Filing: Elon Musk delivers a non-binding proposal to take Twitter private by acquiring all outstanding stock for $54.20 per share, in a cash deal worth ~$43B
not “cancel culture” — are ruining discourse Eugene Robinson / Washington Post : If Elon Musk wants Twitter, he's welcome to it Financial Times : How Elon Musk could fund his $43bn Twitter takeover Gavin Kevin / Gavin's Newsletter : Twitter and the Elon Bid: An Analysis Maxwell Strachan / VICE : Twitter and Elon Musk Are Now at War Tweets: Elon Musk / @elonmusk : I made an offer https://www.sec.gov/... @zerohedge : Well this is awkward: TWTR board hired Goldman to “advise” it that the @elonmusk $54.20 offer is too low. Only problem: Goldman has a SELL rating with a $30 price target. Oops. https://twitter.com/... Elon Musk / @elonmusk : Taking Twitter private at $54.20 should be up to shareholders, not the board @justinsuntron : I believe @Twitter is far from unleashing its full potential, thus I am offering $60 per share to take the platform private. But we fully support the reform initiatives of @elonmusk and would love to see Twitter becoming crypto-native and Web3 friendly. Fred Wilson / @fredwilson : Twitter is too important to be owned and controlled by a single person. The opposite should be happening. Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services. @maxboot : I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less. Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : Friends, Musk/Twitter headlines are all variants of ‘what will Elon do?’ It's a signal of how lost we are. We obsess over one man and his whims because we don't yet have the democratic rule of law needed to govern our information spaces. Without law power is dangerous.🧵[1/8] Keith Rabois / @rabois : The Twitter woke employees are in for a rude awakening. Elon once threatened to fire all the interns for waiting in a long line for coffee at SpaceX and installed cameras to ensure it wouldn't happen again. Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Watching Elon say that you should be allowed to say anything ‘legal’ online, which is what everyone says until they discover how social networks work https://livestream.com/... Mark Cuban / @mcuban : My conclusion, @elonmusk is fucking with the SEC. His filing w/the SEC allows him to say he wants to take a company private for $54.20 😂 Vs his “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured” Price go up. His shares get sold. Profit⬆️ SEC like WTF just happened. Ryan Sarver / @rsarver : “Why hasn't twitter product improved much over the years?” There hasn't been a single day without drama since the company started. Brian Chappatta / @bchappatta : For those wondering, Elon Musk has about $2.95 billion of “cash,” as estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He just made a $43 billion cash offer for Twitter. You can figure out where that cash will come from. https://twitter.com/... Mark Cuban / @mcuban : Want to see the whole world lose their shit ? Get Peter Thiel to partner with Elon and raise the bid for Twitter @mikeisaac : Musk admits he's “literally on the toilet” when tweeting sometimes, stream of consciousness tweets (how is reporting on this my job) Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : “I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it...I could technically afford it. But this is not a sort of way to make money... I don't care about the economics at all.” - Elon Musk talking about his Twitter bid at TED right now @sbf_ftx : 1) FWIW, some thoughts on what a decentralized Twitter might look like: @zei_squirrel : I wonder what a twitter owned by elon musk would have done about the account which is tracking his flights that he tried to shut down https://twitter.com/... Mark Cuban / @mcuban : Every major tech company , Google, fb, et al is on the phone with their anti trust lawyers asking if they can buy Twitter and get it approved. And Twitter is on the phone with their lawyers asking which can be their white knight. Gonna be interesting https://twitter.com/... Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : Abdicating our information spaces to private control concentrates unaccountable power in the regime of #SurveillanceCapitalism. Our fate should not depend on the whims of individuals. What they decide today may be undone tomorrow. No democracy can survive these conditions.[8/8] Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : Just as Mr. Zuckerberg leans on “free speech” to justify corrupt information flows that advance data extraction, Mr. Musk takes center stage with the same rhetoric. It's a shameless distortion of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. [6/8] Marc Andreessen / @pmarca : The future of democracy rests on the many pro-censorship media billionaires crushing the one anti-censorship media billionaire. Alex Heath / @alexeheath : Can't make this stuff up: It's “focus week” for employees at Twitter. They had Monday off and the rest of the week is supposed to be heads-down on projects with minimal meetings. Now they wake up to Elon's hostile takeover playing out. Kara Swisher / @karaswisher : Money speaks: Wall Street does not believe this deal is happening. The spread is enormous. https://twitter.com/... @verysmallriver : i was on tumblr when yahoo had to sell it for $3 million after buying it for $1.1 billion. we were all a little bit responsible for losing yahoo a billion dollars. and with that type of collective effort, i believe we here on twitter can lose elon musk even more Dustin Moskovitz / @moskov : If I were a Tesla investor I'd be asking myself how much liquidity the boss has right now. Carl Quintanilla / @carlquintanilla : * TWITTER WILL HOLD AN ALL HANDS MEETING WITH EMPLOYEES AT 2PM PACIFIC TO DISCUSS MUSK OFFER -SOURCE @reuters $TWTR Lt. Winslow / @lt_winslow : $43b seems like a lot of money to spend to stop people from tweeting out this photo https://twitter.com/... Taylor Hatmaker / @tayhatmaker : fedex knocked on my door literally two minutes ago and handed me this i am not lying https://twitter.com/... Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene / @repmtg : Kill freedom of speech to save democracy? Say you're a communist. Just say it. You're actually scared of people freely discussing ideas and saying words. You're terrified of the impact on politics when truth isn't censored. I'm offended by your weakness. https://twitter.com/... Robert Reich / @rbreich : We are watching a hostile takeover of Twitter by the richest man in the world who regularly tries to silence critics. This is what oligarchy looks like. Nilay Patel / @reckless : Elon proposes banning spam bots on Twitter which... hey did you know spam is not actually illegal under the First Amendment? So he is writing a speech regulation because he doesn't like the experience of other people's speech. Nilay Patel / @reckless : “Civilizational risk is decreased the more we increase trust in Twitter as a platform” is an incredible thing for anyone to say, let alone Elon Musk Nilay Patel / @reckless : This conversation between Chris Anderson and Elon Musk about speech regulation is the most depressingly stupid thing I have heard in a long time. Chris really mentioned “fire in a crowded theater,” which is like sign number one you have no idea what you're talking about. Alex Stamos / @alexstamos : There is no way you unlock the value of Twitter by making it 99.9% porn, fake Ray-Ban and male enhancement ads. He really doesn't seem to understand the adversarial nature of running any online speech platform. @elonmusk, happy to privately speedrun my trust and safety class! https://twitter.com/... Chris Anderson / @tedchris : THIS! Here's a better link to watch @elonmusk live. https://livestream.com/... Come join us. Something amazing is scheduled to start in about 15 minutes time. Nate Silver / @natesilver538 : Pillars of democracy: * Free and fair elections * Separation of powers * Equal rights for all US citizens * Content moderation on Twitter https://twitter.com/... Lauren Boebert / @laurenboebert : .@ElonMusk is showing us that free speech IS worth fighting for! I hope Twitter's board sees the light. If they reject his offer, the company's stock will likely never recover. Casey Newton / @caseynewton : There's an obvious solution to this: Twitter employees should all work on a severed floor https://twitter.com/... Scott Nover / @scottnover : Elon Musk can buy Twitter but he still can't tweet about Tesla without a lawyer's approval. https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : The market doesn't believe Twitter's shareholders will accept Elon's offer. It would have jumped to $54 otherwise. Expect the stock to tank if so and for pressure on Parag to show meaningful user or revenue growth this year for passing this up. Jack couldn't, can he? https://twitter.com/... @realwillybot : Elon Musk after he owns 100% of Twitter https://twitter.com/... Matt Levine / @matt_levine : at the risk of taking this too seriously, i will say it's kind of weird for the richest man in the world to say “this is the public square, i will take it private.” https://twitter.com/... Scott Nover / @scottnover : Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has nothing to do with “free speech.” My latest essay in @qz: https://qz.com/... Maya Zehavi / @mayazi : Twitter as a private company just reduces the little public accountability social media have as fiduciaries to the public, but corporations (public or private) have a right to do as they will provided it's legal. Limiting free speech on social media is curation & moderation https://twitter.com/... Glenn Greenwald / @ggreenwald : Like everyone, I have no idea what Elon Musk's intentions are with Twitter. But what I know for sure - having seen it first-hand with Substack, Rumble, Callin - is that few things are more urgent than platforms devoted to free speech and discourse, rejecting messaging control. https://twitter.com/... Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : The result: people, society, & democracy are at the mercy of the individuals who exercise ownership and/or executive control over information. We beg Mr. Zuckerberg to stop the social wreckage, honor our privacy, protect us from disinformation, but he refuses.@mariaressa [2/8] Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : Democracy will only advance with laws & institutions designed to guarantee our knowledge rights and the integrity of information in the digital century. Absent law, we're forced to worry,'What will Elon do?' The emperors have all the clothes, while we run naked. @Moonalice [5/8] Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : As Constitutional scholar @tribelaw tirelessly repeats, the Bill of Rights pertains only to government action, not to private companies. [7/8] https://thehill.com/... Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : We've learned FB is big business in which corrupt information is positively correlated with revenue. FB's profit-maximizing imperative ignores us. Privacy is destroyed. Corrupt information triumphs. Society fractures. Profit wins. Only law can change this. @carolecadwalla [3/8] @beniaminmincu : Twitter has effectively become the defacto Town Square for the world. It is important for humanity that free speech be preserved, and twitter's potential be unlocked. Perhaps the optimal path would be for @elonmusk to buy twitter & immediately open source and decentralize it. https://twitter.com/... Shoshana Zuboff / @shoshanazuboff : Mr. Musk wants to join the gods who rule the information space and control answers to the essential questions of knowledge, authority, and power in our time: Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides? But we never elected them to govern. We need laws not men.[4/8] Ryan Moore / @ryanmoore : @elonmusk ... And we get more clarity on the significance and importance of Elon owning Twitter. If Elon owns Twitter this will also push Facebook/Instagram, TikTok and possibly Google/YouTube to allow a lot more free speech than they do now. Alex Kantrowitz / @kantrowitz : Pretty clear: The deal is not going through at this number. Twitter stock fell today despite the premium Musk offered. The real story now is what happens next. https://twitter.com/... Dan Primack / @danprimack : This is another reminder of why tech founders love dual class shares and voting control. Zuck turned down Yahoo. Spiegel turned down Facebook. Both at good prices. Twitter has 3 founders, and none has any real power to stop this (save for Jack w/ one board vote and <3% stock). @amy_siskind : As I have said before, no good will come of megalomaniac Elon Musk owning this platform. We will find other alternatives over time. And frankly with him letting back all the dangerous nut jobs, even Facebook is better for now, warts and all. @szhang_ds : Free speech absolutism sounds nice in theory. But the reality is that the large majority of content moderation is not the frequently-debated areas of hate speech/misinfo, but rather areas such spam, scams, etc. Even Elon himself has criticized crypto scammers after all. https://twitter.com/... Carol Roth / @caroljsroth : “I'm going to leave Twitter if Elon Musk takes over” is the new “I'm going to move to Canada if Trump wins”. Fred Wellman / @fpwellman : This is just an awful idea. https://twitter.com/... Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Does this mean he views Mark Zuckerberg, whose company's board he sits on, as a “pro-censorship media billionaire”? https://twitter.com/... @jbouie : i guess “woke” means drinking coffee now https://twitter.com/... Brian Stelter / @brianstelter : “My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk adds. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” Here's the text from the SEC filing 👇🏼 https://twitter.com/... Dan Primack / @danprimack : Very notable that Twitter stock isn't rising close to Musk's bid. Traders either don't believe he's serious, that he can get the cash or that the board will accept. Dan Primack / @danprimack : If launched as a tender offer, yes. If launched the way Musk launched it, then no. https://twitter.com/... Liz Hoffman / @lizrhoffman : Hostile bidders generally need two out of three things in their corner: shareholder support, cold hard cash, and a board with few alternatives. Right now it looks like Elon Musk is 0 for 3. Latest w/ @CaraRLombardo on his quixotic bird hunt https://www.wsj.com/... Anthony DeRosa / @anthony : It's unclear how much $TWTR Prince Alwaleed still owns. His last filing was at the end of 2016 which stated 34,948,975 shares of Common Stock https://www.sec.gov/... Ashlee Vance / @ashleevance : To help Twitter's board stay focused during their deliberations, Elon will have a Falcon 9 hover over the Twitter HQ for the next several days Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : Musk's thoughts on policing users: * if it's in a gray area, leave it up * more temporary suspensions, be careful with permanent bans * you need to be able to say stuff people disagree with Twitter, of course, would argue it already does all of this stuff Nicholas Carlson / @nichcarlson : Didn't fully appreciate before today how much the MAGA/Barstool/Convoy types lay claim to Elon Musk as one of their own. @semil : Just purely from a financial POV, Elon's bid for Twitter gives the company a 38% premium from the day his large investment was publicly disclosed. Unlikely anyone else would pay such a premium. Q - in previous takeover attempts, what are the % premiums typically offered? Julian Sanchez / @normative : (a) This is probably a troll and/or pump & dump. (b) If Musk DOES buy Twitter, he's fairly quickly going to realize a whole lot of moderation is necessary to keep it viable (c) If he's really committed to running a Gab clone as a vanity project, something else becomes dominant. https://twitter.com/... Packy McCormick / @packym : $54.20. He put 420 in the offer price 😂 Somebody please bid him up to $69 @ivanthek : Funding not yet secured. https://twitter.com/... Sherrilyn Ifill / @sifill_ldf : Why settle for a board seat when you can own & control the entire thing? https://twitter.com/... Parker Molloy / @parkermolloy : It's honestly wild that there are a bunch of these conservative guys just licking their chops at the prospect of a weird vindictive dictator type running a social media company. What does “woke” even mean in this context? https://twitter.com/... Nic Carter / @nic__carter : @MaxBoot It's a private company, just build your own :) @iamharaldur : Thousands of amazing people work at Twitter. Their job is to build and maintain a product used by hundreds of millions globally. That is an incredibly hard job and we don't always succeed. But I'm proud to work alongside them and today I tip my hat in respect. @dan_rowinski : “You do wonder if he's thought this through,” says Stephen Diamond, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. Going out on a wild limb here but . . . no? https://twitter.com/... Greg Olear / @gregolear : Musk just loves manipulating the market. https://twitter.com/... Eric Garland / @ericgarland : Well, it was just reported that he's been using this company to run what appear to be pump-and-dump scams using “market sentiment” driven by Twitter. Owning the company would be in the interest of Musk, and his foreign intelligence backers. https://apnews.com/... Peter Kafka / @pkafka : Would be an excellent Truth Social owner. Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : Is there a Plan B if the board rejects your offer? “There is,” Musk says, but declined to share. Gabe Rivera / @gaberivera : Would love if @TEDchris had asked Elon Musk to list, in his view, the most serious examples of free speech being limited on Twitter... Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : in other words, whose definition of “legal”? https://twitter.com/... Andreas Proschofsky / @suka_hiroaki : Musk's idea of how the Twitter edit button might work without people abusing it is: Only make it available for a short time and also reset retweets and favs. So. Uhm. Like: Deleting and making a new tweet? Wow, that guy has really though hard about the problem #TED2022 Peter Kafka / @pkafka : It's almost like he hasn't thought this through. https://twitter.com/... Sarah Frier / @sarahfrier : people should get only a limited time to edit tweets and “probably the thing to do on the edit is to zero out all retweets and favorites” so that those people don't get caught promoting something where meaning has changed @mikeisaac : lol, he takes a dig at zuckerberg's owning Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and the share structure surrounding it, so that “Mark Zuckerberg the 14th” would still own it somewhere down the line. “We wouldn't have that at Twitter.” —EM Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Having talked to employees at social networking companies, this may be easy to declare, but what country's laws is Twitter going to choose to abide by? India's laws look a lot different from those in the US. https://twitter.com/... Mollie / @mzhemingway : Democracy requires attacks on the culture of free speech, more authoritarianism, says WP guy. https://twitter.com/... Sarah Frier / @sarahfrier : Musk says, in terms of speech he would be “very reluctant to delete things.. very cautious with permanent bans. Time outs are better.” https://twitter.com/... Dan Primack / @danprimack : Elon says free speech is working on $TWTR if “someone you don't like can say something you don't like.” If so, then Twitter is free speech central. Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : This is literally what Twitter does now. https://twitter.com/... Kelly Evans / @kellycnbc : “If in bounds, let the speech exist. If it's a grey area, I would say, let the tweet exist. If there's a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet. I'm not saying I have all the answers here.” -Musk TED talk @CNBCTheExchange $TWTR @derektmead : prolonged Twitter usage is correlated with the same neurological outcomes as air duster addiction https://twitter.com/... @mikeisaac : he also started the talk basically doing the “hand over mouth” emoji but like, irl. (he tweeted that last week when coming off the board) Dan Primack / @danprimack : Elon: Goal is to maintain as many shareholders as possible, as a private co. Well, that's one way to help finance the bid. Says he doesn't care about Twitter as a biz, per se. He cares about it as a utility. “I don't care about the economics at all.” (those shareholders do) Casey Newton / @caseynewton : “I don't care about the economics at all,” Elon Musk says of his plans to buy Twitter @engadget : Watch Elon Musk's TED talk live for free https://www.engadget.com/... https://twitter.com/... Dan Primack / @danprimack : Two things that aren't mutually exclusive: 1/ Elon is serious about his offer. 2/ Twitter will determine it isn't a serious offer. Farron Cousins / @farronbalanced : Imagine having enough money to help cure diseases, end poverty and famine, or to house the homeless, but instead spending it to buy Twitter because you have some kind of God complex. https://twitter.com/... Gerald Butts / @gmbutts : The Saudis say no dice to Elon. https://twitter.com/... Steve Schmidt / @steveschmidtses : Hmmmm. Better call Jared. https://twitter.com/... @armchairdude : Maybe this whole Elon Musk Twitter thing is the catalyst that gets someone to sit up and finally attempt to build a better Twitter. https://www.techmeme.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : Elon soon to discover that “free speech around the globe” means very different things in different countries, none of whom like having their laws broken and who will happily retaliate against Tesla and SpaceX to spite the world's richest man https://t.co/cI7RH2iFJ4 https://t.co/ORodO5cqeZ Liz Hoffman / @lizrhoffman : The world's richest man should be able to buy anything he wants. But can Elon Musk actually buy Twitter? (Spoiler: he doesn't have the money and getting it will be harder than it sounds) https://www.wsj.com/... Sam Biddle / @samfbiddle : I don't understand why if you were a billionaire you'd even want to use twitter, let alone own it, I'd be on a beach paying robots to fight each other every day. the compulsion to control the means of posting when you have enough money to never post again is so bizarre to me @litcapital : Elon Musk went from: 1. teasing changes to twitter over a poll 2. buying a 9.2% stake 3. accepting then declining a board seat 4. getting sued by twitter shareholders over delayed disclosure 5. offering to buy ALL of twitter in just a few weeks. absolute rollercoaster Christina Warren / @film_girl : I also don't think Elon is even the worst-case scenario here. I think a far scarier scenario is if a competing PE bid to go private comes in. Sigh. Love to all the Flock tweeps out there right now. I'm sorry you're dealing with this. Tom Brady / @tombrady : If you buy twitter can you delete the combine photo? @elonmusk @podsaveamerica : NEW: @jonfavs asks Twitter co-founder @ev his thoughts on Elon: https://twitter.com/... Alex Sherman / @sherman4949 : In January, @DineshDSouza floated the idea of buying a social media platform at @elonmusk Musk responded “interesting ideas.” https://twitter.com/... Jason Pontin / @jason_pontin : Needless to say, this is almost certainly a publicity stunt. Twitter is not for sale to Elon Musk for $41B. The company's market cap is currently $45B. I don't know what “the Musk premium” is for Twitter's shareholder, but it's got to be at least 15%. @sbf_ftx : 2) Tweets go on-chain, encrypted; the sender chooses who has access to them (i.e. who can decrypt). In some sense this unifies DMs and tweets—DMs are just tweets with the privacy setting of “only Jill”. @mikeisaac : Prince alwaleed back in the mix. Kingdom holdings has been in Twitter as a shareholder since before it went public. this is board signaling fwiw. cough up more money, he says! https://twitter.com/... Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel : i feel like what we're seeing this is just the rich person version of like...meme stock/robinhood stuff. just this idea of being bored and throwing money around to make chaotic stuff happen. hostile takeovers and market manipulation as a service lol @punk6529 : feels like a missed chance to round this up to $69. https://twitter.com/... Aaron Zamost / @zamosta : I wonder how Twitter's search for a head of communications is going. Tim Carmody / @tcarmody : One problem with Musk owning Twitter is that it turns into a dysfunctional, nefarious place (that is, more so) through his own policies; another problem is that he gets bored with it and lets it wither... which further turns it into a dysfunctional, nefarious place Nigel Farage / @nigel_farage : This is the best news for free speech in years! https://www.bloomberg.com/... Dustin Moskovitz / @moskov : Several people saying “he'll just borrow”. I think that would be by far the biggest loan to an individual in history? And would require even more shares to collateralize. Not a cost free option for him and still likely to impact share price. Kurt Wagner / @kurtwagner8 : Twitter activists: We need a CEO who isn't distracted with another job! Different Twitter activist: I'd like to run this company alongside my car business and my rocket ship business! @nameshiv : The next time you think youre overreacting, remember that Elon Musk is really willing to pay $43 billion just to prevent people from laughing at him on Twitter Sean Garrett🇱🇹🇺 🇦 / @sg : I wonder why the PTSD of working in Twitter comms never seems to go away. It's a mystery. Christina Warren / @film_girl : Twitter has been my “home” on the internet for 15 years. It's my place. I just don't want my home to be destroyed. Ryan Mac / @rmac18 : Been trying to parse the management lesson in this, which seems to be that it's ok to intimidate and surveil the lowest level of workers for getting coffee? https://twitter.com/... Nic Carter / @nic__carter : I don't think the regime will allow Elon to control the most important media organization out there. Not if he bids $100 per share. It's not about money, it's about a corporate entity that is an outsourced and fully cooperative arm of the state. Will Oremus / @willoremus : Elon Musk cares very genuinely and deeply about freedom of speech for one person, and that person is Elon Musk https://twitter.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : Might as well stream this live on their IR site because it'll leak in real time anyway. https://twitter.com/... Chris O'Brien / @obrien : Given that Musk has publicly lied about having such funding before, this is a legitimate concern for the board before it wastes time and resources. It's also critical for everyone to know precisely how he would finance it. Ali Rayl / @alirayl : Elon: wtf did I just buy TERA: A modern cloud service, my man. What did you think you bought TERA: Oh and we hate that we've spent the last 9 months scoping and estimating and Jira-ing so we quit. We obfuscated the entire codebase on our way out. ggs! Chris O'Brien / @obrien : If I'm reading this filing correctly, the only thing he has sent so far is this “letter” and text. Twitter board should simply acknowledge receipt and ask him to send details of the financing he has secured to support such an offer in order for them to consider it seriously. https://twitter.com/... Ali Rayl / @alirayl : Elon: okay but unsuspend Trump TERA: sooooo there's a scale problem here and that'll take down the service for 4 weeks Elon: ?! TERA: Too many tweets and likes and followers. We have to rehydrate the entire service and the only way to do it is while it's offline Elon: JFC Will Oremus / @willoremus : my tweets don't always hold up well but this one seems to be doing ok so far today https://twitter.com/... Dave Pell / @davepell : Elon Musk is Donald Trump with money. If he owns Twitter, I'm out. Josh Barro / @jbarro : Honestly that seems like a bizarre management approach. Shouldn't people be in meetings or doing individual work as appropriate for their job functions at a given time, rather than a company-wide shift? https://twitter.com/... @antoniogm : If Elon takes over, there'll be a slew of left-wing Gabs and Parlers as the super-woke threaten to leave Twitter, they'll all fail like the right-wing versions did, and it'll be glorious to watch the “just build your own” people sulk and wail.
Well this is awkward: TWTR board hired Goldman to “advise” it that the @elonmusk $54.20 offer is too low. Only problem: Goldman has a SELL rating with a $30 price target. Oops. https://twitter.com/...
I believe @Twitter is far from unleashing its full potential, thus I am offering $60 per share to take the platform private. But we fully support the reform initiatives of @elonmusk and would love to see Twitter becoming crypto-native and Web3 friendly.
Twitter is too important to be owned and controlled by a single person. The opposite should be happening. Twitter should be decentralized as a protocol that powers an ecosystem of communication products and services.
I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
Friends, Musk/Twitter headlines are all variants of ‘what will Elon do?’ It's a signal of how lost we are. We obsess over one man and his whims because we don't yet have the democratic rule of law needed to govern our information spaces. Without law power is dangerous.🧵[1/8]
The Twitter woke employees are in for a rude awakening. Elon once threatened to fire all the interns for waiting in a long line for coffee at SpaceX and installed cameras to ensure it wouldn't happen again.
My conclusion, @elonmusk is fucking with the SEC. His filing w/the SEC allows him to say he wants to take a company private for $54.20 😂 Vs his “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured” Price go up. His shares get sold. Profit⬆️ SEC like WTF just happened.
For those wondering, Elon Musk has about $2.95 billion of “cash,” as estimated by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He just made a $43 billion cash offer for Twitter. You can figure out where that cash will come from. https://twitter.com/...
“I'm not sure that I will actually be able to acquire it...I could technically afford it. But this is not a sort of way to make money... I don't care about the economics at all.” - Elon Musk talking about his Twitter bid at TED right now
I wonder what a twitter owned by elon musk would have done about the account which is tracking his flights that he tried to shut down https://twitter.com/...
Every major tech company , Google, fb, et al is on the phone with their anti trust lawyers asking if they can buy Twitter and get it approved. And Twitter is on the phone with their lawyers asking which can be their white knight. Gonna be interesting https://twitter.com/...
Can't make this stuff up: It's “focus week” for employees at Twitter. They had Monday off and the rest of the week is supposed to be heads-down on projects with minimal meetings. Now they wake up to Elon's hostile takeover playing out.
Abdicating our information spaces to private control concentrates unaccountable power in the regime of #SurveillanceCapitalism. Our fate should not depend on the whims of individuals. What they decide today may be undone tomorrow. No democracy can survive these conditions.[8/8]
Just as Mr. Zuckerberg leans on “free speech” to justify corrupt information flows that advance data extraction, Mr. Musk takes center stage with the same rhetoric. It's a shameless distortion of the First Amendment and Bill of Rights. [6/8]
i was on tumblr when yahoo had to sell it for $3 million after buying it for $1.1 billion. we were all a little bit responsible for losing yahoo a billion dollars. and with that type of collective effort, i believe we here on twitter can lose elon musk even more
We are watching a hostile takeover of Twitter by the richest man in the world who regularly tries to silence critics. This is what oligarchy looks like.
There is no way you unlock the value of Twitter by making it 99.9% porn, fake Ray-Ban and male enhancement ads. He really doesn't seem to understand the adversarial nature of running any online speech platform. @elonmusk, happy to privately speedrun my trust and safety class! htt…
Elon proposes banning spam bots on Twitter which... hey did you know spam is not actually illegal under the First Amendment? So he is writing a speech regulation because he doesn't like the experience of other people's speech.
Pillars of democracy: * Free and fair elections * Separation of powers * Equal rights for all US citizens * Content moderation on Twitter https://twitter.com/...
THIS! Here's a better link to watch @elonmusk live. https://livestream.com/... Come join us. Something amazing is scheduled to start in about 15 minutes time.
Kill freedom of speech to save democracy? Say you're a communist. Just say it. You're actually scared of people freely discussing ideas and saying words. You're terrified of the impact on politics when truth isn't censored. I'm offended by your weakness. https://twitter.com/...
.@ElonMusk is showing us that free speech IS worth fighting for! I hope Twitter's board sees the light. If they reject his offer, the company's stock will likely never recover.
This conversation between Chris Anderson and Elon Musk about speech regulation is the most depressingly stupid thing I have heard in a long time. Chris really mentioned “fire in a crowded theater,” which is like sign number one you have no idea what you're talking about.
The market doesn't believe Twitter's shareholders will accept Elon's offer. It would have jumped to $54 otherwise. Expect the stock to tank if so and for pressure on Parag to show meaningful user or revenue growth this year for passing this up. Jack couldn't, can he? https://twit…
at the risk of taking this too seriously, i will say it's kind of weird for the richest man in the world to say “this is the public square, i will take it private.” https://twitter.com/...
Twitter as a private company just reduces the little public accountability social media have as fiduciaries to the public, but corporations (public or private) have a right to do as they will provided it's legal. Limiting free speech on social media is curation & moderation https…
Like everyone, I have no idea what Elon Musk's intentions are with Twitter. But what I know for sure - having seen it first-hand with Substack, Rumble, Callin - is that few things are more urgent than platforms devoted to free speech and discourse, rejecting messaging control. ht…
“My offer is my best and final offer and if it is not accepted, I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder,” Musk adds. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.” Here's the text from the SEC filing 👇🏼 https://twitter.com/...
Very notable that Twitter stock isn't rising close to Musk's bid. Traders either don't believe he's serious, that he can get the cash or that the board will accept.
The result: people, society, & democracy are at the mercy of the individuals who exercise ownership and/or executive control over information. We beg Mr. Zuckerberg to stop the social wreckage, honor our privacy, protect us from disinformation, but he refuses.@mariaressa [2/8]
Democracy will only advance with laws & institutions designed to guarantee our knowledge rights and the integrity of information in the digital century. Absent law, we're forced to worry,'What will Elon do?' The emperors have all the clothes, while we run naked. @Moonalice [5/8]
As Constitutional scholar @tribelaw tirelessly repeats, the Bill of Rights pertains only to government action, not to private companies. [7/8] https://thehill.com/...
It's unclear how much $TWTR Prince Alwaleed still owns. His last filing was at the end of 2016 which stated 34,948,975 shares of Common Stock https://www.sec.gov/...
Hostile bidders generally need two out of three things in their corner: shareholder support, cold hard cash, and a board with few alternatives. Right now it looks like Elon Musk is 0 for 3. Latest w/ @CaraRLombardo on his quixotic bird hunt https://www.wsj.com/...
Free speech absolutism sounds nice in theory. But the reality is that the large majority of content moderation is not the frequently-debated areas of hate speech/misinfo, but rather areas such spam, scams, etc. Even Elon himself has criticized crypto scammers after all. https://t…
This is another reminder of why tech founders love dual class shares and voting control. Zuck turned down Yahoo. Spiegel turned down Facebook. Both at good prices. Twitter has 3 founders, and none has any real power to stop this (save for Jack w/ one board vote and <3% stock).
As I have said before, no good will come of megalomaniac Elon Musk owning this platform. We will find other alternatives over time. And frankly with him letting back all the dangerous nut jobs, even Facebook is better for now, warts and all.
We've learned FB is big business in which corrupt information is positively correlated with revenue. FB's profit-maximizing imperative ignores us. Privacy is destroyed. Corrupt information triumphs. Society fractures. Profit wins. Only law can change this. @carolecadwalla [3/8]
Twitter has effectively become the defacto Town Square for the world. It is important for humanity that free speech be preserved, and twitter's potential be unlocked. Perhaps the optimal path would be for @elonmusk to buy twitter & immediately open source and decentralize it. htt…
Mr. Musk wants to join the gods who rule the information space and control answers to the essential questions of knowledge, authority, and power in our time: Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides? But we never elected them to govern. We need laws not men.[4/8]
@elonmusk ... And we get more clarity on the significance and importance of Elon owning Twitter. If Elon owns Twitter this will also push Facebook/Instagram, TikTok and possibly Google/YouTube to allow a lot more free speech than they do now.
Pretty clear: The deal is not going through at this number. Twitter stock fell today despite the premium Musk offered. The real story now is what happens next. https://twitter.com/...
Just purely from a financial POV, Elon's bid for Twitter gives the company a 38% premium from the day his large investment was publicly disclosed. Unlikely anyone else would pay such a premium. Q - in previous takeover attempts, what are the % premiums typically offered?
(a) This is probably a troll and/or pump & dump. (b) If Musk DOES buy Twitter, he's fairly quickly going to realize a whole lot of moderation is necessary to keep it viable (c) If he's really committed to running a Gab clone as a vanity project, something else becomes dominant. h…
It's honestly wild that there are a bunch of these conservative guys just licking their chops at the prospect of a weird vindictive dictator type running a social media company. What does “woke” even mean in this context? https://twitter.com/...
Thousands of amazing people work at Twitter. Their job is to build and maintain a product used by hundreds of millions globally. That is an incredibly hard job and we don't always succeed. But I'm proud to work alongside them and today I tip my hat in respect.
“You do wonder if he's thought this through,” says Stephen Diamond, an associate professor of law at Santa Clara University. Going out on a wild limb here but . . . no? https://twitter.com/...
Well, it was just reported that he's been using this company to run what appear to be pump-and-dump scams using “market sentiment” driven by Twitter. Owning the company would be in the interest of Musk, and his foreign intelligence backers. https://apnews.com/...
Musk's idea of how the Twitter edit button might work without people abusing it is: Only make it available for a short time and also reset retweets and favs. So. Uhm. Like: Deleting and making a new tweet? Wow, that guy has really though hard about the problem #TED2022
people should get only a limited time to edit tweets and “probably the thing to do on the edit is to zero out all retweets and favorites” so that those people don't get caught promoting something where meaning has changed
lol, he takes a dig at zuckerberg's owning Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and the share structure surrounding it, so that “Mark Zuckerberg the 14th” would still own it somewhere down the line. “We wouldn't have that at Twitter.” —EM
Having talked to employees at social networking companies, this may be easy to declare, but what country's laws is Twitter going to choose to abide by? India's laws look a lot different from those in the US. https://twitter.com/...
Musk's thoughts on policing users: * if it's in a gray area, leave it up * more temporary suspensions, be careful with permanent bans * you need to be able to say stuff people disagree with Twitter, of course, would argue it already does all of this stuff
Musk says, in terms of speech he would be “very reluctant to delete things.. very cautious with permanent bans. Time outs are better.” https://twitter.com/...
“If in bounds, let the speech exist. If it's a grey area, I would say, let the tweet exist. If there's a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet. I'm not saying I have all the answers here.” -Musk TED talk @CNBCTheExchange $TWTR
Elon: Goal is to maintain as many shareholders as possible, as a private co. Well, that's one way to help finance the bid. Says he doesn't care about Twitter as a biz, per se. He cares about it as a utility. “I don't care about the economics at all.” (those shareholders do)
Elon soon to discover that “free speech around the globe” means very different things in different countries, none of whom like having their laws broken and who will happily retaliate against Tesla and SpaceX to spite the world's richest man https://t.co/cI7RH2iFJ4 https://t.co/O…
Elon Musk went from: 1. teasing changes to twitter over a poll 2. buying a 9.2% stake 3. accepting then declining a board seat 4. getting sued by twitter shareholders over delayed disclosure 5. offering to buy ALL of twitter in just a few weeks. absolute rollercoaster
Imagine having enough money to help cure diseases, end poverty and famine, or to house the homeless, but instead spending it to buy Twitter because you have some kind of God complex. https://twitter.com/...
Maybe this whole Elon Musk Twitter thing is the catalyst that gets someone to sit up and finally attempt to build a better Twitter. https://www.techmeme.com/...
The world's richest man should be able to buy anything he wants. But can Elon Musk actually buy Twitter? (Spoiler: he doesn't have the money and getting it will be harder than it sounds) https://www.wsj.com/...
I don't understand why if you were a billionaire you'd even want to use twitter, let alone own it, I'd be on a beach paying robots to fight each other every day. the compulsion to control the means of posting when you have enough money to never post again is so bizarre to me
2) Tweets go on-chain, encrypted; the sender chooses who has access to them (i.e. who can decrypt). In some sense this unifies DMs and tweets—DMs are just tweets with the privacy setting of “only Jill”.
I also don't think Elon is even the worst-case scenario here. I think a far scarier scenario is if a competing PE bid to go private comes in. Sigh. Love to all the Flock tweeps out there right now. I'm sorry you're dealing with this.
Needless to say, this is almost certainly a publicity stunt. Twitter is not for sale to Elon Musk for $41B. The company's market cap is currently $45B. I don't know what “the Musk premium” is for Twitter's shareholder, but it's got to be at least 15%.
Prince alwaleed back in the mix. Kingdom holdings has been in Twitter as a shareholder since before it went public. this is board signaling fwiw. cough up more money, he says! https://twitter.com/...
i feel like what we're seeing this is just the rich person version of like...meme stock/robinhood stuff. just this idea of being bored and throwing money around to make chaotic stuff happen. hostile takeovers and market manipulation as a service lol
One problem with Musk owning Twitter is that it turns into a dysfunctional, nefarious place (that is, more so) through his own policies; another problem is that he gets bored with it and lets it wither... which further turns it into a dysfunctional, nefarious place
Several people saying “he'll just borrow”. I think that would be by far the biggest loan to an individual in history? And would require even more shares to collateralize. Not a cost free option for him and still likely to impact share price.
Twitter activists: We need a CEO who isn't distracted with another job! Different Twitter activist: I'd like to run this company alongside my car business and my rocket ship business!
The next time you think youre overreacting, remember that Elon Musk is really willing to pay $43 billion just to prevent people from laughing at him on Twitter
Been trying to parse the management lesson in this, which seems to be that it's ok to intimidate and surveil the lowest level of workers for getting coffee? https://twitter.com/...
I don't think the regime will allow Elon to control the most important media organization out there. Not if he bids $100 per share. It's not about money, it's about a corporate entity that is an outsourced and fully cooperative arm of the state.
Given that Musk has publicly lied about having such funding before, this is a legitimate concern for the board before it wastes time and resources. It's also critical for everyone to know precisely how he would finance it.
Elon: wtf did I just buy TERA: A modern cloud service, my man. What did you think you bought TERA: Oh and we hate that we've spent the last 9 months scoping and estimating and Jira-ing so we quit. We obfuscated the entire codebase on our way out. ggs!
If I'm reading this filing correctly, the only thing he has sent so far is this “letter” and text. Twitter board should simply acknowledge receipt and ask him to send details of the financing he has secured to support such an offer in order for them to consider it seriously. http…
Elon: okay but unsuspend Trump TERA: sooooo there's a scale problem here and that'll take down the service for 4 weeks Elon: ?! TERA: Too many tweets and likes and followers. We have to rehydrate the entire service and the only way to do it is while it's offline Elon: JFC
Honestly that seems like a bizarre management approach. Shouldn't people be in meetings or doing individual work as appropriate for their job functions at a given time, rather than a company-wide shift? https://twitter.com/...
If Elon takes over, there'll be a slew of left-wing Gabs and Parlers as the super-woke threaten to leave Twitter, they'll all fail like the right-wing versions did, and it'll be glorious to watch the “just build your own” people sulk and wail.
Elon: produces product brief for Project Speech Freedom Twitter engineering resistance army: Okay man we'll start scoping this out <5 months later> TERA: Cool dude it's all in Jira epics and we'll have those initial string changes done in Q4 of next year Elon: JFC
No surprise that @benthompson has the most accurate & succinct reasoning for why Twitter should be taken private: “it is clear that the company's monetization approach just doesn't fit its market niche, but it's going to be impossible to rework that while on the public markets.”
The fact we even have to worry about someone like Elon Musk just buying a social media platform that millions of people, especially journalists, artists, and activists, depend on to do their work shows that we have a fundamental problem: too few companies with too much power
Remember that time Salesforce flirted with buying Twitter and Salesforce shareholders hated it and Salesforce gave up? Anyway, Tesla stock is down a bit this morning.
I wonder what the SEC will think of his takeover bid of Twitter, after having punished him for making false claims on it about a takeover bid. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
I'm not *really* worried about the racist white man buying this dumb platform because all the racist white man wants to do with it is make it easier for his friends to be racist. Which, like, they already are, all the time. And I make fun of them and they block me so whatever.
One of the most important things about Twitter is the broad array of micro-communities here. Scientists talking among themselves, farmers, all kinds of topical communities. It's really important that goings on at the global scale public sphere not mess up the micro communities.
Musk is offering $54.20 per share. Twitter's shares hit $70 less than a year ago. So Twitter's board may reject this - while Musk still gets to enjoy a public stunt.
Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter because he believes “free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” while Tesla denies critical journalists access to events etc... 🤔