[Thread] After Bill Gross' 2015 hostile takeover attempt, Twitter locked down the API and limited third-party clients to 100K users until Jack Dorsey's return
oh my! Bloomberg : Sources: Twitter's board is considering a poison pill after Elon Musk's bid; a source says another plan under consideration is saying that the offer is too low Josh Kosman / New York Post : Source: private equity firm Thoma Bravo has a team working on a potential Twitter bid; the firm owns McAfee and Landesk, and is acquiring Sailpoint and Anaplan Wall Street Journal : Vanguard Group disclosed on April 8 that it increased its Twitter stake to 10.3%, or 82.4M shares, making it Twitter's largest shareholder, ahead of Elon Musk Tweets: Elon Musk / @elonmusk : @Alwaleed_Talal ... Interesting. Just two questions, if I may. How much of Twitter does the Kingdom own, directly & indirectly? What are the Kingdom's views on journalistic freedom of speech? 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] @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. @reuters : Buyout firm Thoma Bravo has contacted Twitter to express interest in putting together an acquisition offer that would rival Tesla CEO Elon Musk's $43 billion bid, people familiar with the matter said https://www.reuters.com/... https://twitter.com/... 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. Max Boot / @maxboot : I realize you're just trolling, @tedcruz, which seems to be your fulltime job. But your claim that I want an “exclusive platform” at the Post or Twitter silly. There are a million different voices in both places, many expressing conservative views. I support that.... (1/2) https://twitter.com/... Ted Cruz / @tedcruz : Orwell would be truly amazed at today's authoritarians. Free speech = “anything goes” To get “more democracy,” we need “MORE content moderation.” TRUST the overlords, the corporate media insists. Big Tech billionaires should decide what YOU get to say. What BS! https://twitter.com/... Matt Taibbi / @mtaibbi : A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, but the Musk-Twitter news has brought a lot of them out of the woodwork: https://taibbi.substack.com/ ... Max Kennerly / @maxkennerly : Looking forward to him learning from his lawyers that the Revlon standard (506 A.2d 173, Del. 1986) precludes Twitter's Board from simply passing his offer along. They have a duty to maximize shareholder value, they can't just accept a 420-joke number with unclear financing. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Alex Hern / @alexhern : If this story is true it recontextualises an awful lot of the last decade here https://twitter.com/... Rishi Iyengar / @iyengarish : Tbf “tell me why” pretty much encapsulates today's overall vibe https://twitter.com/... Jay Graber / @arcalinea : Fascinating thread from someone who was there in the early days https://twitter.com/... Andrew Hart / @andrewhartar : Two huge claims in this thread: 1. Twitter bought TweetDeck to protect itself against the threat of a billionaire acquiring all third-party Twitter apps 2. When Twitter infamously shut down their developer API without explanation, it was for the same reason. https://twitter.com/... @thevunderkind : this is...huge if true. wow. https://twitter.com/... Emmet Connolly / @thoughtwax : Fascinating backstory on how Twitter became the company it is today (and the platform it is not) https://twitter.com/... @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/... @mikeelgan : Phrase of the moment: “Elon Twitter” https://twitter.com/... @carnage4life : The question for Twitter's board is whether the historical precedent in rejecting Elon's acquisition offer is Yahoo rejecting Ballmer's offer (high point on journey to irrelevance) or Snapchat rejecting Zuck's offer (set tone as a company with a bold vision now worth 20x offer). 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. 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. 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/... @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/...