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Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

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The Great Zaganza said:
What would be the point of being cash flush with billions, especially in times of high inflation?
It's not like it's possible to carry a billion around with you.
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The largest bank note is $100, weighs a gram, so a million kilograms, or a thousand tonnes if I got that right.
Not easily portable.
ETA divide by 100 so 10 tonnes.
 
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Samson said:
The largest bank note is $100, weighs a gram, so a million kilograms, or a thousand tonnes if I got that right.
Not easily portable.
ETA divide by 100 so 10 tonnes.
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that's why the 500 Euro note is the money launderer's favorite.
Does help much in this case.


Musk would have to go to the Federal Reserve directly if he wanted to 1 million printed 100 Dollar bills.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
that's why the 500 Euro note is the money launderer's favorite.
Does help much in this case.


Musk would have to go to the Federal Reserve directly if he wanted to 1 million printed 100 Dollar bills.
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A lazy 10 million needed.
A decent payload for Spacex
 
Wouldn’t it be easier to put it all into crypto and send it to mars on a thumb drive?

And by the time it gets there, the thumb drive would still be worth something.
 
Dr. Keith said:
Wouldn’t it be easier to put it all into crypto and send it to mars on a thumb drive?

And by the time it gets there, the thumb drive would still be worth something.
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Only if it had been wrapped in a few kilos of lead to exclude radiation. :(
 
One good thing about this fiasco: It has opened a great many people's eyes about Musk;that he is not the infallible genius his cultist claims him to be.
Oh, he still has some hard core cult members, but they are not as many as they once were.
I notice that on other forums the number of denunciatory posts you once got by daring to criticise Musk is a lot fewer then they used to be.
 
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Just read the story about Musk's father having a kid with his own stepdauther.
Call me old fashioned, but I find that pretty deplorable, to put it mildly.
 
dudalb said:
Just read the story about Musk's father having a kid with his own stepdauther.
Call me old fashioned, but I find that pretty deplorable, to put it mildly.
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When that family tells old stories around the campfire, talk about some real doozies, I bet!
 
From Twitter

[IMGW=340]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=1447&pictureid=13151[/IMGW]
 
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jeremyp said:
For those who are interested, Ars Technica have a copy of Twitter's lawsuit.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/twitter-lawsuit-against-musk.pdf

It's definitely worth a read. It's pretty well written and, viewed as a character assassination of Musk, it's a work of art.
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Lmao! Wow! Oh wow. Ignore the character stuff and even the obvious violations of the non-disparigment clause. Musk's grade S hubris is fully realized in the other clauses he allowed in that agreement. I'm on my phone right now so I'm not going to pick out the sundry provisions individually, but hot damn Twitter's lawyers did some mighty fine work there, and overnight iirc.

I feel bad for whoever Musk had negotiating that EXPLICITLY 'seller friendly' deal because there is near zero chance any transaction lawyer was ok with it, but the E-loon likely insisted.
 
The Opening Arguments podcast (hosted by a real-life lawyer) has been critical of Musk in this entire affair. The simple criticism was something like, "I wouldn't let my client buy a McDonald's franchise under these terms." They have promised a deep dive into Twitter's lawsuit in their upcoming Tuesday episode. They maintain that forcing Musk to complete the purchase is almost certainly not going to happen.
 
I Am The Scum said:
The Opening Arguments podcast (hosted by a real-life lawyer) has been critical of Musk in this entire affair. The simple criticism was something like, "I wouldn't let my client buy a McDonald's franchise under these terms." They have promised a deep dive into Twitter's lawsuit in their upcoming Tuesday episode. They maintain that forcing Musk to complete the purchase is almost certainly not going to happen.
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That's probably true, but I'd bet they get some compensation for their time and troubles.
 
I Am The Scum said:
The Opening Arguments podcast (hosted by a real-life lawyer) has been critical of Musk in this entire affair. The simple criticism was something like, "I wouldn't let my client buy a McDonald's franchise under these terms." They have promised a deep dive into Twitter's lawsuit in their upcoming Tuesday episode. They maintain that forcing Musk to complete the purchase is almost certainly not going to happen.
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It has happened before. The court's chief judge Kathaleen McCormick forced Kohlberg & Co LLC to close its $550 million purchase of DecoPac Holding Inc. Musk should be ok though, as long as she doesn't get assigned to the case...

... oh

https://www.reuters.com/legal/trans...e-rare-ruling-ordering-deal-close-2022-07-15/
 
The consolation here is that also Twitter can easily pay an army of top lawyers. Bit different if you are some scuba diving company owner that is casually implied of being a pedophile by a billionaire superstar on social media. I still can't get over that decision.
 
dudalb said:
Just read the story about Musk's father having a kid with his own stepdauther.
Call me old fashioned, but I find that pretty deplorable, to put it mildly.
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"Happy Father's Day! Or as we call it in our family, Happy Brother-in-Law's Day!"

(Dylan Farrow in a different, but similar situation)
 
I Am The Scum said:
The Opening Arguments podcast (hosted by a real-life lawyer) has been critical of Musk in this entire affair. The simple criticism was something like, "I wouldn't let my client buy a McDonald's franchise under these terms." They have promised a deep dive into Twitter's lawsuit in their upcoming Tuesday episode. They maintain that forcing Musk to complete the purchase is almost certainly not going to happen.
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I was going to type out a few things that are especially cringeworthy moves on the side of Musk, and how they are addressed by the provisions Twitter's lawyers got inserted, but thankfully in looking up a provision I came across an Above the Law article that already has every point and then more. Being written by actual lawyers helps that (where my experience was in learning parts of the law and contract when I was given the job of running tariff exemptions for materials at my last job, on top of the work I did for the lab and my main job of Quality/Compliance with Standards).

The big takeaway I want to stress is that Musk is on the hook for between $1B and $44B. While he's less likely to be made to actually purchase (courts tend to encourage settlements that don't force angry groups to join together) and therefore not being made to give up the full $44B, it's even more unlikely that all he has to do is pay the $1B mutually agreed on 'deal collapse' fee. Most likely is Musk is made to pay Twitter a good deal to make them whole. If we had an actually fair regulatory scheme in the US, he'd be on the hook for huge fines and even more restrictions on his stock crimes.

jeremyp said:
It has happened before. The court's chief judge Kathaleen McCormick forced Kohlberg & Co LLC to close its $550 million purchase of DecoPac Holding Inc. Musk should be ok though, as long as she doesn't get assigned to the case...

... oh

https://www.reuters.com/legal/trans...e-rare-ruling-ordering-deal-close-2022-07-15/
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This along with Musk being a gelatinous discharge brained egomaniac does make it possible that the acquisition is fully compelled. Further it means that this isn't likely to be drawn out for years either.

If the acquisition is forced through and Musk has to dump a lot of Tesla stock that could either collapse that company, or ironically if he has to dump enough shares others could gain enough control to put the company on a better long-term footing. There is a lot of rot in Tesla, but if enough of the stock buyers can be fooled for long enough to address some of it, Tesla might actually turn around to doing better than it would have under Musk. After all, the stock is still hugely over-valued from every rational metric, Musk has already fooled shareholders, so it isn't impossible that enough stay fooled to keep the company afloat. (Yes, the value of a stock is more controlled by the perception of it's worth than by any actual work a given company does and so some or even most shareholders might not be truly 'fooled', but you all get the idea.)
 
tyr_13 said:
If the acquisition is forced through and Musk has to dump a lot of Tesla stock that could either collapse that company, or ironically if he has to dump enough shares others could gain enough control to put the company on a better long-term footing. There is a lot of rot in Tesla, but if enough of the stock buyers can be fooled for long enough to address some of it, Tesla might actually turn around to doing better than it would have under Musk. After all, the stock is still hugely over-valued from every rational metric, Musk has already fooled shareholders, so it isn't impossible that enough stay fooled to keep the company afloat. (Yes, the value of a stock is more controlled by the perception of it's worth than by any actual work a given company does and so some or even most shareholders might not be truly 'fooled', but you all get the idea.)
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It's my opinion that Musk doesn't have $44 billion with which to buy Twitter. Even with the deal he signed, a fair amount of the money was coming from third parties in the form of loans, some of which were collateralised on Musk's Tesla shares. If I ran one of the banks providing those loans, I'd note that the price of Tesla has fallen significantly and therefore the collateral needs to be more shares and also that (according to Twitter's complaint) Elon Musk is an utter child who should not be trusted with to run a lemonade stall, never mind a multi billion dollar corporation.

If Musk doesn't have the $44 billion, he cannot be forced to buy the company. Can the court force him to sell assets to meet the purchase price? I don't know, but I think you are correct: it's more likely he'll negotiate a settlement with Twitter.

If he does that, that opens another question. If he settles for - say - $20 billion, where does that leave Twitter's shareholders? If Musk had bought Twitter, the $44 billion would be in the pockets of the shareholders. If he settles, the $20 billion would be in the hands of Twitter. I think I'd be a bit pissed off by that, if I was a shareholder. I might even sue.
 
Any settlement would be couched in terms of making the shareholders “whole”. So, costs of the M&A work and dispute would be step one. Step two would be to pick the stock price that best represents the loss to the share holder. He offers $54/share and it is now at $38/share. I could see a settlement in the range $10-16/share. It could be reinvested by the company to increase shareholder value or they could pay a one time dividend.

I think Elon owns around 9% of the shares.
 
Ya, courts love when you try and use them for delaying tactics. That will work out really well for him.
 
Musk making noises about buying Disney. He has totally lost his marbles if he thinks he can pull that off.
FOr one thing, companies are sucessful as Disney has been are not good targers for hostile takeovers..which this would be.
 
dudalb said:
Musk making noises about buying Disney. He has totally lost his marbles if he thinks he can pull that off.
FOr one thing, companies are sucessful as Disney has been are not good targers for hostile takeovers..which this would be.
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He's probably trying to set up some ludicrous argument like "Hey, I talk about buying companies all the time. Should I now be forced to buy Disney?"
 
dudalb said:
Musk making noises about buying Disney. He has totally lost his marbles if he thinks he can pull that off.
FOr one thing, companies are sucessful as Disney has been are not good targers for hostile takeovers..which this would be.
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My Google foo has deserted me. I can’t find any reference to Musk saying he wants to buy Disney, only speculation based on the fact that he has started disparaging them on Twitter.

It is possible he is trying to drive down the stock price so he can buy some shares, but Disney’s market cap is more than four times that of Twitter so things have got to get pretty bad before he could consider buying them.
 
Also, I am pretty sure Disney can have him legally murdered in the state of Florida.
 
jeremyp said:
My Google foo has deserted me. I can’t find any reference to Musk saying he wants to buy Disney, only speculation based on the fact that he has started disparaging them on Twitter.
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I see only idle speculation, nothing from Musk himself. They are reading waaay too much into a few tweets.

Also, Disney is a $200 billion company, or has been recently, although with share price fluctuations it varies somewhat.
 
Puppycow said:
I see only idle speculation, nothing from Musk himself. They are reading waaay too much into a few tweets.
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Wasn't the first foreshadow of Musk's eventual bid to buy Twitter simply him liking a speculative post by a fan saying he should do that?

Musk is impossible to read. Things that initially look like jokes, lead to serious actions. Things that initially seem to be serious, go nowhere. It's not that he is operating on some higher inscrutable level; it's because he is impulsive, has a skin rivaled in its thinness only by Donald Trump's, and loves to perform theatrics for his personality cult. He is a walking meme and, like the success of memes, utterly arbitrary.
 
jeremyp said:
And now Musk has challenged the CEO of Twitter to a debate. As the subtitle of the linked article says, Twitter has accepted, and it will take place in the Delaware Chancery Court between their respective lawyers. And it won't be about the number of bots.
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"I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage," Musk wrote in a tweet on Saturday. "Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!"
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As a member of the public, I don't care a fig about what percentage of twitter users are fake bots. The only person who cares is Musk himself.
 
Puppycow said:
As a member of the public, I don't care a fig about what percentage of twitter users are fake bots. The only person who cares is Musk himself.
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Advertisers care too. Which impacts shareholders as well.
 
Puppycow said:
As a member of the public, I don't care a fig about what percentage of twitter users are fake bots. The only person who cares is Musk himself.
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Ziggurat said:
Advertisers care too. Which impacts shareholders as well.
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As a member of the public who has never used twitter I don't care a fig about what percentage of twitter users are fake bots, or twitter advertisers, or twitter shareholders, or twitter users themselves. Or Musk for that matter. The whole shebang could disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow and I would not notice.

But there is a modicum of comic value in some of the shenanigans being discussed here.
 
I can't find the video now, but earlier this week, Musk said during a broadcast that "everyone who uses twitter knows how many bots there are" (paraphrasing). This would be really bad for his case, as he now cannot claim that he had been misled by the information Twitter gave to him.
 
jeremyp said:
And now Musk has challenged the CEO of Twitter to a debate. As the subtitle of the linked article says, Twitter has accepted, and it will take place in the Delaware Chancery Court between their respective lawyers. And it won't be about the number of bots.
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QED of that "theatrics for his personality cult" thing I mentioned. His fans tend to be the "debate-me-bro" type.
 
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