Ewwwwwww
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When stupid rich people decide to take stupid disagreements to court, why is lawyers benefitting from that unfortunate? I know everyone think lawyers are the ones pushing these idiots into suing each other, but they usually aren’t. They’re usually just trying to minimize the damage their stupid rich clients are creating. In all seriousness, the only way this sees the inside of a courtroom is if Musk decides to be stupidly stubborn. Odds are the lawyers negotiate a settlement and both parties go home mad.
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Yeah, I’m sorry. I hadn’t had my coffee yet when I wrote that. Not as funny as I thought, and really just icky. Editing it out.
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It’s really hard to decide which way the shrapnel is going to fly in this particular omnishambles.
Markets depend a lot on confidence. It’s hard to invest with confidence if you think that a play-acting billionaire might come along and shred the value of your holdings by posturing for his fanboys. Twitter’s market cap has fallen about $9bn since the saga started, much of which is probably due to Musk’s antics.
Investors may start to avoid companies that might be the target of similar shenanigans, which gives billionaires like Musk some ominous new short-and-distort powers: “That’s a nice company you’ve got there. It would be a shame if I publicly declared my interest in it.”
Then there’s confidence in contracts. When you sign a contract, there is a basic expectation that most of the time all parties will keep their end of the bargain. How well does the system work if contract negotiations are only the start and you have to assume that you’re always going to have to engage in a ruinously-expensive battle with a billionaire’s legal team just to get them to do what they said they’d do?
Things get worse if Musk loses in court (as he well might) and simply stamps his feet and says “Shan’t.” Can the courts or the SEC sanction him effectively? If they can’t then all bets are off, because every billionaire or other too-big-to-jail entity is going to feel free to view compliance as optional. And that raises questions about the power of government vis-a-vis market actors (to be honest, that was already looking a little shaky, but this could be another nail in that particular coffin).
On a more local level, Musk has probably damaged not just Twitter, but his own companies as well. A lot of the success of Tesla etc. is based on his reputation as a savvy business genius. His latest antics make him look, at best, unreliable, at worst like a total idiot. If he walks out of this having spaffed a billion dollars up the wall for the sake of a few thousand Twitter likes, it’s going to be harder to keep up the pretense that he’s some kind of sui generis four-dimensional chess wizard. So that’s going to hurt his businesses. Also, cue the shareholder lawsuits. I am not a lawyer, but I bet one could make a pretty good case that Musk’s antics do not meet the requirements of fiduciary responsibility.
Speaking of fiduciary responsibility, one of the reasons why the board of Twitter accepted his offer was that if they didn’t they could be accused of not acting in the best interests of shareholders. The Musk saga actually gives boards more power in similar future situations: saying “While this offer is ostensibly advantageous, we do not believe that X can be relied on to fulfill their end of the bargain, and that therefore it is in the best interests of shareholders for us to reject the offer.” Any business that Musk himself tries to acquire in future should be able to play this Get Out of Musk Free card quite effectively (or to stipulate extraordinary conditions in any contracts that they do sign). But the same reasoning might be usable in other situations as well.
This is going to send ripples in lots of interesting directions. The net effect is probably going to be to increase chaos and uncertainty, probably to everyone’s detriment. Still, if it reduces the general tendency to worship billionaires – or even, inshallah, leads to them being somehow reined in a little bit, maybe that’s not a bad thing.
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Oh! Maybe the case will be called Twit v. Twitter?
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He can offer Twitter a horse.
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I disagree. I feel that he profits by making unattainable promises. That’s all there is, it’s not complicated, that’s his job. He doesn’t know or not know things, because it doesn’t matter. He produces promises. The noises that come out of his noise hole affect stock value in predictable ways.
Make promise, stock goes up, sell stock. Promise collapses, stock goes down, acquire stock. Repeat.
He tried this double backflip combo Twitter and Tesla stock thing and it blew up in his face.
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New to me, & LOL’d. Thx.
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“omnishambles” is a registered trademark of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, the world’s most prolific producer of omnishambles.
See also Omnishambles - Wikipedia
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I loved the whole comment, especially for how well it’s written.
More from you plz, @angusm.
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Well, he’s developed a cult following as a result, anyways. Though a certain number of car sales have certainly been premised on unattainable promises. But he still expects his employees to make good on them, and when they can’t, most of the time the promise doesn’t collapse so much as he goes right back to making the promise, but on a different deadline.
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We’ll know the self-driving function works right when he tells us they can fly themselves too
NEXT AFTER THAT: through hyperspace
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I think at this point there’s a good chance he can’t pay 44 Billion if he wanted to. Between the Bitcoin crash and the falling TSLA price (and a lot more competition on the horizon) he probably can’t cough up what he thought he could and since the price of TWTR also fell there’s a good chance people like Thiel aren’t willing to kick in more to make up the difference either.
I think at the end of the day the whole thing will go down as the most expensive shit-post troll ever.
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He seems to have jumped some steps by already convincing people that’s happening (it’s not happening):
I expect as long as Tesla exists, it’ll be “self-driving cars are coming in a year or two!”
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Seems like his family isn’t his always on the same page and not afraid to call him out.
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