Stabitha_Christie

hexclock said:

It’s an awful lot of money for unskilled labor, but still, someone will complain that it’s not enough. 

hodar said:

Stabitha_Christie said:

“ It's not clear why Musk failed to do due diligence of the service before offering to buy, which should have included an accurate count of fake users”

Yeah…. His history of being an impulsive jackass certainly doesn’t explain it. 

Umm, you do your Due Diligence by reviewing the SEC forms (10K statements for each quarter).
These are publicly available, and are the OFFICIAL STATEMENT of the company's financials, quarterly expenses, costs, debts, plans and forward mission statements.
They are signed by the CEO and/or the CFO.
These are the forms that Stock Brokers will analyze to set a stock price target, banks will use to determine loan amounts and percentages, and are a base for taxes.  These forms are generally "audited" by a 3rd party, before release.
They are a big deal. A very, very Big Deal.

That's why Elon had a $1 Billion Deposit, so he couldn't walk away.
However, fraud in vitiates everything.  Twitter lied by overstating the actual user base, and instead of the bots being <5% as Twitter claimed, two separate 3rd party audits showed that bots were greater than 19.2% (about 400% higher than claimed).  That's serious, very, very serious.
So, now come the law suits

Elon was defrauded, Twitter lied to him, they lied to the SEC.  Oxley-Sarbanes Act sets up some very severe prison sentences for all involved for this.
So, Elon could walk away, or negotiate a much lower puchase price; due to this fraud
next, we have the stockholders, who will recieve far less share value, because Twitter committed fraud
Finally, we have the advertisers, who overpaid for advertizing, as the consumer base they thought they were reaching, did not exist.

yes, this is catetrophic.

gatorguy said:

aderutter said:

Does anyone know if the stock buy-backs are undetaken in US or overseas? Might it make sense for non-US income to be used for buy-backs to avoid repatriation tax? Just pondering an area I don’t know too much about…

The buybacks can't use un-repatriated funds. That's why you see Apple issuing bonds to at least partially fund the buybacks. That money held overseas, and as I understand it not necessarily subject to Irish or even EU law (see Paradise Papers), is significantly shielded from taxation by any authority including the US and Ireland. 

So much for that vaunted repatiation of $200B held overseas that Apple implied would have happened in 2018 or shortly thereafter. It did not. 

EDIT: A bit more detailed article concerning the Irish story reported by AppleInsider:
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/apple-s-irish-subsidiary-doubles-pretax-profits-to-64bn-1.4871203

wrbluepearl said:

I was getting notifications that my own AirPods Pro were following the other day, though I’m not sure that’s the same strange behavior being discussed here.