musk’s “i will fix twitter” has big “kyiv in three days” energy
— Seva (@SevaUT) April 15, 2022
Translation: if his worst critics leave, Twitter will be as worthless as Gab, Gettr (lol) and Truth Social. He needs y'all to stay on here so his "free speech" people can harass you for fun. Because dude does not ALWAYS believe in free speech… https://t.co/k21qu1QXwT https://t.co/Z2UNJs8LU6
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid ?? (@JoyAnnReid) April 25, 2022
As the business media have been careful to point out, any deal of this size takes six months or more to finalize. And, the unspoken subtext runs, many highly publicized megadeals never come to fruition, especially when the bid is led by a guy renowned for ideas about child-sized rescue submarines and brain implants. So it’s a little early yet to panic, not that logic ever stopped Twitter users…
Who can we get to explain that Musk doesn't want Twitter for any logical reason and just wants to wat- https://t.co/3WFuw1kOFF
— zeddy (@Zeddary) April 25, 2022
(Reference: Some men just want to watch the world burn)
What will change is that in the one or two cases a year that make news that Musk reads (Trump, Babylon Bee) he’ll personally intervene. The rest of the moderation decisions will be made as before.
— Noah Snyder (@NoahJSnyder) April 25, 2022
Whereas up until now you were doing this for a slightly less weird rich guy. https://t.co/82Uq9YDmWM
— The Substack of Boba Fett (@agraybee) April 25, 2022
there’s not exactly a surplus of talented software engineers right now and if you’re winnowing the field to “talented software engineers who are willing to enable alex jones” you’ve got a real who-does-the-work challenge
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 25, 2022
This is why no blue check is going anywhere. This place is a combination of Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram and OnlyFans.
— The Substack of Boba Fett (@agraybee) April 25, 2022
i mean it cannot get any clearer that the people seeking to destabilize society are perfectly happy to do so under their real names and in fact benefit from doing so
— Seva (@SevaUT) April 25, 2022
i mean, sure, if what you want out of twitter is a bunch of elon musk fanboi crypto degenerates, great, that's what he wants, too, but that's not the majority of people *on twitter*, nor is it what people come here for.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 25, 2022
on the other hand, we may not have to worry about leaving if twitter leaves us https://t.co/dua0SY57qe
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachi) April 25, 2022
OLD: Applauding magnates for using their unfathomable wealth to improve material conditions for millions of people.
NEW: Applauding magnates for using their unfathomable wealth to persecute ordinary people who anger them.
— Fred of Fred Hall (@LesserFrederick) April 25, 2022
Major Major Major Major
Yeah I don’t think much is going to change. Lotta sturm & drang over this. Musk just gets bored so easily.
Kent
That is the 2020s in a nutshell right there.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
TBF if Elon drives Twitter into the ground, I see this as a big net plus for Humanity.
NotMax
It is impossible for me to care any less about anything Twitter – then, now or in any conceivable future. Never been there, don’t pay any but the most fleeting heed to the content when it is foisted upon me elsewhere as it is tamped down as tight as can be on my computer so never see more than the most cursory text. YMMV.
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
Elon killing twitter is worth it for the Wailing and Lamentation of the D.C. Press Corps alone.
RaflW
Jack Dorsey is doing too many left coast drugs. “In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving for the problem of it being a company however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
Emphasis added, because WTAF.
eta: Though the part about “not a company” kinda makes sense since it’s barely ever made money!
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: I call BS, I’ll bet there are lots of things you care fewer than 64 words about.
eclare
I follow about a dozen people on Twitter, including our own Mr. Cole and Ms. Cracker, and of course Paul Bronks for funny animal videos. I have sent a handful of tweets over the years, so I don’t see my experience on Twitter changing very much.
What will change is if Musk lets TFG back on and the media breathlessly reports on his dozen or so utterances per day. It was so nice when that cacophony of bullshit stopped, I hate that there is a near 100% certainty that it is coming back. It’s not good for anyone’s mental health.
NotMax
@Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
Speculate that once the last i is dotted and the last t crossed on the sale one will be able to count in days the time before he announces plans for a fresh IPO and cashes out not long thereafter.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
All the folks saying nothing will change reminds me of all the people who said nothing will change under a Dump administration
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
To quote Cal Coolidge, “You lose.”
;)
guachi
I like Twitter because I like the people I follow. All 62 of them. That includes 12 anonymous accounts and three BJ front pagers.
I get great news updates. But it’s not necessary. I can live without it or live with less of it.
If trolls start to infest it more than they do now I’ll either quit or engage less and only read my main feed. At least Twitter lets me sort chronologically.
BeautifulPlumage
It’s weird how some people on Twitter are reacting like he walked into the store and bought it and now it’s his. As you point out above, the deal will take time to complete. And Muskrat gets bored quickly.
Felanius Kootea
@Major Major Major Major: You’re probably right, but I don’t trust Apartheid Clyde, as Azealia Banks calls him. I don’t trust his friendship with Peter Thiel, who I know is definitely bad news for anyone who isn’t white and I don’t trust a “free speech” model that gives equal air time to hate speech and disinformation with no consideration of the larger damage done to vulnerable people and society as a whole. Elon’s view of twitter also seems very US-centric, which isn’t good news for the rest of the world. I’m not deleting my twitter account (yet) but I’ll be exploring other social media outlets.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: there are definitely things you don’t even write one comment about.
LeftCoastYankee
Sounds like Jack Dorsey found his mark.
BeautifulPlumage
Click on the Kilgore Trout tweet and read the rest. They point out that a seat on the board was a path to hero-held-back but complete ownership means you own allll the decisions. And maybe your most valuable employees can find work elsewhere instead of enabling trashy-fashy types.
I’m leaning towards Muskie realizing the downsides and not completing the deal (while basking in the attention). Or, alternatively, what Major x 4 predicts.
Felanius Kootea
Imagine an Arab Spring where every twitter user had to verify his or her identity in countries where the twitter owner is seeking to do business. Yikes.
LeftCoastYankee
Oops duplicate deleted
BeautifulPlumage
@LeftCoastYankee: site’s been a little glitchy tonight; I almost double posted at the same time as you
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
It could have been worse, at least he didn’t take over Pornhub
mrmoshpotato
Wow. Even Joy-Ann Reid is saying “Look at this asshole!”
Shalimar
@eclare: I don’t think the banning of the account is why Trump doesn’t dominate the news post-presidency. Liz Harrington still tweets out his public statements to her 237k followers and emails them to their media list. Said media still reports on what he says, though not as widely as before because he isn’t the leader of the free world anymore. Mostly what has changed though is that he doesn’t say as much as he did when he was in office.
Lately we have been getting a couple press releases a week and occasional interview, because Trump is endorsing people in primaries. In 2021, that was more like a couple press releases per month. He intentionally kept a low profile. That will change if he runs of president again. He will be just as hard to avoid as before, Twitter or no.
Redshift
@Shalimar: Hmm, but a big part of the reason he doesn’t say as much is because for him, the important part of Twitter was people worshipping him, not putting out statements. It was kind of as vicious circle, and press releases can’t replace it.
I think you’re right that there would still be less, but I don’t think it made no difference.
Felanius Kootea
Well, we’re all talking about him, so that’s the most important thing for a narcissist.
The level of debt he’d need to take on to go through with this deal makes no sense. How many people would pay to stay on Twitter? How’s it going to be profitable?
burnspbesq
Like all deals of this size, it’s subject to HSR review. It may not get approved.
There is also the small matter of the deep shit that Musk is in with the SEC, which will only get deeper in the short run because of his further violations in connection with his initial acquisition of TWTR shares.
opiejeanne
So-called Black Twitter is a thing I would hate to lose, and some of my favorite voices are talking about leaving but someone I follow on Twitter said that they were there before so many of the assholes were banned, and they and their followers flourished, so they’re sticking around and waiting to see what happens. I think that was PropaneJane/DocRocket, and I think I’ll stay for a while too. .
Princess
Six months of instability while Twitter waits to see if this deal actually happens are going to destroy whatever remaining value the company still has. If I am a shareholder, I am getting out, yesterday.
Splitting Image
Only last week I suggested that Elon Musk was the most likely of the big three dudebros (him, Zuck, and Bezos) to bankrupt himself through his own idiocy.
And here he is already, spending $40 billion to buy up Twitter.
burnspbesq
Didn’t he say that the acquirer’s obligation to close isn’t subject to any financing conditions? If that’s true, then either (a) he’s dumber than I think he is, or (b) his lawyers committed malpractice, or (c) both.
burnspbesq
I was never a securities lawyer, so I don’t want this to be read as asserting violations of the securities laws by anyone, but in my experience it’s odd for the target’s 8-K announcing a deal of this kind to not include a copy of the agreement and plan of merger as an exhibit.
https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001418091/2438f74a-dacf-4b4b-b3d2-6d507cee9721.pdf
gene108
@burnspbesq:
The SEC seems to be a toothless tiger. I doubt they will harm Musk.
prostratedragon
For a late night breather, recent Walk of Fame inductee and representative of Marshalls everywhere, Marshall Thompson, singing “Low Key:”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8DfS0MqR_b8
burnspbesq
@gene108:
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, however, is anything but toothless—and it currently has before it a case alleging (quite credibly, I might add) numerous breaches by Musk of his existing SEC consent decree.
I would describe Elon’s counsel in this matter as the Sydney Powell of securities lawyers. Neither he nor his client seems to have understood and internalized the most fundamental principle of American jurisprudence: you piss off a United States District Judge at your Erik.
burnspbesq
@burnspbesq:
that was supposed to be “peril.” Fucking auto-correct works about as well as Tesla self-driving.
montanareddog
@prostratedragon: I admit I was thrown by that as I did not know that Daktari was also a singer.
But it would seem there has been more than one Marshall Thompson.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Absence of interest and devoid of care are not interchangeable stages of being.
Brachiator
@Splitting Image:
He’s got a long way to go before he bankrupts himself, but I agree with you that the acquisition of Twitter is foolish.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
@Splitting Image: Of the three Bezos is IMO least likely to be bankrupted by his own idiocy. He seems more focused on business and his empire isn’t really a social media empire. He hasn’t been injecting misinformation into the political bloodstream the way Zuck has and Elon is presumably about to do. Amazon’s empire isn’t completely benign but I’m also not seeing how he’s aiding and abetting the most malign forces in American and global politics.
He basically makes money by selling stuff to people they want to buy. If he didn’t have something approaching a monopoly on online sales and his company’s labor practices were more enlightened there really wouldn’t be anything objectionable about him. Unless there’s something else there I’m not aware of, which there might be. I’m not that knowledgeable about the guy.
sab
@burnspbesq: You can always turn off auto correct. Just saying. My typos are my own.
germy
germy
p.a.
Twitter suspended me for a tweet encouraging Ted Cruz to self-harm because of his anti-vax tweets. He, of course, got no sanction for his tweets, so I decided to take my suspension as a ban, and never went back. ?? Now I get weekly emails from twitter about how they miss me and I should comment on x, y, z…
germy
Tony Jay
@RaflW:
Heh. It’s like a verbal storyboard for “And this is the moment Musk points his
guncheckbook at Dorsey’scrotchbank account.”Brachiator
@germy:
Google and Facebook are not closed ecosystems. They are both vulnerable because they are free. Users can walk away at any time. Google must continue to provide value. Ask Jeeves or shout to Yahoo about how hard it is to keep customers when something better comes along.
Facebook has a slightly different challenge. They are losing younger people in droves. And there is the phenomenon of teens not wanting to be where their parents are. The kids use Instagram and other services. Facebook bought Instagram and will buy any serious challengers if allowed. Congress could easily remedy this with strong anti-trust remedies.
sab
@p.a.: That is hilarious,
satby
Well, I’m on Twitter a lot and enjoy it so this sale, if it goes through, does worry me. But I’m waiting to see what happens too. There’s a lot of pushback on misinformation in real time and a lot of great voices I would not have encountered otherwise.
David Collier-Brown
At the expense of being a grumpy Canadian, I definitely want twitter to be run by a white South African who wants free speech under US rules that say there is no such thing as hate speech (qv).
Kay
Nate Silver writes this as Ron DeSantis just levied harsh state punishment on Disney for disagreeing with Ron DeSantis, Republicans have pushed through 20 state laws banning speech in public schools, and every single day there is a national news story about how conservatives are pulling books from libraries.
He really should go back to compiling political polls. He’s a moron.
prostratedragon
@montanareddog: Heh, saw that when checking whether the singer was still around. Never watched Daktari a whole lot, but do recognize the actor. He was pretty busy.
MagdaInBlack
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, this.
Ken
At first I didn’t understand the tweet from Tim O’Brien, but then I realized — of course this isn’t like when you or I buy something, this is how rich people buy things. He’s going to “pay” 40 billion dollars, but immediately repay himself with money borrowed against the company, saddling it with the debt.
Kay
No more mention of sexual assault in the public square! So say the defenders of free speech on the Right and center Right.
Also, romance novels may not be discussed. Thank goodness they conquered the scourge of “wokeness” though. That was the real speech threat.
Kay
@Ken:
I don’t care what anyone says – Tesla is insanely overvalued. At some point reality has to hit. This is magical thinking. I would say it makes me wonder about the lenders, but since I watched the 2009-2010 depresssion unfold I no longer believe finance people are rational.
Kay
@Ken:
I would no more buy Tesla than I would buy bitcoin. They have, once again, lost their minds in their customary herd like manner and are making up numbers.
No normal person who needs to retain their funds for retirement should have anything to do with this puffed up, inflated, over hyped celebrity driven bullshit. They should RUN.
But they consistently get absolutely reckless and bad advice, so many of them won’t.
Salt Creek
@NotMax:
To anyone not familiar with this quote, Calvin Coolidge ( a man who couldn’t elected to a school board) was known as silent Cal, one day at a dinner a woman said to him “Mr. President, I have a bet with my friend that I can get you to say three words” to which he replied “You lose”.
Another Scott
@BeautifulPlumage: Balloon-Juice is always wonky for 10-20 minutes starting at 2:00 AM Eastern time. Some sort of daily server activity. It’s best to wait until that is over before trying to comment then.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
If the NYTimes had revealed this to the public at the time they learned it, it would have changed ensuing events.
I’m curious how the process of interviewing people with the intent not to reveal the news and instead save it for a book works in practice. Do the reporters tell the lawmaker they intend to save it for a book? Is there a timeline? So a guarantee it won’t be revealed until the book is published? Is it specific? “I will not reveal to this public for at least 12 months from today”? Because there has to be some kind of understanding or deal going on and both parties have to be aware of it.
Maybe two separate interviews – one for the newspaper, where nothing of import is revealed and a second for the book. Because how else would McConnell know this wasn’t going to be in the newspaper the next day?
Shouldn’t they have to reveal the process? Because it’s more elaborate than it appears- it must be.
Geminid
@Kay: It would be one thing if Tesla had a monopoly on electric vehicle technology. But that technology was around 100 years ago until the prevalence of cheap gasoline forced a hiatus in it’s development. Now every major vehicle manufacturer is in the business, and their offerings will outperform Tesla’s in objective measures of quality and reliability.
This alone might not shake Tesla investors’ confidence right away. They want to feel “smart” about their investments in a company that seemed to be on the cutting edge of electric vehicles. But that was in the last decade. These investors won’t feel as smart when their stock drops 30%, and they’ll feel even worse when it keeps dropping.
I think you are correct in saying Tesla’s massive capitalization “value” is a bubble. That may take another year to sink in but it will.
Betty
@burnspbesq: I thought that was a reference to Eric Trump that I hadn’t known about. Funny.
Betty
@p.a.: I was put on time out by Twitter for making fun of Mark Meadows. Boy, do I feel vindicated now.
TonyG
Elon Musk has a net worth of more than a quarter-trillion dollars. His money is play money; Monopoly money. If his net worth was one ten-thousand of what it is, he would still have more than enough money to buy any luxury goods that he desires. Musk is a little boy playing with this play money. What an empty, pathetic, shell of a person he is. I actually don’t understand how he made all that money though. Very few people buy Teslas, and his Boring Company seems like a joke. Something doesn’t add up here.
Kay
@Geminid:
Tesla recruited in areas like mine where the traditional auto industry and skilled workforce is strong and offered bonuses to go work for them. Every single person who took it came back and says they have quality problems. They say the company portrays “work arounds” caused by a refusal to invest in manufacturing “infastructure” – what you need to produce high quality at scale- as “innovations” when really they are cheap, on the fly fixes to problems other auto companies have already solved. Decades ago.
It’s flimsy. It won’t hold up. Traditional auto companies are slower, that’s true. That’s because it takes time (and money) to do it right. You’ll have plenty of reliable, well built electric cars to choose from in all price ranges and that would have happened with or without this celebrity loudmouth. Only in imaginary internet world is a company like Honda sitting on their hands and refusing to innovate.
There’s an investigative expose coming out next week about how Tesla manipulated regulators and hid deaths caused by the self driving cars from the public. Why in the world do people imagine this self-promoting egomaniac is anyway trustworthy? We let him test this shit on public roads? It’s insane.
I don’t care that much about Twitter. I think it’s always been a lie that it’s a “public square” and anyone who says that doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “public”. But it has been disconcerting to watch people happily inflate another big, shiny bubble with a big personality in the center of it. I think we never learn.
Kay
@Geminid:
I feel like his insane “fans” are themselves a tip off. Why does this automobile – this machine- need so much defending? I feel like they bought into it and it’s essential to them that you buy into it too or they fear the whole thing comes crashing down.
The Moar You Know
@Felanius Kootea: you forgot the mandatory (in this case) “and male” because if there’s one thing ol’ Pete hates more than nieblankes, it’s women.
The Moar You Know
@TonyG: Irrational investors who keep buying up Tesla stock at higher and higher prices. That’s where all the money comes from.
But that’s monopoly money, in a sense. It can go away.
Elon’s real asset, the one worth so much real money he will never let the public invest in it, is of course Space X.
Also, don’t know where you’re from, but here in SoCal about 10% of all vehicles are Teslas. The damn things are everywhere. I’ve driven a couple. Don’t like the new steering yoke but aside from that they are damn nice cars. That being said, I expect that when Ford comes out with that new F-150 Lightning that Elon, having fucked around, will find out.
Geminid
@Kay: I suspect that a number of Tesla’s investors themselves made their money in the tech industry. A lot of personal wealth has been “created” there in the last 20 years. They are predisposed to back another “disruptive” outfit led by someone who passes for a role model, a billionaire that some millionaires look up to.
burnspbesq
@TonyG:
302,000 Teslas were sold in the US in 2021 (930,000 worldwide). That doesn’t seem like “very few” to me.
For me, the tell was Tesla’s reaction to finishing dead last in the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey a few years back: they denied J.D. Power permission to contact Tesla owners.
Ken
Have they never heard of the Streisand Effect? At the least, they should have expected J.D. Power’s surveys to include the line “Tesla was not evaluated because the company does not allow us to contact Tesla owners”.
randal m sexton
@p.a.: Did you urge Cruz to ‘Go F*&k yourself’ ? Cuz that seems to be a sort of allowed urging of self harm these days :)
Captain C
@Kay:
TV Interviewer after the book is out: “So, Bob, why didn’t you report this at the time? These seem like critically important details.”
Bob: “Well, Jim, there were an awful lot of zeros on that check from the publisher…”
PaulB
My two cents (and worth every penny). In no particular order:
If Trump was a serious contender in 2024, I’d be willing to bet that Twitter would have reinstated his account anyway, even without this purchase. They’d talk about “fairness” and “in the public interest,” etc.
Short term, not much changes, not just because it will take some months for the deal to close, and that’s assuming they don’t run into any roadblocks. Add a couple of roadblocks and it can easily take a year or more to close this deal. Even after the deal closes, it will take time, measured in months at a minimum, to make whatever modifications Musk insists on.
Even though nothing changes in the short term, I do expect a brain drain at Twitter. Probably not a lot, maybe 5% to 10% at most initially, but many of them will be people that Twitter can ill afford to lose. It’s going to take some time to recover from that. Every high-tech recruiter is now searching LinkedIn for Twitter employees and reaching out to them.
There will also be a problem with recruitment. If I’m in the pipeline for a job at Twitter right now, I’m re-thinking that decision and likely withdrawing. Now would definitely not be a good time to join Twitter, not unless I’m right out of college and/or don’t have much of a choice. The hiring managers and recruiters at Twitter are now banging their heads against their desks, as their job just got 10x harder.
Financially, this deal makes no sense. He financed it mostly through debt and not at a very favorable interest rate. Servicing that debt is going to be costly and Twitter’s revenue stream isn’t going to cover it. This is not a sustainable business model. He either drives Twitter into bankruptcy or he loses interest, declares victory, and takes it public again, likely at a significant loss.
Ignoring the finances for the moment, I can see two possible likely outcomes, neither of which reflect favorably on Musk:
Outcome #1: He listens to the experts at Twitter and, aside from resurrecting a few formerly-banned accounts, basically does nothing. Twitter would continue largely as before but the right-wing idiots and Musk fanboys would be furious at him for letting them down.
Outcome #2: He ignores the experts at Twitter and Twitter turns into another cesspool, much like Gab, Parler, etc. And not just a cesspool of misinformation, bigotry, etc., but also a cesspool of porn, spam, scams, and, well, shit. In this scenario, Twitter becomes a shell of its former self and some other platform eventually becomes dominant.
Jinchi
Is there some line buried deep in a car sales document I’ve never heard about?
Jinchi
There was a blissful time post Jan-6th where we didn’t have to hear every idiot comment from TFG. He gets in the news a lot more these days.
So yeah. By 2024, he’d be everywhere.