asked the board if he could buy Twitter. If the board were to say "no", the poison pill protects Twitter against Elon buying up all the shares in the open market anyway. The board saying "yes" bypasses all that.
    • xwowsersx 5y ago
      Ohh right, thank you!
    • dhimes 5y ago
      Thank you. I was also confused.
• shreyshnaccount 5y ago
  Elon is probably doing it for increased political and social influence. Like I've said before, whoever controls twitter, controls the next election.
• willcodeforfoo 5y ago
  This $43B valuation makes the GitHub acquisition look like a bargain.
• bigbillheck 5y ago
  I wonder if there'll be a clause in the terms of purchase where Musk gets to call himself a founder.
• thejackgoode 5y ago
  I can empathise with both ends of the table here, but you have to agree that entering such a world of pain as moderating Twitter and re-shaping it's dynamics voluntary (and paying $43B for it!) is yet another thing done by Musk that you will see once in a lifetime. This is "bread and circuses" of our time.
  • hooande 5y ago
    I do agree. I can't think of a precedent for this. Usually wealthy people get that way by making good investments. This is like the richest person in the world spending 15% of their net worth to buy Blockbuster in 2006
    • foolfoolz 5y ago
      this is no blockbuster dead end company, elon will have significant influence over the 2024 election
  • PaulKeeble 5y ago
    Every really rich guy needs a media company of some description to provide their narrative control to maintain their wealth. 30 years ago a billionaire would have bought a newspaper to exert their influence, today you would buy social media sites to achieve the same.
    • thejackgoode 5y ago
      You are right in general case, but I somehow doubt Musk needs Twitter to achieve narrative control (maybe, as opposed to Bezos with WSJ). It's hardly possible for him to not be able to get across the message. Good public image is evidently his priority, I am just thinking that buying Twitter is not an optimal way to achieve it. He might have something bigger in mind.
    • andruby 5y ago
      > 30 years ago No need to go that far back. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#The_Washington_Post
• andyjohnson0 5y ago
  Is "free speech absolutism" something that Twitter's advertisers (== paying customers) actually want?
  • Miner49er 5y ago
    I doubt it, it's been pretty obvious that YouTube and Reddit have been censoring at the behest of advertisers for years now.
• giarc 5y ago
  Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.
  • lawn 5y ago
    In the same way that Elon, and only Elon, can solve self driving.
  • emteycz 5y ago
    Because he has money and so can easily make everyone listen to him, unlike most other programmers who are stuck behind business/product/finance/management guys.
  • dd36 5y ago
    He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.
    • malfist 5y ago
      How does charging for a checkmark prevent bots? Forgive me if I'm wrong, I'm not a twitter user, but typically, aren't bots not verified?
      • dd36 5y ago
        The idea is that you can filter out the unpaid.
        • XorNot 5y ago
          How many accounts are needed to meaningfully influence a Twitter story? How much can you charge for a checkmark that people will pay for? Because if a checkmark costs $1/month for example, then spending a couple grand to be able to turn any story you want into "trending" is chump change for corporations, governments, and any particularly motivated silicon-valley salary'd employee. There are already services which essentially sell you retweets - all this is is an adjustment to their business model to sell "verified retweets" and "aged verified retweets" (in case you want accounts with a posting history to do it). It's a cost model adjustment, that might not even cost that much - after all if "verified" accounts receive less scrutiny from anti-bot algorithms, then they'd be cheaper to run then the developers/workers who need to keep your sockpuppet farm ahead of the game.
• mmaunder 5y ago
  Don’t underestimate the power that Twitter confers on a private owner. It has become the de facto public square for the highest level politicians and executives. It is where embassies, CEOs and presidents publicly squabble. While Instagram and Tik Tok provide entertainment and distraction, the powerful influence the masses on Twitter. When Trump was banned in Jan 2022, most of his 88 million followers never heard from him again. No matter your feelings or leanings, that’s a lot of power - to instantly mute a president. This has nothing to do with turning Twitter around as a business. It may have something to do with fostering freedom of expression globally. It definitely confers a huge amount of power on the new owner and ensures no one can mute them. Given the adversarial nature that Musk has with the current US administration, I expect an almost immediate regulatory action if this deal completes.
• known 5y ago
• rinze 5y ago
  Elon, if you're reading: this is yours now. Kill it.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Prediction: Musk will buy it, Twitter will tank, Musk will sell it at a loss.
  • hooande 5y ago
    I'd put the over/under at 365 days before he sells, and take the under
  • pm90 5y ago
    probably to someone in the house of saud lol
    • the_only_law 5y ago
      You mean our allies that help us against wicked secular regimes in Middle East?
  • loceng 5y ago
    And what do you base that off of? He seems to do quite well once he puts his focus on a problem, even if that's due to the people he ultimately decides to hire/fire.
    • ronnier 5y ago
      Because the people with power, the leaders, big tech, advertisers, people with influence, and the media do not like musk. They’ll just start some new trendy site and go there.
      • loceng 5y ago
        Are you sure about that? I think you may be conflating people with artificial power and those with genuine power. You realize people have tried that before as well, e.g. Parler, Gab, Truth Social, etc? You're likely right to some degree though, in so much as that there will be a group or a few who will for reasons (whether truthful or not) don't want to associate with a site owned by Musk and will try to start and create a successful site; it's not easy though - and why Musk is willing to buy a head start for ~$42 billion.
• sitic 5y ago
  Twitter has a shareholder meeting on May 25th, could/would they stop this? Or will it be a done deal by that time?
• MarcScott 5y ago
  Am I the only person here that finds Twitter a nice place? I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators. My feed is a really nice place to go, and I can't remember the last time I read or saw anything that triggered me in the slightest. I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over.
  • jdrc 5y ago
    yeah it is , but given this a lot of people are going to leave and some others will become very rabid. Smells like trump again . And perhaps it's for the best - this kind of service should be served by some decentralized protocol so that the chaos is warranted
  • orblivion 5y ago
    I bet if I followed exclusively capybara accounts my blood pressure would drop 5-10 points.
  • 4dahalibut 5y ago
    Totally agree. It's incredibly easy for me to simply filter out ppl who rage-bait. I am more internet-native than most though? Maybe it's harder for the general populace than I might otherwise assume?
  • HikeThe46 5y ago
    I have the same experience, I don't dive into trending "drama" I follow people I find funny, companies/athletes/celebrities that I am interested in, etc. I prune who I follow probably about twice a year to cut back on people I maybe followed because I saw one funny thing. If someone trolls me in a reply, I ignore them and move on. Having the last word means nothing on the internet.
  • ggepolja234411 5y ago
    >> I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over. Its like white people telling brown people that airport security isnt a toxic place and its all in their mind. Things are toxic...just not for everyone. Try being colored or not part of the in-crowd on Twitter and you get to see how toxic it is. The point of twitter isnt just to read, but also to engage. But engagement is hard when tiki-toting nationalists are sending death threads to anyone that doesnt want to turn the world into prison. Even technical (non political) conversations get all sorts of hate flung at PoC accounts.
• mark_l_watson 5y ago
  I understand the arguments on why some censoring is required but I would like to still make a counter argument: Twitter allows users to select unwanted tweets and say ‘not relevant to me.’ Allowing people to set there own filters seems like a better option to me. Also, Twitter could have a standard set of filters that users could choose from.
• themusicgod1 5y ago
  Don't like it? Join the fediverse! https://jointhefedi.com/ https://jointhefedi.com/
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Karawebnetwork 5y ago
    Looking at the homepage, here are the 5 servers that are advertised as (I assume) the biggest: > Politically incorrect (i.e. chan culture) > Gender-critical (i.e. transphobia) > Shitposter club (advertised as loosely moderated) > Free speech extremist (not moderated) > (Along with a meta server about new features for the platform itself) Without judgement from the content of those spaces, I would argue that those are the exact kind of culture and content that people are worried will become rampant on Twitter. If someone doesn't like what Musk is hinting towards, this is the last space they would be interested in joining.
    • themusicgod1 5y ago
      > If someone doesn't like what Musk is hinting towards, this is the last space they would be interested in joining. But they should be. "People" can have lots of reasons for wanting to leave twitter with Musk at its head - including but not limited to having a loose canon billionaire have control what can and cannot be said. On the fediverse, there's a lot more freedom. With this freedom comes people you'll agree with and those you won't.
• TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
  I honestly did not expect this outcome.
• afavour 5y ago
  One random side thought: Elon has, from time to time, shown that he can be a little petty. He will now have access to every DM sent on Twitter. I’m genuinely interested to know if he’ll be able to resist doing something wild.
• WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  Whoever you are, whatever your politics and positions are, you have to admit and appreciate the humor in the saying: “it’s a private company, they can do what they want”. Full 180 and probably shouldn’t use an argument you don’t believe in to help make your point if you are on the receiving end of that joke. Just trying to enjoy the ride on by this one… I’m still much more concerned with the on-demand Ludovico Technique / aversion therapy device TikTok is using on kids. If anything comes from this Twitter mix up and supposed transparency — hopefully some algo literacy. Just not a healthy way to be informed through a click bait anger machine designed for engagement. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4woPg0-xyAA&t=3m10s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4woPg0-xyAA&t=3m10s Aka, don’t ever tune in and tune out!
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Pxtl 5y ago
    Nobody who supports Twitter's (imho responsible) use of censorship thinks that Musk's plan to libertarianize Twitter should be illegal, unlike the folks who used to shout "First amendment! Free speech!" about Twitter's moderation. They're just saying that his actions are childish and will make the site substantially worse. And having seen the arc of many social media sites with "libertarian" moderation, I'm firmly in that camp. I mean, Hacker News would not be what it is today without firm-handed moderation.
    • lukeramsden 5y ago
      Hacker News is not a valid comparison. dang is not going around telling people what is "right" and what is "wrong" and what is "misinformation", or trying to control a narrative. Hacker News' heavy-handed moderation is specifically what allows a vast array of opinions to be discussed and debated honestly and openly, in a way that Twitter and YouTube would simply remove as "misinformation".
      • 1270018080 5y ago
        I think your first and second sentences contradict each other. If content gets removed, it's removed. Why do you care if the moderators remove it as "misinformation" (which is probably is), or for being hate speech, or being stupid?
• JulianMorrison 5y ago
  The main use of Twitter, to me, is that it gets news out of places that have poor, slow or no mainstream coverage, and does it fast - seconds after the event, in some cases. That won't be helped at all by unblocking the howling id of the right wing and (barely distinguishable) the paid and volunteer troll farms of every (would-be) dictator with a hate-on for reality. That will just adjust the ratio of piss to pool sharply in the wrong direction. To the point it may lose its utility.
• n-i-g-g-e-r 5y ago
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  Any machine learning experts out there willing to weigh in on what they expect to see if Musk does open-source the algorithms used in Twitter's individualized recommendation and overall top-ranking systems? What kind of datasets are used to train these machine-learning models? What's their technology stack like anyway? Personally I've always had a low opinion of Twitter and have never used it or even looked at it, except by accident when a tweet gets memed somewhere. More often than not my response to reading some 'tweet' is "I am now stupider for having read this." I also loathe the typical recommendation algorithms (Netflix in particular), which assume that you only want to see more the same. Has anyone ever considered that at least some people still like to see things outside their little bubbles, some novel content, something new, creative, interesting? Those algorithms are reinforcing siloing - here, get in this little box, here's what you and your fellow box-mates like, here's some more of that box content, here's what to think and believe... Really, the knobs and dials on these recommendation algorithms need to be directly exposed to the userbase, and the overall ranking algorithm and the datasets used to train it need to be open-sourced.
• RockyMcNuts 5y ago
  Free speech absolutism isn't really the norm in places where people come together for any shared purpose. Courts and parliaments have rules of procedure so it's not, whoever's loudest wins. Free speech is never 100% free, there are laws against libel, fraud, conspiracy, copyright, trademark, which create crimes that consist only of speech, or civil liability. And then there are social norms. It's always a balance between letting 20% of hateful crazy trolls hijack all rational conversation, on the one hand, and blocking unpopular opinions on the other hand. Even HN moderates a lot. Same applies to all the rights enumerated in the US Constitution, you have freedom of religion to the extent it doesn't infringe on the other important rights and provisions of the Constitution. Polygamy is banned. If your religion says servitude of women or Black people is God's will, you don't get to practice it. 2nd Amendment however broadly interpreted doesn't let you build a nuclear weapon in your backyard. There are people who want to block legitimate speech they don't want to hear and these should be resisted. A first step toward fascism is indeed people not caring about free speech and thinking their personal discomfort is the most important thing, starting with the most powerful. There are also liars and extremists who want to take a first step toward fascism by extinguishing the ability to have the sorts of rational debate we need in a democracy. You need to find a balance. You need to protect free speech by having reasonable rules and norms. "Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness." - George Washington
  • bombcar 5y ago
    We need to stop using the term free speech as it literally means restricted speech (because everyone agrees there needs to be limits).
  • raxxorraxor 5y ago
    Our laws for copyright and trademarks are pretty broken and inhibit innovation more than they protect it. It is still the law, but not a good measure. Conspiracies are entertaining and there are consequences for libel and fraud. So what is the problem again? There are social norms? General norms for the whole planet you mean? I have yet to hear a good case for more content control on the internet. The EU just voted for a law against illegal content? Makes no sense at all. But it is also against hate and for propaganda. Some say it is historic. Doesn't make a good case for history then. I don't think your quote adequately confirms the incentive of big tech companies deleting user content. Yes, the anonymous blob of internet users has arbitrary und unlimited powers. Should I really believe that?
• eatbitseveryday 5y ago
  What about the poison pill the board created after Musk announced his desire to move ahead earlier?
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    He probably got enough large institutional investors backing him that he had virtual control of the company.
• bannedbybros 5y ago
• Jaruzel 5y ago
  The ONLY way to solve the toxic nature of Twitter is to enforce a)a real name policy, and b)fully verified[1] identities for all users/bots (opt-in, where others by default filter out non-verified accounts in their feeds) Bots can continue to exist, but must be identifiable as such and connected to a verified real user. Not only will this clean up twitter dramatically, it will also push off those who wish to hide behind anonymous hate speech - they'll flock to somewhere else, and good riddance to them. Sadly, the human race isn't quite ready for anonymous 'free speech' online as all it does is attract the shouty nutjobs and political shills. So lets park that concept, and try again in a few decades time. EDIT: To clarify (and thanks to the responders for calling it out), I meant a real name policy on the verified account details only - it doesn't have to be visible to the masses. --- [1] REAL verification for all, not the blue tick which is basically a vanity symbol these days.
  • ramraj07 5y ago
    Do you know how many Aadhar verifications I can buy for a dollar each here in India? Not a billion but it’s still a lot. Just saying.
    • musingsole 5y ago
      The problem with rigid systems of control is they are often terribly blind at even recognizing what enables exploitation due to faulty boundary conditions.
    • iKevinShah 5y ago
      speaking remotely related to the topic, do you know of any good Aadhar verification service (not providers, I do not need Aadhar verifications) - All I need is a way for my users to verify themselves (KYC), preferably via Aadhar. Searched a lot but either I Am doing them wrong or unable to locate the exact thing I am looking for.
      • ramraj07 5y ago
        Quick google reveals sandbox.co.in and Mahagram.in among others. Do these not match your needs?
• FYYFFF 5y ago
  The value of Twitter is the amplification by media. It has very little actual traction in the whole, without the amplification its worthless to anyone but narcissist and PR folk. One solution is to charge users $1 to tweet. Charge users with over 10k followers 1k a month per 10k to Tweet to their followers. Its a PR machine, not a news source. Treat it like one and its value will both rise and fall...
  • conqueso 5y ago
    It is the go-to source for breaking information - how is that not a news source?
    • FYYFFF 5y ago
      Define news. Is it anything new? Is it factual information? Is it any information by anyone? News, as its meant in the lexicon, is factual based reporting. Twitter is the opposite. Its a hodgepodge of everything. You have to mine the data to find the gems. Very few people (percentage of the pop) are on Twitter. People hear about Twitter via other media's amplification. So on its own, its a small platform with oversized influence.
      • conqueso 5y ago
        News simply meaning new information. Yes it is a hodgepodge - that doesn't mean its only value is for narcissism and PR. The fact that most people only engage indirectly through media amplification doesn't take away from its utility for disseminating information in real time as events unfold throughout the world.
        • FYYFFF 4y ago
          Your definition is incorrect. Maybe that's a problem? When one is focused on an incorrect thing, they'll always end up with an incorrect conclusion.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• soapdog 5y ago
  folks, if you're as unhappy with this as I am, you should look into being more active in alternative platforms such as Mastodon which has the advantage of better moderation tools and federation.
  • JohnWhigham 5y ago
    Ah yes, a platform where one can recede even further into one's own echo chamber! Surely that is the solution to our problems.
    • soapdog 5y ago
      any platform can become an echo chamber, it really depends on you. There is a difference between Mastodon "no algorithm" echo chambers and Twitter "our algorithm decides your echo chamber". So yeah, you do you. I prefer other networks where users have more agency and where the owner is not a bully, but you do you.
• VikingCoder 5y ago
  I feel like Musk is spending $108 per Twitter user, in order to have access to all of their account data. That he wants to sell micro-targeted ads, with the aim of changing the outcomes of elections. That's my hot take.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • dimitrios1 5y ago
    You are giving twitter far too much credit. 206m users, most of them bots, trolls, and spam accounts. For American politics, it represents the two polar extremes of our electoral base. Twitter is not what it used to be anymore, and all the "moderation" has a big part of it. Elon has a long journey ahead if he wants the platform to have the same influence it once did.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    My hot take is that he doesn’t much care for politicians of any party.
• 1970-01-01 5y ago
  A great way to advertise Tesla would be to fully weave it into the very fabric of Twitter. Every tweet then has the potential to inject Tesla's brand into eyeballs.
• m1117 5y ago
  Twitter needs a strong leader with a vision, IMHO
• jordemort 5y ago
  I'd delete my Twitter account now, but I already deleted it in 2016.
• VonGuard 5y ago
  How do you fix Twitter? Why, there's computer science for that: https://spritelyproject.org/ https://spritelyproject.org/
• javajosh 5y ago
  I've always wanted a feature that just bins similar reactions together, so I don't have to read them. For example, I'd love replies to be binned into categories like "cruel disparagement", "wilful misunderstanding", "mindless agreement", "fallacious", "opinion as fact", and "threats and doxing". Ideally the last category would be taken seriously by law enforcement. People who write things who get binned into these categories should get a score which, after reaching a threshold, get blocked, and ideally even generates a report for others to see of who I've blocked, and why, to save others the trouble. Interestingly I feel like the trolls would like this too because it would let them compete with each other for being the most horrible and the most blocked on the platform.
  • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
    Crowd-sourcing moderation, including flagging for categories you've outlined, will fail utterly. Spend some time on /r/BestOfReports and you'll see what moderators deal with. People use reports like a "super downvote" button for things they disagree with, and I don't mean the "things they disagree with" as the racism/bigotry dog whistle it often means. Reddit somewhat recently added a option to report a post for describing intent to self-harm, and if someone hits it, it sends a message to the user containing resources for seeking help, and spend enough time on reddit and you'll see people edit posts/comments saying "Apparently someone reported this for self-harming?" I think the only way to make crowd-sourced content flagging and moderation work is if you see a post that's been flagged that clearly shouldn't be, you should be able to click a button that unflags it for yourself, AND adds everyone who flagged it to a list of accounts to ignore their flags. But that list must be kept personal. As soon as you allow that data to train an algorithm that detects false flaggers, the system gets broken again.
    • javajosh 5y ago
      >Crowd-sourcing moderation, including flagging for categories you've outlined, will fail utterly. I agree, which is why I didn't suggest it.
      • Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
• cogogo 5y ago
  There are so many comments I may have missed the right thread but I hope Twitter doesn’t kill all automated and/or anonymous accounts. I run one (@bostontimelaps1) and it has been such a fun project for the last year with nothing other than positive interactions with my niche group of followers - even a bunch that are obviously on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me. Not to mention it has been a great learning experience building the automation and the content itself brings me joy to see tweeted automatically. Had heard about maybe verifying this type of account. I’d be willing to pay to keep it going but I definitely don’t want it overly easy to tie it to my name for all kinds of dumb reasons.
  • jmkni 5y ago
    I don't think banning them is the right move, but making it easy to clearly identify who is a real human and who is a robot/fake account would improve things a lot imo I think there is value in robots on Twitter, and there is value in anonymous accounts (for whistleblowers etc)
• jillesvangurp 5y ago
  It's a good offer and the share holders seem to lean towards agreeing with that statement now. Of course the question is whether Elon Musk can turn this company around. He seems to feel that that is something that needs to happen. I tend to agree with on that. If nothing happens, Twitter will continue to slowly and steadily decline; like Facebook has experienced with their social network in recent years as well. But share holders appear to be happy to take the cash and make that Elon Musk's problem. That tells you all about the level of confidence they have in the current leadership.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    It’s almost too easy for Elon to improve Twitter. The list of problems and features is a mile long. Twitter has done nothing but stagnate the last 10 years.
• lizardactivist 5y ago
  I wonder what his real motives are, and if they are his motives alone.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    I’m guessing like many users of twitter he’s pissed about how much it sucks and never seems to improve. The difference with Elon is that’s he’s actually in a position to do something about it.
• ratsforhorses 5y ago
  Will Musk let Trump back on Twitter? I dislike the latter but was under the impression both are kind of buddys? It's just I thought a lot of advertising revenue was driven by polarization of issues and both have used Twitter to push the boundaries on that...
• billiam 5y ago
  My life will get a lot better when I abandon the platform the second this deal goes through. It's just the last reason, not the first.
  • Splendor 5y ago
    Same here. I've had an account since 2007. This will be the thing that nudges me far enough to delete my account.
  • furyofantares 5y ago
    Why wait until it goes through? Make your life better now.
  • wollsmoth 5y ago
    I leave the apps uninstalled, and only look at it when bored at home. no need to look at this throughout the day.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Why? Twitter is actually going to get some real improvements after 10 years of crap.
• scruple 5y ago
  Now I wonder if we'll see Trump back on the platform ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
• artur_makly 5y ago
  Having the 'richest' man w/ social Asperger fully control the largest 'public town square" seems..ironic and frankly dangerous. To me it feels like twitter or something better should simply be a DAO. What are the chances of that?
  • IE6 5y ago
    Not a Musk fan or a Twitter user but is the sentiment here that someone with ASD cannot properly create policy or (more likely) employ people to create policy? Just curious.
    • artur_makly 5y ago
      yeah I know that sounds non-PC... but there is some irony here.. that's all. Clearly folks w/ ASD have incredible super powers, and in Elon's case, he feels he take a hard problem: ie, how to provide "freedom" of speech in every country, while adhering to that country's laws, and provide more transparency, better UX, and decrease the spam/botfest. and with the help of other experts in this field, solve it. Sure why not. But solving social media and all its nuances, psychological challenges, per culture, is not the same as solving manufacturing or space expansion..IMHO. It requires, I feel a different set of skills ( soft-skills ) which you just dont read about, but embody yourself to a major degree. So for example he was asked recently here at this TEDx : https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM?t=1477 https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM?t=1477 "how would you solve the Edit button problem? If someone tweeted "Elon Rocks" and then it was retweeted by millions..and then they changed it to "Elon Sucks" and everyone is embarrassed. How would you avoid changing a meaning so retweeters are not exploited" his response: 1- I would have Editing() be available for a short time only. 2 - I would Zero out all retweets and favorites. His solution, is very 'systems-thinking', and im sure comes from his personal social-skill biases 'super powers'. Which seems fine on some level, but also opens up another debate on the benefits of keeping a record or not. But let's say that in the end, his psy-ops team of scientists take a vote and tell him that 50% of them feel we should not Zero-out ( because X, Y, Z ) and he ends up being the tie-breaker, and dictates that he prefers a more non-human/empathetic solution that would be more appropriate for his Ai's educational training.. or simply his personal social algo/taste.
• AlwaysRock 5y ago
  Cool. I'm curious if any real change will come of this or if twitter will continue chugging along like it has for years.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    There will be many changes no doubt. Elon is great at cutting out the fat and iterating a product relentlessly.
• dhimes 5y ago
  This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One that is being discussed here in other threads is basically, "What does Musk think he can do that others before him haven't been able to?" Are we going to see a stroke of real genius here? The second point is also interesting, but isn't being discussed: Twitter enacted a poison pill on 15 April which could allow Musk to pay a ton but not get board control. I'm not an expert but what I've read is that if Musk (or anyone) tries to get a controlling share then other shareholders can gain voting shares for cheap, which makes it very expensive for Musk to actually achieve a takeover in the sense that he can do what he wants with the company. I'd love for somebody who knows more about that to help clarify it.
  • furyofantares 5y ago
    The poison pill is just to prevent him from buying twitter on the open market. It can be removed at any time and any sale will be contingent on it being removed.
    • dhimes 5y ago
      Thank you. I saw something about that downstream.
  • dhimes 5y ago
    UPDATE: Farther downstream https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154330 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154330 dahfizz explains that the poison pill only goes into effect if the board does not approve the purchase. If the board accepts the offer, the poison pill won't be an issue.
  • axg11 5y ago
    The poison pill is irrelevant if Elon and the Board come to an agreement. Any deal would involve a workaround or nullifying of the poison pill. Elon is a smart guy but the real impact of this takeover will come from his ability to act unilaterally. Jack Dorsey hasn't owned a significant amount of Twitter for a decade and likewise hasn't had much ability to take bold decisions for at least as long. Elon will come in with the willingness and ability to take tough decisions, such as sacrificing engagement numbers for the sake of kicking out bots.
• sfmike 5y ago
  i'm skeptical. we can't see the future, but if Denial Of Service has happened with Tesla Cars that same power dynamic could be applied to Twitter.
• smm11 5y ago
  If our last president is again given a voice on this platform, I'm deleting my account.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Funny how people are ok censorship until it happens to them or someone they support.
  • throwaway_1928 5y ago
    If Elon takes over, it is likely he will be back on Twitter.
• mrkramer 5y ago
  Zuck offered $500m for Twitter 14 years ago and they refused it so I guess it paid off looking at the price but man Twitter sucks. They have incompetent management that destroyed $100bn opportunity called Vine and that can't get their shit together. Elon might help but Twitter is doomed in the long term imo.
  • ng12 5y ago
    I'm still mad about Vine, it had such a cool community of creators. I was shocked when they shut it down.
    • misiti3780 5y ago
      Vine was awesome.
• jasonwilk 5y ago
  While I don’t advocate for anyone losing their job, my partial view on what Elon will do with Twitter once he takes it private is to shut down their ad business and focus on Twitter Blue (or some variation of subscription based product announcements). This will have several benefits. 1. Simplifies the business operation by reducing fixed headcount significantly 2. This will have a hard hit to Twitter revenue but Musk will have the benefit of downgrading the new ad-free business valuation and using the haircut against his future personal Tesla stock sales. Losing the ad business doesn’t actually cost him anything. 3. Product will now be more user friendly than competition, focusing more on product Vs ad tech. Eventually because it doesn’t have ads it could reignite growth to become a dominant social network. Whether it grows in value or not is irrelevant to Musk and because of this, he seems like the most aligned to improve the product Vs any other financial suitor.
  • axg11 5y ago
    Without the ads business, Twitter will be operating at huge loss, much larger than recent times. The best way to monetize attention is through ads. I'm not saying that I am happy with that, but there is a lot of evidence to suggest that subscriptions will lead to much lower revenue/profit than ads. There's a reason why no other social media platform has ever succeeded through a subscription model.
    • corobo 5y ago
      Have any tried? The only one I can think of close to social is the forum Something Awful, which did (does?) pretty good for itself
      • bombcar 5y ago
        Something Awful ended pretty awfully, at least for the founder.
        • irthomasthomas 5y ago
          And for that moderator who was killed in the attack on Benghazi.
• distrill 5y ago
  i wonder if musk will finally get out of my news cycle for 10 minutes now
• McLaren_Ferrari 5y ago
  Looking at the multiple threads about Musk/Twitter a clear pattern emerges: 1) People who look at the future with wide eyes and and a huge amount of optimism would gladly put their lives, finances and generally the whole society in the hands of this man. 2) People (including myself) who look at the future as a concept that scammers and snake oil salesmen often use to convince people to give them money...well they think this guy is nothing but a scammer and a snakeoil salesman convinving people to give him money right now for stuff that he'll never deliver. I sometimes envy the first category and would like to make a leap on the other side...just to see what it's like...but man are the awakenings rough. When they happen the former optimists reach level of cynism that are sky high even for those of us who are regularly cynic.
• noobermin 5y ago
  The level of hero worship on this site is bizarre, not even for someone for their technical acumen, but just because they are a figure in the broader culture. It's really disappointing, actually.
  • rootusrootus 5y ago
    I don't hate the guy, but I am slightly disappointed that this is the best we can get for a real world imitation of Tony Stark.
    • nh23423fefe 5y ago
      Word salad.
    • samstave 5y ago
      We have both ends of the extremes of "wanting to seem like Stark, but not quite making the cut" ; We have Gates, who is seemingly using his philanthropic money shenanigans disguised as for the public good, while ensuring every single move is 100% profit driven only... and winding up an evil figure from such We have Musk's fanciful and awe inspiring feats of enterprise and business acumen, and the glowing admiration from imaginations of our future futurists... Yet, both cut from the same cloth, just orthogonal threads.
    • ironmagma 5y ago
      I always found Stark to be a brash, unlikable character. We have enough of those in the world already.
      • user_7832 5y ago
        (Slightly controversial opinion for this thread) Stark is an a*hole. Folk(s) imitating him (or imitated by him) ironically don't realize it.
        • ironmagma 5y ago
• blu0rca 5y ago
  Everyone is scared of what he is going to do to twitter; why? We have zuck in control of meta so it can’t be any worse than that, right?
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  People are going to implode when Trump is unbanned.
• ensan 5y ago
  I don't like Mr. Musk but the highly upvoted and analytical takes about how he is not serious with the offer or is just trolling did not age well at all.
• DrBoring 5y ago
  I liked it when StackOverflow introduced features to elicit better community manners. For example, the prompt that say something to the effect of "BobUserXYZ is new to SO, he may not know all the social rules of our community, please take that into consideration and try to be welcoming and polite". I wonder if similar prompts like that on Twitter/et al would improve toxicity. I don't specifically mean a "welcome our new community member" prompt. I'm suggesting UI changes that are designed with the goal of improved community manners which work in the context of Twitter. StackOverflow being a community of mostly tech professional is far from an analog to Twitter. Surely, the goal of curtailing toxic behavior is much more easily attained in a community where the society have a common goal of solving technical problems.
  • PufPufPuf 5y ago
    Most importantly, StackOverflow has a goal -- they are creating a collaborative QA collection. The focus is on the content, not on user interaction. I'm afraid that what works on SO may not work at all on Twitter.
• whateveracct 5y ago
  Wonder if it'll be able to compare to Tumblr from a social media-quality perspective now that it's private like Tumblr has been. I just paid Tumblr $25 last week to have 7000 people see a funny joke I made last year. Win-win. The users get a sensible chuckle, and Tumblr gets a little walking around money. Can't believe Tumblr Blaze is advertising done right.
• lbriner 5y ago
  My understanding of the narrative: * Musk approached us and we decided it was the best thing for him to take over and join the board * We have decided that the best way forwards will be for him not to join the board * We have decided that we absolutely do not want to have Musk as owner * We have decided to accept the offer to buy Twitter by Musk. All of this is corporate bollocks and probably has very few useful lessons for us lesser mortals except that to succeed in business, truth and honesty does not add any value.
  • samstave 5y ago
    >>...that to succeed in business, truth and honesty does not add any value... I wish we had an open forum on HN to call out all the times engineers have been fucked over in so many situations of acqui-hire-BS that has occurred. I know I am not alone in having companies build entire revenue streams around my efforts and contributions and fucked me over in the end after I set them on the right trajectory with my efforts. Its funny this came up, as while I was on my morning ride, I was lamenting about this very issue ; I was calling back a memory from a few years ago while I was building the Salesforce offices throughout the US... I had regular meetings with my CEO discussing my bonus. Which was to be about $30,000 for the completion of 50 Fremont in SF. They used a tool to track contribution to the efforts, and I had a pretty little graph showing my bonus payout based on what I was doing... (we were the technology designers for all their offices, I was the TPM who did the actual design, implementation, consultant and construction management of the LV/AV/IT/Sec/Facilities etc.. vendors et al - installed and configured every piece of networking equipment, maintained the IT project plan and etc.... I made this company millions. After completing the Chicago office - I was told that the project was closing and that I would be laid off ( I did the work of a team ) and that my bonus was $2,000. that "Salesforce hasn't paid us yet" --- This company, was denigrated all over the bay area, and I was literally hired to clean up their mess at multiple locations. Hospitals, tech companies, etc... They have a slimy sales and CEO, and while they seem all professional and moral etc.. they are not. David and Ken, bless your heart, for helping keep psychopath archetypes alive and well.
• WilTimSon 5y ago
  God this is depressing. I'm sure many people are excited about it but I feel like this will just make Twitter worse than it already is, and the scariest part is that it won't kill off the platform. People may say they'll ditch it but, realistically, there's no real competitor to it.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    It’s going to get way way better. Twitter is so bad right now it’s almost too easy to figure out what needs to be fixed.
• khazhoux 5y ago
  What most troubles me about this whole ordeal: The lack of upper limits on wealth accumulation by an individual means that a single person can eventually directly control enough funds to simply decide one day to buy one of the world's largest communication channels. No one here seems to have a problem with this. For as much as the tech community generally despises generational-wealth families like the Waltons, or foreign oligarchs, or Saudi royalty who get free unlimited money and power from the ground, we're all perfectly comfortable with an executive amassing ever-increasing power like a giant Katamari ball. A democracy can vote out a leader who grows corrupt or ineffective. But the power of Elon (and Zuck, and the other modern mega-billionaires) is effectively unstoppable. Bill Gates, e.g., still sits at the top of the money-power pile, even though his own success peaked 25 years ago.
  • pfarrell 5y ago
    Agree with all your points and I share your concerns. If this deal goes through, I'll cancel my (almost completely unused) Twitter account. It's not much, but it's more than nothing.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • nyxtom 5y ago
    I hear what you're saying, but on the other hand, it's because of people like Elon Musk, the Saudi Royalty, and dozens of other wealthy individuals and funds that many of us even have high paying jobs at a number of high profile tech companies.
  • soperj 5y ago
    Seriously? Anyone can just not use their product. Did you feel this way when NewsCorp bought MySpace?
    • pfarrell 5y ago
      Yes, an individual can protest in this fashion, but that doesn't negate the unchecked influence Twitter has and the GP's concerns over how the rich and powerful are able to acquire this influence without any limit. It's a good point about NewsCorp, but I think the world has changed considerably since the MySpace purchase happened.
• jmpman 5y ago
  Twitter is a place for D list celebrities attempting to become C list celebrities, and a place for politicians to post their accomplishments, only to turn a deaf ear to the responses.
  • samstave 5y ago
    >D list celebrities attempting to become C list celebrities, and a place for politicians to post their accomplishments Now, stop being redundant. -- The Department of Redundancy Department.
• WYepQ4dNnG 5y ago
  Elon is no fit to own and run a social media company. Let’s remember the toxic tweet against Bernie https://twitter.com/sensanders/status/1459584250668331011 https://twitter.com/sensanders/status/1459584250668331011 I will for sure delete my account.
• metamuas 5y ago
  I hope they do something about government officials from random nations shitposting with proxy accounts.
• rosenjcb 5y ago
  Does anyone else feel like he's going to start doing petty shit like banning people he doesn't like (e.g. that musk flight tracker account)? He talks a lot about free speech but he has a track record of limiting speech on the platform (blocking multiple people) and off (making the founders of Tesla sign a hush contract).
  • darknavi 5y ago
    Perhaps. But it's his (or his investors) 40 billion to burn. I'd hope that spending that much money makes you think twice about being a petty ass.
    • rosenjcb 5y ago
      His whole life he's had to listen to shareholders. This is his one chance to just say "Fuck it" and just do whatever he wants. I would hope the businessman and him would prevent him from doing this. However like most gag orders he imposes, it would be completely hidden from us. He won't be tweeting about it.
  • thepasswordis 5y ago
    As opposed to petty things like banning the sitting president of the united states?
    • rosenjcb 5y ago
      I'm confused, are you talking about banning Trump (after he lost the election)? I'm not saying the decision is right or wrong, but Twitter thought a long time about it. I'm pretty sure the board wanted him banned even earlier, but they waited for the right moment.
    • jakemauer 5y ago
      • xanaxagoras 5y ago
• pupppet 5y ago
  Very interested to see what happens to @ElonJet.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    blows my mind people think he paid 43B to block a few people.
• jmyeet 5y ago
  I feel like the world is divided into two kinds of people: 1. Those who are active on Twitter; and 2. Those who don't and don't even scroll through it. The first group seems to think this buyout is the most pressing issue of our generation. The latter just doesn't care. I honestly just don't care about Twitter. The only people who "engage" in Twitter are those with a decent number of followers and they're, by definition, a small minority (of the small minority who use Twitter). For the remainder that read Twitter, it's really interchangeable with Facebook or Reddit or whatever. Like Twitter disappearing overnight would (IMHO) have very little impact. My prediction here is that Elon will take it private, realize the "problems" aren't really problems or are incredibly hard to solve and then after a couple of years there'll be some face-saving reorganization and the whole thing will get made public again, probably for a net total loss. Luckily (thus far) there's a pretty limited market for conservatives crying about censorship of hate speech masquerading as free speech.
• anovikov 5y ago
  We will soon find out what's harder: settle Mars or make a public place where everyone can post, anything but a cesspool of bullshit. I think we will see Mars colony first.
• generalizations 5y ago
  I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Twitter is probably the best social media platform for interplanetary communication, where low bandwidth and delayed transmission are fundamental bottlenecks, and both limitations are considered part of the appeal (character limitations and a format where you simply disperse messages and have no real notion of when they'll be received). In that case, I wonder if the monetization will ultimately be based on latency and message size: pay more for your message to be sent from Mars in the next transmission, and pay more to send a larger message. Locally, I wonder if Twitter will be tied to starlink in some fashion. If this does become some kind of interplanetary messaging system, I wouldn't be surprised if other technologies are built around it. Maybe Dorsey's decentralization attempt will be used as the infrastructure for the free tier of Twitter, and starlink is the infrastructure for the paid version (pay more to send faster, or to another planetary body). Edit: I can imagine a rebuilt backend that's decentralized across large (planetary?) regions, where messages are just the tweet content & metadata and passed between nodes. Very efficient, and the non-technical user already has the right expectations.
  • Hendrikto 5y ago
    > both limitations are considered part of the appeal I don‘t think so. That‘s why you get people posting screenshots of text, or 50 tweet threads including a link to a thread reader "unroll" service. Many people want to use Twitter like a blog. But it is terrible for that use case.
    • wrycoder 5y ago
      I would like to see an option to turn off all images by default, and possibly enable them per user followed.
    • krono 5y ago
      It would work fine for those purposes if it weren't for the confusing and unreliable order in which these tweets are rendered, and all the unrelated crap they've put everywhere in between, over top, and all around the actual content. It's so terrible that it must have been implemented this way on purpose.
• munificent 5y ago
  It's hard to imagine anything good coming from the world's richest man owning one of the world's largest information dissemination systems. Do we really need to concentrate power even more than it already is?
  • preordained 5y ago
    lol...like Twitter was some kind of bastion of information dissemination for the people, rather than a massive narrative filter and amplifier. The irony is that a lot of people are hoping he can return Twitter to a place of a less restricted conversation...
    • munificent 5y ago
      "bastion of information dissemination" and "massive filter and amplifier" are synonymous to me. Maybe I should have been clearer, but I didn't mean "information" in the sense of "true facts about the world", I meant in the sense of "data someone wants to get in the heads of others". Truth, lies, stories, anecdotes, misinformation, fiction, data, and nonsense are all "information" in that sense. And Twitter is clearly one of the world's largest services for moving data into human heads.
• kyruzic 5y ago
  Get rid of the mandatory account please. I have no need for a twitter account because I have no need to follow people or tweet myself. Why do I need an account.
  • robonerd 5y ago
    Why are accounts needed for following at all? Youtube gives me personalized suggestions without an account, just a cookie.
• jwmoz 5y ago
  No desire for musk to run twitter. Watch it turn to a shitshow.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    A shitshow would be a step up from where it is now.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• throwaway658 5y ago
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Because it’s easier/faster to go from a 43B to 400B valuation than from zero to 400B valuation.
• didip 5y ago
  My first reaction: Say good bye to Twitter's famous WLB. Second reaction: I think Twitter has a lot of potential still. The platform is currently stuck in the past and having a power user being in-charge would help Twitter grow again.
• rosmax_1337 5y ago
  I hope Elon succeeds in his plans here, and that Twitter can once again become a place with functioning freedom of speech for all sides of the political spectrum once again. Considering the most recent trajectory of the west regarding censorship online, this is a breath of fresh air. And dare I hope, maybe it even sets a new trend?
  • mooman219 5y ago
    What side of the political spectrum do you think is currently not able to voice their opinions on the platform?
• technick 5y ago
  As much as I hate twitter and their censorship bullcrap, it's not worth that much. Twitter is a bad investment and doesn't have "stick" with consumers, as in a consumer can drop twitter easily.
• escapecharacter 5y ago
  Prediction: he’ll force them to add an edit button, and put Twitter up for sale again within 6 months. Like a social media fixer-upper
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Counter prediction the value of Twitter will 10x in the next 3 years.
• TedShiller 5y ago
  aka Twitter about to become useful
• skoczko 5y ago
  Elon Musk is a manipulative internet troll with little respect for others. His Twitter will not be dissimilar.
• Melatonic 5y ago
  This is just Elons version of the uber rich dude buying / starting a newspaper.
• timcavel 5y ago
  Twitter will have to subscribe to the Science Ministry's USA Fact-Check Algorithm to ensure absolute truth on the Internet.
• peter_retief 5y ago
  He has already increased its value by buying it.
  • moffkalast 5y ago
    Question: Twitter is currently trading at 51.something USD. > Twitter stockholders will receive $54.20 in cash for each share of Twitter common stock that they own upon closing of the proposed transaction Isn't there an arbitrage profit here of ~$3 per stock or something? Am I completely nuts or is it a sure thing to throw literally all money at twitter right now haha.
    • peter_retief 5y ago
      Great question, probably is so but who would sell and lose $3 per share?
      • moffkalast 5y ago
        Well you're forced to sell for a profit, Elon is buying for a loss.
• longtimegoogler 5y ago
  As an ethnic Jew, pure un-moderated free speech is a frightening prospect for me. I can't wait for twitter to become another Parler or 4-chan filled with hateful content. As someone impacted by this kind of speech, I don't see how this is any different than yelling fire in a crowded theater. We are essentially normalizing ideas that will lead to violence and oppression of certain groups.
  • dash2 5y ago
    > pure un-moderated free speech is a frightening prospect for me You'll be horrified by this one eighteenth-century document. More seriously, if Twitter becomes 4chan, won't it become as popular as 4chan? Sewers aren't popular places to hang out.
  • hash03x 5y ago
  • LadyCailin 5y ago
    Yeah. I can’t help but think his goals for Twitter just already describe a few existing platforms. They’re all full of vile, racist stuff, which advertisers don’t want to touch with a 30 foot pole, and aren’t worth anywhere near $40 billion. So I’m really not sure what he’s going to change, at least not without lighting his money on fire.
  • hash07e 5y ago
    "As an ethnic Jew, pure un-moderated free speech is a frightening prospect for me." Don't worry. Whole MSM bash white people and they are ok. You will be fine.
• AbrahamParangi 5y ago
  It's absolutely wild that many of the same people against Elon Musk controlling twitter are okay with the Chinese Government controlling an app with literally 10x as many users.
  • smegsicle 5y ago
    that's just conspiracy theory garbage- there's no way the chinese govenment has a political agenda
• dash2 5y ago
  Well, my favourite comment so far comes from Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1518645588350361602?s=20&t=SMd5sRws64Y1ccWfK7nPZw https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1518645588350361602?...
  • fullshark 5y ago
    Yglesias of all people shouldn't consider silencing people to be a trivial matter, but he wants to remain in his in-group...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • robonerd 5y ago
    If he's earnestly serious about colonizing Mars (I have serious doubts), then investing in influence over political discourse seems prudent. There are many who will oppose any attempt to set up colonies on Mars, for numerous reasons.
• xyst 5y ago
  I was just beginning to like Twitter too... How long until it becomes a dumpster fire like FB
• jdlyga 5y ago
  So, looks like Twitter will turn into Parler? Let's hope it doesn't become more of a dumpster fire.
• sidcool 5y ago
  Musk has seen production hell. This is a different kind. Good luck Elon. Make good on your promises. EDIT: What I will be watching for is what Elon will do when freedom of speech is at odds with a big chunk of revenue. He is investing a boatload of money and at his philanthropic worst, he would like to break even in a few years.
  • boringg 5y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. Musk has done very well on hard engineering problems - now he is entering a special kind of hell running a social media company.
    • UncleOxidant 5y ago
      I have no idea why he would willingly take on this kind of distraction at this point.
    • warning26 5y ago
      Presenting Twitter with AI Full Self Anti-Spam!* *Coming in 5 years
    • dudus 5y ago
      Why do you assume he'll be running the company? I assumed he would appoint a new CEO and just participate on the board.
      • AlexandrB 5y ago
        If he just wanted to participate on the board he could have stuck with his 10%. It definitely seems like he's looking for a more hands-on role than that.
        • dudus 5y ago
          He just has a different kind of decision power by owning 100% of a private company. But he doesn't need to be involved on day to day operations and can appoint a CEO to do his bidding.
• downvoted98 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • l33t2328 5y ago
    Uhh...this seems like legitimate schizoposting. I hope all involved seek and receive help.
• aliswe 5y ago
  I follow only musk and casey muratori. good mix of unhinged.
• davesque 5y ago
  Here's the mental hurdle I have to get over with all this. And call me old fashioned, but I'm trying to figure out how a guy who has himself essentially proved to be a troll is supposed to be the right person to improve the quality of human interaction on the platform. The whole "pedo guy" episode comes to mind. Are my concerns too simplistic here? Somebody help me feel better about all this.
  • DodgyEggplant 5y ago
    It took years, sometimes centuries, to understand that in some industries a take over should get a regulatory approval. Maybe a central social media platform with enormous influence on public opinions, should be too.
  • tmp_anon_22 5y ago
    "Oh he was just joking when he said that"
    • la6472 5y ago
      Mr T will be tweeting again!!
      • philosopher1234 5y ago
        enjoy the end of democracy, i hope it makes you feel whole.
  • nh23423fefe 5y ago
    You invented a fake mental hurdle that you can't jump over. You setup a strawman argument that you yourself can't see past? Improving human interaction isn't anyone's goal. Imagining there is a "right person" is fake. Why are people imagining the network which invented contextless hot takes is somehow now the most important public square which must be protected from what? Twitter will be destroyed and we won't have what?
    • 5y ago
• realmod 5y ago
  He, undoubtedly, overpaid for Twitter. Also, the blue-check allows key users to distinguish themselves and is one major reason that "notable" people are using Twitter for essentially all their communications. Elon's plan to diminish the blue-check by giving it to anyone who has verified themselves by buying Twitter Blue would be very destructive and hurt Twitter's moat. -- Edit -- Actually, disregard the blue-check comment. I oversold it. A blue-check is actually not that important.
  • WesleyHale 5y ago
    the blue check is already meaningless. It's been handed out to people with 100's of followers and no names.
  • paulgb 5y ago
    I kinda doubt it. Notable people were using Twitter long before blue checks were a thing, and although people threaten to leave twitter for other platforms, they usually come back. Instead, I think his ideas for blue check verification won’t happen because blue checks are unofficially a carrot that Twitter can hang for brands that spend on their ad platform.
    • realmod 5y ago
      I wasn't even considering the people who threatened to leave in response to Elon's takeover - the true number would be inconsequential. > Notable people were using Twitter long before blue checks were a thing True. Now that I think about it, I most definitely oversold it. Blue-check is a nice to have benefit but notable accounts are still today religiously using Twitter despite not being verified. I think I was focusing too much on the journalist clique on Twitter and their excessive desire for a blue-check.
  • ericmay 5y ago
    He could maybe do different colored "verified" (maybe green?) checks. Obviously anyone with a blue check is going to be inclined to defend the exclusivity of it, but that's the problem. There are also notable people who aren't verified because they didn't jump through Twitter's hoops to become verified. Personally I'd like to see real human verification and filtering based on "real human" and I'd pay for something like Twitter Blue if it had this. Sam Harris recently interviewed Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) and he had a very interesting and related point which was free speech should be just for real humans, bots don't have such rights. Unfortunately it seems that there is Blue Checkmark land and then spam land for the rest of us. If it kills Twitter for certain people to lose their status symbol, well, it would have killed Twitter in the long run anyway by maintaining it.
• quirino 5y ago
  I wonder about the potential for Twitter to improve as a product with a little shakeup/different priorities. Stuff like not needing to login to browse or a better system for longer tweets/threads. I'd also be a fan of a very fast/lightweight interface, something closer to nitter.net.
  • napolux 5y ago
    I bet 5 dogecoins that we won't get anything of this.
    • phkahler 5y ago
      >> I bet 5 dogecoins that we won't get anything of this. I bet you get Donald Trump back on Twitter.
      • WillPostForFood 5y ago
        I bet you get an edit button
        • SlonBog 5y ago
          I bet spams will be removed.
        • illwrks 5y ago
          ...or a pay-to-edit button.
    • memish 5y ago
      Looks like we already have. Your 5 dogecoin is worth 25% more on the news.
      • SZJX 5y ago
        ... and? That's not related to whether the said functionalities get implemented or not is it.
• jypepin 5y ago
  So, how does that work for current stock holders and employees? If you own Twitter stock, will it be automatically sold at 43b val? And twitter will get out of public markets? For employees, are they pretty much seeing their comp getting divided by 2 because now they can't sell the stocks/rsus they vest every quarter?
  • draaglom 5y ago
    I've seen two options floated: - replace RSUs with cash payments on same vesting schedule @ equivalent of final sale price - keep RSUs despite being private (apparently SpaceX issues RSUs just fine & has regular liquidity events)
    • HWR_14 5y ago
      I thought as a private company Twitter (and SpaceX) would be limited to 999 shareholders. Is that not then case?
      • draaglom 5y ago
        I'm no financier and I don't know anything about a 999 limit, but apparently SpaceX has been doing something to make it possible: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1518408959022968833 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1518408959022968833
      • julienb_sea 5y ago
        No, I can say from personal experience receiving RSUs from private companies that there was no arbitrary limit on how many people could receive them. I don't fully understand why that is the case, my suspicion is that employees receive share units, i.e. are not "shareholders" technically. The share units can be converted to cash at liquidity events or will convert to actual shares at an IPO event.
      • eklitzke 5y ago
        Why would this be the case? There are tons of tech companies (possibly even most?) that have more than 1000 employees at the time of IPO. As far as I know there are no limits on the number of shareholders for C-corps, private or not.
• asasidh 5y ago
  feeling bad for the employees who will have to work under Dogefather now.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Yea sucks working for someone who will make their stock options actually valuable.
• AviationAtom 5y ago
  Wowza. The engagement in this post might beat Stephen Hawking's death announcement.
  • sytelus 5y ago
    I haven't understood why people obsess so much about someone's death. Shouldn't they be thinking about them more when they were alive?
    • AviationAtom 5y ago
      It's the point at which people finally realize they should have appreciated the living more than they did. To quote a pop song: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you got 'til it's gone"
    • layer8 5y ago
      I think anytime is fine, but death is a good opportunity for reflection, recollection and sharing. And sometimes it’s the very realization that one should have engaged more with the person when they were still alive which intensifies the reaction.
    • savanaly 5y ago
      It's a schelling point.
    • carapace 5y ago
      Are you going to NOT think about them?
• halyax 5y ago
• blantonl 5y ago
  I'm curious, how long until the mean tweets are back? Anyone want to place bets?
• abnry 5y ago
  Ways I think Twitter could immediately improve, from the perspective of users: - Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol. Offer "real person" twitter filter. - Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out. - Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-bait content.
  • toephu2 5y ago
    > Return to a reverse chronological time They've had this for years. Press the "swish" (stars) button top right.
    • yupper32 5y ago
      We have to remember that a lot of people who criticize twitter don't actually use twitter. This happens so often with so many things. Facebook: "I haven't used Facebook in 10 years, and never bothered to unfollow things on my feed back then, but it sucks! The feed is just garbage!" SNL: "I haven't watched SNL since the 90s. It hasn't been funny in years!" Expensive restaurants: "I went to one Michelin star place in 2007 and it was like 3 bites of food! I don't know why people bother!"
      • danachow 5y ago
        Your examples are still straw men. I do occasionally have the misfortune of using twitter - sometimes a link is posted or sent to me, or I am curious if something specific is trending. It sucks ass and is unenjoyable in my opinion - the worst when someone tries to use it as a full blown blogging platform. It seems designed to exploit certain triggers for compulsive content consumption. There are numerous similar testimonials of people that still regularly use twitter if not compulsively, so the straw men are irrelevant.
        • yupper32 5y ago
          You use twitter in a different way than the vast majority of users. Twitter users follow people and see their posts. Their feeds are mostly their followers posts. You ever look at the youtube home page when you're logged out? It's absolute garbage. It's also not the way most people use youtube.
• khazhoux 5y ago
  And... Twitter accepted the offer.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Funny how like 99% of posts here and everywhere else said ‘this would never happen, and this is only a ‘publicity stunt’
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• vishnugupta 5y ago
  Looks like the deal is done: https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1518664847768006656 https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1518664847768006656
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • tomatowurst 5y ago
    Yeah I mean Parag was not going to make it. He was a lame duck but the product itself can't be changed much as it is still about amplifying status updates. Pushbacks on Elon threatening to bring free speech back (hopefully addressing the toxic witch hunts, cancelling) were seemingly orchestrated by incumbent billionaires with their own mainstream media outlets feeling threatened by it—because it would undermine the impact of their own loudspeakers if views that challenge popular narratives or The Current Thing. Anyways, I am not a fanboy of Elon by any means other than SpaceX, I think it was a refreshing move for a billionaire to not just buy another mainstream media outlet. Unsure what will happen going forward .... but strictly from a business point of view, buying Twitter for the purpose of profiteering was a bad one, but at his level, money has become irrelevant, its more about control here. Having said that I do question how far he would be able to take the free speech thing as a private company.
    • aluminum96 5y ago
      > Pushbacks on Elon threatening to bring free speech back ... were seemingly orchestrated by incumbent billionaires with their own mainstream media outlets feeling threatened The alternative facts and hate speech that dominate Facebook have been incredibly harmful for society, and I think there should be tighter guardrails for online content moderation. There are legitimate reasons to disagree on this issue.
      • 14 5y ago
        Wasn’t YouTube deleting content that suggested covid was airborne transmitted? Now we are seeing the scientific community agree it is in fact airborne. We should not have guard rails it only leads to censoring and whenever there is censorship there will be abuse of it.
• Gelob 5y ago
  maybe i can get my twitter unsuspended now. the fact that there are monthly reddit megathreads for people to complain about random suspensions/bans by the algorithm and that reaching out to twitter to even asked for a reason why go un-answered and auto-replied is really annoying. https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/rtr4t6/january_2022_rtwitter_mega_open_thread_for_open/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitter/comments/rtr4t6/january_202...
• TrevorJ 5y ago
  Something that gets missed a lot, is how much the news media relies on Twitter now. The percentage of stories that get run on online news sites which are built entirely on a few Twitter hot takes is astonishing. This is allowing journalists to write a lot more stories without leaving their desks, which means they can likely pump out a ton more articles each week than in the old days. If Twitter changes such that it's no longer seen as appropriate or acceptable to pullquote tweets as the basis for an article, a lot of Blogs/News sites are in serious trouble.
  • ng12 5y ago
    Man, I hope so. I really think this makes Twitter more toxic than Facebook ever was. Somehow the vocal minority on Twitter getting riled up about something always gets treated as "real news".
  • primozk 5y ago
    Good, it means that "journalists" will have to do some actual research before writing their articles.
    • cwkoss 5y ago
      If Elon Musk can reform the bluecheck system to stop lending 'journalist' credibility to 'professional take-havers', he will have done society a great service.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • hstan4 5y ago
    This is spot on. It’s pretty absurd to constantly see the top “news” articles be “_____ says that _____” with the entire article just mentioning context of a tweet of some famous person.
• jprd 5y ago
  Pulling for dang over this thread, server must be on fire at this point.
  • pfarrell 5y ago
    Last time this happened, dang asked us to log out while browsing and not commenting/voting which greatly eases the server strain.
• firstSpeaker 5y ago
  Fun two years ahead!
• edison112358 5y ago
  I suspect Dorsey is coming back to run it and Elon just bought it. Given Dorsey’s comments about how toxic the board was I think this is the ideal situation.
• charcircuit 5y ago
  Hopefully my friends and artists I follow can be unbanned. It's annoying how their abuse team fails to understand the context behind messages because they aren't a part of the community.
• people_not_bots 5y ago
  Alot of huff and a lot of guff the end result will be Elon will think of this as buying his version of the washington post and then will be relatively hands off.
• ckastner 5y ago
  After all the theater about Musk joining the board, then him not joining the board as it's "best for all", then refusing the $54.20 offer for being too low... I have a feeling that Twitter's Q1 numbers to be reported on Thursday won't be good. If they would be, they could reasonably ask for a better offer. If, as I expect, they aren't, they wont have much of a credible leg to stand on to continue to refuse his offer.
• politician 5y ago
  Article updated: "The transaction was approved by the board and is now subject to a shareholder vote."
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• suction 5y ago
  The world today made another big step towards the abyss.
• halotrope 5y ago
  Very curious to see how this plays out. One thing that I would love to see is stopping these obnoxious login and “show in app” nags. The web would be a better place if the social platforms behaved like normal websites with optional login instead of using any public surfaces just as a funnel to suck you into their silo. Maybe it would have been better if twitter and possibly reddit where owned by Wikimedia or Mozilla? Not that they would have had the change for that anyways.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  • LargeWu 5y ago
    Calling what Trump was banned for as "political dissent" is extremely reductionist and naive. He was banned because he was inciting violence and insurrection.
    • incrudible 5y ago
      Arguably, but is that against the terms of service? https://twitter.com/hashtag/DeathToAmerica https://twitter.com/hashtag/DeathToAmerica
      • aceazzameen 5y ago
        None of those posters have a cult-like following and the ability to sway millions of people like Trump. Maybe Twitter is allowing fringe extremists to say what they want as long as they don't inspire dangerous actions from others.
        • incrudible 5y ago
          "Inspiration to dangerous action" doesn't sound like a good criterion. Are there terms that apply only after an account is believed to reach a sufficient amount of people? In any sufficiently large amount of people, you'll find at least one lunatic. All things considered, the events on January 6th weren't any more violent than many protests for various political causes that unfolded in the years prior. Heated rhetoric on Twitter did play a part in that, would you apply the same standard in those cases?
          • aceazzameen 5y ago
            We're comparing Trump's influence over people when he had millions of followers, likes, retweets, etc vs a hashtag used by 5 people. Common sense should be used.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  Has any other submission got so many votes and comment on HN before ?
  • paradite 5y ago
    This currently has 2.2k comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993 3.8k https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25359003 3.2k
    • agumonkey 5y ago
      Interesting
• prbuckley 5y ago
  Here is a recent interview of Elon speaking about what changes he wants to make at twitter, https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM. TLDW: He wants to open source the ranking algos and make the history of each posts ranking transparent.
• sendos 5y ago
  Does this need any regulatory approval, or will it go through as is?
• shrimpx 5y ago
  What’s the consequence for employees? People with 3 years left of vesting RSUs. Will those keep vesting somehow? Or they’ll get an upfront payout? And what’s my incentive to work for an established private company with no stock growth prospect? I guess Twitter will have to pay 500k senior eng. salaries in cash instead of stock?
  • beebmam 5y ago
    Superb question. If I were an employee there, I certainly would be sending out applications elsewhere.
  • exhaze 5y ago
    Periodic liquidity events
  • umeshunni 5y ago
    "Voluntary, non-regretted attrition"
  • taf2 5y ago
    It sounds like there would be a private investor pool- so options would convert?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • airstrike 5y ago
    > What’s the consequence for employees? People with 3 years left of vesting RSUs. Will those keep vesting somehow? Or they’ll get an upfront payout? It varies. I'll preface this by saying I am not privy to the specifics of this deal, but in general this depends on the terms of the options plan. Some employees may have their options accelerated upon triggering events like a change of control. Others may have options accelerated on a "double trigger" such as a chance of control followed by termination. > And what’s my incentive to work for an established private company with no stock growth prospect? I guess Twitter will have to pay 500k senior eng. salaries in cash instead of stock? You don't need publicly traded securities to have deferred compensation. Shares continue to exist even if the company is private and liquidity events can be structured to allow employees to cash out in a "controlled and deferred" fashion. Plus you could structure deferred compensation entirely without those liquidity events or shares for that matter. Just promise to pay people $X in Y years
• pieter_mj 5y ago
  Nobody is ready for US style free speech. In Europe some of it will be illegal. Musk is seriously underestimating the toxicity of "liberated" social media in its current form and seriously overestimating the nuggets of truth and criticism we would not be able to read in the absence of it. His human authenticating scheme is unimplementable in the EU. It's a shame, because I'm all for a real free speech platform.
• robbomacrae 5y ago
  This could be dangerous for democracy. The worlds richest man can influence whether a politician is de-platformed or re-instated to Twitter whilst legally protected in such decision making by section 230. We have seen him act petty when offense is taken [0]. We have seen him be quite opinionated on tax proposals [1]. Is no one else concerned by this? It seems a more powerful control of the narrative and politics than Bezos owning Washington Post. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk-british-diver-thai-cave-rescue-pedo-twitter https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk... [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-democrats-billionaire-tax-plan-annual-tax-bill-2021-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-democrats-billiona...
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    Some other rich men already had that control.
  • TbobbyZ 5y ago
    The danger is already there. Banning a former US president is dangerous.
  • ulkesh 5y ago
    I'm concerned, but there's effectively nothing I can do about it. I vote based on issues mostly and also vote based on whether or not I feel the person or people are saying and doing what I want to see, for the public good. Unfortunately, there is a severe education gap in the United States which allows conmen to gain political power. And until education can be properly addressed, and the people have a willingness to learn and critically think, this will only continue to get worse. EDIT>> The point being, the uneducated allow themselves to be duped by said conmen on Twitter, their choice of news outlet, Facebook, etc. And voting is the only power that I, an educated, reasonable, and critically-thinking citizen, have to combat anything I am concerned about. Because if we're being truthful, the issue at stake here is the fact that Musk is clearly a Republican who thinks there are free-speech issues at play with Twitter due to the silencing of Trump and others on that platform. I will disagree completely because Trump and those others who have been silenced from those platforms are quite free to create their own Twitter (and have) and work to gain a critical mass. It doesn't really matter, though, since almost every single social network on the planet is just an echo chamber of what people want to hear. But I, for one, have no interest in hearing lies being made with a very huge bullhorn such as Twitter -- no matter who it comes from. If this deal is done, I will wait and see what Musk does. If he does what I expect him to do (unban everyone he agrees with politically, financially, etc. despite those who were banned for good reason), then I'll happily stop using Twitter. The good news for me, is that I have choice. While I cannot control what the other masses will do, I have control over what I will do. And very, very little will change in my life if I no longer use Twitter.
• taubek 5y ago
  Twitter PR has released that the offer was accepted. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquire-twitter-301532245.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/elon-musk-to-acquir...
• fleddr 5y ago
  I'm optimistic from a nihilistic point of view: for Twitter the only way is up, and yet even a complete failure would be a net improvement to the world. There's a laundry list of uncontroversial improvements he can make to the product itself. Twitter as a product is broken in so many ways. Musk is the kind of outcome-driven character to get things done. And it will be done in a way that does not directly conflict with existing pressures, like ads. He claims to commit to get an understanding of the algorithms for both censorship and promotions/verifications, and make them more transparent. As to what this will reveal, or how this will be changed, we don't know, except for a general direction of less censorship. So far he mentioned to want to strike a balance where both extremes (left, right) are equally unhappy. My hope, but I expect to be disappointed, is that the influence that both extremes have on Twitter is nuked. A reversal of roles, where sane and reasonable voices capture the majority of attention, instead of rage-addicted mobs. The truly tricky thing though is that if you dis-empower these extremists, you'll find that there's not much else. Twitter is basically those people and the rest retweeting it. What remains when you take away this outrage snowball activity...not very much. Twitter isn't at all a mainstream platform.
  • op00to 5y ago
    I am looking forward to stop using Twitter myself, but there are so many communities not related to politics and social division on there. Amateur Radio is a big one that I’ll miss.
    • wrycoder 5y ago
      Why not just stick to that part, then?
      • brewdad 5y ago
        Because, at least in its current form, it becomes inevitable that the ugly stuff leaks in.
        • wrycoder 5y ago
• khazhoux 5y ago
  I don't know if we should blame Twitter for the toxicity that Trump rained down upon the US for 4 years, or the big media companies for front-page reporting his daily ragers.
• fredgrott 5y ago
  It does not mean what you THINK it MEANS... 1.Pretend that there are specific problems where groups of people loose trust in the systems they interact with. 2.Pretend that social networks currently implemented as social platforms are strongly biased towards noise. Assume for the sake of debate that Elon is ware of this. He may be after the crux of the issue in that monitoring is an indication that social platforms are amplifying noise from interactions with broken systems. He may instead be after an algo change rather then re-instatement of those who were banned.
• no_wizard 5y ago
  Its now been accepted: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/twitter-accepts-elon-musks-buyout-deal.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/25/twitter-accepts-elon-musks-b...
• kul 5y ago
  I wonder how much this will distract him from Tesla and SpaceX. Also, social media is now an attack vector for misinformation from hostile foreign adversaries. How will he fight that?
• vonsydov 5y ago
• SXX 5y ago
  Okay. Now actually let's see how "free speech absolutist" Musk will deal with this account: https://twitter.com/elonmuskjet https://twitter.com/elonmuskjet It's will tell us a lot about his plans with Twitter.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    He doesn’t care.
• JohnClark1337 5y ago
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  Could twitter allow real people to stay anonymous? As AI generated content approaches 100% of internet content over the next decade (gtp-powered bots, russian troll farms, etc), it will be good to have human verification… If, after human verification, twitter can implement a zero-trust software means to allow those humans to post anonymously to protect certain dialogue… that would be great.
  • null_shift 5y ago
    why do you need zero trust software for this? everything else is already being handled by a centralized authority (twitter), why not let them also handle letting users post anonymously after having been verified?
  • abvdasker 5y ago
    If Twitter learns your identity through the verification process are you really anonymous, though?
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      It is possible.
• nullzzz 5y ago
  That’s bye bye to Twitter then.
• dinvlad 5y ago
  Ways to improve Twitter: - Delete it
• FriedPickles 5y ago
  So why isn't TWTR trading at $54.20? There must be a significant chance this won't go through. Indeed, the deal is "Subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders". Stockholders are holding it because they believe it's worth more than its current price. And Elon's offer is only slightly more than the current price. The board members do not hold much stock at all. It seems this might fail at shareholder vote.
  • s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Small but non-zero chance. The price was <$40 before Musk announced, currently $51.7. At this point, an investor might see it as a chance to make $2.30 MAX or loose 11.60 OR MORE if it drops lower than it started.
• thedrbrian 5y ago
  Surely all those blue checks can just go and make their own social platform?
• overgard 5y ago
  I don't really love the notion of billionaires buying up media; but given how incredibly important twitter has become to media and its influence on democracy and politics, I think it's a huge improvement that a free speech advocate will be in charge at least. I don't buy that content "moderation" (ahem, or as it should be called, censorship) is desirable when a tech company can silence people that have legit-if-undesirable influence on the world.
  • mhoad 5y ago
    His words might suggest free speech advocate but his actions do not
    • xwdv 5y ago
    • avs733 5y ago
      Yeah but he’s rich so we are compelled to take him at his word
    • overgard 5y ago
      I would think putting up 43 billion of your own dollars to protect free speech is a pretty strong action. Not that I think all his motives are pure; TBH I'd rather some other mechanism of enforcing free speech that doesn't involve the media being the plaything of billionaires. However, given the awful situation right now, I think I'd prefer Musk to the current board.
  • pavlov 5y ago
    The problem with this line of thought is that there are sites like Gab that serve the exact same purpose as Twitter but without content moderation. And the problems there are pretty obvious. How does Musk-Twitter avoid becoming Gab? Or is that actually somehow a desirable outcome?
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    > I think it's a huge improvement that a free speech advocate will be in charge at least Musk tried to have an employee whistleblower murdered by the police by falsely accusing him of being a mass shooter and having him SWAT'd[1]. That is not something a "free speech advocate" would do if they were sincere about advocating for free speech. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon-musk-tried-to-destroy-tesla-whistleblower-martin-tripp https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
• ryanmercer 5y ago
  Can I finally get verified now?
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  You can check if twitter is silently oppressing your account here: https://taishin-miyamoto.com/ShadowBan/ https://taishin-miyamoto.com/ShadowBan/ Mine currently has "reply deboosting" applied. Twitter didn't notify me of this either. I had to actively hunt it down. And there's nothing I can do to change it. Such a shady company so far.
  • nicksiscoe 5y ago
    Does the green check mean the ban is or isn’t being applied?
    • hbn 5y ago
      Yeah the UI is confusing. I think green check means "you passed, this doesn't apply" and red x is "the restriction is applied"
  • dado3212 5y ago
    How does this work?
  • xeromal 5y ago
    Damn, I have reply deboosting and search ban. I post rarely to complain about services being down or for customer support.
    • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      Sounds like negativity to me! Silence!
  • oauea 5y ago
    My HN account is rate limited by @dang, if I post more than an unspecified amount of comments in an unspecified time frame I get a message telling me to go away.
    • ant6n 5y ago
• jcadam 5y ago
  We'll see how many employees leave. Might be some good job openings soon...
• earphonesthrow 5y ago
• rammy1234 5y ago
  Bring in NFT :)
• Vladimof 5y ago
  lol, poison pill...
• sytelus 5y ago
  I would wish Musk would just focus on Tesla and SpaceX and not throw himself in this snake pit. There is so much to do at Tesla (primarily cheaper EVs, FSD and 10X more super chargers). There is even more to do at SpaceX. Twitter is political issue and cannot be solved using tech or features. If one is not good at politics, they should stay out of it. We don't have replacement for Musk if he gets burned in this little adventure and there is a lot at stack for humanity.
  • gigel82 5y ago
    Lol, you make it sounds like we're about to lose Einstein due to overwork. Musk is an opportunistic man-baby, not the second coming, let him burn out...
    • asd88 5y ago
      They are probably TSLA shareholders. Otherwise, who cares?
    • sytelus 5y ago
      If Musk dies tomorrow, I don't see anyone else leading up charge for all the progress in space exploration. No one is gutsy enough to go after Mars landing as much as Musk. I would fear that Mars mission will die out if Musk goes away and we won't see it happening in our life time. All the EV race is also purely due to Tesla lead. No car manufacturer wanted this change and they are all now getting dragged into it. If Musk dies and Tesla goes stagnant, I can bet car manufactured will return to same-old same-old in no time. I am less worried about Musk "overworking" and more worried about him getting identified as sacrificial scapegot in one of the political fights and get "cancelled".
      • craftyguy 5y ago
        Meh. He's not the only person on Earth pushing for a Mars mission. > I can bet car manufactured will return to same-old same-old in no time. I'd bet against you. Not sure if you noticed, but gasoline prices are skyrocketing. This isn't the first time this century and it definitely won't be the last time. EV will happen whether musk autopilots his way into a highway median or not. > scapegot in one of the political fights and get "cancelled". Maybe you shouldn't "cancel" your spellcheck.
• andyjohnson0 5y ago
  I strongly suspect that the New Twitter will fairly rapidly turn into the world's biggest toxic waste-dump fire - when everyone on Gab, Parler etc. piles back in along with Trump and his associates. Perfect timing for the US mid-terms. I can't see how they'll be able to keep a lid on it as a functioning community and live up to Musk's publicly-stated ambitions. Even so, it might be a commercial success if they can keep the advertisers on board. But if mainstream advertisers panic and pull out then they're going to have push a lot of gun/porn/crypto/whatever ads to keep the lights on. And that may work, or it may turn into the biggest act of wealth destruction in history. I wonder how much of Musk's $23B Tesla bonus is going into the purchase.
• furyofantares 5y ago
  Given the amount of Tesla stock used for backing the financing of this deal, deleting your twitter account is now akin to shorting Tesla, which as we all know means you hate planet Earth
• sabertoothed 5y ago
  Does anyone know what happens to call warrants in this case? I have some 48 USD call warrants. I was surprised to see them crash in value today. They showed some really weird behaviour.
• pseudosavant 5y ago
  Social Media is so horrible. I'm absolutely convinced that humans haven't evolved to handle the insanity that is social media. Yet, they are the public squares. And isolating myself from the cesspools (FB, Twitter, etc) has also isolated me from everyone. Twitter was the last one I used a very small amount (never more than 5 minutes at a time, not more than once a day). This was the final straw for me. No good options when the choice is: participate in communities I care about + my data being abused, or maintain a sliver of privacy and control over my data + social isolation.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Quit right before it actually improves after years of stagnation?
• mzs 5y ago
  >Elon Musk told the United Nations he would give them $6 billion to end world hunger if they showed him a detailed plan of how they would use the money. They called his bluff and gave him their plan— and then they never got the money. Now he’s buying Twitter for $45 billion. https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1518658761979842560 https://twitter.com/NoLieWithBTC/status/1518658761979842560 >Here is the executive summary of the UN’s plan for how they would spend the money. Musk publicly ghosted them after this was provided. >Months later, they told Forbes they never received the money. “Whether WFP receives any of this money is yet to be seen” https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-people-brink-famine https://www.wfp.org/stories/wfps-plan-support-42-million-peo...
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Feeding everyone for a single year is not ‘solving’ world hunger. That’s why he didn’t pay.
• icare_1er 5y ago
  This is a great news for freedom of speech.
• nuancebydefault 5y ago
  Wait a minute. I read the first 20 or so comments and the following strikes me. Most comments are about -- Musk could try toake Twitter better but will probably fail... This is not the first thing that came to mind for me. How 'bout: a very rich man is capable of doing what a very powerful man is/was not capable of. Being able to influence in a major way the policies of the most influential social network in the world. A US president was kicked of the very same platform.
• etchalon 5y ago
  I am exhausted by literally everything about this.
• standyro 5y ago
  I tried to make a pull request already, haha. error forking repo: HTTP 403: The repository exists, but it contains no Git content. Empty repositories cannot be forked. (https://api.github.com/repos/twitter/the-algorithm/forks https://api.github.com/repos/twitter/the-algorithm/forks)
• wly_cdgr 5y ago
  Best news in a minute
• _blz2 5y ago
  One example of Twitter's obvious role in election meddling is this: before 2020 elections, posting new york post's article on Hunter Biden's laptop leaks would result in an error. At the time all the msm said this was fake news. The New York Times, more than a year later accepted that the laptop indeed belonged to Hunter Biden. Twitter is heavily biased towards promoting progressive 'ideals' and hollywood propaganda. It's trending section, even after muting and blocking several accounts and words, keeps suggesting biased 'news'. It also played a huge role in the Arab Springs which arguably is the largest criminal act in 12 years. I'm glad censorship is being taken seriously. Hope Musk is a true libertarian when it comes to free speech.
• rkagerer 5y ago
  After 16 years I still struggle to concede the value proposition of Twitter. I don't think it's the best platform for advancing democracy, and I'm convinced we should aim higher. Take a cue from StackOverflow, which does a better job surfacing quality content while letting drivel sift to the bottom. It has an incentive system where those who demonstrate expertise build up reputation over time (instead of a simple popularity contest won by the loudest voices). Even here on HN the culture nurtures a forum that holds more interest for me than Twitter. I know politics is a different game, but I think the internet's still barely scratched the surface when it comes to transforming democracy. There's so much runway remaining to elevate constituent engagement without the toxicity. When I see examples like municipalities using apps to let citizens photograph and report potholes it gives me hope. The internet is powerful at enabling people who care about a given set of issues to congregate in convenience and without limits of geography. We can figure out how to do it more constructively. I envision a more issues-centric platform, a kind of one-stop you can visit to get a concise picture of the best-informed discussion around hot topics of the day (or archives of the past). With elements from Wikipedia, and the ability (and allure) to dive deeper where you're interested. Integrate fact-checking efforts (something like Snopes / PolitiFact) to encourage authenticity. Maybe you could even plug in a feedback loop where local officials can open polls and allow granular voting on matters within their jurisdiction (borrow ideas from Change.org) or facilitate grassroots organization ("garbage cleanup at the park today swing down if you can"). Democracy could never exist without the invention of mass media. Historically that's been a one-way street. The internet upgraded the pipe to an instant, two-way connection to almost every citizen. Yet we've stuck to the same old pattern (figures with lots of followers using it to broadcast their message) with a bit of incremental evolution (interesting or provocative replies can get upvoted). But that's just baby steps. The internet has transformed nearly every other industry, is even transforming banking and finance, and I believe the way we run our civil institutions is up next. Just like invention of mass-media enabled democracy, the internet is about to facilitate the evolution of some kind of Democracy 2.0. I for one want to see that nurtured into something amazing and special.
• dark-star 5y ago
  Think of all the awesome stuff he could have done for humankind with that kind of money. But nooooo, he wastes it all on a that dungpool of a website
  • oxplot 5y ago
    Turns out, no amount of money can speed up launch of a rocket when the regulatory agency in charge approving launches takes months to respond. Turns out no amount of money can speed up opening a car factory when a bunch of so called "environmentalists" keep nagging the regulators for baseless water shortage claims (all of which have eventually been declined). Musk has already done more awesome stuff than any single human in history has done with their cash. He has built multiple companies, each a catalyst and revolutionary in their field; has paid more tax than any single citizen in US history; and shit load more than I can remember right now from top of my head.
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    He’s going to 10x that 43B into 400B and use it for electric cars, solar panels and going to Mars. Twitter has been 10 years of wasted potential that is about to be unlocked.
• fareesh 5y ago
  Twitter is a private company and can do what it wants I remember the absolute smugness of people who trotted out that line when it suited their politics
• nathias 5y ago
  I hope this really means a return to the free speech absolutism of the old internet.
• mzs 5y ago
  main points from all-hands https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1518706644124721152 https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1518706644124721152
• Thorentis 5y ago
  > will shift control of the social media platform populated by millions of users and global leaders to the world's richest person The subtly terrible journalism continues. The implication of this phrase is that Twitter was previous controlled "by the people", whereas now some rich oligarch will control it. The irony, given that Musk hopes to make the platform more neutral than ever before.
  • SteveDR 5y ago
    That quote doesn’t imply anything about Twitter being ran “by the people”
    • jdthedisciple 5y ago
      "imply" is a rather strict term from logics, and you're right, no it doesn't imply that. "suggest"/"insinuate" is a less strict term, however, and that definitely applies here!
• jeffnappi 5y ago
  I hope Elon opens the firehose back up. I would also like to see a return of the tweet count API, and reasonable pricing for Twitter Premium API calls. Twitter premium API pricing right now is ~$0.25/call. How about $0.01/call?
• ineedasername 5y ago
  I think this represents an event horizon for both Twitter and social media, beyond which it is a little more difficult than usual to make accurate predictions. We know Musk wants a less moderated Twitter (less censored, depending on your point of view). But it's hard to think that all the changes would stop there. I can't imagine Musk just opening the door on content and then... Stagnation. But what else would he change? A more comprehensive social platform than just tweets? Revive the Vine concept to compete with TikTok after completely missing that opportunity the first time around? And since Twitter is one of the social media pillars, whether they succeed or fail will strongly influence the direction of the other big players. They could follow suit in content policy, or lean harder in the opposite direction to distinguish themselves in the marketplace: Twitter is open, some other places are more of a walled garden, users choose what they want. It could also mean slightly less antitrust & political attention for other social media players: again, market differentiation would mean that mainstream social media still provided all users with a top-tier platform. It's difficult to argue that Big Social Media (BSM™) is stifling free speech, or has a collective monopoly (or Cartel), and therefore needs to be regulated or broken up. Not when one of the most influential outlets is a much more open platform.
  • mirceal 5y ago
    is it though? (an event horizon) the play is really simple: restore the orange clown account. get more subsidies in case the orange clown gets re-elected. that’s it. can make a big show out if it and we can build more shrines to Musk (yuck) but at the end of the day nobody pays 69 billion dollars out of pure thoughts on free sp33ch.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > We know Musk wants a less moderated Twitter (less censored, depending on your point of view). No, we don't. We know that Musk says this, and we can probably reasonably conclude that he wants a differently moderated Twitter, but neither his past actions, his use of congressional Republicans (and their willingness to do the job) as bad cop to pressure the board, nor anything else other than his own PR supports that Musk has any particular devotion to the idea that private actors should not do everything in their power to constrain others speech. > Twitter is open, some other places are more of a walled garden, users choose what they want. Musk's specifically stated plans include making Twitter more of a walled garden, pushing people harder to paid accounts and using paid account status of the originator as a stronger signal in content distribution. Looser content policies, even if that is what actually happens, aren't opposed to being a walled garden. > It's difficult to argue that Big Social Media (BSM™) is stifling free speech, or has a collective monopoly (or Cartel), and therefore needs to be regulated or broken up. Au contraire, it's must easier to argue that your preferred approach is reasonable, viable, and should be mandatory if someone is already doing it and you can vilify those not doing.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sytelus 5y ago
  We wanted Mars landing instead we got an edit button. - Peter Thiel, 2025.
• jjmorrison 5y ago
  I am so excited to be in this version of the multiverse.
• DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I was here. To me, this is historically important news of the ‘interesting’ variety. I’m not sure where this is taking us, but it surely will be interesting.
• memish 5y ago
  It's telling that no one is worried about being censored by Elon. They're worried about Elon not censoring others.
  • rxhernandez 5y ago
    Many people are very worried about Elon censoring others. He has already done that before.
    • buzzert 5y ago
      Example?
    • throwaway290 5y ago
      Bloomberg wrote Elon asked the CCP to censor posts about Tesla in China at some point. In the US, Elon is vehemently against activist short sellers. Elon strikes me as an insecure man and opportunistic free speech champion. I don't think accounts like TESLAcharts would survive on the new Twitter. Stonks are supposed to go up, so your speech is definitely free to help that. Once people like that get rid of inconvenient to them speech limitations, they inevitably end up with new ones, overt or hidden. There is never unconditional free speech in any society.
      • s1artibartfast 5y ago
        Would be interested in the CCP article
        • throwaway290 5y ago
          See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-fall-from-grace-in-china-shows-perils-of-betting-on-beijing https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-f... for an offhand mention at the end.
      • badwolf 5y ago
        "In an unmoderated online forum, all speakers do not play by the same rules or have the same tools. University of Maryland professor David Kirsch has found that automated pro-Tesla Twitter accounts are responsible for 20% of the tweets about Tesla, and that the launching of these bots correlates with increases in the company’s stock price. It’s not just bots. Say something negative about Elon online, and I’ll vouch for this, the Tesla Taliban comes for you. Anyone who tells you this is "free speech" doesn’t want freedom, they want power via elimination of competitive speech." https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-off-the-twitter-board-of-directors-the-tesla-twitter-bot-army-marches-on https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
• Vladimof 5y ago
  I think that it is the first time that I see a post with only one top level comment on its first page
• stereoradonc 5y ago
  The great liberal meltdown :-)
• quickthrower2 5y ago
  A good time to short-term bet on NFTs
  • trixie_ 5y ago
    Doge
• Exuma 5y ago
  Commenting on this amazing piece of history.
• amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  Wow this feels historic for some reason.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• 627467 5y ago
  Other billionaires bought newspapers and news magazines, and Elon got his way at buying an entire major social media platform. Interesting times
• ngcc_hk 5y ago
  Very worry about any one that has such a power. Power corrupt. Absolutely power corrupt absolutely.
• sriku 5y ago
  Anyone knows what happened to the small change $6B needed for WHO to solve world starvation?
  • eks391 5y ago
    He said he'd provide the money if they could show how they would use the money to help. They refused because they were caught in their lie. Biden can't solve American hunger with 4T, 6B cannot solve world hunger. Throwing money around just doesn't solve problems
    • sriku 5y ago
      https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/18/tech/elon-musk-world-hunger-wfp-donation/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/18/tech/elon-musk-world-hung... - wasn't that plan given? Did it become a "no true Scotsman" afterwards?
• daniel-grigg 5y ago
  Cool, we’ve reached the point where to improve our chances of protecting free public speech we have to abandon the public stock market and entrust it to a benevolent few.
• kraig911 5y ago
  All this drama but I really feel this is a huge waste of time, energy and money for Mr Musk. Seriously we all know Twitter will continue to be a cess pool of human thought in the name of free speech. I think the only feature we need online is ramifications for being an asshole on the internet other than just being 'banned'.
  • kuraudo 5y ago
    The whole point is that less people will be banned. I'm hoping that the only people that are ever banned are those posting pornography or violating us laws.
    • Whatarethese 5y ago
      The only good part of twitter is the pornography.
    • foepys 5y ago
      This is the fastest way to get fined and eventually excluded (if not outright banned) from the European market.
    • ModernMech 5y ago
      > I'm hoping that the only people that are ever banned are those posting pornography or violating us laws. So you hope the only people are banned are those posting what you find disagreeable or illegal. How is that different from what anyone wants? What kind of porn do you hope is banned? All of it or just what you personally find shameful? And do you have a definition for porn we can all conform to (e.g. does describing a sex act constitute as porn? Do lewd sounds count as porn? Does nudity count as porn? How much nudity?) And who gets to write the laws about what's legal to post? Would that be content owners and rich billionaire owners of media companies?
    • Kye 5y ago
      Many people make a living making adult art for consenting adults, and Twitter is one of their main platforms. Why do you want to get rid of this?
• tomerbd 5y ago
  Can now Trump post again on Twitter?
• btirnsltuebn 5y ago
  Tide is finally turning in the culture war. Maybe there is hope after all.
• nichch 5y ago
  I’m hoping the full API becomes open again.
• blenderdt 5y ago
  Of all big social platforms Twitter has the least amount of active users per month ( ~330maum). Pinterest (~$10B) has more active users (~460maum). I can't imagine that there is much more potential in Twitter. So how it is possible to get a loan for this amount of money?
• whiplash451 5y ago
  Feature request: kill re-tweets.
• Heyso 5y ago
  Wait and see. If he unban peoples talking about the injection in a non favorable way, he get a good point. Like Robert Malone or Silvano Trotta or Alex Berenson.
• nirui 5y ago
  > "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement. Uhhh... objection. A digital town square is more like Reddit or Hacker News or an online forums, where people are gathered by discussions, not someone attractive. Twitter and other social medias however, is where people go if they want to watch someone. From this perspective, I think Mr Musk bought the wrong company...
  • vishnugupta 5y ago
    Yeah I too found that comparison to town square a bit odd. However, these comparisons are bound to fail, town square is a physical space that has natural limits such as number of people who can gather, speed of discussion and communication, tolerance to hostility and such. Almost none of these limits apply to a digital space. Humans just don’t know how to deal with these new media we are making up rules as we go along.
• LoveMortuus 5y ago
  Judge people not by what they say, but by what they do!
• pontifier 5y ago
  A thing people seem to forget is that Elon isn't your average guy. He's consistently shown that he has wild ideas that fit the times. Prepare for a new Twitter cryptocurrency that is based on verified humans, and instantly has more users than any others out there. The price he paid to be able to do that is a steal.
• rhagert 5y ago
  I welcome the acquisition, but we have to see if Musk can live up to his free speech standards. We also must consider the fact that the government has leverage in the form of subsidies to Tesla and Space X. For example, this leverage could be used to get an interface to all private messages for some agency.
• Dorothy014 5y ago
• Dorothy014 5y ago
  [flagged]
• ctvo 5y ago
  Could this scenario be possibly? Twitter earnings this quarter are a disaster. Elon find a way to pull out of the deal by not being able to secure financing. Twitter falls to 30 dollars.
• ezconnect 5y ago
  Just have a down vote button and just moderate the contents that breaks the countries law and it will be like the old internet, the best internet.
• zxienin 5y ago
  can @dang coach twitter moderation team, like "how it's done"?
• fuckofff 5y ago
• throwaway383jf 5y ago
  3 million upvotes as of 27 but only 85k followers. Something fishy? https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?s=20&t=4genTqGeqeEMah0hiq_ASg https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1518623997054918657?s=20...
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Brain Drain: Set aside any issues with employees not wanting to work for a Musk-run Twitter if they believe would be more toxic. I would still expect a lot of employees to look for the exit right now. First is simply the uncertainty involved: Large restructuring, reassignments, or layoffs could occur and it's always nicer to find a new job before you begin to hate your old one or lose it all together. Second is compensation: Equity via stock options or awards boosts total compensation, but it's much more complicated in private companies. There's been a commitment to the same benefit plan for the next year, but beyond that no new ones can be issued after the deal closes until Musk decides what they will look like. If he doesn't commit to keeping a similar vesting & award schedule then it will be a problem. Then there's liquidity. You can't sell private equity the same way you can with a public company. Again, if Musk doesn't commit to preserving the same liquidity as employees would have in a public company by allowing stock sales back to the company at-will then it will be a downgrade in compensation. SpaceX uses an internal market to provide liquidity to employees for this, but Twitter will be more uncertain. It will depending on how many current investors decide to stick around & their appetite for increasing their shares. SpaceX is also on a strong growth track, giving awards & options a likely increased value in the future while Twitter is on much more uncertain footing, especially with Musk emphasizing that it's not an economic investment for him. A stock grant equal to $50k today at SpaceX might grow to $100k by the time an employee wants to sell, whereas the same grant at Twitter may not have the same expected growth. It will also be difficult to hire new people until this is settled. Anyone accepting a job right now will have no idea when or how they'll be able to cash in any stock compensation promised in the benefits package. As for the ideological issues, that may balance out. People leaving for such reasons by could be offset by new employees seeking jobs because they like the new content direction, although the extra churn will still make operations more turbulent for some time.
• kornhole 5y ago
  The greatest data miner in history hits a mother load. With location data and the rest, he has Kompromat on almost every politician.
• sidcool 5y ago
  The conspiracy theorist in me feels that the deal will not go through in a few months. It has not closed yet and there is a $1 billion rescind clause in the contract. Somehow I feel Musk just wants to show his power. This will end up with Twitter remaining public.
• MrMan 5y ago
  Looks like the market has knocked off approximately one Twitter worth of market cap from Tesla since Musk made his disclosure.
• Abdelkader014 5y ago
  [flagged]