It just won’t work.
As you’ve pointed out, the product Facebook sells is YOU, and the genius is that the products all join Facebook for free. It’s as if all the televisions and cell phone accessories sold by Best Buy manufactured themselves and drove themselves to the store.
Facebook wouldn’t exist today if the users had to pay for it.
I’m not sure I even understand the concept. I thought the way Twitter worked was that you follow who you want to. Is he suggesting that people should pay for their own tweets according to how many followers they have?
Or do people frequently sign up to follow hashtags, so they see every tweet from anyone that contains that hashtag? So attaching a popular hashtag to your tweet would cost money? I don’t see how that would work either.
Otherwise… if he’s talking about something being pushed to people who didn’t sign up for it - well that already exists, it’s not a tweet it’s a paid advertisment.
I’m morally certain you’ve put more thought into this than Elon Musk has. Elon just wants to troll people for the yucks and get free advertising;buying Twitter is, in his mind, a way of ‘owning the cow’ and removing the constraints preventing his legion of followers from shouting down anyone to says bad, bad things about their demigod. That it is actually a stupidly counterproductive plan is only just now occurring to him and he’s trying to backpedal without having to admit his mistake or shell out a billion clams as a penalty for reneging on a deal he forced the Twitter board into accepting.
Stranger
So he’s announced that he’s a Republicans because Democrats are meanies.
So Republicans are not the party of division and hate?? Tell me, how’s a guy so fundamentally stupid get so rich?
They are united by their love… of hatred.
He’s just a troll at this point.
His father owned an emerald mine.
Having traded up within 5% of Musk’s proposed buyout price 3 weeks ago, the stock closed today 32% below that price, or $13 billion difference in market cap.
Musk isn’t personally responsible for the general decline in the markets that has exacerbated this, but he’s in a big hole here. He’s not allowed to back out just because the market is down, it comes down to whether he can fabricate a reason that will hold up in court. There’s so much at stake now that the Board have a fiduciary duty to make him pay. I wonder if the stock is a buy at this point, on the basis that it’s trading at $37 and there’s a good case Musk owes every shareholder $17 on top of that even if he doesn’t go through with the acquisition - and he has the resources to pay. The caveat, of course, is that he may be dumping his existing stake on the market, and in a sulky and disruptive manner.
He’s also probably trying to distract from the simple fact that he cannot “put the deal on hold” or “negotiate a lower price” based on the number of bots on Twitter. He’s signed a deal with Twitter. There’s nothing in the deal about Twitter swearing they know exactly how many bots there are and that Elon can end the deal if they are wrong.
If I understand the reporting correctly (I tried scanning the deal itself, but it’s dozens of pages of legalese) he can’t even pull out and pay the billion dollar fee except in very narrow circumstances. Twitter can basically take him to court to pay up and take the company he’s just trashed merely by agreeing to buy it. (Well, buy it and then talk the stock down.)
For whatever reason, in SEC filings yesterday, Twitter’s board advised shareholders to vote in favor of the buyout.
Because if they didn’t, they couldn’t pursue legal options against Musk to compel him to complete the deal. I haven’t read the full deal, but Bloomberg has reported what @naita states–that the $1bn isn’t just a magic get out of jail free, it’s what he has to pay for walking away if he can’t come up with the financing. But Twitter is allowed to basically try and force him to complete the deal if the financing is in place, and is allowed to try and compel him to secure financing if reasonable financing can be available. For someone who now appears to be having second thoughts, he signed a pretty bad deal for himself, one that, to get out of, he likely will have to pay significantly more than the $1bn breakup fee.
Oh. That’ll do it.
This wording makes me smile. 
I guess this deal is quite a bit more risky than your typical “cooling-off” period they warn you about when buying a car.
It could of course, just be that Musk wants to lower his purchase price–and that is something he probably can succeed at, within limits. The deck is decently stacked in the favor of the company being purchased, as a number of recent court cases have generally taken a dim view of acquirers trying to justify backouts.
Tiffany & Co was bought out right before the pandemic by LVMH to form a big luxury brands empire, but then covid hit and LVMH wanted to back out–Tiffany said no way, and sued. It never got litigated out, but LVMH eventually relented and agreed to the purchase at a slightly lower price. It ended up being like $17bn instead of $18bn…I would be surprised if Musk can get much more of a shave than that–Tiffany wanted to avoid endless litigation, but it held most of the cards and wasn’t going to settle for something wild like a 25% markdown.
Does anyone know what Musk is allowed to do in the open market at this stage of proceedings? I assume the answer is nothing - otherwise the rational thing for him to do would be to just buy shares in the open market at a 30% discount to his buyout offer since people are willing to sell them there.
One must receive as good as one gives…
Well, let’s be honest: Elon Musk has always been a troll. He’s trolled board members of various companies he has invested in; owners of startups he has taken over; the FAA, the FCC, the SEC, and probably NEA at this point; Tesla investors that he stuck with acquiring his SolarCity debacle and who are taking the hit for his recent shenanigans; Tesla owners and would-be owners awaiting their “Full Self Driving”, CyberTruck, or the US$35k ‘Mythical Unicorn’ Model 3; former residents of Boca Chica, TX driven out by noise, traffic, and falling debris from his unregulated fireworks factory; SolarCity investors and would-be purchasers hyped up on his solar shingle sleight-of-hand; the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority which was sold on a sleek, futuristic automated vacuum tube transporter and instead got ordinary electric cars driving through a concrete tunnel with mood lighting; the diving team trying to rescue a student football team stuck inthe Tham Luang caves; space enthusiasts who want to believe his nonsensical fabulisms of colonizing Mars in a couple of decades; people who desperately want a brain-machine interface for controlling prosthetics and instead got dead monkeys and fanciful claims of making direct-to-brain video game consoles; NASA in too many ways to count; the astronomy community as a whole; and everybody who watched more than five seconds of that video of Elon talking about household android robots and then presented a guy in a body sock dancing even more awkwardly than Musk himself.
Elon Musk isn’t just a troll; at this point, he is the Troll; the Troll-King of Troll Nation, trying to acquire the Troll Anti-News Network by leveraging grossly exaggerated valuations of his company and Other People’s Money (which is the best kind of money with which to gamble) so that he and his national militia of online trolls can troll their way to fascism, promoting and giving voices to übertrolls like Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Steve Bannon. If Elon Musk held a press conference one day and ripped off his mask tl reveal a gnarled countenance with big teeth and pointy ears, most people would just shrug and say, “Well, that makes sense now.”
A troll’s gotta be what a troll’s gotta be, and he should fit right in with the modern GOP which is so Troll-Trumpy that candidates are trolling each other trying to be more of “Them Trumps” than the others. Pretty soon they’re going to start getting plastic surgery to look more like their favorite Trump (Donald, Ivanka, Don Jr., maybe Bannon for the little ones, but no love for Eric) and Elon will be Friedrich Flick to Trump’s Gröfaz.
Stranger
I don’t envy the poor sap who’s gonna have to tell Elon that MAGAheads don’t buy electric cars.
Is this his secret plan? If Musk turns around climate change by convincing them to buy electric cars, I will welcome him as our trillionaire overlord.
“The Libs are cancelling Musk! Everyone go buy Teslas, Cybertrucks and Solar roofs!”
