JWSC

lkrupp said:

If the deal falls through I think the SEC would have a good case of fraud to bring against Musk. Looking like this was all theatre from the get-go.

On what grounds?  This is part of the negotiation process, which can be public as well as private.  Musk likely thinks he can get a better price.  And Twitter‘s board of directors have made some serious mistakes and given him the upper hand.  It’s nothing more than managerial incompetence, and Musk is exploiting it.  Nothing illegal about that.

foregoneconclusion said:

JWSC said:

sevenfeet said:

I think Elon Musk realized that being a board officer would put him under even more constraints on the use of Twitter than he currently has. Musk's problems right now come from the fact that he can't say anything he wants about a public company about Tesla without running afoul of SEC rules. Joining Twitter's board wouldn't change that....in fact, he'd be under even more communication constraints since he'd be a fiduciary officer who is supposed to be looking out for the company's best interests. It's not that he cannot publicly disagree with the rest of the board, but there would be limits as an officer as to when and how that is done. It's better for him to remain on the outside.

Yea, I think a lot of people are misreading what's happening.  Musk is not backing off in any way.  As you state, joining the board would constrain him in ways that he has determined would be unhelpful to his ambitions for Twitter.  Get your popcorn out people.  This is going to be fun to watch.

LOL...Musk and his brother are both being investigated for insider trading by the SEC. That's happening AFTER Musk already had to settle a securities fraud charge with the SEC several years ago and is now attempting to back out of the settlement. How is he qualified to sit on Twitter's board and provide "advice"? 

So I did a little on-line research into the SEC investigation.  They're probing him about the sales of Tesla shares after he asked Twitter users via a poll if he should sell his shares in order to pay taxes.  This was done after much criticism was leveled at Musk for paying so little in taxes.  One only pays taxes on capital gains and not stock prices rises, which didn't seem to matter to his detractors.  So Musk asked and the people answered - sell shares and pay taxes, which he did.  This was all done publicly.  Accusations of insider trading are spurious in this case.  It appears that the SEC is going after him for not having his public Tweets be vetted by the SEC in advance, which was included in the terms of settlement in an earlier dust up with the SEC.

As far as I can tell, the SEC is not currently investigating Musk for his trading of Twitter stock - at least not publicly.  Musk has been open about his contempt for the SEC as an organization, stating that it is under the purview of vested interests that are not aligned with the good of the general public and the markets.  He has stated that he is prepared to expose them.  I guess you could call it a sort of threat to the SEC apparatchiks.  No love lost there.

sevenfeet said:

I think Elon Musk realized that being a board officer would put him under even more constraints on the use of Twitter than he currently has. Musk's problems right now come from the fact that he can't say anything he wants about a public company about Tesla without running afoul of SEC rules. Joining Twitter's board wouldn't change that....in fact, he'd be under even more communication constraints since he'd be a fiduciary officer who is supposed to be looking out for the company's best interests. It's not that he cannot publicly disagree with the rest of the board, but there would be limits as an officer as to when and how that is done. It's better for him to remain on the outside.

Yea, I think a lot of people are misreading what's happening.  Musk is not backing off in any way.  As you state, joining the board would constrain him in ways that he has determined would be unhelpful to his ambitions for Twitter.  Get your popcorn out people.  This is going to be fun to watch.

My Mac Studio with M1 Max arrived earlier this week.  Migration assistant from my 27" Intel iMac worked well and took only 5-6 hours for the data transfer to complete.

I was anxious to verify that the applications transferred over still worked.  I opened up several programs and they ran without issue.  I was particularly interested to see how SketchUp Pro was working on the Studio since I got the M1 Max with 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, 16-core Neural Engine, with 64GB of unified memory.  I knew it would be a huge leap in performance, and wow it was.  I had assumed that since it was installed as Intel binaries on my Intel iMac and that SketchUp Pro and the other apps were running under Rosetta 2.  I planned to delete SketchUp Pro and reinstall it on the Studio with M1 binaries.

But before I did, I decided to run Civilization IV, my favorite time killer.  And low and behold, a dialog box pops up and tells me that this is an Intel application and asks me if I want to install Rosetta 2.  I installed it and Civ IV worked like a charm.  But the interesting thing is that SketchUp Pro and the other apps I ran before apparently had both Intel and M1 binaries at installation.  They were running natively on the M1 Max.  I hadn't expected that.  If anyone has any insight into how this works I'd be interested.

I was absolutely thrilled to hear that Musk had bought into Twitter to become the largest shareholder.  Since that announcement the interwebs has gone into overdrive expounding on why Musk would do such a thing.  Purported reasons vary from Musk wanting to profit quickly on the stock price jump, or perhaps make it a long term investment, or maybe he wanted to push cryptocurrencies through Twitter, or perhaps he feared that his Tweets might be labeled disinformation.  Most of these reasons are baloney.

Anyone who has been following Musk knows perfectly well why he bought Twitter stock.  Musk is fed up with arbitrary removal of prominent people for allegedly spreading disinformation according to Twitter's appointed fact checkers.  It's one thing to have fact checkers state that 2+2≠5.  But when these 20-something Silicon Valley fact checkers, who are not subject matter experts, start removing prominent scientists and other experts in their respective fields from Twitter, that's a bridge too far.  These so-called fact checkers have no business doing this.  Companies like Twitter and Facebook are far too powerful to be left in the hands of non-experts who conclude something is disinformation because someone says something that is not considered the norm or the consensus.  That kind of censorship retards the advancement of new knowledge.  It allows the loudest and most politically connected voices to set a narrative that is incredibly difficult to overcome, even when new facts and data come to light.

Over the last several years we have witnessed repeatedly what was once deemed disinformation by powerful people turn out to be true.  The fact checkers did society a great disservice then and they continue unabated.  The knee-jerk reaction by many in Silicon Valley to censor dissenting views is outrageous and it needs to be put to a stop.  Hurray for Elon Musk stepping in to make a positive change!