Elon vs Twitter update: Elon helped America win , Tesla stock through the roof

lol

 

Sorry to disappoint you, but I've been on vacation and missed all of this fun. I still believe my thesis - Musk doesn't want to own Twitter and won't own twitter. His initial offer wasn't even serious - he stuck a 4.20 as a joke meaning the price wasn't based on anything. But I did underestimate how easy his ego was to manipulate - he got sucked into the attention given to him and committed himself to his offer without doing any due diligence. Now he's realizing that trying to acquire Twitter leverages him way too much on his Telsa stock - especially if Tesla suffers the same multiple-contraction fate as Netflix which is about 1-2 years ahead of it in the "disruptive company in a mainstream industry" situation. So he's looking for his way out.

He has the technical ability to finance it himself, so the $1B breakup fee likely doesn't work. If he backs out for no reason, Twitter can sue him for way more in damages. So he's made up this "too many bots" thing to allege fraud or whatever, which is nonsensical. First off, the time to ask that question (along with many others) was *before* making a firm offer to buy. Second, Twitter's claim of 5% of users being bots came *after* his offer. And finally, he already knew there are tons of bots on twitter - it's one of the things he's argued as a reason to buy them and something he wants to fix (which would be fantastic). It's an attempted way to negotiate down the price to save himself from his leverage problem or get himself out of this mess. But either way, it buys him some time, even though a definitive offer like that can't just be suspended because he's reconsidering.

Him tweeting about owning twitter is not the same as him owning twitter. He's been sued by Twitter shareholders; he's under investigation for securities fraud related to his initial purpose (I don't think it was intentional - he just doesn't care about rules or laws). Him pretending to purchase Twitter has made a mess of Tesla stock to the point where the purchase would cost him way more than just the proposed price of Twitter.

In the end, I still believe he doesn't want and won't own Twitter. The market never seemed to buy into the type, with Twitter stock never passing $50, meaning a decent likelihood of failure was always priced in even before yesterday's nonsense. This will be my last post on this topic until it resolves one way or another - sometimes, it's best to wait and watch things play out instead of trying to pretend day to day events are definitive. After it's resolved, either way, I'll come back and comment in this thread. I suspect it will be within the month if he does back out; probably several months if it does work its way forward.

On a side note, an easy low-risk way to play this is to sell call options on Twitter (you have a top end valuation of $54 and likely lower if he renegotiates, so it's not really a naked call) and use some of the proceeds to buy put options on Telsa, though this worked a lot better prior to yesterday's Twitter drop. If the purchase goes through, you lose a bit on your call options but likely make money on your Tesla puts. If the purchase falls through, you lose the money on the Telsa puts but you pocket the premium from the Twitter calls when its stock tanks.

 

Welcome back buddy. We needed a balance from @tinman

 

lol

 

long essay, too long to quote in full. Worth a look

Elon Musk Is Not the Enemy
. . . but his Twitter reform plan is unlikely to succeed.

https://www.thebulwark.com/elon-musk-is-not-the-enemy/

excerpt including the conclusion:

“Disinformation”—as shown by the recent controversies about the proposed “Disinformation Governance Board” of the Department of Homeland Security, raises similar loaded definitional questions. Do we only put the “disinformation” sticker on Donald Trump’s “stolen election” lie, or should it be affixed to, at the very least, a “misleading” or “partly false” label to the parallel claims of Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams? Should Twitter’s disinformation crackdown have snagged the many viral tweets in March 2021 claiming, based on a blatantly out-of-context quote, that a Georgia police official at a press conference casually excused Robert Allan Long’s fatal shootings of eight people (six of them women of Asian background) at several Atlanta spas and massage parlors as “yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did”? (In reality, the official, Capt. Jay Baker, was merely answering a question about what the suspect told interrogators.) Would it apply to a viral tweet earlier this month which distorted a footnote from Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade to claim that Alito and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were arguing that abortion should be banned because the United States needs a “domestic supply of infants” for adoption?

The same complications extend to “hate speech.” Does the definition apply to invective against whites or males? Do “gender-critical feminists” have a point when they argue that Twitter’s policy against “misgendering” (which can apply not only to targeted abuse of transgender individuals but to general statements of opinion about sex, gender, and identity) puts a heavy thumb on the scale of one side in an ongoing and still-unresolved controversy?

Given that Twitter is a mammoth site with somewhat opaque rules and policies and haphazard enforcement—based not only on user complaints but on decisions by individual staffers—drawing any kind of conclusions about patterns of bias is enormously difficult. Again, the point isn’t “Twitter is biased against conservatives” or “Twitter is biased in favor of progressives.” It’s more that the people who think Musk will unleash the forces of darkness on Twitter really do tend to have a huge blind spot when it comes to the toxicity that is already there, including toxicity among progressives, and they want the social media to be managed in a “no enemies to the left” frame of mind.

Assuming Musk does acquire Twitter after all, it is far from certain that he will make things better. But despite his nods to the “countercultural” right, he really does not seem to have a right-wing agenda; he’s no deep political thinker, but he’s flexible enough to offer some possibilities beyond kneejerk polarization. (Is the proposed unbanning of Trump a sign of where things are going? Not necessarily—and some say the move won’t benefit Trump.) Musk certainly seems willing to talk across political lines, even if his ego is likely to get in the way. Preemptively making him the enemy is not a smart move.

If nothing else, a Musk buyout or even just the prospect of one might shake the place up and drive us to reexamine all sorts of questions—including the political and ideological framing of such concepts as “harassment,” “disinformation,” and “hate speech” on Twitter. Perhaps the difficult conversations could also tackle the outsized role Twitter has come to play in the media and in politics. Is it a public square? A national consciousness? An imperfect cross-section of unrepresentative opinions? Or just a site where journalists, pundits, and activists like to hang out, and whose importance they are prone to inflating?

We’re having that conversation now, which is not a bad start.
​

more at the link

 

Elon praises Netflix new policy telling the wokesters and the PC snowflakes to hit the bricks.This indirectly provides a similar communication to the hardcore radical leftists that currently infest the Twitter organization.

 

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/e...ver-spam-accounts-may-jeopardize-twitter-deal

Is the Twitter deal dead? Musk seemed to suggest it was, unless he can buy the company for a lower price in light of 'bot-gate' which erupted over the weekend.

Speaking at the "All In" summit, Musk said that a viable deal for Twitter is "not out of the question," but at a lower price.

He also challenged the truth and accuracy of Twitter's public filings.

* * *

Speaking virtually at the "All In" summit tech conference, Musk speculated that at minimum, Twitter is '20% bots,' before asking rhetorically whether it was potentially 80-90% bots.

He added that there's 'no way' to know the actual number of bots on the platform.

Later, Musk suggested that while he's historically voted for Democrats, he may vote Republican in the next election. According to the Tesla CEO, the Democratic party is 'overly controlled' by unions.

* * *

The fate of Elon Musk's Twitter deal - or at least the price he'll end up paying - may hinge on just how many 'spam' accounts are active on the social media platform.

 

@tinman hero turning into a hood rat that buys a $200 dress, wears it out to the club and tries to return it the next day saying it has flaws.

Africans like musk are known to be cheap.

 

Tinmans hero Elon Musk is now trying to back out of this Twitter deal. How embarrassing and humiliating for a man of his wealth and success. His legacy is turning into a joke.

 

Spoiler

Elon Musk slams Biden: 'The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, whose purchase of Twitter remains ongoing, slammed President Biden in a podcast interview Monday and warned that if the government continues printing money, inflation will get worse and the U.S. might follow the path of Venezuela.

Musk, who said he has voted "overwhelmingly for Democrats," slammed the Democratic Party and Biden in particular. He suggested that Biden is something of an empty suit.

"The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter," the Tesla CEO said. "The path to power is the path to the teleprompter."

"I do feel like if somebody were to accidentally lean on the teleprompter, it's going to be like Anchorman," the CEO added.

"This administration doesn't seem to get a lot done," Musk said. "The Trump administration, leaving Trump aside, there were a lot of people in the administration who were effective at getting things done."

He also claimed that the Democratic Party is "overly controlled by the unions and by the trial lawyers, particularly the class action lawyers." He argued that when Democrats go against "the interests of the people," it tends to come from the unions and the trial lawyers, while when Republicans do that, "it's because of corporate evil and religious zealotry."

"In the case of Biden, he is simply too much captured by the unions, which was not the case with Obama," Musk said. The Tesla CEO defended Obama as "quite reasonable," but insisted that Biden prioritizes the unions ahead of the public.

The Tesla CEO also weighed in on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's claim that the White House has resorted to "misdirection" in order to "muddy the topic" of inflation.

"I mean, the obvious reason for inflation is that the government printed a zillion amount of more money than it had, obviously," Musk said, echoing Republican critics who claim that Biden's American Rescue Plan COVID-19 relief stimulus bill contributed to the near-40-year-high inflation the U.S. experienced in April.

"So it's like the government can't just, you know, issue checks far in excess of revenue without there being inflation, you know, velocity of money held constant," the Tesla CEO argued. "If the federal government writes checks, they never bounce. So that is effectively creation of more dollars. And if there are more dollars created, then the increase in the goods and services across the economy, then you have inflation, again, velocity of money held constant."

Musk insisted that "this is just very basic" and "not like, you know, super complicated."

"If the government could just issue massive amounts of money and deficits didn't matter, then, well, why don't we just make the deficit 100 times bigger? The answer is, you can't because it will basically turn the dollar into something that is worthless," he noted.

"Various countries have tried this experiment multiple times," Musk noted. "Have you seen Venezuela? Like the poor, poor people of Venezuela are, you know, have been just run roughshod by their government."

"So obviously you can't simply create money," Musk said. He emphasized "the true economy," by which he meant "the output of goods and services," as opposed to mere money.

U.S. inflation rose 8.3% in April, slightly below the 8.5% jump in March but still near the 40-year-high.

Musk addressed his purchase of Twitter, restating his belief in the need for an unbiased "public town square."

"I think there's a need for a public town square, digital town square that where people can debate issues of all kinds, including the most substantive issues," he said. In order for that to work, the platform needs to be "as broadly inclusive as possible" and it needs to feel "balanced from a political standpoint," that is "not biased one way or the other."

"The reality is that Twitter, at this point, has a very far left bias," Musk said. "And I would trust myself as a moderate and neither Republican or Democrat."

Musk also lamented the decline of the state of California. He said the Golden State was once "the land of opportunity" but it has become the land of "taxes, overregulation, and litigation." He said, "There's got to be like a serious cleaning out of the pipes in California."

He insisted that "there's got to be an above zero percent chance of Republicans winning in California."

 

Parag is full of ****.