Originally published at: Musk puts Twitter purchase on hold | Boing Boing
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Smells like stock manipulation.
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He’s just trying to knock down the price so he doesn’t have to pay what he initially promised.
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Says that content moderation is Twitter’s biggest problem, tries to push web 3.0 stuff about making the company more ‘de-centralized’ and then a few days later starts complaining about Twitter being unable to have the tools to deal with bots haha.
Kinda like a vegan getting a job at the beef jerky store at the mall and then starts complaining about the smell of the store a few days later.
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Senior executives have been leaving Twitter left and right, serious TSLA shareholders are freaked out, fascists and white supremacists are celebrating their imminent re-platforming, and who knows what new shiny thing has captured Musk’s attention now that the business media have moved on to other things like inflation and now that he’s made some money and gained some publicity manipulating the market
[Shortly, a fanboi will enlighten us as to why this is “well actually” a 4D chess move in value-added business by his god-emperor]
A questionable move if true, considering the initial resistance of the board and major shareholders until he offered way above market value. I’m sure they’d be happy to return to life as before after showing him the door, collecting $1-billion from him on his way out.
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Rumors I have read state that since a lot of his money is tied up in cryptocurrencies, the slide there has him panicking.
I personally think he doesn’t really know what he’s doing himself, his wealth is such that he can surround himself with yes men and be insulated from his bad decisions for a few years.
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Well, he has been living inside a simulation (his own) for the last ten years or so, not the real world.
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The number of spam accpunts is 5%, but what percentage of Twitter activity do they represent…? And also, could they really worse for Twitter than what Musk wants to replace them with? I suppose Musk’s only concern is that bots don’t convert ad impressions to sales…
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Can I just ruminate for a moment on how completely ludicrous a $1 billion “termination fee” is?
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When you are dealing with a notoriously shitty person a break-up fee on a deal is a very good idea.
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Does it sound better when you say “a little over 2%”?
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Agreed. Posting inaccurate information in your regulatory filings is a form of stock manipulation, by Twitter.
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1-3% is a typical termination fee, so that’s in line (and, as Jason notes above, is sensible). What’s ludicrous is the offered price to which it’s being applied.
The 5% bot user figure has been around for a while, such that Twitter can plausibly say they’ve been holding steady on the problem.
They’re still conveniently ignoring the issue (brought up by @HMSGoose above) of what degree that persistent problem segment impacts their ad-based revenue model (itself something of a scam), but so is Musk.
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Can’t that be further reduced to the stock price is ludicrous? It’s just a few dollar premium over the price when it was made.
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As I recall, he offered to buy at $54/share when it was trading around $50-51. That’s a pretty significant difference in percentage terms, enough to change the minds of shareholders and board members who were initially strongly opposed to the sale. I do agree with your opinion that the pre-Musk market price also was out of line with the company’s underlying value.
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From what I can tell, Elon bought $2.1B in stock to give him his 10% stake. By the end of the day, it was worth $2.9B. (I do not know what he held before then.) A few weeks later, after putting together his offer to buy control of Twitter with other people’s money and driving the price WAY up, he sold enough Twitter stock to earn $8.5B.
Now, he’s balking. Tell me again how he’s not manipulating the market.
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From Elon!
What? NOOOO!!! nEveR…
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