The Elon Musk and Twitter deal is in danger, again
Ahead of a looming court date in Delaware, Elon Musk's renewed $44 billion bid for Twitter has been shot down by Twitter, says Musk's lawyers.
Elon Musk Twitter bid in question again
The renewed bid came from Musk just days before he was set to appear in a Delaware court over the Twitter deal. In the letter proposing the renewed deal, Musk hoped -- and required -- that the trial would end as a result of the re-up of the $44 billion offer.
On Wednesday, the judge presiding over the case said she will continue to press on with the trial as neither side had moved to stop it.
According to a report from Associated Press, Musk's attorneys said the trial should be adjourned to leave more time for Musk to secure the financing -- and for the first time, Musk was clear that the deal was dependent on finding that funding.
"Twitter will not take yes for an answer," said the court filing signed by Musk attorney Edward Micheletti. "Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders' interests."
Twitter did not respond with a comment.
Musk had previously tried to walk away from the Twitter deal in July, but was sued for the action soon after. The court date has been debated since the lawsuit began, with Musk's lawyers originally fighting for more time to gather data over spam accounts and bots.
The court date is still set for October 17 in Delaware.
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Elon Musk Twitter bid in question again
The renewed bid came from Musk just days before he was set to appear in a Delaware court over the Twitter deal. In the letter proposing the renewed deal, Musk hoped -- and required -- that the trial would end as a result of the re-up of the $44 billion offer.
On Wednesday, the judge presiding over the case said she will continue to press on with the trial as neither side had moved to stop it.
According to a report from Associated Press, Musk's attorneys said the trial should be adjourned to leave more time for Musk to secure the financing -- and for the first time, Musk was clear that the deal was dependent on finding that funding.
"Twitter will not take yes for an answer," said the court filing signed by Musk attorney Edward Micheletti. "Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders' interests."
Twitter did not respond with a comment.
Musk had previously tried to walk away from the Twitter deal in July, but was sued for the action soon after. The court date has been debated since the lawsuit began, with Musk's lawyers originally fighting for more time to gather data over spam accounts and bots.
The court date is still set for October 17 in Delaware.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Musk's attempted hostile takeover of Twitter was a self-indulgent, self-destructive strategic blunder. It reminds me of another highly overrated egomaniac who attempted a hostile takeover this year. Maybe that's why Musk is suddenly concerned about Putin's feelings.
He's hoping to avoid court, where he is assured to lose, by attempting to get Twitter to accept a "new" deal, for which he hopes to negotiate new terms which would give him new reasons to back out. Twitter doesn't need to accept a "renewed" offer to buy them, they already accepted an offer and signed a deal. Musk just needs to follow through with his part of the existing deal, as far as Twitter is concerned — i.e., if he's changed his mind and wants to buy Twitter again, all he has to do is complete the previously agreed to purchase.
Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23108357/redacted-version-of-exhibits-a-j-to-letter-to-the-honorable-kathaleen-st-j-mccormick-from-edward-b.pdf
https://danluu.com/elon-twitter-texts/
Quite a few people just casually saying they'll throw a couple of billion dollars in.
Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol (like Signal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Protocol ) so government and advertisers wouldn't influence it. This would need a decentralized verification system like blockchain.
Musk and a few others want to get rid of bots but know it will tank revenue, which wouldn't go down well as a public company so they want Twitter private.
One plan to tackle bots was to use crypto/blockchain/dogecoin (possibly getting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried on board for $5b) to verify tweets but dismissed as not scalable due to latency/bandwidth.
Musk plans to lead software development, says he coded for 20 years. Parag (Twitter CEO) used to be Twitter CTO so is also familiar with the codebase. Someone recommended their son who works at Reddit for software development. Parag said Twitter has 2500 coders doing at least 100 lines of code per month.
They spoke about revenue per employee $5b/8k and how it would improve to be nearer Google and Apple by cutting headcount to 3k.
Twitter currently doesn't make revenue from videos, plan to do revenue sharing like Youtube e.g 100% for creator up to $1m and split above.
Aim to fix free speech, e.g allowing Russian news feeds even though they are against and sanctioned.
The ideas inherently hit the same barriers that all social media companies run into. They want free speech but need to moderate bots/spam/scams and having a centrally controlled platform means free speech is determined by the shareholders, employees and government in each region. If they make it decentralized, they can fix the censorship issue more easily but then they lose control over bots, ability to verify users, ability to monetize because big advertisers don't want to be associated with bad content and it's harder to scale. They'd really have to maintain and mingle both setups.
There are lots of areas for Twitter to grow revenue. Earning revenue from video could be a big one and would take on TikTok and Youtube, maybe even Twitch if they do live streaming. They can also give Reddit competition if they do articles and article feeds and these can be used like Medium and independent forums as long as they do revenue sharing.
Execution will determine if any of this will work out for them. All the big social media companies have tried to add in the strengths of competing platforms and didn't reach a competitive level.
It feels like there's some demand for a large-scale open conversation platform. Peer-to-peer like torrent is one way. Building nodes on open platforms is another but these are still censored individually, the following is used by Truth Social:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
Fully peer-to-peer allows for really bad content to be shared, not just disagreeable conversation. Community censors can help somewhat but can also be weaponized and the online community can't be trusted to block really bad content effectively.
One option for scalability is to have a platform that only maintains conversations for a few days while active. The rest can be archived. Most people are only interested in the current conversations and interest in archived content tails off exponentially.
Another option is for people to be their own platform and host so their conversations are initially stored locally. They would be the main seed of their content. Others could seed the same content like how the torrent protocol works and everybody stores blocks of the data along with central servers. Each block has a unique id. It doesn't necessarily need a blockchain to verify the seeded content as long as someone couldn't easily spoof the message against the id and conflicting messages/ids can use timestamps to get the original one. There was a torrent chat app Bleep that didn't take off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainberry,_Inc.#BitTorrent_Bleep
It will be interesting to see what happens with a Twitter takeover. There have been a lot of conversations about cutting headcount dramatically so Twitter employees would be rightfully concerned about a takeover.
Whatever platform comes as a result will still have issues. At some point there's a realization that the main problem with social media isn't the platform - not Facebook, Twitter, TikTok - the problem is with people, how they choose to express themselves, especially online and how well people tolerate opposing views. This won't change with an open, bot-free platform. People today are arrested, prosecuted, fired for what they write on Twitter, in Eastern countries even worse and that will continue. An open platform will allow hateful, harmful, defamatory, false information to proliferate. Social media will always be a mess because they are platforms for people.