Gonna get this in before the Orange Nazi Mafia gets his Twitter account back online…
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I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a long term plan.
This whole thing has been him doing one stupid, impulsive thing after another, and lashing out when he’s faced the consequences of his actions.
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yes all that, and even worse because it’s as if the original tenants had to pay for half the purchase
Elon Musk’s deal to take Twitter Inc. private will nearly triple the social-media company’s leverage and saddle it with hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payable on the more than $25 billion used to fund the leveraged buyout.
ie. twitter itself paid 25 billion for the purchase. the result:
Analysts estimate that Twitter’s interest burden will increase to $845 million annually … more than half of the company’s adjusted annual earnings
too late it seems
Elon Musk’s antics have made it hard for his banks — Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays — to sell the debt required to do the Twitter deal. So they’re just going to hold it, all $13 billion… it threatens to bring [all other] leveraged buyouts to a halt.
separate thought, but that quote of his “i didn’t do this because it was easy…” is such bs, because it was easy. he drunk texted his friends, asked them to back him with some billions, told his lawyers to draw up a deal, cried backsies, gave up and carried through
that’s not “difficult” in any sort of normal use of the word. it’s barely even “work”
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wHat!?! b4t w34Lty m3N g0t tH31R $$$$$$$ bY Th31R 0Wn h4Rdw0rKs!!! /s
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If I can admit to being terribly ignorant for a moment, this is something I never really understood. I mean, I know the whole point of a leveraged buyout is to leave the company on the hook for the money you paid for it. But how do you actually move your debt to them? Is this some “normal” corporate thing or does it take some special rules to make it possible?
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i think it means, because he’s taking it private, all existing twitter shareholders ( including employees who get stock grants on this nov 1 ), will get a check they can cash to cover their stock
twitter the company takes out loans to pay for those checks
the shareholders are like, yay: quick money. ( eta: which is why they (or the board?) approved it ) even though they’re no longer shareholders
the banks normally would resell the loans almost immediately as investments to people betting on the company going public at some future point
the company though is going to have to pay interest on that money, making it harder to be profitable and go public. so it may be the interest alone is enticing.
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Dorsey envisions a foundational “Twitter” protocol that anyone can implement and run. This would need to become a formal Internet standard, which requires going through the Internet Engineering Task Force’s “Request for Comment” (RFC) process. This can take a long time. This is what Bluesky has been working on starting to map out.
Smells like poo, and I think he wants a Dominion rather than a Federation.
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huh. something standard that allows anyone to get or post standardized representations of text, images, and other data? revolutionary! ( well, for 1989 anyway )
not convinced? i’ll have to rest my case
( eta: oh! i know. what if there was just one app where you could do it all… )
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Musk will just pull a Trump and knock down the payments. When you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem; when you owe them billions- it’s their problem.
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You really gotta need the money badly when you borrow from somebody named “Prince Bonesaw”
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Ha ha. HA ha Ha. HA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
California is not a right to work state. I haven’t seen Twitter’s employee / HR manual, but I would guess for anything short of a straight-up crime or employee malfeasance (such as pulling a Toobin) there is a formal process for employee termination, including a Performance Improvement Plan. Musk just screwed himself, his investors, and Twitter out of tons of cash to deal with the multiple lawsuits that will come from this. My guess is that he’ll be paying between $500K and $1M per rank and file employee terminated (pay, damages, and legal fees) and easily $10M - $50M per executive. Non-terminated staff have probably started documenting harassment at this point to also get in on that sweet, sweet payout.
Of course, his sycophants will be screaming that the muskrat is playing 40 dimensional chess, but as many here have already pointed out, this was an incredibly stupid move on his part. I mean, really, mind-bogglingly stupid. The sort of stupid that will be a case study in colleges and grad schools for at least a generation.
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person.
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There’s more to it than that, but those wheels already exist too.
Maybe he’ll invent a wheel that’s rounder?
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My bet is he’s going to accuse all the “underperformers” who don’t have as much code as their peers of “stealing from the company” and drum them out that way. Twitter historically has a PIP process, but it can be bypassed at will of management for situations of “gross incompetence.” and I suspect Musk’s love of stack ranking and this “code review” will do just that.
It’ll be interesting to see whether Twitter, now that it’s private, will be able to get away with the same things the other big tech companies in california have been doing with regards to firing people.
Further, I bet a huge number of twitter’s resources are contingent workers, and they don’t even have the full rights of employment.
Not to defend twitter, but things have been shitty in tech in California for awhile now, what with collusion and illegal work actions and the like. It’d be nice if this is the point where it turns around but I can’t see the majors allowing that to happen, not even against someone like Musk.
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insert xkcd standardized standard comic here
really, i think the “problem” is that twitter is simple to create but hard to run and monetize
im assuming any push by musk will be for user identity - just like facebook, just like google and apple - so they can try to learn who you are enough to sell (better) targeted ads. the monetize part
the only reason to recreate the web protocols and make a “do anything” app is so that they own identity.
( those federation apis seem mainly to try to address the hard to run part. but only to ape existing commerical social media. they are neat but they seem niche )
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It looks retaliatory to me. He’s pissed off that they forced him to make good on his offer instead of letting him off the hook. So now that he’s in charge he’s getting back at them, by firing them with no severance and before stock options vest. Just to be petty. I hope they sue, so once again he’s called out for being a child, and is forced to compensate them. It’s no wonder he has an affinity for trump; they’re both emotionally children.
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Yeah it doesn’t seem to be a smart move to try to cheat the lawyer who wrote the deal he was unable to break. I’m pretty sure the general counsel structured that part to ensure he would get his share of the spoils one way or another.
These folks bested him in the acquisition, that’s what happens when you do “force of personality” instead of diligence. If he’s smart he’ll pay off some of these obligations with TSLA stock while it’s still worth anything, because I don’t see these shenanigans accelerating the release of Cybertruck and the other stuff. A worldwide recession and embargo on Russian raw materials won’t help matters, not to mention the whole “owning the libs who actually belieive in climate change”. His upside is shrinking.
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I sincerely hope that everyone who vowed to “abandon Twitter if he took over” will now actually abandon it. Problem solved. It’ll become Truth Social 2.0 and will drown in an echo chamber of garbage.
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Maybe not. If it’s true that he’s firing them now before they vest in their stock, he may be doing it to screw them out of their gain from the sale.
His payment to take over the company goes to stockholders, and if he prevents them from being stockholders, they don’t get the money, the company does, which he now controls. So this may well be a chess move to claw back some of his money from the people he was forced to buy from. I wouldn’t be surprised if he strategized this before he had his recent change of heart.
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