Elon Musk makes offer to purchase Twitter outright
I made an offer https://t.co/VvreuPMeLu
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 14, 2022
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
Cherry-picked roundup:
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Are there many people asking the government to intervene?Report
That was literally the basis of the first three replies to Joe Walsh’s tweet.
Don’t expect to hear anything significant in response to your question.Report
Eh, I’ve seen a number of people argue that Musk buying twitter would be against the law and, therefore, needs to be prevented.
Is that government intervention? (It is unclear to me that Musk buying Twitter is, in fact, against the law. It’s not a 1:1 analogy to Bezos buying the WaPo but I could see why someone would use it as an example.)
Of course, if it’s against the law, the buyout won’t happen but I get the feeling that the people arguing that it’s illegal are using “illegal” as shorthand for “the government should prevent this” rather than “I am a legal expert and believe that this purchase would break such-and-such statute.”Report
Here’s Ellen Pao writing in the Washington Post back when he almost got put on the board:
Does that count?Report
Yeah, that’s one. I don’t know whether she’s on the “left,” in either the lose or strict sense. She’s the former CEO of Reddit, right? But at least it’s someone saying what Walsh says the left is saying, so there’s that. Perhaps a more accurate version of his tweet, then:
The right: “Twitter isn’t fair to me. Government must do something!”
The left: “Twitter is a private company. It sets its own rules.”
ELON MUSK THREATENS TO BUY TWITTER.
A former social media CEO: “Oh my God, stop this. Government must do something!”
The right: “Twitter is a private company.”Report
I don’t know if this mindset is necessarily representative of “the left” but it’s not particularly right and it’s not particularly centrist.
(And you caught that she was saying it in the WaPo, right? You caught that, right?)Report
Yeah, I don’t know what to make of her, but she’s one person, so I’m not particularly worried about her opinion. Perhaps she has some influence? All the responses to her I can find on Twitter are critical, and seemingly from the right.
To be comparable to the calls for government intervention on the right, we’d need actual lawmakers to try to do what Pao is saying lawmakers should do, though, so we’re still far away from anything like the equivalency Walsh suggests, even if we stipulate that a non-trivial number of people agree with Pao.Report
She has enough influence to be writing that in the WASHINGTON FREAKING POST.
To be comparable to the calls for government intervention on the right
Oh, is that where we were going?
Is this one of those things where I need to find another couple of examples because of the editorial in the WaPo isn’t sufficient and then we can point to a random guy on twitter as representative of “the right” and telling me that I have to find someone that maps to *THAT*?
But, no, @johnnyfirstname3219845972 doesn’t count as someone being on the left?Report
That’s where we’re going because that’s literally where Republicans have gone. Like, as in actually openly discussing making laws, all over the country.
And sure, more than one example would be good, but I don’t think it really matters. The fact that there aren’t a bunch immediately jumping out suggests that it’s not much of a thing.
That it is in the Washington Post? A Bezos paper with a centrist/conservative editorial page? I’m not sure what that’s supposed to show us. That they publish click-bait, maybe?Report
There are a bunch, but I don’t want to play the “find me a rock” game.
That it is in the Washington Post? A Bezos paper with a centrist/conservative editorial page? I’m not sure what that’s supposed to show us. That they publish click-bait, maybe?
That the whole idea that tech oligarchs shouldn’t control the media showing up in a Bezos paper is, at best, representative of a blind spot.
At best.Report
Ackshully, FWIW, I would dispute the first part of Walsh’s comment, not the second.
When have we liberals NOT wanted to have some sort of regulation over major corporations?
But of course the idiocy would be seeing a discrepancy between “Twitter is a private company [and can kick Trump off for violations of TOS] and Pao’s editorial.Report
So we were talking the other day about how people who write for the Washington Freaking Post live in insulated bubbles and don’t represent the views of typical Americans…Report
I don’t recall that.
Could you link to that?Report
WaPo job ad in the Haidt thread.Report
OH! The “why do we need to hear about people in Texas instead of the ones on the coast?” discussion!
Yeah, I guess if we agree that the WaPo is in an insulated bubble, Pao’s editorial is probably further evidence of that.Report
I’m not going to claim I understand this conversation. I just caught the reference, that’s all.Report
For what it’s worth, I didn’t see the Washington Post’s posting a job ad as evidence of the Washington Post being in a bubble as much as I saw it as the Washington Post thinking that it didn’t have insight that it thought it should have.
We never really got to whether it was right to think that. Mostly mocking the idea that other people might think that it was right/wrong to think that it didn’t have that insight.Report
I assumed your initial comment about it on the Haidt thread was to emphasize the way the elites ponder the behaviour of the mysterious primitive tribe, and how they keep going back to examine their inferiors rather than talk to or debate equals. I never considered that you meant the WaPo was interested in actually covering them, just as I wouldn’t consider that the WaPo is interested in actually covering them.Report
“Conservatives in the Mist” coverage is always amusing but I more saw it as the WaPo realizing “we can’t cover them from here… like we can’t even lie to ourselves about being able to do that”.
It didn’t get to the “the locals at the bowling alley are drinking beer unironically…” stuff. It was a take on the whole Tower of Babel thing where they actually realized “we’re not hearing this particular language”.
For what it’s worth, I think that they’re right that they’re not.
But I also know that it’s unlikely that boots on the ground will give them enough of a foothold to grasp the other culture.
Much like Chip hinted, they’ll go to Austin and be delighted by the music and food scene and be surprised that Austin is in Texas.Report
If you just wrote that “Conservatives in the Mist” line, my hat is off to you. I was fumbling trying to express exactly that phenomenon.Report
The “C’s in the Mist coverage” is always a funny times given there are many groups that never even get that level of coverage. For the past few years Wapo, NYT, CNN tromp off to diners in Ohio while for some reason never sending them to black churches in Georgia. Or for that matter talk to liberals in Ohio or Alabama. C’s get more national coverage then almost any other group.Report
Trump alone got himself billions in free air-time from the “biased liberal media”.
I do love hearing conservatives bemoan how the “coastal elites” look down on them, while earnestly explaining how they are real America — and the coastal elites aren’t.
it’s apparently not hypocrisy because, obviously, they are right. Iowa is America in a way New York isn’t.
I mean despite New York being one of those founding States and all.Report
Maybe they do, although I’d bet against it. But it’s all done in the way you’d examine another species. They probably think they understand all black people because of the black friends they had in undergrad at Syracuse. As for the Hispanics, they have their own TV stations, right?Report
You should respond to the WaPo’s tweet with that.
Don’t tell me. Tell them!Report
That has been tweeted at Wapo and all the big media many times and by people with a lot of followers.Report
They should send somebody down to Atlanta.
Lord knows that place could use a news presence.Report
The same way that the extremely online liberals were amazed at Joe’s popularity contra Bernie most conservatives view of liberals is always someone who is highly online and visible.
Like even here, when Jaybird wanted to quickly find “liberal arguing for regulation of Twitter” he went online and found a highly online visible columnist.
It’s like searching for the car keys under the lamppost. We speak online, argue online, research online. If a voice isn’t on Twitter or major media in a Google le format, it doesn’t exist.
If Paos proposal were to be put to a vote among Democrats, would it garner Bernie level of support or Biden level of support?
“Middle aged Black woman professional” isn’t likely to be spouting off online where her voice is easily Googlable, so Paos voice was found instead.Report
Who would have thought that a Ten-Second Sidebar about a tweet from a guy who was looking to buy Twitter would refer to tweets! It’s got to be proof that conservatives think everyone’s on Twitter. This should have been a more fully-documented article about breaking news, with detailed links and sourcing.Report
No.Report
I’ve learned that there is no accounting for your feelings. But if Musk’s proposed purchase would violate any relevant laws — and I’m not sure it does — that would, of course, be seeking to have government to prevent it. But that’s what you should say if it is illegal, not a flip-flop. Which was the point of the original snark.Report
Yeah, that wouldn’t be seeking to have the government prevent it. The fact that it’s illegal means that the government already is!
But I still suspect that people are using “illegal” to signal how much they’re against it.
I guess an example that would address the original snark would be somebody arguing “we need regulation of social-media platforms to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication” or similar.Report
Yeah, that wouldn’t be seeking to have the government prevent it. The fact that it’s illegal means that the government already is!
A delightfully optimistic, if not naive, view of law enforcement.Report
Eh, I see “enforce the law!” as a different kind of squelch than “the government should do something!”
I mean, assuming a law.
If there’s not a law, it’s just “the government should do something” wearing a costume.Report
Related to Walsh’s question:
https://puck.news/the-rights-mackenzie-scott-problem/
Tl;Dr is that many of the leading billionaires are contributing to socially liberal causes and this fact is causing many conservatives to re-evaluate their commitments to private capital liberty.
I see it as a data point of the cleavage of the social conservative wing from the financial libertarian wing.
The difference in reaction is that despite the assistance provided by wealthy social liberals, there just isn’t much support for capital liberty on the left; most liberals are still eager to raise MacKenzie Scott’s taxes and regulate her business no different than if she were one of the Kochs.Report
Official Confirmation:
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so he did his job. Hooray?Report
The question was about whether many people were calling for this.
I suppose that this doesn’t demonstrate “many” but that makes me wonder if anything would.Report
Who asked?Report
Let me click on the letter and read it.
Hrm.
“The Open Markets Institute”
Never heard of them.Report
I know them. Antitrust people with good intentions, but bad politic. Matt Stoller (whom you may know from his ubiquity in the blogosphere in the Aughts) used to be a fellow there, but I believe he’s moved on.
Which makes me wonder, what has Stoller been saying about the purchase. Turns out, a lot: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40matthewstoller%20musk&t=tZ4CtTRjWniFIS7vy497Kw&s=09
This is a pretty interesting example, because the antitrust folks are hard to classify on a left-right political axis. Most, I think, have fairly progressive cultural politics, but their economics tends to range from centrist to libertarian to downright conservative (in the old sense that has little to do with today’s Republican Party). I often find them very interesting, because we agree very often in the identification of the symptoms, but come up with completely different diagnoses.
Anyway, I suppose their opposition to this was inevitable, because of Starlink and China. I should have seen it coming.Report
Huh. Insightful.
He’s a bullshitter who sometimes delivers. No wonder the anti-anti-Trump people are so willing to be anti-anti-Musk.
(And we had a fun moment about Matt Stoller a few weeks ago. “Matt Stoller represents the consensus of the conservative elite.“)Report
OK, that’s pretty funny.
Stoller is someone I follow on Twitter, but mute frequently, then unmute got a while, the regret it and mute him again, then rinse and repeat.Report
This is a little like Napoleon marching into Russia – why would you even want it?Report
To crush his enemies, to see them driven before him, and to hear the lamentations of their women (the precise nature of whom is a philosophical question that cannot be answered in 280 characters or less).Report
Musk, Bezos, Gates, and Zuckerberg do seem like the most flat-out Bond villain candidates. People like Bloomberg and the Koches don’t really measure up. Nominating Trump or Soros would trigger too many arguments. Branson would make the list except he’s trying too hard. I’m sure some of the Russian oligarchs would fit the role, and Putin might, but only as an idiot frontman or enforcer for one of the oligarchs.Report
The war in Ukraine will only end when a two foot tall guy with metal teeth and a strange but impossible to place accent shoots Putin in the back, then quips ‘I’m sorry, Vladimir, but you seem to have outlived your usefulness.’Report
It’s better than having a satellite crash into your volcano.Report
Forgot to add: When I typed this up initially I accidentally typed in a K instead of a Z for the beginning of Zuckerberg’s name. That would have caused a dustup if I hadn’t spotted it!Report
Elon Musk is winning the Simulation.Report
Per former OTer Patrick, Elon Musk also basically said he does not have the cash for this plan and is doing nothing to raise the cash, and reverses his right to change his mind. In short, this feels a lot like one of his attention grabbing stunts.Report
I’ve seen the theory that this is just a monumental pump&dump.
The good news for people that think that Elon buying twitter is bad news is that the Saudi stakeholders have publicly refused the deal.
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Elon Musk has responded to the tweet!
Vince McMahon ought to be taking notes.Report
Musk buys Twitter stock at a relative low. Stock appreciates in value. Musk ensures everyone knows he has large stake, puts himself in the news, pushes buyout he can’t afford. Stock rises 20%. Musk executes pre-planned sale for profit.
Next month: Musk screams about how SEC is “stalking him” and “freedom of speech” as they fine him yet again for the exact same behavior he’s gotten fined for several times before.
Fine is tiny fraction of profits.
I can’t help but wonder how much regulatory compliance would change if fines were set based on how much money breaking the regulations earned/saved/gained the company, plus say…10%.
Fining someone 200k over profits of 20m isn’t a fine that changes behavior. It’s a very tiny tax.Report
Bingo.Report
I don’t think so. Musk does things he believes in (even crazy things), rather than pursue safe profits.Report
Musk pursues profits and attention. None of his ventures are wild shot risks even if the tech needs to be developed. Each of his big things ( space x and tesla) were obvious needs that people had been talking about for years and other companies have been working on.
His tunnel crap is …IDK but it’s something. His ventures have always courted and used all the government funds he can get which is safe safe safe.Report
There aren’t that many space companies, and I don’t think there’s been a new car company in 50 years.Report
All the old car companies are building electric cars which has been a widely known goal for years. Yeah not many new car companies mostly because we have a lot of big ones already.Report
That makes starting a new car company sound like a wild shot risk.Report
Starting to build an electric car which many have been wanting and working on for a long time is a good business move. Not w/o risk but it’s not like every other car company hasn’t been working on them also. He was a new entrant into a race with many other competitors. He also used all the gov funding he could get which lessened his risk and also shows that Space X and Tesla were things widely wanted. NASA didn’t funnel money to Space X because they didn’t want a private space company. Tesla was able to focus on their new product sicne they weren’t selling hundreds of thousands of regular cars already.
They were not wild risks since there was a ready and willing market with gov helping out. That is not a wild shot. Their task was pushing tech forward which they have done with Space X. Tesla is going to be Porsche of electrics while Toyota, Ford, etc are going to be selling electrics in far greater numbers.Report
This seems like a really weak argument.
There’s an anti-Musk theme in this thread from the left, and maybe I shouldn’t be noticing it, but this particular argument you’re making seems too weak for it to be worth making on its own. I don’t know the guy’s career, and maybe he does a lot of things like buying large portions of companies and threatening takeovers, but there have been quite a few comments to the effect that this is all about money or attention, and they’ve come from Saul, JS, Philip H, and DavidTC, and they haven’t provided reasons for their positions.
I think my speculation (James Bond villain) is the soundest way to explain a guy who builds tunnels, spaceships, and flame throwers. Maybe money and attention are a good explanation as well. But safety?Report
This ties to my reference to that Puck article about Mackenzie Scott and the role of billionaires in our national discourse.
The central feature of a supervillain is that they are usually very frail and brittle, overgrown manbabys with deep psychic wounds and possessing a small petty view of the world.
We live in a Gilded Age where superrich stride the world, possessing fortunes larger than the output of entire nations and wielding immense power, yet like the gods of Greek mythology, having all the same old human frailty and flaws.
Its a bit like that Twilight Zone episode where Billy Mumy has the power of a god and wields it in terrifyingly petty and spiteful ways.
I know that conservatives grasp this- they explained it perfectly well when they were complaining that Jack Dorsey had the singlehanded power to silence the President of the United States.Report
Something is weird on the site: I actually got your followup comment down below in my email about how you had indirectly asked this above, and I followed the link to reply…and that comment of yours appears to not be on this page? Along with another comment that I made. So who knows what’s going on here, some caching problem. But I’ll respond up here instead:
The reason we are all saying this is that Musk has gotten into dustups with the SEC before by making public comments to manipulate stock prices…just before, it was Telsa stock prices. Back in 2018. It’s why he had to step down as the chairman of the board.
He also, in this _very incident_, saved several hundred million dollars by delaying his disclosure of his Twitter stock purchase, and he is currently being sued by someone over that delay!
He’s also notable tweeted about bitcoin and used Telsa itself, to manipulate the price of it. Telsa announced it had already bought a bunch of bitcoin and made the price of its bitcoin shoot up, and then they secretly sold it all and announced they weren’t accepting it three months later. Probably making a ton of money, but, of course, it’s bitcoin, so we have no idea how much he made, and apparently it’s automatically legal if bitcoin.
And it seems likely he is now doing it with Twitter. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know, but his announcement caused the price of their stock to jump up 30%, and…he’s literally just filed something with the SEC that said he might ‘reconsider’ his ownership if his takeover fails, which it _obviously_ was going to…so he’s got an excuse to get out.
At the now-higher price.
But Elon Musk fundamentally does not believe that securities laws apply to him. He thinks he can do and say anything he wants to, to make prices move where he wants them to, and then buy and sell.Report
Thanks for the explanation.Report
I think really the only actual question is: Did he think there was any possibility that this would work?
I.e., was this 100% a scam to manipulate the stock price, or did he going in thinking ‘Well, either I will end up owning Twitter and if I fail, at least I’ll have skyrocketed the stock price so I can sell out of my position for a profit.’.
We’ll never know what he was thinking, though.Report
If it’s not a wild shot risk to start a private space company with the goal of colonizing Mars, I’d genuinely like to know what you consider to be a wild shot risk.Report
He’s not colonizing Mars. That is a publicity bs. His solid business idea is making it easy and cheaper to get to space to launch satliates. That has been a known need for years. NASA gave him money to help because they wanted private companies to make it cheaper for close in space. Other companies are doing the same thing. Musk isn’t sending anybody to die on Mars. We aren’t remotely close to having a colony on Mars unless the first victims want to die of radiation poisoning or cancer.
Any talk of colonizing Mars is sci fi at this point.Report
SpaceX’s mission statement is “The Company was founded in 2002 to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.”
Also, you didn’t answer the question.Report
Nice mission statement. Getting a rocket to Mars is one thing. Surviving there is something we are not even close to. We can’t keep people alive there at all. It would be a gruesome death from radiation or starvation. Mars would is a death trap now and for the next decades.
Space X is a solid business that i respect.
What would be a wild shot? Hmmm Maybe starting to build a workable commercial fusion reactor now and hoping to figure out all the problems along the way.Report
Yeah, I don’t understand why anyone thinks this is a real offer.
Musk does this sort of nonsense, and he is apparently allowed to, when in any sane universe he would have been forced to no longer participate in the stock market the first few times he did it, or at minimum fined more than he made.Report
For me, I thought that there was something to it based on the purchase of 9% of the stock, the failed board member thing, and the SEC filing.
I suspect it’s more likely that he’s going to end up with 20% of the company than with 50.1% (let alone 100%!), but those three things in tandem made me say “he’s making a play here”.Report
…he has to purchase the stock so he can sell the stock when the price goes up because people start buying it because of what he’s doing.
Him deciding to not join the board is just a PR thing. I really don’t know why him saying ‘I will join the board’ and then immediately ‘I won’t join the board’ is supposed to make him look more serious in your eyes?
Yes, he can’t join the board if he wants to do a hostile takeover, but…why would he have _said_ he was joining the board to start with if that was the plan?
As for the SEC thing: He not only is required by law to do those disclosures, he, uh, actually broke that law:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musk-lawsuit-twitter-sued-sec-disclosures-rcna24138
And speaking of those, his newest disclosure said he “would need to reconsider [his] position as a shareholder” if his takeover didn’t succeed. Yeah…interesting there.
What he’s done is deliberately made a lot of noise about taking over Twitter to get the stock to jump up, and he’s going to jump out whenever he feels like it, selling his shares at around (at this point) about 30% profit. He just needs to fake it long enough that he can make his extremely flimsy excuses (Well, I was trying to buy the entire thing, and I said so! I just failed, so I sold off what I had bought!) for his obviously fraudulent behavior stand up, so it can stand up to the incredibly weak enforcement actions of the SEC.Report
I indirectly asked this question above, so let me make it more direct: does Musk do this kind of thing a lot? If so, could you cite some examples? (I don’t know much about the guy, so I’m not saying you’re wrong. I just don’t know.) And if not, why are you so confident that this is just PR and money?Report
Maybe he’ll raise the character limit waaaaay past 280 characters so we can be spared the miserable phenomena of a tweet storm (for fish’s sake, write a blog entry or something). Or maybe he’ll reduce the character limit to nothing so it can just be a repository of pictures and memes. Either one would improve twitter enormously.Report
I’ve heard the argument that twitter should be 140 characters plus a “more” button (if more characters are needed, of course).
Click “more”, you get the rest of the tweet. If that’s 5 characters, it’s 5 characters. If it’s a 5000 word essay, it’s a 5000 word essay.
Overnight it becomes the blogging platform of choice for the entire dang world.
And we get a thousand “Girls, here’s how to best apply foundation with a sponge. I like the Ulta Beauty Wedge. It’s $3 for one or 3 for $6.99. Start with a drop of foundation, about the size of a pea, and OKAY ALL OF THE BOYS ARE GONE THE REVOLUTION STARTS AT MIDNIGHT” posts.Report
Twitter was originally based on the SMS text service all cellular networks are required to provide. No separate data service is required. Most (but not all) modern networks support SMS segmenting and concatenation for longer messages. I believe, but am not entirely sure, that Twitter’s 280-character messages are not done with SMS segmenting, but are a home-grown bit of protocol.
Once you go past 140 characters, there are parts of the world where your message can’t be delivered, or may be truncated.Report
Oh, yeah. Twitter started in that wonderful space when the Razr was the phone that they gave to executives in the movies and the iPhone hadn’t come out yet.
I totally understand why they were doing the SMS protocol then…
But in the current year?
(But I say this as a desktop twitter user and only an infrequent phone user.)Report
I would bet money that a tweet thread/storm still gets more readership than a blog post because it seems shorter/less difficult/less like school work.Report
Musk is no more interested in freedom of speech then Putin is. he wants to make money; he wants to silence critics; and he wants to remain culturally relevant – in that order. Were he to actually buy Twitter – and Saudi’s weighing in will impact his fund raising – and take it fully private I suspect he’d be way more interested in canceling people he doesn’t agree with or who he thinks make him look bad. Much like Donald Trump he’s got a very big ego and a very thin skin.Report
Not sure what he has done previously to make you think any of that. His free speech advocacy is not anything new.Report
A hedge fund has become the largest stakeholder.
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IOW, they think that it’s going up in the short term, and that they’ll know when to get out.Report
Twitter’s stock price is volatile over the last 5 days. Churny, even.
(I also couldn’t help but notice that Tesla is down 3.66% over the last day and 5.5% over the last 5. Granted, that’s “down” to $985. And if you zoom out a month or more, it’s still up an obscene amount.)Report
You make money on churn with purchases/sales too small to affect the price, not by acquiring 10%,.Report
The Vanguard Group isn’t a hedge fund; it’s a collection of, mostly, boring but sound mutual funds that mainly invest in an index or similarly passive style. It’s a big enough presence in the overall market to buy a bunch of Twitter even as a passive investment. If Vanguard were making some kind of bet or play on Twitter, it would be out of their investment style and, consequently, big news.Report
Vanguard is actually a good place to get no-fee index funds, and what I recommend to people who want to put money ‘in the stock market’.
I mean, I’m sure they’re horrible people in some way and their business is built on eating live baby seals, but, like, they do have a bunch of investment setups that are basically free and fee-less, where you can invest in a fund indexed to the S&P 500 or whatever without any cost.Report
That’s what 90-plus percent of investors should be doing. But if they all did it, what would the indexes be an index of?Report
In that scenario valuations would start to collapse back towards the knowable on paper value of corporate assets plus present value of their expected earnings no?Report
An update:
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WSJ is reporting that it seems likely:
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And now the New York Times.
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Is it official?
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So he negotiated down $1.5B?… walk about money.
Wonder what did it? The executive exit program plus the guaranty of a job on the ‘transition’ team for at least, let’s guess, 18 mos or until something better comes up?
Boards and Execs are easy to buy once you have the financing lined up. It’s all about fiduciary responsibility, don’t’cha know.Report
Fiduciary responsibility was the pitch to Vanguard and Black(star?)
“I’m paying more than Twitter will ever be worth, and you could be sued if you don’t agree.”
The board owns less than 1% of twitter.Report
I’d sue them if they refused. An index fund like that would have absolutely no reason refuse to sell their stocks for more than they were worth.Report
Is it done?
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from a guy who routinely locks critics so they don’t show up in his feed.Report
Are we back to “freedom of speech” also means that “you have to listen to me”?
That didn’t take long.Report
It means I believe, based on Musk’s own Twitter use record, that he will direct the company to deplatform anyone he doesn’t like. He’s no more a free speech absolutist then our own Russel Michaels is.Report
“Wait, so it’s all Will to Power?”
“Always has been.”Report
News you can use:
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Heh, they should just build their own platform…
Going to Truth Social to pwn the, the, um, the Musks.Report
Did the pendulum used to swing this much?
Was there that much a difference between Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and LBJ and Nixon and Carter and Reagan?Report
Did Eisenhower’s election cause .04% of the population to change apps? Am I reading that question correctly?Report
Hey, I’m just trying to think about the pendulum swinging from this cultural dominance to that one.
If you don’t think presidents are worth much as a somewhat lagging indicator, I’d love to hear a better one.Report
I’m just harassing you to help you keep your credibility, because apparently people have stopped being able to distinguish between us.Report
Well, it is certainly easier to drop twitter than it is to move to Canada like lots of people promised… so maybe this time will be different.
I honestly don’t know what Musk is hoping to do with Twitter… I assume it has something to do with embedding short tik-tok like videos and much much better ad targeting and some sort of for-pay influencer scheme better than whatever they were trying to do with Blue.
After that? Maybe adjusting who’s on the naughty/nice list for the secret algorithm pushing timeline tweets. I suppose adjusting some moderation will get all the ink, but I’m put my money on monetization and/or better integration with something like sub-stack… or a gateway to twitter-stack. But mostly money.Report
Well that’s it. Total societal collapse is now imminent.Report
Total societal rejuvenation.
Birds singing, grass touched, f*cks given.Report
I think I just lost a comment in a computer crash, or maybe I already said this elsewhere on this thread. But at the risk of repeating myself: Saul, JS, Philip H, and DavidTC indicated that there was no reason to take this bid seriously. The near-unanimity from the liberal OT side made me wonder if this was ideologically-driven, or based on some common media or liberal talking points. If this does go through, the error should be noted.Report
For me, it’s not the “I don’t think that he’s going to go through with this… I think it’s a ploy…” makes sense.
I could totally see how someone would have looked at what Musk was doing and then said “he’s up to something”.
It’s the “I don’t understand why anyone thinks this is a real offer” that has me saying “this is a personal epistemology problem. Find a new way to look at things that could get you to a place where you can understand why someone else might think it it’s a real offer.”
I’m wrong, like, *ALL THE TIME*. The fact that I’m wrong all the time helps me see “I don’t understand why someone else thinks X” as a problem with *ME*. It’s not an indicator that other people are dumb! IT’S AN INDICATOR THAT I AM DUMB. It’s a sign that I need to figure out how to be less dumb!Report
Maybe “this couldn’t possibly be true, no one could believe it” is just an intensifier.Report
Yes, a personal epistemology problem. Namely, an inability to do math, assess the product value, or explain why Elon Musk’s Tesla drives into a marijuana dispensary on 4/20. And then hits a private jet on Earth day.
I live in a world where these things make sense.
Last week, The DOD goes in front of congress and says “it is critical that we continue to control Twitter/Big Tech in order to Win the War against Russia”. That’s… what do you say, brazen?Report
Twitter accepted the offer.
I know this puts me in the minority, but I’m going to wait and see. Everything Musk has been involved in winds up doing something different than people thought when he got involved. Eg, SpaceX is building very non-traditional rockets, and (at least IMO) is in the process of taking over the heavy launch business. Tesla is fooling with all sorts of things that are possible when you’re an enormous provider of lithium-ion batteries. He’s convinced a bunch of banksters to put $30B or so into taking Twitter private. I’m sure he’s told them more than “We’ll clean up after we give Trump his account back.”Report
^^^This. Twitter is, for the most part, a hell pit, but it does give you a decent amount of control over what appears on your timeline. I’m not going to automatically assume that Elon Musk will make twitter worse, but I might start looking into who among the people I enjoy following have blogs and substacks and stuff. I miss blogs anyway.Report
Just as idle speculation, what could be done with Twitter infrastructure and Starlink?Report
Darn it Fish, you’re starting to make me feel actually good about Musk buying Twitter.Report
Yes, we got it wrong. Mostly the cowardice of the Twitter board of directors. Beyond that I’m fairly certain this won’t actually do anything for free speech, and certainly won’t make Mr. Musk any more welcome in liberal circles.Report
Were you right to have been wrong? Would any thinking person have reached the same conclusions that you reached if only they weren’t blinded by wishful thinking and/or ideology?Report
A great many thinking people reached that conclusion, biases and all. Clearly we got it wrong. What else, exactly do you want from me?Report
Don’t ask.Report
As I said before: I understand “I looked at this and think that he’s up to something else.”
I don’t understand “I don’t see how someone else could look at something and come to a different conclusion than the one I’ve come to.”Report
I’m speculating that the statement “I can’t believe anyone thinks…” means only that (a) I heard a different theory, and (b) that different theory fits my priors. The only question is whether (a) and (b) result in a person actually not being able to believe that anyone thinks differently. I don’t think it has to follow. It could simply be “no one I respect thinks…”.Report
That is the most transparently bad faith trollish thing you’ve ever written. That’s your whole schitck. But hey, way to be consistent I guess.
See, lots of people look at the same things I do – even people here – and reach differing conclusions. I think those conclusions are badly reasoned, but they think the same about me.
And now one guy is going to control one part of the Internet where that happens – albeit a part I don’t interact with because I use my time here. One guy controlling an information stream like that is never good. But a lot of people like the idea because they think it will shut people like me up. Which it won’t. Not here. Not there.
Again, though, C+ for trolling effort.Report
Here’s the copy/paste:
“I don’t understand why anyone thinks this is a real offer”
I didn’t write that. I copied/pasted it.
I absolutely and totally understand looking at a situation and thinking X instead of Y when Y is correct.
I AM WRONG ALL THE TIME.
It’s the “I don’t understand why someone would think Y” that I think is bad.
Again: I’ve got no problem with people not reaching the same conclusions that I’ve reached. Hey, as I said, I’m wrong a lot. It’s when I cannot comprehend how Y could possibly happen and then Y happens that I know that I was in a bad place before. Like, not merely one that didn’t allow me to guess that Y might happen, but one where I was actively believing that it could not.
It’s not the different conclusions.
It’s the being cut off from different conclusions.Report
SO you will notice this thread STARTS with me admitting I got it wrong. I still say at the time, with available evidence, that it appeared to be a major Elon Musk troll. The man shot a car with a dummy into space for crying out loud.
That’s all you are going to get out of me however. Unless you want to ask cogent well formed questions I can respond to.Report
I heard that it was David Bowie.Report
More seriously, we still don’t know if we’re right!
The deal hasn’t gone through until the deal goes through! The deal still might not go through and I saw someone claiming that this is just one of Musk’s head-fakes to do damage to Twitter but it backfired and now he has to run back to staunch the bleeding at Tesla!
Until the deal is officially through or officially cancelled, it’s still Schrodinger’s Deal.
My main argument isn’t “HA! I’M RIGHT YOU’RE WRONG”.
Good God. I’m wrong all the time.
My argument is, and was, “I can totally see how someone could see that this is a real deal.” (And, yes, how someone could look at it and see shenanigans similar to previous shenanigans.)Report
Here’s a take arguing that the deal won’t go through.
Makes sense!
(But it still might.)Report
In fairness, I think it was only DavidTC who used a “no one could possibly believe this”-type formulation.Report
Fair enough.
It’s unfair to say that everybody shared the sentiment.Report
The CEO of Twitter has reportedly just sent out this email:
Parag himself has just tweeted this out:
The last tweet he sent was the one where he said that he didn’t come to an agreement with Elon about Elon getting on the board. (Or, of course, maybe he sent some other ones but then deleted them. In any case, his timeline now shows that one and then the Elon board one.)Report
I love that they sent an email. It’s like not even Twitter considers Twitter to be official.Report
To communicate with your employees by tweeting, you’d have to be Donald Trump.Report
Hm… I wasn’t on Twitter before and all this hubbub indicates I should do… something… so I guess I should sign up for Twitter? And then quit? Or something?
More seriously, my general understanding of Twitter is that it is a barely functioning cesspool that savvy people can make work for them reasonably well but which overall probably does as much harm as good, with individual people’s experiences varying pretty dramatically in terms of their personal calculus. Is that reasonably accurate?
If I’m right… if Twitter seems to kind of teeter on the brink, never quite collapsing but constantly falling short of its potential for good… I imagine the most likely outcome is that Musk pushes it one way or another… and that is most likely to be positive one way or another. Either he opens the floodgates and the whole thing burns itself into the ground OR he figures out how to maximize — or at least begin to realize — its potential and it starts to flourish in a much more positive light.
Maybe that’s just wishful thinking or ignorance or both. But, as a non-user and someone kind of ambivalent to Elon Musk, that’s my two cents.Report
I think the only safe thing to say is that Elon Musk is gonna lose a lot of money and end up owning Twitter. Maybe we should send him a fruit basket.Report
Conspiracy Theory:
He’s going to sell part of it to the government. Wait, not sell. *LEASE*.
Also, it’s the world’s biggest advertising platform and he can put Tesla ads on EVERYBODY’s timeline. And not just Tesla.
So he gives Trump his account back, gets government Twitter contracts out the wazoo, and has real-time zeitgeist feedback that can be used for his other hobbies. Tesla, the tunnel thing, Space X, and so-on.
That’s the conspiracy theory that *I* have seen.Report
Ok, I mean if we’re wrapping our heads in tin foil I’ll indulge in the other direction.
When I think about Trumps victory in ’16 one thing that leaps out for me is that in the run up to the election one of the things that Trumps people did that helped him win was they took away his phone. Like, he went radio silence for around almost a month running up to November. Now obviously HIllary’s deficiencies existed, Comeys insane intervention happened etc etc but shutting Trump up was something that Trumps people could actually affirmatively do.
Now in the run up to the midterms Musk is buying Twitter and is purportedly going to give Trump his account back. This is effectively the opposite of taking Trumps phone away.
So… are we 100% certain Elon Musk is a closet righty out to destroy the left by torching their precious little bird crap crusted insular twitnests? Or is he a closet liberal trying to give Trump the ability to shoot himself in the foot again in the run up to a national election?
And now I’m out of tin foil.Report
We (and I include the banks putting up a bunch of the money to acquire Twitter) already know that Twitter will have to deal with the EU’s impending hate speech and disinformation rules. None of them are going to put up the kind of money they did if they believe Musk is about to announce, “There will be a US operation where content is unrestricted, and a rest-of-the-world operation that monitors and suspends or blocks users who say things like Trump does.”Report
Fair enough, but that’s not sensible enough for tinfoil hat wearing. That just sets me back to “Musk is going to lose a fortune on this.”Report
Musk was going to lose a fortune on Tesla. He was going to lose a fortune several times on SpaceX. In the most recent Wikipedia list, he’s the richest man in the US. He could lose the entire $43B and he’d still be the richest man in the US.Report
Fair enough, maybe he’ll get something useful out of Twitter. I can’t say I’m rooting against him.Report
I’ve said it in other comments here, but… Musk also owns an ISP with a truly global reach.
Zuckerberg spent a lot of money on transoceanic fiber, fooling with a LEO satellite grid, high-flying drones, and (I believe) a geosynchronous satellite trying to provide ISP service to Africa alone. Zuck has since sold his LEO effort to Amazon. Musk’s Twitter purchase may just be the reverse of that — he needed the server farms, the UI and back office teams, and a well-known initial service offering.
Musk is reaching Bezos’s scale. When Bezos bought Whole Foods for $13B all of the commentary was negative. Amazon has tried a number of experiments with those physical facilities, figuring out what works with the rest of the business and what doesn’t. Despite that, he didn’t mess with the basic Whole Foods high-end grocery service.Report
In passing… my wife and I were just talking about how bad Whole Foods is since the take-over; from our perspective he *did* mess with the Whole Foods high-end grocery service.
Whole foods is a mess right now.Report
Bezos, or the pandemic and ongoing supply chain fiascos? All of my local grocers are a mess right now. There’s not a trip to the grocers that I don’t come home cursing these days.Report
Honestly it’s the homogenization of producers; I used to sell to Whole Foods (long time ago) and they were famous for buying from lots and lots of producers and spent a lot of time/money in regional and local programs to bring in interesting foods.
This aspect has been declining for a while; ironically if they had a more robust local/regional network like they had in the past, they’d have fewer supply chain issues.
My suspicion watching it change over since the take-over is that smart people recognized that having so many producers selling small (boutique) products was very inefficient and probably driving up costs.
However, efficiency attempting to drive down costs is precisely what leads to the homogenization of large producers selling inferior products. I say this as someone who was an early supporter of the quirky over-priced foods (even when I was poor) because the quality and variety was un-matched. It saddens me this is gone.Report
As a fellow non-user and equally ambivalent about Musk I share the sentiment.
About the only take I can summon up is to reflect on the amount of power that can be amassed by one person for good or ill and how this fits into the American ideal of a republican democracy.Report
Tech peoples, I have a question:
Is the old previous policy a normal one for a company of this size?
Report
The couple of times I was involved with an effectively hostile takeover, yeah, steps were taken to keep disgruntled employees from screwing with software.Report
Oh, I understand that! I’m just sort of surprised by the whole “it was easy to make unauthorized changes before?” question that I had not considered until the moment that I saw it announced that the policy was ending.Report
Not easy, but possible for select individuals to change the software and push those to the field without anyone else confirming it.Report
I suppose that the dumb question involves The Algorithm.
There are calls to make The Algorithm open source.
But making it open source makes it gameable.
I suppose I can appreciate the need to constantly tweak and mold and pat The Algorithm to keep ahead of the gaming folks, but would an open source one benefit most non-power users?Report
Ah, but which algorithm? And how is the code distributed to end user devices? If I’m a disgruntled employee, you can bet that I’m going to f*ck up algorithms that affect a revenue stream, or produce serious customer outrage. In one instance I remember, for 45 minutes any customer who tuned to the Disney channel — or let their kids do it unattended — got hardcore porn. The code change got pushed, and the person who did it had taken pains to make it hard to override. Several million users sat with blank screens during prime time while their boxes went through a hard reset and download of all code.Report
Well, I mean, I’m kind of a fan of “in backwards chronological order, see tweets from people that you follow, mute the words that you’ve muted, also you get to enjoy advertisements from our sponsors and we will make sure you get the freshest and most appropriate ads for you” when it comes to how tweets are picked for my timeline.
Which, of course, means ads for superhero movies, medication, and sportsbook.
I suppose the stuff in WHAT’S HAPPENING is algorithmically generated.
As is the stuff curated by the so-called “quality filter” (e.g., shadowbanning and whatnot). That’s where I think that a transparent filter would be most interesting for me… but I could see why pre-Musk twitter wouldn’t want it available.Report
I could push a change right now that would break a web site with millions of daily visitors. I’m not supposed to push changes without having at least one other person review them, but I can. People would know it was me, and I might get fired, and possibly prosecuted and/or sued if it were suspected that I had done it maliciously, but our source repository and deployment tools don’t actually prevent me from doing so.Report
Me too, once in particular. Pretty much all of engineering left, and we were escorted a few at a time to our desks to box stuff up, and then to sit in a conference room to wait for our severance checks to be cut.Report
I can’t make changes without at least one other person’s OK, but that person could be at or below my level, and once the change is in I could push it. Like Brandon said, it would be obvious it was me, meaning heavy consequences for anything malicious. (I don’t work on anything user-facing, so I’d have to be very clever indeed to do anything visible besides cause outages.)
In my Dad’s day, on big IBM iron, nothing changed without The Designated Authorities say-so; I’d guess that’s still the case at banks and power plants. With less critical software, we have to be agile to keep up.Report
(looks at how Google Maps routinely releases unannounced app changes that delete features and break workflows)
sounds good to me!Report
One possibility that hadn’t occurred to me – but should have, is Musk is trying to shot the stock he already owns. One way to do that – drive the price down (it’s dropped 5% in two days):
https://www.barrons.com/articles/twitter-stock-price-elon-musk-pressure-51651050941?tesla=yReport
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/04/27/the-place-of-fireReport
It’s getting *WEIRD*.
Okay, fine. Then he tweeted this:
I’m sure that you, an avid reader of Ordinary Times had a good chuckles about this. What the hell? A random sample of 100?!?!? A random sample needs to be 10,000 AT A BARE FREAKIN’ MINIMUM!
Anyway, then he tweeted this:
Wait. What?
Now, I have to admit, I don’t *NECESSARILY* mind bots. I’m deliberately subscribed to several.
There’s one that posts the lyrics to Toto’s Africa.
There’s another from a museum that just posts exhibits from its collection.
And there’s this one:
Anyway, Parag Agrawal has been tweeting about the philosophical nature of bots and talking about the difficulty of accurately measuring how many bots there actually are.
And then this happened:
Anyway.
IT’S GETTING WEIRD.Report
Tesla’s stock price looks to be returning to Earth while Musk is now doing the due diligence he should’ve done before throwing around meme offers. Weird, sure, but not entirely surprising.Report
Twitter is currently trading at around $38.
Musk offered $54.20.
This seems to indicate to me that people don’t think that the deal is going through.
I mean, you could buy shares of Twitter right now and get, what? A 33% return? In less than a year?
But people ain’t doing that.Report
Yeah. I’m trying to be more Zen Master “we shall see” these days, so I’m still unsure where this all leads. But I wouldn’t be too horribly surprised if he did flake.Report
When I game it out, I see Elon saying something like “I was lied to about the number of bots, it wasn’t ~5%, it was ~20%, here’s also what I learned about the algorithm and shadow banning and the Trust and Safety Council and I was lied to so badly that my offer is now $42.69.” (Or some other dumb-assed number that will get people to laugh.)
And we’ll get the people who were screaming “THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD PREVENT MUSK FROM BUYING TWITTER!” will pivot to “THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD FORCE MUSK TO BUY TWITTER!” and the people who were screaming that Musk absolutely needed to buy Twitter to save all of us are going to start explaining that, hey, maybe he doesn’t need to save us. Who can say whether someone needs saving?
And it’ll get dumber.
My guess is that Elon ends up with Twitter, he does *NOT* pay $54.20 for it, and he quickly finds that, he paid way too much for it even at the new share price he negotiates, whatever it’ll end up being.
But that’s just a guess.Report
I *think* that if $TSLA continues to drop and goes below its value from last summer, he’ll flake. The money just won’t be there. If not, then you’re probably right. In any case, “it’ll get dumber” is the safest bet.Report
Just checked the price to confirm and noticed that Twitter was at ~$48 a month ago, ~$52 on April 25th, back to ~$48 one week ago, and, yep, it’s now at $37.92.
Down 21% in the last month.
I can only assume that the people panic selling are people who do not believe that the deal will go through.Report
I’m telling you, he’s shorting the stock . . . .Report
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“They didn’t want me around because I was too cool and they couldn’t handle it”Report
And, on top of everything, Project Veritas got one of the senior engineers on some Third Date stuff.
“If she’s a 10? SHE’S A SPY! YOU STUPID, STUPID ENGINEERS!”
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And there it is:
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