Elon Musk

I think its not just that he's wildly overpaying but also that the writing seems to be on the wall for Twitter so he's gonna left holding the bag when everything goes South. who knows though he'll probably convince the US government to spend $5 billion bailing him out so long as he promises to unban all the Nazis

i guess i see it like when jeff bezos bought the washington post. i don't know how much he paid for it. let's say he overpaid by like 2x, just a ridiculous overpay, like the twitter thing.

but who cares? newspapers don't make money. twitter doesn't make money. bezos and musk could both just subsidize the total financial failure of both companies, out of pocket, or by getting donations from their friends. "you in for $5B to float twitter for another 5 years? should be fun -- elon"

didn't mean to pick on yerac in particular, other than in her capacity as an actual finance expert. a lot of people have been comically wrong about what would happen. that was my point.

he agreed the price at twitter's absolute top of its value, and it's near zenith of cultural relevance.

total fuck up. he can't fix it. (someone paste this when he fixes it.)

You edited out a few posts in the middle, so yeah, it came across exactly how it did. I would be less fast to point out someone else’s wrongness - not their singular wrongness, given people have assumed the same- if I had posted this in the past month but you know.

just curious why anyone in the uk gives a shit about interest rates given how the mortgage market there works.

xp to Karl

Bezos paid $250 million in cash for the Post. Since he made it private, it's impossible to tell if that was a good financial decision (and as you said, he clearly did not buy it as a pure investment)

twitter does make money, but now it likely won't (at least under GAAP accounting), because of the interest it has to pay, xp to karl

I mean yeah I think people constantly underestimate just how stacked the deck is in favor of people like this. they can't fuck up no matter how hard they try. Donald Trump committed like 57 different crimes in office that would get a person like me the death penalty in 57 different ways and yet he just walks around his golf club all day. this Twitter deal looks like one of the stupidest rich guy decisions in history but I have no doubt his finance guys will find a way to make money while completely torpedoing the company. thats America, baby!

I always hope for the big social platforms to die, so hoping for this outcome atm

Newspapers are profitable. They’re just not profitable ENOUGH to keep Wall Street scumbags happy, so they get bought and sold back and forth among the vulture class.

he agreed the price at twitter's absolute top of its value

not quite true - twtr was a lot higher in 2021. if he'd made an offer in 2021 when twtr was trading in the $70s, the offer would probably have been $142.069. relative to that, he thought he was getting a bargain at just $54.20, but failed to account for the fed!

xp to rob $250M in cash! the brinks delivery people must have felt like badasses on that day!

but still, that entire investment is a rounding error to Bezos. less than 1% of his net worth, in fact far less than that (.0017)

to compare, i have in the neighborhood of $10K left to live on. a "Washington Post" to me is $17. Less than a twenty dollar bill. I could take a 20 dollar bill and light it on fire and it would be like buying the post and burning it to the ground, on Bezos terms

Twitter was much more expensive, on relative terms, of course ($50 billion to musk's ~$200B). i realize that's still a lot of money, even to musk

Oh hey

On the @Reuters wire: EXCLUSIVE-TESLA FACES U.S. CRIMINAL PROBE OVER ITS AUTOPILOT TECHNOLOGY-SOURCES

— Dan Levine (@FedcourtJunkie) October 26, 2022

we just need something bad to happen to tesla now

lol xp

hell yeah! finally i'm starting to understand this whole "thoughts and prayers" obsession, it really works!

relative to that, he thought he was getting a bargain at just $54.20, but failed to account for the fed!

― 龜, Wednesday, October 26, 2022 3:43 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

he failed to account for a lot!

he should have hired an accountant

it's true

They usually take things into account.

good calls

We have closed our long position in Twitter. pic.twitter.com/wsmbhxtyz9

— Hindenburg Research (@HindenburgRes) October 4, 2022

not a finance expert caek. I don't remember the context five months ago on this one messageboard but it did drop back down into the 30s for quite some time after. People made money both ways. I don't work there and i don't like the company or even the stock but it made a lot of people money on the news cycles. But most people who were trading it are glad it's over this week.

lmao he's in the building the stock price is still only $53.40. seems like trust in him is shot to the extent that next time he tries to buy a public company a board will be able to reject a strong $ offer on fiduciary grounds just because he's such a liar.

This always happens. Look at ATVI. People play arbitrage but it's dead money. Who wants that tied up when the difference is so little.

i went through an public-private with a company at $16. the stock price was $15.85-$15.95 for four months. a dollar seems like a pretty big implied risk.

and xxp didn't mean to pick on you in particular. everyone was very confident about what would happen. most of us were wrong. just struck me as a particularly unequivocal claim about what people think, from someone who would be in a position to know what smart people would think (or what conventional wisdom was). enough that i remembered it 6 months later, which is more than i can say about my own posts.

I probably do not understand what you are trying to say then.

"Hindenburg" is a rather ominous name for a company that is supposed to be about the future.

he literally tried every conceivable way to get out of the deal. It is a terrible deal. Everyone realizes this.

xp
I was thinking the same thing, so went to their web site and learned they picked that name intentionally, because they focus on finding companies that are close to self-destruction.

Oh, the humanity

they publish short reports. they were shorting twtr like everyone else in the world when elon was trying to get out of it and then they went long when it looked like he was stuck.

xxp oh for sure. but "no one thinks he will pay $54.20 per share for twtr. no one." is a statement that conventional wisdom was that he would succeed in getting out of the deal. which it was!

again, i probably have no clue what you are trying to say. well done. look at the big dick on caek.

my point is not that you were wrong. if you want me to try to explain more clearly then lmk, but if you don't care that's fine.

i am good, i kind of have a memory about you working at twtr? but it's ok.

it's never a good idea to make general points by quoting a specific poster. for some reason they take it personally.

Like, literally I got pings that someone was being a dick about me when i haven't posted here in months and months.

aimless, that's fair. yerac, sorry for doing that.

xxp yes i worked there until last month. it was weird. i wouldn't pay $46bn for it.

so wait - carrying the sink into the lobby was just so he could tweet a pun? What is he, 14 years old?

That reeks of "Steve Jobs making his assistant get him a dress shirt five minutes before his McIntosh demo just so he could show that its floppy disks fit in a breast pocket" energy, except with less of a point

doing stupid stuff for the sake of a bad pun is good imo

Ehh, when you've publicly stated that you plan to lay off most of the workforce? Not necessarily a way to ingratiate yourself into the new digs

I brought these leis for you from Hawaii.

Now I want you to count off from 1-10, and everyone with numbers 1-7, take them off

Meanwhile...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/exclusive-tesla-faces-us-criminal-probe-over-self-driving-claims-sources-2022-10-26/

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a41781263/tesla-us-criminal-investigation-full-self-driving/

(it's about time)

lol i finally got a chance to read the _dark forest_ thingy and saw the author and just lolled irl, it's been a long time since i thought about him. good enough piece though.

“elon musk will never actually buy twitter” is kind of the “no way donald trump would win a presidential election let alone be a serious candidate” of 2022 and ok, yeah, still doesn’t make a lot of sense

The difference is Trump wasn’t desperately trying to get out of being President

since this is the platform thread, is this good

Meta has lost almost 20 percent of its value since the stock market closed three hours ago. pic.twitter.com/P3N6ikcgYw

— Ernie Smith (@ShortFormErnie) October 26, 2022

context is zuck had an earning call in which he announced their profits were way down and he planned to waste even more money on the metaverse