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How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?
by mongol 4y ago
How will Musk's failure at Twitter affect market confidence in his other ventures?
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoDepends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative. I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore. Being Elon, I would be more worried about the fact that Saudi's are supposed to be as one of the investors in Twitter and they already have trace of killing people. If Elon won't be able to spin the story as somebody's else problem and instead of it will be presented as his managing failure, well could be interesting.
- BizarroLand 4y agoI mean, he may be finding himself a good reason to repay the Saudis their 44 billion dollars after mismanaging their investment that terribly or he may find himself having an "accident". This is no threat, just a very real concern that I have for him. That is not the kind of money you blow.
- brookst 4y agoMy understanding was the Twitter financing was $27B cash from Musk, ~$5B from his pals, and $13B in bank loans. There was something like $500m in Twitter shares owned by a Saudi prince that were transferred to Musk as part of buying in, I think. Where are you seeing $44B of Saudi money?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rurp 4y agoI believe this is correct. The Saudi's will lose a decent chunk of money on this deal, but hardly an earth shattering amount relative to their overall investments.
- mikeyouse 4y agoThe $5B in pals included the Saudi and Qatari money -- Qatar put in $375M and the Saudis rolled over their stake which is closer to $2 billion (they're the largest shareholder after Elon). https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/1585975226567110656/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Alwaleed_Talal/status/158597522656711065...
- CogitoCogito 4y ago> Depends how he spins it and how much he will be able to control narrative. > I guess he will use something like - Twitter was broken before I got in and I could not save it anymore. So Musk's best defense is that he decided to buy a company that couldn't be saved? Might be hard for him to get loans going forward.
- m_ke 4y agoI'm sure he'll be able to dump it for peanuts on a company like Oracle or Salesforce.
- jachee 4y ago… or Tencent …
- pjc50 4y agoThat is not how the Saudis work. Losing mere money is a cost of doing business. It's losing face that matters. That's why they murdered Kashoggi. They're probably already being handed the DMs of critical people who they are going to be able to quietly murder without any outrage.
- awinter-py 4y agothey're going to have to rehabilitate him or make it clear he's not in operational paths 'chief creative officer' sort of thing with a sandbox always wondered if he bought twitter to boost spacex IPO; for now, good thing that it's private or it would be getting hosed to mortgage twitter fail like tesla is tesla build quality and self-driving snafus may get assigned to him as well
- mlindner 4y agoWho is "they"? Elon has controlling interest in SpaceX and all the largest other shareholders are largely his friends. At Tesla while he doesn't have controlling interest, he does have de-facto control because of 2/3 majority required on the board for certain actions that could remove him from control. Short of some legal action forcibly removing him from the companies from breaking a law, he's not going anywhere.
- awinter-py 4y agosorry, 'they' meaning whatever PR firm he hires
- tomcam 4y agoYou’ve diagnosed failure after a month? How many puts have you bought at what price? This is the perfect moment to cement your reputation as a stock market expert.
- joshstrange 4y agoTwitter isn’t on the stock market anymore...
- tomcam 4y agoI’m a complete idiot. Downvotes richly deserved
- thw09j9m 4y ago> about: Investor, husband, father. Those weird spelling and syntax errors are thanks to Siri. I try to preserve my arthritic hands for higher value targets than trolling hacker news.
- tomcam 4y agoAnd apparently news-illiterate! I sure got owned… by myself. ahem
- mrguyorama 4y agoI'm not sure if you were trolling, but you probably are also getting downvoted because the idea that you have to put money on a bet against something before you are allowed to voice criticism, even scathing criticism, is not a good take. You shouldn't be required to play stupid games in a volatile stock market where you are just a bit player against behemoths just to criticize something.
- mym1990 4y agoNot that this is at all significant, but these past few months of Twitter charades have erased any appetite for one day buying a Tesla, or any other Musk owned products. Luckily almost every automaker is coming out with their own EVs in the next couple years, so the market should be pretty competitive(in some ways it already is).
- browningstreet 4y agoI got mine in April. So all this is probably my fault.
- mym1990 4y agoMay your door gaps never be in alignment! Haha just kidding, at least you have a nice car now :)
- browningstreet 4y agoNo creaks, no groans, no gaps. Srs.
- burntalmonds 4y agoSame here. I'll never buy a Tesla now, whereas before I might have.
- happytoexplain 4y agoSame. I would have had a hard time imagining a way he could behave that would affect my feelings about a Tesla, but he found it. Seeing a CEO act so childish and cruel and emotionally unstable and antagonistic and conspiratorial in a purposefully public way makes me not only feel uncomfortable in the idea of buying his products, it even makes me feel worried about how that insanity might materially affect the product.
- lavezzi 4y ago
- chippiewill 4y agoNot a whole lot. Elon's primary failure with Twitter was joining a behemoth and arrogantly assuming he knew better than the existing leadership, sacked them all and pushed sweeping changes in a nonsensical time-span. At his other ventures he already has strong leadership in place that he's worked with so he just assumes everything's already great rather than second guessing everything. In practice he doesn't run them on a day-to-day basis. He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO.
- rurp 4y ago> He's more like a chairman with an interest in engineering than a CEO. This strikes me as a very apt description. Still though, he basically has free rein at those companies and there is always a chance he decides to get more involved. Maybe Tesla or SpaceX hits a rough patch next year and he decides to get more hands on and "fix" the situation. That fear is probably a lot more relevent in potential customer's minds these days.
- Krisjohn 4y agoI once wanted a Tesla Powerwall. If I do get anything like that for the house, it's not going to be a Tesla product. Though, to be fair, I made that decision before he set Twitter alight.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI wouldn't have anything like that in my house any more than I'd store 100 gallons of gasoline in my house. Maybe in a shed, 50 ft or more away.
- Krisjohn 4y agoOh, yeah, not in. On.
- rot13xor 4y agoIt's counterintuitive but Tesla shareholders might want Twitter to fold quickly so Elon can fully focus on Tesla again.
- agnosticmantis 4y agoAnd where is he supposed to pump Tesla stock?
- SilverBirch 4y agoI think that's probably a naive hope, if we carry on down the current path the only way that Musk can save face and avoid being washed out of twitter is to buy up the debt that he secured to buy Twitter. Ignoring the technical issues, the debt is the thing that really threatens twitter - if the business can't generate the revenue to service the debt the creditors might step in and take Musk's equity. So the logical move if you're all-in on fixing twitter (as Musk seems to be) would be to buy the debt, he can probably get it at 60 cents on the dollar, so that means he needs to come up with somewhere around $8Bn, and we all know where Musk will look for that kind of cash. That would be a very significant head wind for Tesla stock.
- watwut 4y agoDunno. The best for Tesla might be him being occupied by something else.
- pelorat 4y agoWell, as someone who hold about $10K in TSLA, I'd like to see Elon fired.
- brohee 4y agoMusk dumping lots of Tesla shares to reimburse the loan may well crash Tesla price.