African Musk: Not a Fragrance

[Fitzcarraldo]

I don't understand why anyone (let alone Musk himself) thought it was a good idea for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. He tried to back out of it. They should have let him. He was sued, and the government forced him to go through with it. We really need to refresh (and enforce) our antitrust regulations. The richest man in the world shouldn't control a large portion of our access to space, an auto manufacturer, and one of the biggest social media outlets.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/PhilJamesson/sta...iACuR6igkViXYQ

So I thought this was well done. But Musk is making a fool of himself. You have to actually look at his tweets to see how dim he really is. He says he wants twitter to be the most accurate source of information. Then he falls for and responds to a fake Voltaire quote that was written by a Neo-Nazi.

[filghy2]

I don't understand why anyone (let alone Musk himself) thought it was a good idea for Elon Musk to buy Twitter. He tried to back out of it. They should have let him. He was sued, and the government forced him to go through with it.

I don't think it was the government. The Twitter board took Musk to court to force him to go through with the previously agreed deal. The board is legally obligated to act in the financial interests of the existing shareholders, so if someone offers way more than the market vaue of shares it's hard for them to refuse.

[broncofan]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/...8AFKtDGQcCJxmA

he can't be serious here. this is not a coherent idea of what truth is. He wants lies that gain traction.

filghy, i didn't follow the negotiations which were somewhat publicized. but what's kind of funny about it is that i think the board initially wasn't crazy about him buying. But they have fiduciary duties, he had the money or could raise it, and once he was legally bound they really had an obligation to enforce the purchase agreement.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I don't think it was the government. The Twitter board took Musk to court to force him to go through with the previously agreed deal. The board is legally obligated to act in the financial interests of the existing shareholders, so if someone offers way more than the market vaue of shares it's hard for them to refuse.

He had to buy it to avoid a trial:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/06/musk...nal-terms.html

[Stavros]

There is a rumour Musk is thinking of buying Liverpool -I assume the Football Club, not the City....

[filghy2]

The pretence of political neutrality has been discarded completely now.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/1...moves-00071758
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/1...files-00072015

I wonder if he has figured out that making his Twitter takeover a financial success is a lost cause: having trashed his own reputation as a technocratic business genius the only future is to become a right-wing cultural hero.

His creditors must be nervous now. I assume the loan is secured on his Tesla shares, but the price of those has fallen by half since the start of this year.

[filghy2]

Useful article analysing the Twitter Files and the efforts of Musk and his collaborators to use them to promote disinformation about a non-existent conspiracy.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022...en-laptop.html

[broncofan]

His creditors must be nervous now. I assume the loan is secured on his Tesla shares, but the price of those has fallen by half since the start of this year.

Tesla is now trading at $122.15, which gives it a market cap of 382 billion dollars. That's more than 60% off its high at around a trillion. The stock currently has a p/e ratio of around 37. That implies net income last year was something like 10 or 11 billion dollars.

Twitter will likely not have positive cash flow and may require cash infusions to run in the long term and pay its debt (as you say some of musk's tesla shares are pledged as collateral). Tesla does actually make money but while a pe ratio of 37 is not stratospheric, it prices in some growth. Nobody wants a yield of 3% for a risky equity investment.

There's no law that says tesla's net income can't shrink. While the market for electric cars will grow a lot, other companies will be offering their models and I'm sure plenty of people won't want to buy teslas because Musk is a shrill conspiracy theorist. He's definitely not a genius, but unless he's unusually dumb he should still have tens of billions of dollars when he's done damaging tesla's brand and sinking money into twitter.

[filghy2]

There has definitely been a tendency in the technology area for first movers to not retain their market dominance. That seems to be happening with EVs as they become more mainstream. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/2...ones-ira-biden

I guess Musk can keep Twitter going as a loss-maker for some time, possibly with help from like-minded billionaires or foreign interests who find him a useful idiot. It serves his purposes as a narcissist and right-wing troll, and it's hard to see him getting as much attention if he wasn't running Twitter.