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Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

MaybeACoordinator

By MaybeACoordinator
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Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

Hotez is far from bulletproof.       

MissingInAction
MissingInAction
Spottieottiedopaliscious
Spottieottiedopaliscious

Absolutely.    Would you like other guys pointing out Hotez deficiencies?   It was actually more about Hotez but whatever? Why stick around? All the constructive back and forth

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Chopper

Chopper 17431

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15 hours ago, Celery Man said:

I don’t know a ton about Elon Musk but that headline with that picture with those eyes tells me he is bad at measuring risk.

What's the equivalent of crazy eyes for the males of the species? Wearing a bandana around the neck? That's definitely a giveaway for some extremely lame character trait, but it's too infrequent to be the equivalent of crazy eyes. Maybe staring off into the distance in a staged photo?

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Celery Man

Celery Man 21098

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23 minutes ago, Chopper said:

What's the equivalent of crazy eyes for the males of the species? Wearing a bandana around the neck? That's definitely a giveaway for some extremely lame character trait, but it's too infrequent to be the equivalent of crazy eyes. Maybe staring off into the distance in a staged photo?

np1Gvzj3?format=jpg&name=medium

Tribal tattoo?

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chainsaw

chainsaw 10291

Posted
Posted
6 hours ago, Chopper said:

What's the equivalent of crazy eyes for the males of the species? Wearing a bandana around the neck? That's definitely a giveaway for some extremely lame character trait, but it's too infrequent to be the equivalent of crazy eyes. Maybe staring off into the distance in a staged photo?

np1Gvzj3?format=jpg&name=medium

She's not especially good looking or bad looking but anyone who uses LinkedIn is a sociopath.

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Incredulity

Incredulity 11876

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On 6/6/2022 at 1:44 PM, tbone_ said:

So many words to discuss this topic when all that’s really happening is loud mouth rich guy yells about something that supposedly isn’t right (that he has no evidence of) with the hope and belief that if he yells it loud enough and long enough he’ll get what he wants.

It’s chapter 1 in the loud mouth rich guy textbook.

TIL the cloakroom is full of rich guys…

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32588

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/elon-musk-twitter-jeopardy/

 

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Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in serious jeopardy, three people familiar with the matter say, as Musk’s camp concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

Musk’s team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44 billion deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.

 

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Talks with investors have cooled in recent weeks as Musk’s camp has raised doubts about the recent data “fire hose” — a trove of data sold to corporate customers — they received from Twitter. Musk’s team’s doubts about the spam figures signal they believe they do not have enough information to evaluate Twitter’s prospects as a business, the people said.

 

 

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Now that Musk’s team has concluded it cannot verify Twitter’s figures on spam accounts, one of the people said, it is expected to take potentially drastic action. The person said it was likely a change in direction from Musk’s team would come soon, though they did not say exactly what they thought that change would be.

 

Spoiler

The spam accounts are not the only reason Musk might try to wriggle out of the deal. Twitter’s share price has fallen dramatically since his takeover bid in April, leading to the impression that he is overpaying. And Musk also runs two other major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, along with some start-ups.

But the terms of the deal mean it wouldn’t be easy for Musk to walk away. Musk has agreed to complete it unless something major happens to Twitter’s business, and legal experts doubt the bot issue would qualify. Twitter, which initially fought Musk’s takeover bid, would be a weaker company if the deal falls apart than when Musk first bought a stake, and experts expect Twitter to fight to get it done. Twitter itself has said it intends to complete the deal. Even if Musk convinces a judge to let him walk away, he could still be on the hook for the deal’s $1 billion breakup fee.

Twitter spokesperson Brian Poliakoff declined to comment, but referred to a statement the company made in June.

“Twitter has and will continue to cooperatively share information with Mr. Musk to consummate the transaction in accordance with the terms of the merger agreement,” Twitter said in the June statement. “We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”

Musk didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Musk shook up the social media world earlier this year with his unprecedented offer to take the company private, arguing he would be able to grow Twitter and make it more open and, in his mind, politically neutral. He said he would let former president Donald Trump back on the service and argued its content moderation practices infringed on free speech. Musk waived his right to take a deeper look at the company’s finances when he signed the deal.

But soon after, questions arose about whether he would actually follow through. A global sell-off in tech stocks deeply cut into his personal net worth, which he had leveraged to get commitments for the debt he needed to buy Twitter.

Musk’s enthusiasm for following through with the deal has been under question since at least May, when he said the deal was “on hold” until he could ascertain whether Twitter’s long-standing statement that fewer than 5 percent of accounts are bots or spam was accurate. He accused Twitter of withholding information, while the company said it was acting in good faith and providing everything the deal’s terms required it to.

“Twitter has not been cooperative,” said a person familiar with the discussions, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the talks.

But focusing on bots plays into Musk’s hand, lowering Twitter’s stock price and potentially helping him force Twitter to renegotiate the deal at a lower price.

Musk likely grasps the difficulty of backing out at this stage, prompting him to find legal reasons to justify an exit, according to Carl Tobias, law professor at the University of Richmond.

After raising the bot issue, for example, Musk said Twitter’s figures could constitute a “material adverse misstatement,” a likely reference to a contractual clause that gives him the ability to back out of the deal in the event of a significant event that fundamentally changes the business.

“I think it’s an excuse,” Tobias said. “It doesn’t seem to me that a court would find that persuasive.” Tobias cited Musk’s own waiving of due diligence in his hasty acceptance of the deal. “It does seem to me that it undercuts a lot of arguments he could try to make otherwise,” he said.

The debate over bots on Twitter isn’t new, and has been a big part of the public conversation around the company for years. Musk frequently tweets his annoyance at the proliferation of spam and bot accounts on the site, writing in April he aimed to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!” through his Twitter bid. Outside researchers have sometimes said the number of bots and spam accounts could be much higher than Twitter’s estimate. But because of how quickly the tactics for creating and concealing the nature of fake accounts change, it is difficult for even experts to make strong pronouncements on who is right.

Twitter has been defending its process for measuring unwanted accounts, including in a news briefing on Thursday morning.

Twitter said that every three months, it takes a sample of the “Monetizable Average Daily Users,” the base of users which the company feels comfortable charging advertisers to reach. It analyzes that sample by hand to determine whether they are fake or not, including looking at information such as IP addresses that it can’t share publicly. It said it has always been comfortable that the total comes under the 5 percent threshold.

Twitter does not ban all bots, which include accounts that post otter pictures on the hour or the temperature in a specific location. Instead, it looks for indicators that suggest fake or coordinated spam activity, such as the mass creation of accounts or coordination among humans to artificially amplify a specific tweet, set of tweets or topic. The terms of the briefing precluded any of the experts being quoted directly or cited by name.

Musk’s takeover has plunged Twitter into chaos, creating rifts between employees and unease for executives. Some workers, who fear Musk would roll back the safeguards Twitter has put in place to keep harmful content off the site, have started looking for new jobs and have predicted an exodus of employees if the billionaire buys the company.

Musk has already brushed up against Twitter executives by going after the company’s policies on its own site, and amplifying users who criticized the company’s top lawyer.

Even if the deal falls through, Twitter has been dragged through controversy, employee unease and a rocky stock performance for months. Its rebound won’t be straightforward.

“No matter what: The company is in play now,” one person familiar with the matter told The Post in May. “I don’t think it’s a situation where Elon walks away and things can go back to normal.”

 

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F250

F250 29200

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Posted
4 hours ago, CooterBrown said:


Does it matter? It might as well be zero since that’s how much time he spends with them. Child support isn’t even a rounding error. Might as well create your own master race by banging 6s all day, I guess.

I was about to say Talulah Riley is way above a 6 but apparently he couldn't get the job done with her.

 

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MrBig

MrBig 5632

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Posted

Does the Musk family have a history of multiple births (twins/triplets) aside from Elon? I wonder if the mothers of his children all had the same OB. Elon is starting to give the same vibes as fertility docs who use their own sperm.

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fattyflattie

fattyflattie 4640

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5 hours ago, CooterBrown said:


Does it matter? It might as well be zero since that’s how much time he spends with them. Child support isn’t even a rounding error. Might as well create your own master race by banging 6s all day, I guess.

It does. He obviously doesn’t have the time to spend with 1-2 kids, much less 9 from several mommas.  

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NoName

NoName 17148

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7 hours ago, MrBig said:

Does the Musk family have a history of multiple births (twins/triplets) aside from Elon? I wonder if the mothers of his children all had the same OB. Elon is starting to give the same vibes as fertility docs who use their own sperm.

dude has had multiple kids via IVF - it's like 2% for natural vs 12% for IVF

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Immaculate Vibes

Immaculate Vibes 114

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6 minutes ago, tbone_ said:

Why would he think it’s better to sell $8.5b in stock and pay a $1b break up fee than to just sell $8.5b in stock?

I’m not sure if he has restrictions on selling his stock, but maybe it was to help maintain confidence in Tesla. He didn’t want it to look like he was dumping a bunch of stock near the top just for personal reasons. 

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gsoda3

gsoda3 3362

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he wouldn't.  it's a worthless premise.  if you're the largest single shareholder of a company you don't broadcast to the entire world your need to sell.  he saw what happened after his stunt on twitter polling everyone "should i sell...".  if his intention was to sell more shares he would've just done it.  he wouldn't follow a plan to take a billion dollar haircut hatched out of a tinfoil henhouse to do so. 

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MonkeyDoughnut

MonkeyDoughnut 10803

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35 minutes ago, Immaculate Vibes said:

Sounds about right 

 

Elon can't just pay $1B breakup fee because he wants to. There are limited reasons and the bot question is not one. He's on the hook here and will either go through with it or pay many billions in a dragged out lawsuit that he will almost certainly lose.....

That said he's down $20B on the deal currently so he's got some wiggle room.

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Francisco 2.0

Francisco 2.0 32588

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https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201082/elon-musk-twitter-deal-is-over

 

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It’s on. Elon Musk has officially filed to kill his own Twitter acquisition, and Twitter is calling his bluff. They’ll see Musk in court. And while it’s only going to get messier from here, one important verdict has already been rendered by Elon Musk himself: he doesn’t have what it takes to run Twitter. And that’s a damning blow to his own central mythology.

 

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We’ll look at the specifics of Musk’s formal SEC filing in a minute, but first it’s important to remember what he’s said about the deal and why he wanted to do it in the first place. It’s not like the world forced the acquisition of a relatively small social network on the world’s richest man. And Musk’s conduct surrounding the deal has been marked by a lot of obvious troll behavior. A reasonable person would conclude he was never serious about it to begin with, which is already leading to a lot of Musk stans and Twitter haters divining a 4D-chess narrative that makes his blunder seem intentional. But.

 

Quote

There are some things Musk said in the frenzy of the Twitter takeover that can’t be ignored. That’s because they strike at the heart of what built his original reputation: as a visionary, a bold industrialist, a futurist, and maybe even the guy who would solve climate change and multi-planetary civilization. Sure, lately he works tirelessly to attract a huge base of social reactionaries and various right-wingers who care more about his trolling than the missions of SpaceX or Tesla. But Musk’s real credibility — if he ever had any — was being the face of genuinely huge and ambitious efforts to change the world and make it better. 

 

Spoiler

He probably didn’t need to, but he brought that same world-saving energy to the Twitter deal:

Musk said he was motivated by the fact that Twitter had become a “de facto town square” and that it’s “really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely.” (He talked about “free speech” a lot during this time.)

Speaking at a TED conference, Musk said the deal is not a way to make money. Some of his exact words: “it’s about the future of civilization, but you don’t care about the economics at all.”

Later, speaking internally to employees of Twitter, Musk said “I want Twitter to contribute to a better, long-lasting civilization where we better understand the nature of reality.” 

Musk: “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

These statements stand out above everything else because (a) things that are important to the future of human life are not things you typically troll people about, and (b) that should be especially true if you are Elon Musk, who has spent his entire modern career since Tesla cultivating the idea that he is on a mission to save the future of humanity and spread civilization across the stars. Does he tweet dumb memes a lot? Yes. Did he send a car into space as a joke? Sure. But the missions of his companies are dead serious. Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Neuralink wants to build devices that help people with paralysis to “regain independence.” And SpaceX? That’s about nothing less than “enabling people to live on other planets.”

So: Musk has intentionally spent his career leaning into some of the world’s most difficult-to-solve problems. He gives lots of keynotes, throws big ideas on the board, and makes lots of promises. Incidentally, this campaign to save the world earned him one of the biggest and most active fanbases on Twitter. And let’s be real: the man loves to tweet. The only person in the world who might love tweeting more than Elon Musk has been banned from the platform and impeached twice by the United States Congress.

But remember: Musk didn’t say “I want to buy Twitter because I love tweeting and I command an army of users here.” He said Twitter was important to the future of human civilization. And so, spiritually, the deal joined the ranks of the Teslas and the SpaceXs of the world.

What kind of problems would prevent this man from unlocking Twitter’s true potential? To help steer it and, along with his other companies, help humanity flourish in the future? He only really makes two assertions in his SEC filing: 

Twitter won’t give him data necessary for him to figure out how many spam bots are on the platform.

Twitter fired some people and lost some executives.

This is weak crybaby stuff.

Musk has been going on about the alleged bot issue for a while, even getting into public beefs with the CEO of Twitter about it. I’m not going to unpack this whole spat — the Delaware Court of Chancery is about to examine that in some detail — but the TL;DR is that Musk wants to tank a huge deal over a problem known to every social media company on the planet, who have all dedicated vast amounts of resources toward fixing over several decades. It’s just a fundamentally unserious position from a guy who is willing to solve world-shaking problems like climate change

But let’s assume just for fun that Musk is right. After he started the deal and looked under the hood and laid out his plans for Twitter’s staff, he discovered Twitter’s bot population is more like 20% than 5%. So what? What’s a spread of 90 million users when TikTok and Facebook are ahead of you by billions? If your position is that Mark Zuckerberg is an unelected tyrant of speech, how is abandoning Twitter going to help you take him on? And why would you argue in your SEC filing that revenue from active users is at stake? That doesn’t sound like “not caring about the economics at all.” That sounds like only caring about the economics.

And as for blowing the deal because a few Twitter execs fired staff while continuing to operate normally and roll out new features (hi, co-tweeting!) — get real. You’re buying Twitter for $44 billion. It’s yours now. You can clean house if you want to and correct or reverse all of the ill-advised decisions that brought the platform within your sights originally. Nobody will stop you! The SEC couldn’t even get you to stop tweeting!

There are many possible theories for why Musk put himself, Twitter, and the world through this charade. But in the end, Musk wrote a check his myth couldn’t cash.

We’re left with two possibilities. Either Musk doesn’t think he can do the job he promised at Twitter, and he’s not the world-changing force he’s been made out to be. Or, he was lying about the kinds of lofty ideals and visions that built his companies and his image. 

What kind of man trolls the world about a better future?

 

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