> According to some Arabic writers, Musa's gift-giving caused a depreciation in the value of gold in Egypt. Al-Umari said that before Musa's arrival, a mithqal of gold was worth 25 silver dirhams, but that it dropped to less than 22 dirhams afterward and did not go above that number for at least twelve years.[95] Though this has been described as having "wrecked" Egypt's economy,[83] the historian Warren Schultz has argued that this was well within normal fluctuations in the value of gold in Mamluk Egypt.[96]
Seems like this might a misleading folk tale.
This is the guy who’s had more than a few successful businesses now. A lot of smart people did want to work with him. Andrej Karpathy himself has said that Elon was very quick to pick up AI technically. That doesn’t sound like a “fundamentally dumb” guy to me
for the purpose of this thread saying “Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy” is a statement of opinion, one that a growing number of people agree with
Was buying twitter a mistake? Sure. Did he make dumb decisions when it comes to twitter? Yes. But IMO, that’s very different than labelling someone “fundamentally dumb”
seems a lot of people confound funding and founding, he was one of Tesla's early funders, but he was not part of the team that founded it.
> he sank an initial investment of more than $6 million into Tesla, which was then not much more than a pair of founders and a vision of electric sports cars.
– https://time.com/6127754/elon-musk-net-worth-person-of-the-y...
> So AC Propulsion CEO Gage suggested Musk speak with electric car start-up Tesla Motors, which was also looking to commercialize the tzero. Musk reasoned that by teaming up with another company, he could “have my cake and eat it too,” he said on the podcast – he could still run SpaceX but also pursue his passion for electric cars in his spare time.
> “I didn’t think it would be easy, but I thought maybe I could allocate 20 to 30 hours a week and just work on product engineering, and then other people could do the other stuff. I didn’t like doing the other stuff anyway,” Musk said.
– https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/elon-musk-i-really-didnt-wan...
Or do you mean claims about Elon? It would suit your comment better to be more specific, please try to do so in the future :)
"Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against"
Bullshit like this has no relation to reality whatsoever.
Yes. Do you?
> Do you have any idea how this works?
Counter-claims are claims that should be evidenced too.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/elon-musk-sued-2...
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-258-billion-dogecoin-law...
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/timeline-elon-musks-tumultuo...
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1111239959/twitter-elon-musk-...
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https://chat.openai.com/share/aaef7d7c-1537-48b7-bc49-81cecf...
Twitter had traded above that price as recently as five months earlier, and had traded in the $60s and even $70s for most of 2021. Twitter's stock had cratered in early 2022 along with many other tech stocks (Facebook went from $330 to $220 in that period).
At the time, the Board could have argued that the current stock price was artificially low due to market forces, and that it wasn't an accurate reflection of the company's prospects. That's especially true because Boards have access to non-public information and longer term forecasts.
When the board agreed to the merger, it signaled to investors that sophisticated insiders on the Board and their financial advisors did not believe the stock would be reasonably likely to reach the offer price in the near/medium term, on a risk adjusted basis, and thus the acquisition is superior. That's important intel for investors, and one of the reasons why failed mergers are so risky.
The 38% is just the one day premium. The offer was at a discount to the stock price less than six months earlier. It was possible that the stock price had overreacted to a tech sell off, and if the market had rebounded by the summer the bid could have looked genius.
Market pricing in M&A is somewhat opaque and different than trading prices because it's based partly on synergy value to a bidder. To use your house example, if the house next door was willing to pay $1.5 million for your house, then the $1.38M is not above market even if Zillow and the list price say it's $1 million.
There were other potential suitors for Twitter, like Microsoft, Disney, Salesforce and private equity. They might have valued it more than Musk based on the benefits it brought their firms. Twitter would be a lot more valuable inside Amazon, Google or Meta but there were probably antitrust issues there.
Plus Twitter's board and management team had access to a lot of material non public information that investors did not. Even if you thought the market price in early April accurately reflected all the public info on Twitter, the Board was looking at 5 year projections and much more detailed pricing/demand/customer info.
The Delaware Courts give a lot of deference to board judgment in these situations, and Twitter's board would have been well within their rights to say "no, that 38% is not good enough" if that was their conclusion after a good faith and reasonable process.
So he just made it private?
It's a rather dramatic situation.
Your basic assumption already makes no sense. Please list the businesses Elon has started after his PayPal days with the goal of enriching himself.
Also, money is a means to an end, is it not? So what do you think he’d do with more money? Again, you can look at what he did with his Zip2 money. And then his PayPal money. That might give you a clue.
If Twitter stock hadn't sunken immediately like a stone, he probably would have pulled it off, too, even after the signing the agreement.
If indeed the Twitter deal was manipulation to leave poorer investors holding the Tesla bag, it's hard to feel sorry for him.
So maybe that's not the goal. Or maybe it is but the CEO is vastly more incompetent than those underwriting his bid anticipated.
Lol, a guy worth quarter of a trillion dollars, owning an electric car company and a rocket company "is fundamentally a dumb guy". How fucking dumb and full of hate you have to be to say something like that? Hahahaha.
Musk's wealth doesn't come from "being born into money" - it comes from being an entrepreneur. Recently there is hate at Musk for political/ideological reasons. Now people just lie and make stuff up without regard for the truth - I find it sickening.
Musk was advantaged by having parents who raised him, provided for his education, and invested in his early company. He had more advantages from birth than most people in the world, but if you compare him to the average Stanford grad student (where he dropped out) I'm not certain he's in the top decile in terms of advantage. On the other hand, in terms of outcome, Musk is clearly an extreme outlier - pretending like Musk-outcomes are determined by his parents or family money is pure cope.
Him losing 40 billion is like us losing 400. It just won’t matter in the grand scheme
He wanted to sell ~$2.5 Billion Tesla stock at all-time highs without causing the stock price to significantly deflate, so he used the Twitter purchase suggestion as a cover. He did similar pump and dump schemes with crypto - like Dogecoin - but because Elon is fundamentally a dumb guy, he did the extraordinarily stupid thing of signing a purchase agreement with Twitter
Elon thought he'd be able to wiggle out of it because he assumed the SEC would be the regulatory body he'd be up against - and to his credit he has made a career out of making the SEC look like spineless chumps - but much to Elon's horror he actually found himself before the almighty Delaware Court of Chancery
So in an effort to slyly make a couple Billion $'s, Elon torched ~$40 Billion of his personal wealth, in what is arguably the biggest bag fumbling in modern history