Elon Musk Trying To Back Out Of Deal To Buy Twitter Bot Sandwich
Twitter is a cesspool of broken souls. But it is a politically and socially important cesspool of broken souls, one which Elon Musk hoped to rescue from the manipulation by legions of woke Twittercrats.
I know, I know. You don’t care. You are not on the Twitter. You also hate the Facebook.
But like it or not, what happens on Twitter drives news cycles and is the most efficient form of mass communications in the political world.
It’s also run by despicable people who do everything they can to silence non-leftist speech, to manipulate what you see, and to enable sociopaths and psychopaths so long as they hate Trump and Republicans and Conservatives and the U.S. and Christians, and you get the idea. Push back on that, and you get suspended and denied access to the political debate in the most important and influential platform.
It’s a business and can do what it wants, and if you don’t like it you should go build your own, right? Parler tried that, and it was working wonderfully until the utterly false claim surfaced that J6 was planned on Parler. Through the collusion of big tech, Parler was first emasculated by Google and Apple, getting kicked off their App Stores. Then Amazon Web Services kicked Parler off the internet not long after AWS struck a deal to have its cloud host much of Twitter. Funny how that underreported fact worked. It took Parler months to get back up and running, but it’s a shadow of its former self.
There are other new platforms, but they fragment the market and don’t have the critical mass of Twitter. We’ve tried them, and I have nothing against them, but it’s not Twitter.
I’ve called Twitter a cesspool of broken souls, and I was being kind. But it is a politically and socially important cesspool of broken souls. For a nanosecond relative to the life of the planet, it appeared that there was hope for Twitter. That nonosecond was the bid to purchase Twitter by Elon Musk, who promised to restore free expression and to stop the manipulation by legions of woke Twittercrats.
Twitter initially rejected Musk’s $54 per share bid, called Musk names, told him to pound sand and pay more, and then grabbed the deal as it became clear Musk was grossly overpaying. It couldn’t last, and Musk is backing out, asserting that Twitter has refused to fully disclose the percentage of users who are bots, and for (allegedly) misrepresenting other information. In a role reversal, now Twitter says it will sue to force Musk to purchase the company per the inflated price previously negotiated.
When Elon Musk launched his effort to buy Twitter on April 15, the share price was $54.20
Today it's $34.05.
No wonder the board is suing him to complete the original deal.
— Tom Harrington (@cbctom) July 8, 2022
Elon Musk announced Friday that he will abandon his tumultuous $44 billion offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts. Twitter immediately fired back, saying it would sue the Tesla CEO to uphold the deal….
Twitter could have pushed for a $1 billion breakup fee that Musk agreed to pay under these circumstances. Instead, it looks ready to fight to complete the purchase, which the company’s board has approved and CEO Parag Agrawal has insisted he wants to consummate.
In a letter to Twitter’s board, Musk lawyer Mike Ringler complained that his client had for nearly two months sought data to judge the prevalence of “fake or spam” accounts on the social media platform.
“Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information. Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” the letter said….
In response, the chair of Twitter’s board, Bret Taylor, tweeted that the board is “committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon” with Musk and “plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”
The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.
— Bret Taylor (@btaylor) July 8, 2022
Musk walking away puts Twitter in a tough place, a sinking stock price and no other viable option to realize shareholder value. Maybe it’s just to negotiate a more appropriate price.
Elon Musk is going to end up buying Twitter for $17 and a box of old Pokémon cards.
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) July 8, 2022
So that’s the hot news tonight. I know, you don’t care.
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Comments
Well, I for one DO care that the company be bought by Musk and, let’s say, fundamentally transformed.
… rather than wait to see whether Section 230 will get blown to bits.
I read just recently that the deep state uses Section 230 as a threat with big tech to keep them in line and do their bidding.
TGP has a great article on the deal. Musk is claiming Twitter made material misrepresentations in its SEC filing. Serious, material misrepresentations. If this is true, and I wouldn’t doubt that Twitter did make material misrepresentations, then Twitter is toast. It won’t survive and SEC investigation. It won’t survive investor lawsuits, and it won’t survive the advertiser boycott. They’re toast.
Maybe that was Musk’s goal all along.
If the SEC investigates, that is. We should be prepared for them to simply let it slide.
The timing for letting things of that scale slide is rapidly running out.
Musk didn’t become the richest man in the world at 40 something by not reading the situation correctly.
It’s much bigger than that and TimCast has the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccX9Lq5Bz2M
YouTube is NOT a private company. It has been and continues to be a government propaganda tool and it is being protected. Why else would Biden have created the Ministry of Truth as soon as Musk made his takeover bid?
I’ll bet Musk will never tell us what happened regardless of whether he backs out of the deal or is allowed to win.
Respectfully, if you think the SEC is going to investigate their D buddies at TWTR, I have a bridge to sell you in NYC, There will be no SEC investigation, although I do expect lots of civil suits.
Concur this is prob a negotiating tactic.
Twitter most likely provided info about user #s that was materially inflated and as likely as not knew their numbers were grossly inflated.
Musk has been patiently playing his long game. He almost certainly had a strong suspicion the user numbers were laughably high and wrote an offer that gives him an out if the user info Twitter provides/publishes is materially wrong.
Now Musk has a legally defensible exit, the Twitter BOD is being squeezed very hard between the rock of Musk’s insistence on access to Twitter data (which will expose the BOD’s incompetence or complicity or both) and the hard place of a Twitter stock price that’s down more than 40%.
Twitter BOD HAS to be squirming. My POV is the BOD finds a way to sell – either to Musk or one of his allies (Peter Thiel?) for $20-23Bln. About half the original Musk offer ($44 Bln)
He’s established what it is NOT worth….. Now he has to find out what it IS worth…
Price drops like… (choose your own dirty analogy your freaking potty mouths.)
I expect Musk to walk away despite Twitter suing him to complete the deal and the stock will sink below $10 as bots again takeover and subscribers abandon ship. Someone will probably show up to buy on the “cheap” on behalf of the government but it will just become the internet version of CNN.
If you haven’t noticed, quality alternatives have been exploding and that is where we should be heading too. Not just Breitbart but sites like TimCast (huge) and Dan Bon Gino’s many investments are expanding fast as they invest their profits into quality investigation, reporting and alternative universe applications. Our side is rapidly overtaking the collapsing government-controlled legacy media by plowing their income back into their rapidly growing investments.
Twitter will no more than a memory soon. The challenge for Musk will be getting out while the government beats him over the head in a kangaroo court lawsuit.
lol…twatter will be owned by Russia soon, and man will that make it…
….well just about the same.
Twitter is not worth $44 billion. That is the bottom line.
Given time to think it over, Musk is also aware of the roadblocks that will be thrown in his path should he take ownership which would make it very difficult for him to succeed.
Never, ever, play poker with Musk, as the twatterati are learning.
Even Twitter knew about the “roadblocks”, locking its code after the deal was announced so it could not be tampered with.
I was actually planning on signing up. No reason at the moment because I’d be banned in less than a week.
If Musk were to take it over, then it’d probably take more like 3 weeks or so.
As part of their “unban” process, they ask for more information from you. Like I’m going to give out doxxing material just because Nikole Hanna Jones is a troll that can’t take legitimate criticism and has to report it as offensive.
I am on twitter, so much so that I use tweetdeck… I actually did an online thing and spoke with Ron Coleman… confused and mixed up about using the app (callin) ,, but it happened because of twitter.. The bot thing is very real.. and the censorship thing is unbelievable. When I read about Elon backing out, I was disappointed on a very personal level. Basically he is a smart guy and will not purchase a pig in poke. It was fun for a while.
I hope he knows exactly what he is doing in these post negotiations negotiations.
My tinfoil hat says Musk is playing good old 2D chess here. He’s exposed Twitter’s fraud, and people are never going to unsee that. Now he’s just negotiating over the price. And the longer this drags out, the more the price sinks. The Biden recession guarantees that, even if Twitter had NOT turned out to have turds in its punchbowl.
Now would not be a good time to invest in Twitter stock.
I assume this is so obvious that you can’t even get a good deal on put options.
The best option is to buy popcorn and sit back and watch.
I think you are short at least one D.
I would also add that there may be an element of “timing’ here also as this will be a hot thing going into the midterms which will serve to affect the Twitter influence as well.
I don’t believe any of this is accidental or that Musk isn’t ( wasn’t) prepared for it.
I think he started off to ferret them out and this is a step in the process.
“Delaware Court of
ChanceryChicanery.”Fixed it.
It’s pathetically obvious what Twitter was doing. It’s the same crap that liberals engage in constantly.
They claim that Twitter is only 5% bots*.
*And define ‘bot’ so narrowly that 5% is technically true but materially false. Or engaging in the bullshit of ‘well it’s PROBABLY a bot but since we can’t absolutely 100% prove it with total certainty we’re going to not label it a bot’.
They were “assigned bot at birth,” but now they identify as Nobel-winning political science mavens.
I looked at the birth certificate. It says, “WALL-E”
Hmmm…. Before Parler, there was and still is, Gab. Gab is run by an American from Pennsylvania with a normal family. I use Gab and plan to use it more and more and more as it develops new features. GAB TV has a lot of promise AND AND AND
Gab does very little censoring. And it is now offering Gab Pay, like Paypal. I will probably switch to it.
OTOH, Twit is run by Asian Indians.
Elon Musk was asked by someone when he would hire more foreigners to work at SpaceX, and his answer was he was limited since SpaceX has sensitive technology related to national defense, which means by LAW he can’t hire just anyone from anywhere on the planet.
Twitter and other social media that determine how our culture operates, are also national security matters, and we need law that restricts all such employees to natural born American citizens.
India has CASTES. They have no 1st Amendment. This is NOT their culture, they don’t understand, they couldn’t create it, and they certainly can’t maintain it.
Make America America again: REQUIRE by Statute the hiring of Americans for sensitive tech jobs that affect American culture. Twitter, FB, Google, etc.
I wouldn’t go that far. But I would heartily approve of REPEALING all legislation that makes it illegal or disadvantageous to hire native-born Americans if that’s what you prefer to do.
Echo chambers will always exist, The public however is not present on GAB. You also lack non-political things on GAB.
GETTR is like that, too. Every once in a while you see something non-political, but then it is drowned out by ALL THINGS POLITICAL. I peruse it on lunch or at a slow time at work, but even that habit is waning.
I simply realized that I miss Twitter because of the friends I made on the platform. Nothing else. Now that I have ways to make contact with Twitter friends, I’m perfectly fine without it.
I did hold out a hope to get my original account back, but since Musk is walking away from it, I’m okay with not getting it back. 10 year account gone with no explanation, whatsoever.
Frak Twitter.
Does Taylor understand what discovery is? If they pursue this everything comes in. Whatever Elon thinks he has on them, and what they gave Elon, however incomplete it may be, plus probably a whole bunch of additional production Twitter previously refused to divulge. I don’t see Twitter getting this case sealed either.
Bingo. And one suspects that didn’t happen by chance.
Let me tell you.
Twitter is pure B.S, and they have a very high percentage of false members.
Elon has been well within his rights to question actual membership, which goes to market-share.
Twitter refuses to be forthcoming. Flatly.
The market already dropped 2% just today in after-hours.
Monday, I expect a blood-bath.
They Billion they want to bilk Elon for, which they will NEVER get, is going to be the least of their worries.
They are going to lose 20 Billion in the next week, and they won’t even be able to borrow enough money to pay their Attorneys to go after Musk.
Add to this, that after their meteoric stock value crash, Musk will be able to roll in with his truck and shovel in the remains for 5 cents on the dollar.
If the S.E.C. doesn’t completely destroy them first.
I hear there’s been a lot of outrage from the fake accounts.
I don’t care who you are, that’s just funny.
I’ve noticed in the last few weeks that Twitter is demanding that I create a Twitter user id just to read other peoples’ content.
I interpret that as an attempt to boost their non bot user count in a hurry.
For some reason.
They’ve always done that. And there’s always a way around it. On computers, you just wipe out the “twit*” cookies and try it again, and it eventually gets tired. On phones, you zip past the spot where the “log in” block screen is triggered, before the trigger can hit, then read the rest from the bottom up.
Yes and no. Twitter has always had a popup for me recommending that I log on. It came with the requisite”x” to close it. Annoying but manageable.
But now, I cannot close it. The x is gone and so the former recommendation is now a mandate. They’ve also reworded their message to reinforce that.
I will respond to by not bothering to read any Twitter accounts at all. Twitterati take note: this represents the “so it begins” phase of a process. I recommend cross-posting your material to other sites, something you probably should have been doing all along.
Yes, I’ve noticed the same thing. Sometimes at work I’ll browse Twitter by googling Twitter @jackposobiec (or another account I want to see) as I never log in at work. I used to be able to see tweets with no problem. Just click that X and close the popup.
Now the X to close the popup is gone and they want you to log in to see all the remaining tweets. They do this for all accounts you are looking at even for leftist accounts. I checked a handful as I thought maybe Twitter was being it’s usual leftist self and messing with the right-wing accounts. Twitter wants you to log in and they don’t care what account, left or right, you’re looking at. There is no way around the popup.
I just click login, and then get the x to bypass.
I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, it’s been more restrictive lately….
Good catch.
A few years back, you posted a picture of a dollar bill.
It had something written on it using a sharpie. How many times do you think that message was read before it was “deleted?” How many people and corporations who would love to silence that message were forced to “retweet” it?
Along I-5 outside of Chehalis Wa there is a billboard that has stood for decades. It annoys the living hell out of liberals driving between Seattle and Portland.
Building a different platform is only as difficult as your imagination requires it to be. Liberals have bumper stickers and twitter. The rest of the universe is free game.
😉
For the pst 40 or so years, I’ve had a stamp designed to stamp on currency with the message, GUN OWNER’S MONEY. Haven’t used it in a while. Maybe it’s time to start again.
If he actually backs out (and this isn’t an attempt to get the information and then to renegotiate the deal), he’ll be banned from Twitter the minute it’s clear he’s not buying it.
Its possible the deal can legitimately go south and Musk backs out but like most here have previously stated, I strongly suspect Musk anticipated and prepared for this contingency from the beginning and this is playing out according to plan and Musk is going to severely damage them before purchasing.
Not sure about the “severely damage” part unless it’s related to renegotiating the purchase. He’s talking about ways to make Twitter profitable (for a change), severely damaging it may not be in his best financial interest.
I think he means “severly damage the current business as usual” part. I use buying a house/condo as an analogy here. Musk made an offer, put down earnest money, and then went to do the inspection. Now the owner is panicking because the initial inspection revealed a lot of rot, and now they are trying to prevent additional inspections. Musk has basically shown that Twitter is the Surfside Condo of the social media platforms, and like the other condos in that area, I bet the other social media platforms are in a bit of panic lest their shortfalls in rebar and waterproofing be exposed. And at a minimum, he wants his earnest money back. But in true liberal fashion, the Twitter board is choosing to double down at each juncture. If this continues, then the board will be the subject of lawsuits, and then those board members will likely be looking at their seats on other boards going “poof.” That is when it morphs from chess to dominoes, and the thing is, none of these platforms existed 30 years ago and civilization really isn’t dependent on them. They are at best a luxury indulgence that the world can live without, sort of like frosting.
IMO, the Twitter Board is being foolish. This dispute is about the purchase agreement. Implied is good faith disclosure to Musk and the SEC filings by Twitter are part of that. Discovery, even constrained to topics in the agreement plus regulatory filings are unlikely to help Twitter avoid making public things they have hidden. All in all I believe this a pro forma act by Twitter and they will eventually be forced to renegotiate the sale price.
Re: renegotiate the sale price
Maybe. It depends on whether Musk is any longer interested. IMO it is not entirely within his control. I recall that a lot of his purchase price used his Tesla stock as collateral. While TSLA is down a lot less than some other high-fliers, it is down a lot from its high and the stock market might have further serious declines ahead, for example, if Q2 GDP is reported as negative, as expected, and we meet the definition of a recession – two negative quarters in a row..
I think you’re right. Musk just tweeted the following: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1546344529460174849
They said I couldn’t buy Twitter [smiling Musk]
Then they wouldn’t disclose bot info [laughing Musk]
Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court [laughing even harder Musk]
Now they have to disclose bot info in court [rolling on the floor laughing Musk]
And a photo of Chuck Norris playing chess with the caption “Chuckmate.” https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1546361634347749376
There is a new article over at the Conservative Treehouse that is simply amazing.
Elon Musk Terminates Twitter Purchase Deal, Citing Material Breach of Agreement by Company Refusing to Provide Access to Data
It is a bit lengthy and detailed.
But it describes roughly how the U.S. Government is essentially sponsoring Twitter and others to provide mass surveillance, data mining, propaganda, censorship and lobbying services to them.
It also points out that Twitter cannot financially provide the computer processing demands of it’s platform without supplementary sponsorship.
Very insightful, and well worth the read.
I agree with everything you said. You have the CCP, the leader of Iran, and assorted terrorists on Twitter. But Trump was kicked off for trading barbs with journalists.
I have been kicked off a few time for innocuous tweets such as telling journalists to “learn how to code.” I refused to delete the offending tweet the last time and had to start a new account.
Meanwhile, when I posted a couple celebratory posts of our daughter’s conversion to Judaism, a couple anti-Zionists (anti-Semites) messaged me incoherently about the supposed evils of Israel. Twitter is simultaneously the best form of communication for breaking eyewitness news … and a sewer of the worst of human nature.
The other great thing about Twitter (besides videos available within minutes of breaking news) is it allows, even seems to encourage, blue check journalists to self-reveal how utterly biased and corrupt they are. It’s more shocking than I ever could’ve imagined.
I think this is a ploy for Musk to pay much less.
Does Twitter turn a profit? No. It has run at a loss in every year except 2019. So where do its operating funds come from? New share issuances? That dilutes existing share values. Sigh, this is pretty standard for most entertainment tech companies; they’re mostly crap fads–virtual snake oil. Still, this is not any more scandalous than AoL or Yahoo. Advertisers don’t seem to mind, though, apparently, that mostly bots are racking up fake ad engagements. I assume this is because most online advertisers are also selling snake oil of one variety or another, and their revenues are based on sucker investors, too, instead of actuals sales of snake oil, which aren’t selling because their online advertising is useless (because only bots are engaging with it). Okay, it’s far more automated than the quintessential Amway Scam, but the concept is the same. At least Amway manufactured a few useful products to trick its suckers. Online spammers inundate with abject garbage; seriously, who ever intentionally clicks on an online ad for miscellaneous junk, or is soft-influenced to go buy it later from a once-removed retailer (as if you could find that crap being spammed over your screen anywhere else)? No one will ever prove to me that the ROI is justified, so why is spam growing? Unless “spam” is a centrally-planned psyop to cause extreme anxiety. That actually makes more sense.
We will now learn whether Musk is crazy like a fox or just crazy. If I were forced to choose, I’d flip a coin.
Twitter should cut the ask to $25 or so. It’d still be too much, but it would avoid discovery and the flying monkeys that it will release.
Now: How to change Twitter’s internal culture? Easy-peasy. No one else but me has thought of it, so I want a royalty if it happens: Move the HQ to Huntsville, Alabama. I’m not kidding. See Huntsville ain’t just any town. It’s where the feds stashed Werner von Braun.
Think Houston put the man on the moon? Oh no. Houston was Windows to Huntsville’s Intel. Huntsville put the man on the moon, and designed the SR-71. And Huntsville is chock full of telecommunications engineers. You know, the people who can run Twitter’s innards?
If Twitter cuts the ask and Musk winds up with it, all he has to do is inform the white-privileged playtime anarcho-communist smugsters of San Francisco that the company is moving, and that if they want to stay employed they’ll need to move. The company will foot the relocation bill, but the day will start at 8 a.m., and you WILL be in the office.
I’m not convinced that Musk ever wanted Twitter. I actually think he figures a billion is worth it just to put all of the dirty laundry out there for everyone to see, scratch, and sniff. But if he does want Twitter, I have just given him the way to clean out the dead wood in one fell swoop. LOL
I’d be just as happy, perhaps more, if Twitter got utterly destroyed and went out of business. It’s just a platform for narcissistic time wasting.