That opinion would also be consistent with how "fiduciary duty" is interpreted by US regulators: companies are not required to perform any particular action that might reasonably be in the interests of shareholders; they must merely show that the company's actions were intended to be in the best interests of the shareholders.
(I was going to say it also involves too much money to be lefty, but then I realise that just might be my Overton window and isn’t necessarily related to what you think “lefty” means).
I don't own a TV, and yet I can tell you what the chiron said this morning, nearly verbatim. Ask anyone who watched it.
If it goes private. As always, Matt Levine says it better than I can:
"...the financing seems to be made up of cobwebs and phlogiston. But also Musk has joked about taking companies private before, and he generally changes his mind a lot. (He agreed to join Twitter’s board last week! And then changed his mind four days later!) If you are a well-advised professional public company board, it is just catastrophic to imagine that you might say 'okay Elon $54.20 it is' and then he’d say 'ha no I was kidding, psych!' That would be crippling for a public company. Also that is basically what he did to Twitter’s board last weekend!"
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-e...
No. If you’re at a table negotiating a break-up penalty, you’ve already crossed the Rubicon. You have indicated that the price was at the very least worth considering.
If that buyer then walks before agreeing to the break-up penalty, the damage has been done. Board seats have been lost for less.
The stock is toast regardless after this.
So, it can go either way and can be argued either way.
People need to stop saying this. It's nonsense. Or maybe keep saying it so we know your clueless about how anything works that your commenting on
Why? (Honest question.)
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
> Unfortunately, Haplo has its limits. Since we try to pull every single Tweet ID in a conversation every time a conversation is loaded in real-time, this is potentially an unbounded amount of data. We’ve found that if our platform tries to load more than a certain number of entries from our cache at once, our cache request latency will spike, and we begin to time-out on a significant fraction of read requests. Because of this, there is a limit of thousands of Tweets per conversation tree in this cache.
even just showing an ad is a ton work has a bunch of services involved
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...
Other stuff that I think explains the complexity
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...
there's no single algorithm, its a bunch of parts coming together from hundreds of engineers and multiple services.
That... makes absolutely no sense. The interest of the current average shareholder ends when they sell their stock. There is no point in time at which both (1) the current average shareholder owns more than zero shares, and (2) Musk has a controlling interest. So it's impossible for those two things to conflict.
If you were a member of Twitters board, would it be in the interest of the current average shareholder to sell their shares at well above the market price?
That definitionally depends on whether you, as that hypothetical board member, believe that Twitter has the potential to reach a share price higher than $54.20 if it stays public.
Also, remember there is nothing that binds the board of a company to solely consider potential shareholder value in the actions they take. There's a widespread belief that "fiduciary duty" overrides all other concerns, but from a regulatory/legal standpoint, that's simply not so. The board obviously needs to take it into account, but if they believe a merger or takeover is not in the best interest of the company, they don't have to take it.
Don't like the bid, fine, say no -- but don't prevent your peers from selling out.
But all that is irrelevant because he wants to take the company private- no shareholders. The impact to shareholders is the massive bailout he would give them on their shares.
If they cared about shareholders best interests they would bring it to vote.
Of course hindsight is 20/20, but even at the time, it seemed like the company was prioritizing long-term growth, whereas if they were taken over by Carl Icahn, they'd certainly not be.
As an individual and index shareholder I’d love for Musk to take it away at a premium, I have zero faith management will do anything positive.
Second, could Elon swoop in at that point?
Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.
You might want to speak with a lawyer who is familiar with inchoate crime.
What you publicly proposed to Elon is a crime, since you intend to conceal beneficial ownership of shares.
Promising voting rights doesn't change beneficial ownership. Twitter would have precedent, however, to find "conscious parallelism" and thus "a de facto control bloc" between the commenter and Musk, and thus bundle them for purposes of the poison pill's activation [1].
Still, not a crime. Civil dispute under corporate law.
[1] https://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/unpacking-wolf-packs
The Yale Law article you cite is just about groups of investors working together, which is within their rights.
It's not a crime to publicly finance someone else's stock purchases, or even to publicly solicit others to finance your stock purchases (it's not "solicitation" in the inchoate sense, since the inducement is not towards a crime).
Not really.
Setting aside the other issues, first and foremost this is obviously a joke. Prosecution would have to establish mens rea for this to rise to a criminal act. Do you think anyone could prove true intent for these events to unfold, based on this comment?
If you admit that he is the beneficial owner and you are just an intermediary, then the poison pill provision is not skirted.
Oh so Mr. Musk incidentally wired you billions of dollars before the share purchase?
(Assembly into blocs of financing, dpeech as the action of capital allocation)
Honestly I'd lose faith in the U.S. in it's entirety if it was the case that the answer to your question was even remotely "yes".
Keep in mind, I lump in people's behavior with normative restrictions of the First Amendment. If the Government can't do it, and the Government is us, we shouldn't be doing it. So businesses doing it because business doesn't hold for me either. Especially if it happens as a method of indirection to work around literal interpretation.
So if there is a restriction on shareholder coordination, I don't see how our legal system in this case can be taken seriously as anything but a tool utilized by those in positions of influence capable of more tightly coupling to other people of influence.
Saying “the government is the people” is much like saying “the shareholders are the managers of the company”: yes, that’s true in an oblique, ideal sense, but you’re going to run into trouble if you start trying to literally substitute the one for the other in random sentences.
The fund needs to report their holdings. Not all companies have a poison pill provision. Not all companies that do have a poison pill will activate it. In the case of an ETF there's usually a discussion between the portfolio manager and the company. They know where they stand. Plus it's not really in a passive fund mandate to go activist.
Seriously, do you think funds playing with the kind of money to buy 15% of twitter often make careless purchases?
>Edit: Also, if Elon is reading this, I'll happily buy 14.9% of twitter, and vote as part of your block. Just pay me enough to cover the sale and taxes, plus 1%.
Such an arrangement would make Elon the beneficial owner of your shares.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-28/barcla...
$15bn is tiny, presumably we’re talking about big ETFs like SPY here.
And anyway, you’re pretty much agreeing with me. It’s absolutely possible for a big fund to make a huge and hilariously stupid mistake, but this twitter poison pill does not meaningfully affect the chances of that happening.
In a world where you can shoot yourself in the foot in a million ways, it is utterly pointless to speculate about this one extraordinarily unlikely situation.
I think we're in agreement that this Twitter thing isn't worth the attention, but we are far from agreeing that large financial institutions are inherently competent because they're large.
There's a race condition between the poison pill being instated and the ETF updating their strategy. I wonder if a board could maliciously take advantage of that somehow.
I don’t see anyone making that argument.
Speculating on an ETF “accidentally” acquiring more than 15% of Twitter implies a whole different level of incompetence than a big ETF ever fucking up big.
- You
I did not call kolbes comments bad, but patiently explained where they got it wrong.
I think you’re seeing fighting where there’s none, at least not on my side.
We don't care about people saying "fuck". We care about the things that are in the guidelines, such as being kind, not being snarky, not calling names, and so on.
It’s really not unkind to point out when someone is aggressively misinterpreting really simple words.
Thanks for explaining why that won't work.
Presumably, if Elon has a few rich friends, they could use their own money, vote as a block, and the board would still be screwed.
I wonder what other schemes would work. B corp, maybe?
But that’s just playing along with the spirit of the rules, not a loophole.
No, but an ETF has a defined investment strategy, and if enough money comes into the ETF, it could potentially trigger this.
ETFs are a different concept, but a good index fund will be structured as an ETF, and it looks like this thread is using "ETF" to mean "index fund"? If so, then the answer to your question is an unambiguous yes.
The stated investment goal isn't "buy the S&P", it's "match the price of the S&P".
Such an agreement would be reached incredibly quickly, there would be no need for stopgap measures.
From the article:
> Under the new structure, if any person or group acquires beneficial ownership of at least 15% of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval
For example in the case of SPY, that would go against their stated investment objective.
They also clearly state
> the Trust may fail to own certain Index Securities at any particular time, the Trust generally will be substantially invested in Index Securities
The poison pill just requires prior approval from the board, which they would happily grant in this kind of a case.
Mechanically, it's not much different than an issue of new shares. From Twitter's announcement:
>> each right will entitle its holder [...] to purchase, at the then-current exercise price, additional shares of common stock having a then-current market value of twice the exercise price of the right.
There's no obvious breach of fiduciary duty through this plan. Existing (non-Musk) investors get new shares, but Twitter also raises capital at the current market price.
The "poison pill" defense is very old. I'm not going to defend or attack it; it is what it is.
I WILL observe that, once a stock is "in play" it usually gets acquired, or at least gets a bunch of new board members.
If the offer is rejected and Elon continues to attempt to gain control of the company, that would be an attempt at a hostile takeover.
A more typical way of doing this would be to make a proposal directly to the board first. The fact that Elon did it in public means he's trying to pressure the board (via the shareholders) into taking an action they wouldn't otherwise want to take which makes it hostile.
You could then try for a hostile takeover by buying up as much as you can on the open market and possibly to try to get one or two smaller shareholders to sell their shares to get you more than 51% (and in some cases more than 66% aka a supermajority) to be able to call the shots.
I could offer them $150 a share tomorrow, contingent on financing and would get laughed out of the room.
My point is that the number on the offer is not an objective and singular measure of whether this is a good deal for Twitter. Who is making the offer clearly matters as well to how serious it is.
If you borrow from somewhere else it’s just a buyout.
>> A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loans, along with the assets of the acquiring company.
Note how the second sentence says that the assets of the purchased company can be part of the arrangement, but the “L” in LBO means the buyer’s borrowing, however they accomplish that.
So let's say you put in a shareholder rights plan that allows all current shareholders to buy 10 new, discounted shares whenever a new shareholder reaches 20% ownership and for every share they buy from then on. That effectively dilutes that one owner without anyone else, and if they continue to buy it makes all the other shareholders much more money.
That's not always legal, but it would help the interests of shareholders.
Except the guy at 19.9% trying to move up. Considering he has already invested quite a lot of money on the company, shouldn't the board also work for him ?
Why should he be treated differently and his share give him different "rights" than others people share ?
So imagine a company taking $100 million in debt, giving all that out as a dividend then the stock price tanking through quick sales. Poison pill keeps the company going and avoids that fate.
Note that I'm all for companies having much more legal responsibility to other stakeholders, not just shareholders, but that is somewhat irrelevant for a discussion of whether the board could be successfully sued over adopting this decision.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-15/sure-e...
https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...
One of my favorite books: "Small giants, companies that choose to be great instead of big"
But if France put a bid on twitter, they would be forced to entertain the offer.
He wouldn't bother because it'd be a failure. Twitter's tech stack isn't worth 40 billion, Musk could clone twitter for less than $500m, but just having a platform doesn't accomplish much, the overwhelming majority of twitter users have no reason to leave twitter.
For a real alternative to succeed, solid backers focused on dethroning tw are needed to inspire confidence and stability, then we all need to jump at about the same time to get the momentum going and bounce out of the twatterverse.
As it stands now, there is no real competition.
That's exactly the point - there is no reason to believe this would change if Musk created his own social network.
Most rejected the overall concept. The amt of users that stil want something similar but not Twitter AND who will be appeased by whatever alt Twitter is made is an even smaller number.
The world is littered with the expensive corpses of failed software.
Google's product lacked purpose. It died because of a lack of vision and leadership and product mistakes (real names).
It died prematurely. Google treated the product like a pilot a network threw on the first week of September. It had solid numbers and given time it could have found itself if it found a backer in leadership.
And existing investors all have the option to cash out today for just 17% less than Musk's final offer.
a: You're dreaming.
b: You're absolutely expecting a quick short-term gain.
To put this in perspective, 20x in 5 years is an 82% CAGR. And five years is far short of the length of an economic cycle. Traditionally, "long term investing" meant across at least one whole business cycle.
Vote with your dollars: buy shares at a price higher than Elon's. Borrow if you must. If you are not ready to take that risk, then maybe your expectations are more wishful thinking than anything real.
They do not have an offer that will maximize shareholder value - they have an offer that will increase it.
Words have meaning and concepts have definitions. They are not arbitrary of flexible for the sake of making the argument you want.
The BOD's responsibility is to the company, a public company's responsibility is to the shareholders - this difference matters.
Cornell's legal information institute provides a nice and cited set of definitions (albeit in legalese) - https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
you have a company that is worth $1mil and we only imagine that it can be worth $100mil (based on the size of the market we are addressing). someone comes and offers $200mil but we know he will shut the company down (i.e. liquidate all its assets, or even simply the desire to destroy the company).
While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
so if Musk is willing to offer more than shareholders expect to see in the forseable future, why does it matter what will happen to the company after that? their interest in the company ends when their shares are purchased.
This isn't an argument for the poison pill clause, but is an answer to the following quoted question. It is funny to see this motivation of most existing shareholders ignored in order to bring into being analogous motivations of another. Especially when Musk's offer for Twitter has been in order to change it promote certain values, but conspicuously, better profits has not been one of those touted values.
> While this might be sad for the company, why is it not in the interests of the shareholders to take the offer?
I will sabotage my own argument somewhat though and say that I believe the economic motive dominates over time and is almost always (in macro and micro) the primary force.
That is your assertion/opinion (yes, shared by many, sure). But it's not the only opinion in this case, and so I don't think the analogy holds.
Sure, I could see in the abstract times where an offer it just unavoidably good, and so it would not be in the best interest of shareholders to take it. But in this specific instance, there is a lot to be said on both sides of the offer (taking vs. rejecting it).
I would also argue that, depending on the purpose and goals of the company, knowing that a person intends to shut it down would be a reason to value existing (in order to continue carrying out their purpose) over money.
People with more complicated positions should consider covariance and factor in uncertainty. But if you’re a shareholder in a single stock and estimate that it’s overvalued by a significant margin, the rational choice is to sell your position, invest in a low risk, highly liquid asset, and rebuy.
The historical price is irrelevant as well. Looking at the historical price is the same sort of thinking that leads to "throwing good money after bad".
But just offering a 50% premium might not be enough. They'll need to pay taxes on the realized gains and they'll need to find other places to put their money.
A platform that makes money and has free speech would be wonderful. Maybe he can steal Rogan from Spotify too.
If one disagrees with liberal establishment rhetoric on gender issues, you also get banned very quickly. There are a bunch of these consensus political issues that are off limits for debate.
Instead this is how I’d moderate twitter, when a court orders a tweet to be banned or a judge rules that a user should be banned that is when the moderation team would step in.
I’d also make it easier for people to filter content themselves. So if there’s POVs they don’t want to ever see they don’t have to see it.
Essentially this would reverse 99% of the mod teams decisions.
Take the case of Megan Murphy, a woman who is in a lawsuit against Twitter. Rules were added to Twitter that were used as a justification for her ban retroactively:
The speech is made in public and should be adjudicated in public. Today’s Twitter hides its moderation policies and decisions. Even though they are a private company (albeit publicly traded and the effective public square), this is wrong.
The example that people use, would be any speech that legal within the US.
If it is illegal, then most anti-censorship advocates are still fine with it being banned. But generally speaking, the best case scenario for them would be all legal speech in the US.
As a quick example, [1] lists some categories of tweets which they will delete. Twitter seems to have overreached with category 2:
> Claims that specific groups or people (or other demographically-identifiable identity) are more or less prone to be infected or to develop adverse symptoms on the basis of their membership in that group;
This is nonsense. Your risk increases with your age. Your risk increases with your BMI. Men are at higher risk than women. Those working in customer-facing roles are at higher risk than those who can work from home. Each of those statements are apparently banned on twitter.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misin...
How many people were banned or blocked by Twitter for COVID misinformation, when it turned out that those spreading “misinformation” were actually the CDC, WHO, and government institutions, and when said institutions blatantly lied to the public about masking, vaccines, lab leak theory, and lockdowns, Twitter did absolutely nothing, except punish the people who criticized said institutions.
Just look at Facebook. It's widely seen as "boomer garbage" that's only used as a least-common-denominator resort for communication by the target group these days, and conspiracy crap groups and peddlers of propaganda are a huge part of the reason.
Platforms and societies that fail to maintain some basic social order all eventually disintegrate into chaos.
Like is this a we need a speech dictator even people I disagree with is better than chaos point of view?
Or is this a my point of view should be enforced on everyone and platforms should not be allowed to publish things I disagree with point of view?
If Trump was on the mod team of a platform, I simply wouldn't use that platform.
No one needs to use Twitter. Most people's life wouldn't change the slightest bit if Twitter disappeared tomorrow. There's no serious argument that the platform has a monopoly on anything.
If Twitter isn’t a business to make money to them, what is it, and who is it for?
Perhaps the board believes the value of the shares over the next year or two is substantially higher than Musk's offer, such that they should reject the buyout so that shareholders can reap that gain.
The bulk of the holders of stock in most public companies are institutional investors that don't need to pay taxes on the realized gains.
The private analogy is a professional gambler. You don't pay taxes for winnings on each bet. You pay taxes on what you have cashed out at the end of the year.
Tax on individual sales is only a thing for individuals.
Elaborate
This is to prevent say a majority shareholder and/or group of employees from raiding the business of its value.
So a case for a poison pill might be well made to prevent a person from taking a controlling stake to then expose the company’s IP (code base) because they have some agenda, or prevent them running the company into the ground by causing a flight of talent, or by breaking some success formula.
It sounds like your interpretation Vanguard's risk profile / likelihood and their interpretation differ. And given that I trust Vanguard's assessment.
Frankly, if I were an institutional investor, I'd probably prefer the poison pill than have Twitter become a toy subject to Elon Musk's random political fight.
Wasn't he all in on Doge coin, except he wasn't, and all in on bitcoin but then not fully, then some other random alt coin, oh and then he's back in on Doge again and how to improve it.
It sounds like sound fiduciary duty to not let your company be subject to those whims.
As I understand vanguards structure, they have no beneficial ownership of any company and therefore never trigger the poison pill.
> Who does this benefit besides the board?
This benefits anyone who is concerned that a rich person will buy 50%+1 of a company and use their equity to make decisions they are opposed to. Now if a rich person accumulate 20%, the other shareholders can dilute that rich person. That means the rich person has to convince other shareholders that decision is correct.
Or they could benefit because they believe the new owners would be bad for the business.
the people who run the US/world who depend on censorship to maintain their power
I don’t understand how any board can implement a “poison pill”, not just Twitter but Netflix and others, and not be found working against the interest of shareholders. Can anyone help me understand?Correct. Hence the term poison pill. Now nobody else will be interested in buying them either and Elon selling out will tank the stock. As a reminder their stock steadily dropped all the way to $14 after the initial IPO pop and they've been losing money since before Covid.
Woke means broke I guess. I think his plan B will be to start a competitor. I'm very tempted to heavily short as soon as he walks away definitively.
As to your question of, won't the other shareholders get mad at the board and potentially sue them - I think the board is drinking their own koolaid.
Their stock price was over $70 in the trailing 12 months.
Even with Elon's offer they are still worth 10 NFL teams combined.
I can find zero credible evidence to support your position. Please short the stock :)
b) Twitter's stock price is now $45, peaked at $77 only last year and is profitable. Not sure where you get this ridiculous idea the company is unsellable.
c) There are plenty of free speech competitors to Twitter. None are even remotely successful. Because as Reddit also showed far more people want a moderated experience more than those that don't. And Twitter is a business first and foremost.
d) Musk is offering shareholders a premium as the stock is today. But as I mentioned even just last year it was significantly higher. And so I can't imagine shareholders would have an issue about them turning it down if they believed Twitter was still continuing to head in the right direction as it is now.
That's not the right way to think about it. Anything that scares off ambitious, optimistic activists from buying big stakes, will then suppress the stock value in general, which hurts all shareholders, including the smaller ones.
More broadly, going public is a tradeoff. You potentially give up control to outsiders, in return for greater share value (and the cash infusion). Moves like this go the opposite direction: decrease the potential for outside control, and with it, the upward pressure on the stock's value.
I hope it isnt: I think that starting a top down, meaning "look I built this, everyone move over from twitter", competitor has a very low probability of success, regardless of who starts it. There is too much of an attack surface, there will be too much drama on real Twitter about it, early adopters will be gun nuts or some other out group and that will be how they get characterized, etc etc.
The real chance at a competitor would be something that grew organically, that people wanted to move to because it offered something valuable before it reaches scale. This is how actual businesses start. The top down approach is how massive flops happen.
Incidentally, the same holds true for the Facebook metaverse and imo suggests it will certainly fail
I hold some shares of TWTR, and would continue. For the lulz.
There's too much drama on real twitter about it anyway. They might be stupid enough to ban him too soon, and if they keep on doing that nobody will want to use it. A lot of the top users haven't tweeted in over a year.
And they were profitable when you exclude their once off litigation expense.
Not sure about your definition of circling the drain but Twitter definitely isn't.
That sentence alone means you weren't even discussing this in good faith.
It's very well possible that the Twitter board believes that they can achieve higher value for the shareholders than what Elon offered. It's also very well possible that after talking to Elon through private conversations that you were not part of, they fundamentally disagree with his value and the direction he wants to take the company.
>I think his plan B will be to start a competitor.
Hey, maybe he would buy Parler, that would sure get him all the attention he desperately craves for. /s but maybe not.
Is that what good faith means now? Being religiously part of Camp A or B?
The balance sheet speaks for itself. Incidentally Parler or his potential Twitter clone will also end up a toxic internet community. Who cares? I personally wouldn't use either one.
Certainly with Twitter already doing a great job losing money and alienating most people (almost nobody actually tweets and usage is falling) an alternative would split the user base and accelerate their demise and the inane concept of web micro-forums being worth tens of billions of dollars. Companies will simply decide advertising on Parler/Twitter is not worth the hassle.
No. But you immediately made this into a Camp A vs. Camp B problem when in reality there could be a million different reasons for the Twitter board to not want to get acquired means you weren't trying to discuss this specific situation, you were looking to turn this into a debate on "wokeness". That's why I said you weren't discussing in good faith.
>The balance sheet speaks for itself.
Does it? Elon has seen the same balance sheet and he thinks the true value of the company is higher than what it is now as well. So obviously he thinks Twitter has the potential to achieve much higher value through implementing XYZ. The board agrees too but just disagree on what that XYZ is.
Up to you to take him at his word however he has stated otherwise.
"It's important to the function of democracy, it's important to the function of the united states as a free country and on many other countries and actually to help freedom in the world more broadly than the US.
You know I think this there's the risk, civilizational risk, uh is decreased if twitter, the more we can increase the trust of twitter as a public platform and so I do think this will be somewhat painful and I'm not sure that I will actually be able to to acquire it.
I mean I could technically afford it um what I'm saying is this is not a way to sort of make money you know..
It's just that I think, my strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization"
Jesus I know it's Friday but some of you guys start drinking early man.
Why out of everything that he could invest in would he bother with twitter specifically? Whatever his intentions are it seems plausible that this isn't about money.
I get that you don't like him but this attitude of "I am right, you are wrong, and if you disagree you are drunk" is.. not a good look.
It's very plausible that this isn't about money, and I never said it's about money. However it's far more plausible that this is about a narcissist buying media and social influence and he wants to be able to shape public discourse that paints him in a positive light. He really cares what people thinks of him.
All of that would seem far more likely (and suits his past track record) than him doing this to "save democracy".
> Elon has seen the same balance sheet and he thinks the true value of the company is higher than what it is now as well.
Also I'm pretty sure a narcissist is exactly the sort of person to genuinely think he is saving democracy by buying a website.
Do you know him personally? Are you a trained psychiatrist? Narcissistic personality disorder can be a serious affliction, tell him I hope he gets the help he needs and that I wish him the best.
I personally just want to know what will happen to the stock.
He is already an influencer and owning a social network where he gets to set his own rules would be the best way to ensure his influence increases further.
Free speech on social media is an oxymoron. SM is designed to give you power in proportion to the number of connections you hold. Its a popularity contest of twisted, faked, carefully crafted viral thought - most real, true and meaningful things get lost in the sea of professional influencers.
You will find more real free speech with a single visit of a subreddit than you will within a week of being on social media.
have you seen the matrix? they powered a cluster the size of the planet using humans for batteries! this is the same scale problem, that and pedophilia.
Yes, but one version of XYZ (the board's) has been tried while the other (Elon's) has not. Elon's plan might lead to even worse results than the board's, but he doesn't think it would, hence his optimism if they adopt his plan.
a) Revenue increased 37% y/y.
b) User count growing at 2% y/y.
c) Profit of $273m in 2021 when you exclude once-off litigation expense.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
The once-off litigation expense might soon be recuring in 2022, after this move. The former was a shareholder class action lawsuit, and the latter will most likely be the same.
So even if the lawsuit is recurring (neither of us know) they are still managing to reign in their losses.
By any definition the company is heading in the right direction.
Who would believe that? They’ve had years to prove it and as they stock market has doubled in value their stock has been cut in half.
Share holders should sue. It’s time to trick their world and either drive the stock price to a few bucks or force then board to do their fiduciary responsibility and sell the company.
It’s a great offer.
Their board can believe all they want. But they're failing, miserably. Elon isn't perfect, but at least he doesn't have a demonstrated history of driving his companies' value into the basement, like Twitter's leadership does. This move by their board serves no-one but them; it doesn't serve Twitter's users, it doesn't serve their customers (advertisers), it doesn't even serve the vast majority of shareholders (which will be evidenced by an unprecedented sell-off on Monday).
Goldman advised them to block the purchase, because $52/share was too high, while simultaneously holding a $30 sell benchmark on TWTR. Its not even ironic that this is where Twitter's stock is going; its what they predicted, and then caused. The idiots in the room are the Twitter board, who actually believed the advice was given in good faith.
This makes me wary of your post. You could have easily fact checked this and you would have seen that this is incorrect. It's up 37% compared to the year before that. [0] I checked the last 3 years and the growth has been positive during all 3 years. [1]
[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f... [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/reven...
How are SolarCity and Boring doing these days ?
Oh sh*t i don't follow him and didn't care about those votes ... should I write a bot to make my voice heard? Is that how it goes? (Or in other words: such a vote has no statistical significance aside from pleasing Musk's ego or whatever is driving him and his need for attention)
>that my communication-medium
Twitter is first and foremost a publishing platform, you should not rely on it as a private communication medium. None of the chat apps I know censor stuff, so use them instead.
Use Twitter for public communication if you want, but since it's in the public domain you can't complain too much if there is content moderation.
The phone company does a pretty good job of it, and we have regulations that force them to be mostly "neutral".
Those regulations have worked out quite well. Perhaps it time to expand our existing, and working regulations to other platforms, given that they work so well on existing platforms.
The various messenger apps are closer analogs to phone companies and they have no or very light content moderation.
So they could be extended to other things, and the world would also not collapse if that happened.
Sure I can complain. When it's the defacto public forum any administrative conversation-tweaking is pure poison to our society.
And also, yes, there is an implicit promise that the conversation between you and me is not getting fucked with by an invisible rat in the middle. So when I smell one of those rats, heck yes I'll complain. That's objectively ratty.
(Sorry, unable to resist.)
It depends on what the interests of the shareholders actually is. Monetary only, or are there other considerations they care about?
I assume the boards of such companies have had private discussions with the majority shareholders to find out exactly what their priorities are, and then acted accordingly.
Is a board allowed to consider anything but?
https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/3pv8bh/comment/cw9t52d...
There's an easily searchable index of B-Corps: https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/find-a-b-corp
It's moving there but I don't think it's there quite yet according to case law. The board motivations at present still have to tie back to maximizing value for shareholders.
You’re categorically changing the profile of the stock. This has a chilling effect on large investors, including but not limited just to Musk, right?
Vanguard, for example, has just had its range of further investment limited arbitrarily. Isn’t that bad for all stockholders, to know that large stakeholders will not drive the price up if they somehow gain substantial belief in the company?
The risk portfolio of Vanguard just went up considerably because in the case that they fully lose faith in the board, they no longer have the option of installing a friendly board, they must simply liquidate their holdings. This, in turn, makes them more skeptical of further smaller (non-takeover) investment because it’s more to liquidate and more risk.
Who does this benefit besides the board? I guess I understand that the board is not beholden to the interests of all shareholders equally, and I’m not suggesting that this doesn’t benefit some shareholders, but where does the line start?