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Elon Musk Puts $44 Billion Twitter Deal 'On Hold' [Updated]
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If the financial advisers actually said there would be a recession "in a few weeks", then they know about as much about recessions as most financial advisers: nothing. For one thing, recessions are measured over quarters, not weeks. For another they, by definition, need to be determined by looking back on historical data.
Most financial advisers are just hucksters trying to generate churn so they can skim off the flow of funds. Maybe they're predicting (or trying to inspire) a stock market crash, but that's a very different thing than a recession. To quote the great Paul Samuelson:
"Wall Street predicted nine of the last five recessions"
After reading the opinions here, listening to them on most major media, and then seeing the "free speech" on Twitter, I can basically say that most have not clue one and the couple who guess right got lucky.
So, stay tune and we will see who the lucky few were.
So, stay tune and we will see who the lucky few were.
But 2 weeks ago they (Elon and Twitter) entered an agreement which forbids either from walking away from the deal as proposed without a major penalty (percentage of the total deal) taken from the person walking away. There is a name for this but I am blanking on it.
However they are outs if it is discovered that Twitter was hiding something that affects its' value.
When I heard this I started to wonder if Twitter was understating F&B users.
They could've said no but doing so would open the door for shareholder lawsuits given how much of a premium the offer was over where the stock had been trading the two prior months.
However, as I mentioned, shareholders can still nix the deal if enough vote against it.
I'm not opposed to Musk buying Twitter.
But if his definition of "free speech" equals tolerating hate speech and dangerous miss-information, then I'm out.
I'm sure the same people who claim they were leaving the US if Trump won make up a good percentage of those "leaving twitter" if Musk buys it.
Unlike fleeing hostile governments or even dumping the use of particular brands of products made by companies that offend us, which requires resources and overcoming a lot of inertia to actually do, leaving social media platforms is a lot more subtle and frictionless. To start with, very few people actually only use one platform exclusively so spending more time on another service may not be such big deal. Most of it we will do subconsciously if we don't feel our time using the service is mentally rewarding.
For me, when a platform starts to go in the wrong direction I find myself using it less and less. A decade ago, I probably used Facebook for hours a day. Now I check in once or twice a week for a few minutes to see what close friends and family members are up to. The rest of it is of no interest to me. There used to be a lot of photos sites that had really good active communities that I participated in regularly. Now almost all of them have become ghost towns and overrun with spam and borderline porn. I used to use Digg on a daily basis and I just now had to check to see if the site was even still active because I have not seen it mentioned in more than a decade.
If Musk owning Twitter brings about the changes that people fear, then Twitter itself will drive them away by no longer being a rewarding experience. If it become a toxic wasteland, people will not stick around. They may not delete their accounts and they may still use it from time to time, but they will use it measurably less and that will kick off a downward spiral of others that were used to seeing and interacting with their posts using it less too. We all have our favorite stores that we can never imagine not shopping at, but if that store stops selling what we buy and services declines, we will start shopping somewhere else. Same goes for Twitter.
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Some delay maybe. Other than that don't think anything will change
Maybe, just maybe, he sobered up? He sobered up and went, damn, that was some seriously strong weed…wait…I offered to buy what?so much mind reading in this thread and personal projection. I love me some Elon Derangement Syndrome. toot toot, trains a boarding. Queue the spicy tweet and silly photo embedded in an opinionated click bait driven headline:
![GettyImages-1229901940.jpg]()
'HE CANT SMILE! HE CANT EXPRESS HIMSELF! THATS NOT ALLOWED!! REEEE
Anyways-
what if... and hear me out... cause I know its so beyond the pale... he wants to make sure that he's getting what he paid for?
If you were scheduled to meet up and buy a used 256gb iPad, wouldn't you want to get into settings on the device and verify that is has the storage the seller advertised? and if it were 'mistakenly' a 64gb, wouldn't you want to at least re-negotiate (assuming it was a tolerable downgrade to cope with and not a deal breaker)
we’ve all been there and Elons just like the rest of us but his purchases are a smidge bigger ?
My guess is that:
1. He doesn't actually have the money to buy it ($44 billion?) and is just trolling. His networth (based on inflated Tesla shares) is something insane. However, he'd either need to borrow that money or give away his majority stake in Tesla to achieve his end goal of trying to stop Twitter from deleting his tweets when he uses it to try and manipulate the stock market for his own benefit.
2. His little brain thinks that 70% of Twitter accounts are robots and every day it's banning lots of people in order to moderate freedom of speech. In reality... less than 5% of accounts are robots, Trump was banned for asking people to storm the Capitol (i.e. to coordinate a violent insurrection) and 99.99% of humans who are banned are violent/racist/homophobic/misogynistic...etc people who deserve their ban (and have probably re-joined using a VPN anyway).
On my business Twitter account, we did a sample a few months back and put it at closer to 30% out of 25k followers. Many have said the same thing. One thing is for sure it is not close to being as low as 5%.
Services offering to inflate your follower count in return for a fee is big business with Twitter, Facebook and others. The way they do it is by creating huge volumes of fake accounts to follow you for the fee they charge.
It’s not an airport, you don’t have to announce your departure…
Okay - so Elon put things on [pause] while he has the NHI account percentage verified. Yet it seems like so many have lost their freaking minds and look for any reason (realistic or not) to claim that Elon’s stated reason is BS and “here is the REAL reason!”.
Why?
Why?
Most people that are active on social media have an intrinsic understanding of the platform and it’s behavior.
Having founded and managed multiple commercial and independent social media accounts myself I can say that higher numbers representing bots or fake accounts would not at all be surprising. But not on just account totals but rather activity and engagement.
I can also say that among the major platforms Instagram and Twitter do have more “active” accounts than Facebook. Facebook has many essentially dead or abandoned accounts. Bots or proxies not included.
Point of all this being that had Musk consulted anyone of competence in the space he should have been well informed of what to expect prior to even making an offer.
Your definition of "smart"?
I think it's pretty stupid to make it even clearer with such a clumsy kindergarten that you now want to have something cheaper with trickery, because in the meantime you were no longer sure that it's a great deal.
BTW: agreed transactions cannot be legally put on hold.
'Once a deal is agreed, however, it is very hard to get a board to accept a lower offer. Delaware courts, which rule on most corporate cases, have rarely allowed this to happen unless agreed by both parties. Twitter’s board would risk being sued if it agreed to a lower price without serious justification. (...) Musk has secured the financing for the deal but is trying to reduce his $6.5bn margin loan by inviting wealthy and institutional investors to back his bid with equity. He recently raised $7.14bn of funding from investors including Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison, crypto exchange Binance and asset management groups Fidelity, Brookfield and Sequoia Capital. However, he is still looking for more support.'
(FT May14)
Shares of his car shop have fallen 9.37% in the last 5 days.
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While I can agree with what you wrote, it still beggars the question why so many look for another reason than the one stated.
It could simply be that something showed up that called into question the original stated NHI quantity on Twitter. If the NHI percentage is understated, Twitter was either ignorant of the fact (doubt) or it was well hidden / disguised (deliberate).
I have to go back and look but I seem to remember this question coming up in one of the Congressional hearings and I have never heard that is was answered.
Just a thought. Probably he expected more fake accounts (as his initial assumption) to bargain for lower stock price, lol
It’s pretty obvious. Twitter claiming 5% is absurd and now they're on the hook for being fraudulent with their stats.
There was that purge post Musk purchase announcement with e.g. Obama losing 300k followers and many others indicated Twitter scrambling to action fake accounts with the inevitable exposure. Too late, too obvious.
Musk may have intentionally gone in with a high bid to better assure getting a tentative agreement and fully expected that he would find issues once Twitter had to open its books. I don't think he went into this as blindly or ignorantly as some seem to think.
Even though a heavy user with a lot of followers (added another 13 million since early April), he's clearly had problems with how Twitter has been managed and this became an opportunity for him to try to expose some of those issues. I think he still wants to make a deal, perhaps at a lower price, but won't be terribly disappointed if it doesn't go through.
Adding @atomic.flip
Saw this in an article this morning and should have thought of this earlier; If anyone outside of Twitter knew of the incorrectly reported percentage they were most likely covered by an NDA.
