Interesting that he filed his >5% report on Schedule 13G rather than Schedule 13D, and has checked the box for the exemption in Rule 13d-1(c)[1]. This exemption requires that he "has not acquired the securities with any purpose, or with the effect, of changing or influencing the control of the issuer, or in connection with or as a participant in any transaction having that purpose or effect."

If he's indeed seeking to participate actively in changing things at Twitter, he may have opened yet another front in his antagonization of the SEC.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/17/240.13d-1

Background: the SEC requires purchasers of >5% of a U.S. public company to provide certain information about themselves and their intentions in making the purchase. Generally, you file Schedule 13D if you're seeking to conduct a takeover bid. The shorter Schedule 13G is supposed to be used only for "passive" investors.

Here, perhaps Musk would say he's not seeking a change in the "control" of the company (voting share ownership), just a change in governance practices not involving a change in control.

This will be interesting...

Update: some press coverage raising the same questions. The silly part about this is the filing deficiencies seem either inept or willful. Mr. Musk can certainly afford good securities lawyers to make the proper filings. A 13D is not that much more burdensome than a 13G, and some activists use the filing (which gets a lot of free attention) to make statements that to support their objective, whatever that may be.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-twitter-investment-r...

Second update: the inevitable Matt Levine column on the same theme: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/bloomberglawnews/mergers-and-ac...

The intention needs only to be true at the time of the filling. Intentions can change. I wouldn't be surprised this is yet another troll.

His Twitter poll about selling 10% of Tesla was equally disingenuous.

He had pre-arranged those sales in mid-September according to regulatory filings. He also didn’t mention in the tweets that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised.

Musk knows his fans are dumb as rock.

It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him and the smart people at Tesla and SpaceX have created, but my admiration doesn't extend to him anymore.

I still admire him, I just don't idolize him.

The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration. I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.

I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.

> The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around

I mean he's clearly doing something right. But the people at the top are most definitely not staying around.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-executives-who-report-...

Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise.

I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)

> along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse

Give someone a massive retention bonus (in this case structured as an RSU) to get them to stay doesn't seem like unique genius to me

People stayed even with the stock was getting crapped on by Wall Street, he was clearly able to convince everyone that the company would succeed and opinions of the companies future would turn around.

Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.

The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.

2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.

He's a good salesman in getting people to invest money or (in this case) time. But the discussion was talking about retention. And that's just because people are about to clear huge paydays.

That argument is only valid for the last 2 years is my point.

He has retained (and attracted away from places like Apple) really high quality talent for over a decade.

>Executives != smart people

You are saying Elon hired a bunch of dumb people to be executives for his companies.

Not sure that's what you want to imply.

I'm saying just because some executives left doesn't mean all the smart people left.

> Executives != smart people

Ok, so by that very definition, what does that make Elon Musk as a Chief EXECUTIVE Officer...

I can agree with this take.

Everyone has good and bad attributes. If you’re expecting anyone to be 100% good you’ll be disappointed.

I’m still a fan because he seems about 90% right on his opinions and he’s doing amazing work.

Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?

I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.

I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray.

However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.

If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection.

If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?

I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.

I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities.

But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.

I would estimate that Musk accelerated the transition to electric cars by 1-5 years. I believe he claims the same thing you do, that moving to electric is inevitable, and that his strategy has just been to nudge it along a little bit faster.

For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.

> the market was primed for _someone_ to do it.

Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.

In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)

The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.

There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.

The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).

It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.

I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.

I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.

Edit: speaking of EVs:

I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.

I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.

No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.

This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.

Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing).

I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.

Is this a common belief? That he is taking "risks" others don't have the courage to? This is a new one to me and interesting cultural development for sure.

Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"

His two main companies have apparently taken risks that established companies in those areas were not willing to do.

Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.

> Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly.

McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.

One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_McDonnell_Douglas_DC-...

Yeah, basically exactly what I would expect - they're perfectly capable technology-wise, but they're not capable bureaucratically.

Which, if Musk has value, is where it comes in.

s/at that point/before that point

I would say it’s common. Both SpaceX and Tesla almost ran out of money with Musk maximally invested. Both moments were widely reported 5-10 years ago when they happened.

Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies.

That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.

You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around.

The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.

I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time.

This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.

He could waste a lot of money on failed startups and never have any appreciable impact on his day to day life and standard of living other than his own satisfaction of seeing $BigMoneyNumber.

What comfortable life do you think he's giving up? Owning only 10 houses instead of 45?

The comfortable life of not working full time.

Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)

I'm not sure you can argue that the richest man in the world got rich by accident while pursuing purely altruistic goals. He clearly knows what he's doing.

I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.

not by accident, but getting rich clearly wasn't his goal when he dumped all his money into the start ups. why aren't we glad the richest man in the world got there by using his resources for futuristic ideas instead of something like oil and gas

I actually am glad of that - I think Elon is one of the less-bad billionaires. His views are stupid and most of his ideas are too, and billionaires shouldn't exist at all, but I am glad that he made his money building companies that are doing important things. Well, SpaceX and Tesla are - the Boring Company and Neuralink seem like boondoggles, to say nothing of Hyperloop.

SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important? Maybe if starlink goes global, but until then it doesn't seem to change anything in my or many peoples lives by not existing.

They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)

> SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important?

I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors

Spacefaring? Hopefully you mean Marsfaring (at best, if you can find a good reason to set up a colony there)

The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.

What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.

I said SpaceX is moving us towards that goal, not that it will turn us into a spacefaring civilization

Whether it was saved by a phone call from NASA doesn't detract from its merits

> SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA

I believe you, but when I tell other people that they don't believe me. Do you have something I can show them.

I don't see that at all. We're never going to spacefare on chemical rockets, unless you mean maybe going as far as the asteroid belt.

Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.

That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.

SpaceX has drastically lowered cost/mass to put something in orbit with Falcon 9. If they are successful with Starship they will do so again. Already lowering cost to orbit is increasing access to space for companies, universities, and governments. This is huge. Their success has lead to a number of new companies trying to innovate in a similar way and even. altering how governments plan to run future space programs.

I'm asking what is good about cheaper orbit. I get telecommunications, but other than that, what's the point. Any examples?

Because if all we're going to do is launch a few probes every few years, than the cost of the launches is a minor improvement.

Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.

You should check your facts. Elon doesn’t own any houses, he lives in rentals. Also in 2008 when he didn’t even have money for that after putting all his PayPal money into the startups, he was living at his friends’ places.

But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.

Loads of wealthy people live in houses that they themselves don't directly own. Instead they'll form a real estate LLC that owns property, pays contractors to maintain the houses, and the people will then pay rent to their own LLC to live there to cover the maintenance costs and whatever mortgage/debt the LLC has.

Everyman non-home-owning Musk: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-says-he-lives-in-a-50...

The link you sent doesn’t confirm the comment that he owns lots of houses. Of course he won’t live in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stick to facts.

And how do you know what you stated are actually facts?

Multiple books and first-party reports. Hundreds of interviews.

He claimed to plan to offload all his 7 houses in 2020, and it seems that this was completed only a few weeks ago.

`Just look at the tax law of California, I wouldn’t own a house there either.

You mean the state with one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the country? Your property tax is pegged to 1% of the purchase price, and essentially never goes up ever again.

One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.

The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.

A "fan base" for a man is the definition of a cult.

Cult: a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object.

you can admired a person. you don't have to idolize him like he is a second coming of Jesus

Yes same here. At the end he is only a lying salesman and nothing more .

Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish?

If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.

Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.

> Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish?

He can be both smart and evil. It happens often (not all the time, but most of the time).

Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal.

As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.

He's generally always snarky and not-snarky at the same time. Would it be illegal? The SEC is moving, but big ship, turn slowly, crypto-is-quasi-security, etc. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-17/elon-m...

I work under the default assumption that most CEOs of successful companies, when taking actions on their company's behalf, are sociopathic assholes.

It's certainly true that Tesla wouldn't have been able to raise as much money from equities markets if Elon had been quieter.

It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat.

Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.

I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?

Wasn't McAfee personally trading though? I'm not as up on his more recent insanity.

+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.

Or maybe people can like him even if they don't believe that he makes his choices based on twitter polls. But I guess that just a crazy thought.

The poll is open to everyone on Twitter. Not just his fans. I bet many of his fans voted not to sell his Tesla stock. While people hate him are more likely to vote yes.

People who hate him aren't going to vote in his Twitter poll. The sale was already required anyway

Are you saying people who hate him don't visit his Twitter or are you saying they would abstain from the poll on principle?

If the former, I disagree as it seems people do hate him, follow, and reply on the regular. Pretty much trolling.

If the latter, what makes you think those trolls wouldn't spite vote if they take the time to write toxic replies.

I love this is the nitpicky stuff people get into about Elon.

It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.

Hacker News turns into E! news for Elon articles.

> people who hate him don't visit his Twitter or are you saying they would abstain from the poll on principle?

I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.

> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.

I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)

His fans are the ones who already knew that the decision had long been made.

It’s almost like he has a history of using Twitter to manipulate rubes for his own financial gain and has the SEC receipts to back it up.

Do you think Elon Musk does all that he does for the money?

I enjoy my job, I also get paid to do it. If being a twitter troll is both a past time and road to riches for Elon I think it’s just win-win for somebody who seems to need attention and wealth.

He lives in a $50k prefab house

And he flies around in $50M private jets and absolutely revels in the attention, influence and soft power his wealth affords him.

But sure, he's one of us because one of the many places he stays at is a prefab house that's right next to his work.

There's only a limited amount of time one has. The private jet is to save time (convenience). In one of his interviews he talks about how he is always solving problems and his brain is running a million miles a minute. His brain is wired differently than most people. He has so many ideas running through his head. He doesn't have time to work on them all.

He doesn't have many expensive tastes. He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff. Yes he has a huge ego but rightfully so. Look at all that he has accomplished against incredible odds (Tesla and SpaceX almost failing).

I do think he is genuinely trying to expand the realm of human consciousness and save the planet and create a backup plan for humans (colonizing Mars). Overall I think he is a net positive for mankind.

If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.

> He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff.

He absolutely live a life of luxury. He literally used to daily drive a McLaren F1. He stays around in his billionaire friends' mansions when he travels: https://observer.com/2021/12/elon-musk-staying-at-billionair...

And he absolutely is dressed in designer cloths from head to toe for all his public events.

No seriously:

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/fashion/article/elon-musk-snl

https://www.inputmag.com/style/elon-musk-tesla-air-jordan-1-...

https://www.reddit.com/r/findfashion/comments/8q43av/does_an...

Elon is extremely vain so he doesn't put on anything by accidents.

>If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.

It's incredibly obvious he's doing this to be rich. He has incredibly expensive taste that goes far beyond than things like fancy yachts or private islands. He cares about money because it affords him soft power, influence, public adoration and the ability to buy things like you know... *10% of Twitter*.

He is both very well accomplished and a textbook narcissist who ties his sense of self-identity with the world's perception of him. That's why he gets incredibly defensive against naysayers and he is always pushing to "one-up" others.

So yeah, he absolutely cares about being rich because to him it's a validation of his own ego and also allows him to continue to purchase influence and power and attention.

If he's doing it all for money and to live a life of luxury then why does he live in a 50k house in Texas? Yes he had a McLaren F1, so what? That was a long time ago when he was young. He drives a model S these days.

If he's doing it all for money then why start the companies he did? All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind. He didn't become a drug dealer, sell things that are addicting, etc. He doesn't run a tobacco company.

> If he's doing it all for money and to live a life of luxury then why does he live in a 50k house in Texas?

He doesn't most of the time. Read the first link I sent you. He stays in his friend's estate.

People care about different kind of luxury.

Man you are really personally enamored with him. There is nothing that says you can't do good for the society and be extremely profit driven.

>All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind.

And solving problems for mankind is very profitable.

Is this satire? Surely.

There's a scale for it, we've quantified the lack of satire!

---

The celebrity-persona parasocial identification scale (CPI) is designed to measure how media consumers develop identification with celebrities or popular fictional characters. Identification is defined as a persuasion process that occurs when an individual adopts the behavior or attitudes of another individual or group based on a self-defining relationship (Kelman, 1961, p. 63). Identification is a psychological orientation through which individuals define themselves based on their group membership and derive "strength and a sense of identity" from the affiliation (Kelman, 1961). Identification is often confused or entangled with parasocial interaction. Although both parasocial interaction and identification are both forms of audience involvement, they are distinct processes (Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b, Brown & Fraser, 2006). Parasocial interaction often predicts identification because people commonly seek to adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of celebrities and media persona whom they admire. However, there are examples of celebrities that fans have strong parasocial interaction with, and yet the fans do not want to be like that person (Matviuk, 2006). This brief chapter discusses various aspects of the CPI online survey and its use in these contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-08047-038

This is incorrect and he has denied it on a number of occassions. He does live in a relatively small cheap house (likely around $50k when he bought it), but it's in Boca Chica Village near Brownsville, and it's not a prefab.

Are you inferring that when someone tweets about a topic that’s the exact moment the thought first occurred to them?

No I'm saying that quote

> The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.

Is pretty disingenuous when it turns out that he's launched the poll a week after he already decided to buy 10% of the stock. Do you seriously think Musk spent several billion dollars on twitter stock and then decided to check what people think?

Perhaps he's asking as to decide what to do in the company?

I just don't think it's very likely that Elon Musk spend billions buying a stake in twitter before he knew what he wanted to do with the company, especially since his view on free speech is already well known and goes far beyond even vocal free speech advocates.

In what way is his view on free speech far beyond vocal free speech advocates? I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that Twitter is the de-facto public square on the internet, and so it is bad that they clearly have a political leaning when it comes to content moderation. I know they’re a private company. But it’s just naïve at this point to think Twitter is the same as any old private company.

Well on the "far beyond free speech advocates", the position that the SEC can't prevent market manipulation due to the first amendment is a position that basically no one sensible takes. Or that he's happy using "Free Speech" to slander people.

On the subject of Twitter being a public square, I think that's a pretty absurd assertion, it's one of a plethora of social media sites - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reddit, Tiktok, Telegram, Snapchat. And it's not even particularly large compared to that competition. It's not even like Twitter has grown to become some behemoth, it's share price is about flat over the last decade. This isn't some behemoth that needs regulating.

>his view on free speech is already well known and goes far beyond even vocal free speech advocates.

I don't follow him that closely, how so?