5 ms·

Elon Musk terminating Twitter deal

77 points by rmason 4y ago

benj111 4y ago
Wasn't he tweeting that Twitter was full of bots and he was going to sort out the bot problem, after he had made the offer to buy twitter? Now hes pulling because of all the supposed bots because twitter didn't 'prove' to him to his satisfaction the bot problem didn't exist, even though in every filing Twitter has stated that it estimates that X% of users are bots. Further didn't he get access to the very same data that Twitter relies on to make these estimates? So all in all he just decided he doesn't want to buy twitter, has messed everyone around and wants to get out of paying the cancellation fee. For such a visionary, he seems that he can't see the reputational damage it does, consistently failing to follow the law or agreements made with people.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > For such a visionary, he seems that he can't see the reputational damage it does, consistently failing to follow the law or agreements made with people. He's been doing this since 2014 at the minimum. Buffalo, NY is still waiting for their solar shingle factory with thousands of manufacturing jobs. Elon Musk hasn't changed at all. He's always been like this. The visionary part was him recognizing that most people don't care about silly things like corporate ethics. I guess Elon Musk is richer now, so his moves are necessarily bigger. Instead of lying about a $1 Billion factory, he's lying about a $40 Billion Twitter buyout deal, and that necessarily affects more people. But he hasn't fundamentally changed his approach, and I don't think anyone has really punished him for his large-scale billionaire style trolling. ------ EDIT: I'm kinda hoping that Twitter sues him and forces him to buy at $54.20, just like he wrote in this contract. It seems like Twitter has the legal right to do so, though it may be dragged out in court for a while.
  - api 4y ago
    Elon Musk is a bullshitter who also occasionally delivers very impressive things. I'm not aware of many examples of that, and I don't think people quite know how to process it. My approach is to disregard anything he says unless it appears to actually be happening in a verifiable (by third parties) objective way, at which point it hard flips from bullshit into quite possibly revolutionary.
    - rnk 4y ago
      I think that's a great summary of him! He can come across as this amazing bullshitter, but he does succeed with hard work, great fundraising, luck, excellent people.
      - api 4y ago
        I'm on the fence about whether he's intentionally bullshitting or whether he's just off the charts optimistic to the point of being a bit delusional. It seems like when he becomes convinced that something is physically possible he goes "all in" and jumps right to "yeah we can do this now!" I've met a lot of engineers like this. I can occasionally do it at times. I think maybe the difference with him is that he has a ton of capital and a massive reputation from amazing successes like SpaceX VTOL rockets, which makes people take his sometimes unhinged optimism seriously. On a personal character level I hear lots of conflicting stores and don't know the guy, so I remain agnostic. If the bad stuff is true it comes down to that eternal "separating the artist from the art" question. Can you still like a musicians' music if they are an asshole (or worse)? Same question here.
      - la64710 4y ago
        rnk 4y ago
        What in the world are you talking about?
        la64710 4y ago
        Why what are you surprised about?
        api 4y ago
        That may be the first case I've seen of anti-black snarky racism being thrown at an obviously very white guy. Very interesting trolling specimen there.
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    With all the countless ways a deal for anything can fall through it is disingenuous to attribute a deal falling through as Musk lying. If anything it shows that Musk announces deals too soon. Does it look bad for Musk to say he is building a factory then not doing it? Hell yeah. Does that mean Musk lied and was never serious about building a factory or buying Twitter? Not at all.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      Except they're not in the negotiation phase right they're in the deal is already made phase. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545152302142689281 https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545152302142689281
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      > With all the countless ways a deal for anything can fall through Except there's a very limited number of ways for the deal to fall through, and the contract is public. https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e4376-e2c5-4d54-8782-d63fc5e096e9.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e437... The question is now if the law applies to Elon Musk or not. I hope it does, because laws only work if they apply to everybody equally. There's no part of the contract that says Elon Musk can leave because he messed up his bot calculations. Maybe Twitter blinks and decides not to fight a billionaire over the issue. But if that happens, then we're in a situation where we tacitly agree that billionaires don't have to follow the law (because they figure they can leave any contract they sign unilaterally)
- bumby 4y ago
  >Further didn't he get access to the very same data that Twitter relies on to make these estimates? I believe his claim is that they were not willing to give him all the information they use in their bot calculations because some was PII
ryanmcbride 4y ago
Who could have possibly seen this coming? /s
phkahler 4y ago
Seems like he could just start a twitter competitor that he fully owns. Then short twitter while he IPOs.
- dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
  Your comment reads like Elon Musk fan fiction.
- rnk 4y ago
  The hate twitter crowd but want to communicate their thoughts, libertarian adjacent market segment - is already occupied by Truth Social and several other related Trumpy social networks (we allow anything except discussion around Jan 6 really happened topics).
  - treeman79 4y ago
    We had parlor but Amazon shut them down to help suppress the Hunter laptop story. TruthSocial has had a rough scaling start. Imagine building a product knowing that nearly all hosting platforms and services will try and shut you down.
    - cyanydeez 4y ago
      "hunter laptop _bullshit to feed nutjobs_ story" Sorry man, tech don't care about your feelings
    - kjeetgill 4y ago
      Hm. Parler is/was hardly big enough that that taking it down somehow suppressed anyone from talking about that story anywhere else. Like a I get how one might imagine that FB + Twitter + Google together could meaningfully suppress a story from breaking by any other means. But is that the theory here? That they all colluded in that way?
      - nwienert 4y ago
        Facebook and Twitter absolutely did, immediately. Reddit and basically all of the media did too. Can’t find evidence if Google did, but given they suppress far less spicy things already + their automatic upranking of all MSM sources means de-facto they did.
flawn 4y ago
Twitter gonna pull the UNO Reverse and sue him most probably for that 1B break up fee. This is going to be once again a media spectacle.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  I really hope they do so the next clown puts some thought in it.
- amluto 4y ago
  No, they’ll sue him for the actual damages and/or to force him to actually complete the transaction, which is much more than $1bn.
  - nullc 4y ago
    The actual damages will be more than $1bn? How is that remotely credible?
    - khuey 4y ago
      He agreed to buy them at $44B and they're trading after the news broke at $26B, so Twitter shareholders clearly stand to lose a lot of money if this doesn't go through.
      - nullc 4y ago
        That's a perspective but TWTR is currently trading higher than in March when the rumors started, and MUCH higher relative to Facebook (which is highly correlated and in a substantially related business).
        amluto 4y ago
        Which could well be related to anticipation of a possible successful lawsuit. Also, right now META’s P/E ratio is very close to 1/10 that of TWTR’s. One might credibly argue that TWTR and TSLA need amazing growth to justify their market caps, whereas META is actually worth its market cap without any growth required. (At a P/E <13, assuming that Meta’s profits remain unchanged forever, their stock is a bargain even at rather higher interest rates than we have today.) It does indeed seem to be the case that TWTR has fallen less from its all-time high.
nabla9 4y ago
There is no way he gets away with it. Matt Levine has again good thread that explains what is what. Must read. https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545151445057536001 https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545151445057536001
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I don't understand the distinction Matt Levine is trying to make. He signed an agreement to buy Twitter without doing due diligence first. Isn't that the same thing as waving due diligence?
  - nabla9 4y ago
    He is saying >"waived due diligence" and so can't bring up the bots thing is not a reason why he can't bring up the bot thing. He is buying Twitter now. If there is something wrong with the deal, he can sue Twitter CEO's, Goldman Sachs, and some previous shareholders but Twitter is his.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    The way I am currently understanding it, is that I think it's a distinction about the stage of the deal he's in. There would usually be a due diligence phase during negotiations, and then after due diligence they would sign a merger agreement that the purchase was good to go. He could decline due diligence but still be in that prior phase, but they're not in that prior phase. They're in the signed contract phase. I think it's like, you can take a car to a mechanic before you sign a contract to buy a car, or you could write into the contract that you agree x, y and z thing are working in the car and take it to a mechanic afterwards, but he signed the agreement, without taking it to a mechanic and without writing any contingencies into the purchase agreement.
    - elif 4y ago
      In your analogy, I believe lemon laws would apply. You can't just lie about what you're selling and get away with it.
ramacastro 4y ago
- la64710 4y ago
LightG 4y ago
Shocking ... absolutely shocking ... douchebags douching? Anyway, moving on ...

77 points by rmason 4y ago

Wasn't he tweeting that Twitter was full of bots and he was going to sort out the bot problem, after he had made the offer to buy twitter? Now hes pulling because of all the supposed bots because twitter didn't 'prove' to him to his satisfaction the bot problem didn't exist, even though in every filing Twitter has stated that it estimates that X% of users are bots. Further didn't he get access to the very same data that Twitter relies on to make these estimates? So all in all he just decided he doesn't want to buy twitter, has messed everyone around and wants to get out of paying the cancellation fee. For such a visionary, he seems that he can't see the reputational damage it does, consistently failing to follow the law or agreements made with people.

dragontamer 4y ago
> For such a visionary, he seems that he can't see the reputational damage it does, consistently failing to follow the law or agreements made with people. He's been doing this since 2014 at the minimum. Buffalo, NY is still waiting for their solar shingle factory with thousands of manufacturing jobs. Elon Musk hasn't changed at all. He's always been like this. The visionary part was him recognizing that most people don't care about silly things like corporate ethics. I guess Elon Musk is richer now, so his moves are necessarily bigger. Instead of lying about a $1 Billion factory, he's lying about a $40 Billion Twitter buyout deal, and that necessarily affects more people. But he hasn't fundamentally changed his approach, and I don't think anyone has really punished him for his large-scale billionaire style trolling. ------ EDIT: I'm kinda hoping that Twitter sues him and forces him to buy at $54.20, just like he wrote in this contract. It seems like Twitter has the legal right to do so, though it may be dragged out in court for a while.
- api 4y ago
  Elon Musk is a bullshitter who also occasionally delivers very impressive things. I'm not aware of many examples of that, and I don't think people quite know how to process it. My approach is to disregard anything he says unless it appears to actually be happening in a verifiable (by third parties) objective way, at which point it hard flips from bullshit into quite possibly revolutionary.
  - rnk 4y ago
    I think that's a great summary of him! He can come across as this amazing bullshitter, but he does succeed with hard work, great fundraising, luck, excellent people.
    - api 4y ago
      I'm on the fence about whether he's intentionally bullshitting or whether he's just off the charts optimistic to the point of being a bit delusional. It seems like when he becomes convinced that something is physically possible he goes "all in" and jumps right to "yeah we can do this now!" I've met a lot of engineers like this. I can occasionally do it at times. I think maybe the difference with him is that he has a ton of capital and a massive reputation from amazing successes like SpaceX VTOL rockets, which makes people take his sometimes unhinged optimism seriously. On a personal character level I hear lots of conflicting stores and don't know the guy, so I remain agnostic. If the bad stuff is true it comes down to that eternal "separating the artist from the art" question. Can you still like a musicians' music if they are an asshole (or worse)? Same question here.
    - la64710 4y ago
      - rnk 4y ago
        What in the world are you talking about?
        la64710 4y ago
        Why what are you surprised about?
        api 4y ago
        That may be the first case I've seen of anti-black snarky racism being thrown at an obviously very white guy. Very interesting trolling specimen there.
- tastyfreeze 4y ago
  With all the countless ways a deal for anything can fall through it is disingenuous to attribute a deal falling through as Musk lying. If anything it shows that Musk announces deals too soon. Does it look bad for Musk to say he is building a factory then not doing it? Hell yeah. Does that mean Musk lied and was never serious about building a factory or buying Twitter? Not at all.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    Except they're not in the negotiation phase right they're in the deal is already made phase. Musk signed a binding agreement to buy twitter: https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545152302142689281 https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545152302142689281
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    > With all the countless ways a deal for anything can fall through Except there's a very limited number of ways for the deal to fall through, and the contract is public. https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e4376-e2c5-4d54-8782-d63fc5e096e9.pdf https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/e61e437... The question is now if the law applies to Elon Musk or not. I hope it does, because laws only work if they apply to everybody equally. There's no part of the contract that says Elon Musk can leave because he messed up his bot calculations. Maybe Twitter blinks and decides not to fight a billionaire over the issue. But if that happens, then we're in a situation where we tacitly agree that billionaires don't have to follow the law (because they figure they can leave any contract they sign unilaterally)
bumby 4y ago
>Further didn't he get access to the very same data that Twitter relies on to make these estimates? I believe his claim is that they were not willing to give him all the information they use in their bot calculations because some was PII

ryanmcbride 4y ago

Who could have possibly seen this coming? /s

phkahler 4y ago

Seems like he could just start a twitter competitor that he fully owns. Then short twitter while he IPOs.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
Your comment reads like Elon Musk fan fiction.
rnk 4y ago
The hate twitter crowd but want to communicate their thoughts, libertarian adjacent market segment - is already occupied by Truth Social and several other related Trumpy social networks (we allow anything except discussion around Jan 6 really happened topics).
- treeman79 4y ago
  We had parlor but Amazon shut them down to help suppress the Hunter laptop story. TruthSocial has had a rough scaling start. Imagine building a product knowing that nearly all hosting platforms and services will try and shut you down.
  - cyanydeez 4y ago
    "hunter laptop _bullshit to feed nutjobs_ story" Sorry man, tech don't care about your feelings
  - kjeetgill 4y ago
    Hm. Parler is/was hardly big enough that that taking it down somehow suppressed anyone from talking about that story anywhere else. Like a I get how one might imagine that FB + Twitter + Google together could meaningfully suppress a story from breaking by any other means. But is that the theory here? That they all colluded in that way?
    - nwienert 4y ago
      Facebook and Twitter absolutely did, immediately. Reddit and basically all of the media did too. Can’t find evidence if Google did, but given they suppress far less spicy things already + their automatic upranking of all MSM sources means de-facto they did.

flawn 4y ago

Twitter gonna pull the UNO Reverse and sue him most probably for that 1B break up fee. This is going to be once again a media spectacle.

Krasnol 4y ago
I really hope they do so the next clown puts some thought in it.
amluto 4y ago
No, they’ll sue him for the actual damages and/or to force him to actually complete the transaction, which is much more than $1bn.
- nullc 4y ago
  The actual damages will be more than $1bn? How is that remotely credible?
  - khuey 4y ago
    He agreed to buy them at $44B and they're trading after the news broke at $26B, so Twitter shareholders clearly stand to lose a lot of money if this doesn't go through.
    - nullc 4y ago
      That's a perspective but TWTR is currently trading higher than in March when the rumors started, and MUCH higher relative to Facebook (which is highly correlated and in a substantially related business).
      - amluto 4y ago
        Which could well be related to anticipation of a possible successful lawsuit. Also, right now META’s P/E ratio is very close to 1/10 that of TWTR’s. One might credibly argue that TWTR and TSLA need amazing growth to justify their market caps, whereas META is actually worth its market cap without any growth required. (At a P/E <13, assuming that Meta’s profits remain unchanged forever, their stock is a bargain even at rather higher interest rates than we have today.) It does indeed seem to be the case that TWTR has fallen less from its all-time high.

nabla9 4y ago

There is no way he gets away with it. Matt Levine has again good thread that explains what is what. Must read. https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545151445057536001 https://twitter.com/matt_levine/status/1545151445057536001

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I don't understand the distinction Matt Levine is trying to make. He signed an agreement to buy Twitter without doing due diligence first. Isn't that the same thing as waving due diligence?
- nabla9 4y ago
  He is saying >"waived due diligence" and so can't bring up the bots thing is not a reason why he can't bring up the bot thing. He is buying Twitter now. If there is something wrong with the deal, he can sue Twitter CEO's, Goldman Sachs, and some previous shareholders but Twitter is his.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  The way I am currently understanding it, is that I think it's a distinction about the stage of the deal he's in. There would usually be a due diligence phase during negotiations, and then after due diligence they would sign a merger agreement that the purchase was good to go. He could decline due diligence but still be in that prior phase, but they're not in that prior phase. They're in the signed contract phase. I think it's like, you can take a car to a mechanic before you sign a contract to buy a car, or you could write into the contract that you agree x, y and z thing are working in the car and take it to a mechanic afterwards, but he signed the agreement, without taking it to a mechanic and without writing any contingencies into the purchase agreement.
  - elif 4y ago
    In your analogy, I believe lemon laws would apply. You can't just lie about what you're selling and get away with it.

ramacastro 4y ago

la64710 4y ago

LightG 4y ago

Shocking ... absolutely shocking ... douchebags douching? Anyway, moving on ...