Elon Musk takes control of Twitter, fires top management

I don’t get it, either. It’s like saying, “I agree that there should be food safety regulations, but I don’t think the government should decide on or oversee them.”
:woman_shrugging:t2:

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He need to bring some value-added to a bluecheck, like being able to call down a Twitter factcheck on any tweet, n times a month, results marked on the tweet.

(Kidding, but imagine the riot that would cause!)

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are there no labor laws against a 7 day work week? that’s insane, and immoral

my only theory is that he actually wants to shut twitter down. he just needs to do it in a way that won’t break laws about corporate governance or trigger loan payback issues

if the company implodes because they’re not able to implement his vision, it’s not his fault. he already said there were problems so he’s blameless ( that’s how he’d phrase it, anyway )

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the product is the people. people’s identity and preferences.

the usefulness of twitter for its users is more that curation. but not really much. it’s more discovery and search of identity and topics

it’s what i was trying to say about http above. twitter is dead simple at it’s core. it’s just hard to keep running at the scale of having enough users where you can start making money

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Right?

“We’re going to see who is willing to work themselves into exhaustion and fire everyone else to make that condition permanent.”

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It doesn’t seem likely to me, but in my dreams Twitter employees would respond by forming a union.

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Coming in late because timezones, in regards to

Dude: the government does do the regulating. Regulating stuff is literally what government is for. Whoever is regulating the speech, it’s ultimately the government doing it. (Either because it is the regulator directly, it authorises the regulator, or it allows the regulator.)

The question is: what do you do so that the government is representing the people?

I would have thought that the first step is to regulate away the free speech of Nazis, to do what we can to prevent the possibility of them becoming the government. I mean, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s a start.

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People in tech are sold the techbro libertarian myth that because they’re on salary, stuff like overtime, labor laws, the Geneva Convention, don’t apply to them.

Being sent on a Death March project is a privilege!

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This is one heck of a game of 5D chess that the super-genius tycoon is playing.

Ok, but there’s always money in the banana stand Twitter, right? Well…

Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.

That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders.

Ok, but the banks will hold out for Musk to turn things around, so everything’s good. Errrr…

The problem for the banks is that the Fed will likely only allow them to keep the Twitter debt on their balance sheets, marked at par, or 100 cents on the dollar for so long. My bet is that the Fed will get impatient with banks that try to do that much beyond the first quarter of 2023. If the financial markets are still dysfunctional three months from now, the Fed will likely insist that the banks take their hit on Twitter.

And then they’ll have the worst of both worlds—a significant markdown on the Twitter debt, requiring more capital to be reserved against it and a writedown, plus less capacity available for new financings. At that point, the banks are better off selling the debt, even at a significant discount, and taking their painful medicine. And that is when the real fun and games will begin financially for Elon, assuming he is not the buyer of the Twitter debt, himself. Once the Twitter debt gets sold off for a discount to distressed debt investors—they are generally not the warm and cuddly type of investors—then any payment or other technical default on that debt will likely result in a new serious headache for Elon: the risk of Twitter being forced into an involuntary bankruptcy by its irate creditors.

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The American economy and civilization would collapse if we a) had laws against a seven day work week and b) required all the producers we consume from to follow them.

And while tech is getting better, and many tech places have abolished the concept of “crunch time” for the more “When it’s ready” time, there’s still this belief that crunch somehow builds character held by the old white men who run these places. Becuase THEY had to do crunch.

The new , younger, better organized group coming into tech is working their way through middle and middle upper management, but they largely know that crunch in moderation works, but crunch also causes mistakes. You pay for the rushing. And sometimes, that payment isn’t worth the cost.

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Banks that lent $12.7bn to Elon Musk for his $44bn Twitter takeover are preparing to hold the debt until early next year as they wait for the billionaire to unveil a clearer business plan they can market to investors, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.

Barring an unexpected rally in credit markets this year, the group of lenders, led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays, have conceded they will be stuck holding the debt on their books for months or even longer and will probably end up incurring huge losses on the financing package.

The banks have in recent weeks held short discussions with several large credit investors as they attempt to gauge the demand for the debt and the discounts they will ultimately need to offer to offload it. The conversations have been informal and some investors said they were given the impression the deal would not come to market quickly.

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Three days in and they’re already planning how they’re going to dump out before they’re forcd to take a haircut. Why can’t they have faith in his brilliance like his fanbois here do?

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Maybe it’s a haircut with a bonesaw?

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The Bonesaw family, not being constrained by Fed rules, will hold off a little longer and collect directly from Musk in TSLA.

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I wonder which dimension of chess we’ll reach by the end. I mean, I hope there’s an end of some sort, though I suspect we aren’t done reading headlines about the horse enthusiast.

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The American economy and civilization would collapse if we a) had laws against a seven day work week and b) required all the producers we consume from to follow them.

It really depends on what you mean by “seven day work week”.

If it’s the labor friendly “no one can be required to work seven days in a row”, no, there aren’t going to be many problems, and any place that does have them deserves them.

If it’s “you can only be open 5 days”, yeah, there’s a problem.

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Kenan Thompson Snl GIF by Saturday Night Live

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