11 ms·

> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Tw

by phire 4y ago

> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else. I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out. The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it. The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.

ceejayoz 4y ago
> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. That's certainly looking like it was the right call.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
  - gonzo41 4y ago
    Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      > He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines. He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
      - gonzo41 4y ago
        Oh damn, I didn't click on that point. What a footgun.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      > But not all tech debt is bad. Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. > but it was consistent in experience. Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed. > I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        > But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved). I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
  - CloudRecondite 4y ago
    When Twitter fails there will be no one to blame but Elon. Even so he will still have people like you defending him.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
      - echelon 4y ago
        I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
        cokeandpepsi 4y ago
        The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
  - synu 4y ago
    Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.
  - lazide 4y ago
    If you’ve got a giant house of cards you bought for $44 bln, I’m not sure the right approach is to start lobbing grenades immediately.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      The house just standing costs him money tho
      - lazide 4y ago
        Less money however, at least in the short term. It had a lot more revenue!
  - bydlocoder 4y ago
    Do you have any insights on a technical debt thing? From the outside their engineering looks top-notch.
AmericanOP 4y ago
Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now. The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph... However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail. At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.
- janef0421 4y ago
  That gives me a new level of respect for Dorsey.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    Why?
    - janef0421 4y ago
      Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.
      - bmitc 4y ago
        But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
      - caskstrength 4y ago
        > Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards. But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?
gre 4y ago
He could have backed out for only $1B--the dumbest and smartest $1B ever spent.
- detaro 4y ago
  no, he couldn't. That was a fee if something out of his control stopped the deal (like the government saying no).
  - dylan604 4y ago
    so even if he personally spent $1million on getting lobbyists to convince gov't to say no, that would still only have been $1.1b vs the ~$44 or whatever the price in the window was.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Why do you think he was getting involved in Ukraine, Taiwan, and apparently influencing ‘whistleblowers’? He was hoping he’d look like such a mess they’d step in and shitcan it. But no one took the bait.
      - rurban 4y ago
        It looks more like he wanted exclusive Tesla and/or SpaceX deals there. Russia has no proper cars, but China has. The Russian rocket industry might also look attractive, he won't get any Chinese contracts for sure.
        lazide 4y ago
        The heavily embargoed, historic-enemy of the US Russia? The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills? What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades. I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.
rodgerd 4y ago
> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is? > It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal. Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?
- nocoiner 4y ago
  He also would have owed fiduciary duties to the TSLA stockholders if he were a director. I think this, and not the D&O questionnaire, was the primary reason he turned down the board seat. No more pumps and dump with TSLA stock or playing fast and loose with SEC filings triggered by stock accumulation.
parker_mountain 4y ago
>They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.
Eji1700 4y ago
He bought it because he was sued for specific performance and was legally screwed in every available way. He literally waived due diligence and signed a contract with a specific performance clause. Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance. His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments. His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues” So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history. Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch. Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Yes, he was forced to buy it ... after he initially signed a paper committing to buy it. He was only forced after trying to get out of what he had signed.
  - pencilguin 4y ago
    It would have cost him "only" a $B to weasel out, much less than expected losses. So it has value to him greater than those losses. Would be unsurprising if he used it for political leverage. I don't think he is allowed to run for the presidency, but he can probably seat his choice.
    - 4y ago

by phire 4y ago

ceejayoz 4y ago

> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. That's certainly looking like it was the right call.

philliphaydon 4y ago
I don’t think so. I think although Elon is poorly managing Twitter. What we are seeing is how poorly managed Twitter was behind closed doors. Years of technical debt and no movement or improvements. Sounds like people were just getting over paid and producing very little. Atleast that’s what it seems like from all the ex employees ranting on Twitter about being fired.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  Maybe... But not all tech debt is bad. As long as it's not holding you back and you are making deliberate choices. Twitter may have been badly managed, but it was consistent in experience. And in a large way that is a valuable product/feature itself. Elon will change things enough that it won't be like what it was, a giant distributed broadcast platform. I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. He seems to be very badly advised at the moment. It's going to lead to a elon against the world situation where he wrecks something everyone likes and he's tarnished forever. He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > He should have paid the 1Bn exit fee and just keep shitposting from the sidelines. He didn't have that option. That was the fee if the deal fell through for other reasons outside Musk's control. Musk didn't have any out in the contract. When that became clear in Delaware, he gave in.
    - gonzo41 4y ago
      Oh damn, I didn't click on that point. What a footgun.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > But not all tech debt is bad. Of course not, if a company is profitable, its technical debt that made the company money and paid the bills. But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. > but it was consistent in experience. Consistent experience of being spammed by bot accounts. Looking at anyone popular and 95% of the replies are bots, or tweeting the wrong word and being spammed by bots. Is a terrible experience which has never been addressed. > I think the greatest threat to musk is musk himself. I agree. I think over the years popularity has gone to his head, stroked his ego, and he isn't the same person he was 10 years ago. He may not be the greatest example of a 'good' person but wqhat hes done with Tesla, SpaceX, etc, getting the right people in place and such to build these companies up, hes done well, but in the last 4-5 years hes sorta gone off the rails.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      > But if technical debt means running 40 servers instead of 10, then it should be something that is addressed, not ignored for 10+ years. Technical debt is rarely that simple. Usually it is a pile of Chesterton's Fences that only the people who built it really understand why its all there, but if you start just ripping it all down then you wind up breaking something important (think "service which scours databases to ensure that they're compliant with GDPR regulations and avoids a billion dollar fine from the EU" or something of that nature). The code may have grown organically and arguably need to be tossed and rewritten, but most of the time the code in its current state is also the requirements doc for the rewrite (and either the rewrite will take 10 times as long as anyone thinks or else the new system will throw away 90% of the old system without understanding it and now you have to deal with pissed off EU regulators and there goes everything you would have saved). I'm usually on the side where I think its time to take the hard decisions and spend the effort either cleaning up the existing codebase or rewriting it, but that's rarely the way the business sees things, and they'd prefer to just bolt on some more crap yet again to keep it going for another year because they're trying to boost their metrics, not solve long term problems.
- CloudRecondite 4y ago
  When Twitter fails there will be no one to blame but Elon. Even so he will still have people like you defending him.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    How saying "he's poorly managing it" defending that clown ? "elon badly managing it" and "twitter being a shitshow before he took over" do not collide with eachother either
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I'm not quite sure how I'm defending him. I don't really like him, especially after he voiced his opinions on Ukraine and Taiwan, I hope he loses all his money. And I'll never touch a Tesla. All Elon has done by buying Twitter is reveal how much of a trash company it was internally. From management/board perspective, clearly they was never listening to the engineers and just doing the bare minimum to get inflated salaries and bonuses.
    - echelon 4y ago
      I was a fan for all that Musk did with SpaceX. Single-handedly dropping costs to LEO and creating a civilian / commercial space industry -- mind blowingly impressive, and willed into existence by one man. When he spoke against Taiwanese and Ukrainian sovereignty, he looked an awful lot like he was being controlled or having his arm twisted by foreign powers. These were hugely inflammatory remarks made back to back during a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. I have to wonder if those high up in the ranks at the DoD are looking at ways to minimize Elon's risk or influence. Especially given the fact that he now launches classified payloads. Elon has enormous vested financial interests near or within two adversarial countries.
      - cokeandpepsi 4y ago
        The issue here is that he has idiots whispering in his ear this time, the majority of his other ventures he was partnered with decent people it's pretty obvious there's a load of sv vultures egging him on hard to imagine a worse direction for this to go
- synu 4y ago
  Even if that’s true (I just don’t know) the cost alone of servicing the company debt is now greater than the cost of paying all those people to sit around and do nothing, and anyway the problems with Twitter aren’t ones that are fixed by engineering.
- lazide 4y ago
  If you’ve got a giant house of cards you bought for $44 bln, I’m not sure the right approach is to start lobbing grenades immediately.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    The house just standing costs him money tho
    - lazide 4y ago
      Less money however, at least in the short term. It had a lot more revenue!
- bydlocoder 4y ago
  Do you have any insights on a technical debt thing? From the outside their engineering looks top-notch.

AmericanOP 4y ago

Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now. The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/photo/1 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph... However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail. At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.

janef0421 4y ago
That gives me a new level of respect for Dorsey.
- bmitc 4y ago
  Why?
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards.
    - bmitc 4y ago
      But he was at the helm of Twitter for how long? He had the opportunity to pursue all those things. Musk and Darsey’s text message thread was just two billionaires convincing themselves they’re as smart as they think they are.
    - caskstrength 4y ago
      > Because he appears to be pragmatic and understands the benefits of open standards. But only after becoming rich on closed-standard Twitter while also enacting artificial barriers for third-party clients along the way?

gre 4y ago

He could have backed out for only $1B--the dumbest and smartest $1B ever spent.

detaro 4y ago
no, he couldn't. That was a fee if something out of his control stopped the deal (like the government saying no).
- dylan604 4y ago
  so even if he personally spent $1million on getting lobbyists to convince gov't to say no, that would still only have been $1.1b vs the ~$44 or whatever the price in the window was.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Why do you think he was getting involved in Ukraine, Taiwan, and apparently influencing ‘whistleblowers’? He was hoping he’d look like such a mess they’d step in and shitcan it. But no one took the bait.
    - rurban 4y ago
      It looks more like he wanted exclusive Tesla and/or SpaceX deals there. Russia has no proper cars, but China has. The Russian rocket industry might also look attractive, he won't get any Chinese contracts for sure.
      - lazide 4y ago
        The heavily embargoed, historic-enemy of the US Russia? The one who is actively threatening to nuke us because we’re sending millions of tons of weapons and ammunition to someone they’re invading while we sanction them to the gills? What are you smoking? There is no way they’d let him export Rocket engines to them, or cars. Likely for decades. I suspect the FBI visited him after his Putin talk and reminded him that they could make him register as a foreign agent, or go to jail for that. Not that anyone would say anything.

rodgerd 4y ago

> They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. They were happy for him to become a director. He balked as soon as it became clear that he'd have to pass the same background check as all the other directors. I wonder why that is? > It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal. Like... his degrees being dodgy and having been an illegal overstayer in the 90s, which is a documented claim doing the rounds?

nocoiner 4y ago
He also would have owed fiduciary duties to the TSLA stockholders if he were a director. I think this, and not the D&O questionnaire, was the primary reason he turned down the board seat. No more pumps and dump with TSLA stock or playing fast and loose with SEC filings triggered by stock accumulation.

parker_mountain 4y ago

>They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder In retrospect, seems like a wise decision.

Eji1700 4y ago

He bought it because he was sued for specific performance and was legally screwed in every available way. He literally waived due diligence and signed a contract with a specific performance clause. Companies couldn’t prove a MAC in the middle of the 08 housing crash, musk sure as hell wasn’t having screwed every legal argument he had available weeks in advance. His options were buy now for 44 billion or buy maybe a month later for 44 billion plus whatever the court decided to tack on for hellishly bad faith dealing and arguments. His legal team tried every truck available and even a lousy “well we said we’d buy it so they should drop the lawsuit “ play. The court saw right through and said “you get 4 weeks to buy and if not then the suit continues” So they paid up because to claim you’re going to but then to not go through with it would have seen the most wrathfully phenomenal court proceeding in history. Discovery was just an added bonus of embarrassment and very unlikely to be related at all. Every sound legal mind working for musk was probably screaming at him to shut up and eventually told him he was going to have to go through. The ONLY way this current situation could be worse is if he had continued to try and fight it after his last Hail Mary because that specific court exists almost solely to VERY quickly mitigate multi billion dollar deals and would absolutely make a very clear example out of anyone who thought they were too rich to touch. Musk may be one of the most wealthy men in the world but Delaware deals with companies with MUCH higher net worth and resources constantly.

johannes1234321 4y ago
Yes, he was forced to buy it ... after he initially signed a paper committing to buy it. He was only forced after trying to get out of what he had signed.
- pencilguin 4y ago
  It would have cost him "only" a $B to weasel out, much less than expected losses. So it has value to him greater than those losses. Would be unsurprising if he used it for political leverage. I don't think he is allowed to run for the presidency, but he can probably seat his choice.
  - 4y ago