Elon Bought Twitter- X GON GIVE IT TO YA

[Potato]

https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1519157267857293312

Mastodon seems to be talked about now more than ever before.

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-alternative-mastodon-open-source-021001965.html

And probably at least half of that 42k are still on Twitter.

This reminds me of Google talking about signups to Google+

Everyone still remained on Facebook and just hedged their bets.

We know how that turned out.

[VomKriege]

I mostly expect a bunch of stupid (though sadly not necessarily benign) stunts.
He'll make a lot of weird noises but I'd think the most pressing priority for actual policy changes will be geared to making the service more profitable or shore up the stock price. I might be wrong though, Musk is unpredictable. But even if one wished it you can't turn Twitter into 8kun, there's a bunch of legal compliance and strings attached with a variety of national regulators that come with being a global billion valued corporation.

At the end of the day it's the Trump Discussion© of "is it fundamentally different because the plutocrat also happen to be a rude volatile weirdo asshole ?"

[Cauliflower Of Love]

https://twitter.com/joinmastodon/status/1519157267857293312

Mastodon seems to be talked about now more than ever before.

https://www.engadget.com/twitter-alternative-mastodon-open-source-021001965.html

And probably at least half of that 42k are still on Twitter.

This reminds me of Google talking about signups to Google+

Everyone still remained on Facebook and just hedged their bets.

We know how that turned out.

occam decimated

[Uncle]

The world is how you make it.

this is at odds:

By pretending that lies are a valid opinion (the other side of reality and just as acceptable), the American media enabled Trump and everything that follows. Reality does not have two sides.

either the world is what it is and facts are unchanging regardless of what we want, or our desires are able to shape reality and change what is true

Our world is what we make of it. While we cannot change the nature of reality, we obviously have the ability to change our world. We can either make it a great place and live in harmony with nature and each other, or we can allow poison to flow (literally and figuratively) and make the world (more) poisonous.

Which is what is about to happen to Twitter thanks to an obscene manchild who couldn't take criticism.

but you say this as if that which is harmonious or poisonous can be held up to some objective standard, rather than being highly contentious every step of the way, and not necessarily even in the "bad people obviously lying through their teeth" sense, I mean real people with measured opinions and valid arguments for why they might believe what they believe and act the way they do, which may run counter to yours



let's say there's an alternate universe where someone buys twitter only to shut it down immediately, because they believe it's only been a tool for negativity overall (and they naively think that no other platform would rise to fill the gap)

does that contribute to making the world a great harmonious place, or contribute to making the world more poisonous?

you could argue that this immediately makes the world a better place because there are so many rubbish elements on twitter, lots of bad actors who should never have been given a voice, too many toxic elements to suffer its ongoing existence, and its short take format contributes to the erosion of having well-rounded, properly considered ideas as a species

but from other perspectives you could argue that twitter has been a tremendous source for good, in holding people accountable for bad behavior (#metoo), and for allowing marginalized people to organize, bond and make their voices heard, not to mention a free source of globe-reaching advertisement among like-minded people, allowing beneficial alternative media to flourish, now simply snapped out of existence

you could argue that eliminating a nexus where that voice was traditionally louder than others contributes to poisonous elements being allowed to become louder by comparison in other global communication tools

so regarding this particular alternate universe decision, is it a net good or bad to immediately shut twitter down? and in the wake of this, what makes a person so confident or arrogant that they could think they have truly considered all perspectives and eventualities, and arrived at the one, True conclusion?


that's just one example, the point is that any given decision for "what must be done about twitter" can be rationalized one way or the other, and any given perspective on it might end up more or less accurate reflected in the end results

things are not as black and white as you paint them, nor is any given possible change to the platform already a foregone conclusion



I'm no Musk fanboy but in the wake of all this it makes a person want to attempt to learn a few things, and so I googled "is Elon Musk a Trump supporter," and discovered that at least ostensibly he was a supporter of Yang Gang and universal basic income, and rebuked Trump for leaving the Paris Accord because he strongly believes climate change is real and a problem that needs to be tackled

could all this be a lie just to sway popular opinion to his side? sure, but simply saying these things is enough of an actual stance to upset tons of people who would disagree, so I don't know if it makes sense to say these are just crowd-pleasing statements (because everybody loved Yang, right)

you could argue that his actions don't reflect a belief in these things, but then you could also argue that like any of us, even an incredibly rich man is constrained by the society he finds himself forced to take part in, so of course you're going to find lots of examples where these things don't always line up



I just think it's silly to frame this as "this is obvious bad thing done by obvious bad man which will have obvious bad consequences"

everything will have consequences which some rationalize as good and others rationalize as bad, and sometimes they're both a bit wrong in the grand scheme

[Cauliflower Of Love]

 

[benjipwns]

I just think it's silly to frame this as "this is obvious bad thing done by obvious bad man which will have obvious bad consequences"

everything will have consequences which some rationalize as good and others rationalize as bad, and sometimes they're both a bit wrong in the grand scheme

lmao dudes will literally "both sides" capitalism instead of just ending it and finally liberating people to have true free speech and democracy

[Cauliflower Of Love]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519179787163652099

Buy tiktok bro

[benjipwns]

https://twitter.com/geraldstratfor3/status/1519231125171879936
https://twitter.com/geraldstratfor3/status/1519232744567541760

[benjipwns]

 

[benjipwns]

https://twitter.com/sandibachom/status/1518673575053561856

[Kurt Russell]

either the world is what it is and facts are unchanging regardless of what we want, or our desires are able to shape reality and change what is true

 

Shut up and download Libre Office, scrub. It's the only way we'll beat Muskrat and the Nazis.

[benjipwns]

https://twitter.com/i_zzzzzz/status/1518727355702808578

[Uncle]

https://twitter.com/NaimHalawi/status/1518625127629574145

[Cauliflower Of Love]

man if musk gets rid of that stupid pop up about joining he will have won.

[Uncle]

man if musk gets rid of that stupid pop up about joining he will have won.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/breakthrough-twitter-logi/ohhifopcgokjpbnppnmjbdnjnfcfnlep

[Cauliflower Of Love]

man if musk gets rid of that stupid pop up about joining he will have won.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/breakthrough-twitter-logi/ohhifopcgokjpbnppnmjbdnjnfcfnlep

How do I gift you a neogaf gold membership?

[Tasty]

https://twitter.com/cabot_phillips/status/1518790478589841408

 

Seeing journalists, mostly lib ones in this case, freak out because they realized hey maybe building your brand entirely around a for-profit social network isn't the best strategy has been schadenfreude-tastic.

Hey idiots, maybe if the news didn't constantly shove Twitter in our faces maybe it wouldn't have as much sway over society.

[Uncle]

Seeing journalists, mostly lib ones in this case, freak out because they realized hey maybe building your brand entirely around a for-profit social network isn't the best strategy has been schadenfreude-tastic.

Hey idiots, maybe if the news didn't constantly shove Twitter in our faces maybe it wouldn't have as much sway over society.

and again, for those in the back:

22% of american adults use twitter but 25% of twitter users produce 97% of all tweets

so this means about 5% of people are the ones producing all the content, the hot takes, the retweets, glorifying or rebuking brands, all of it

yet it often feels like every news show or story will somewhere reference some tweet someone made, as if it's where all conversation is taking place, or as if it represents an accurate cross section of the general public

[Trent Dole]

Do I get unsuspended then?

[VomKriege]

Honestly 5% of the population is better than I expected.

Also wonder about the chances of the deal not going through for some reason.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519179787163652099

OK ?

Do I get unsuspended then?

Do you have a Tesla ?

[Pissy F Benny]

I think the corp media are mostly upset because they probably won't be able to play their "if we whine about this person enough twitter and everyone else will ban them" card anymore (whether this person deserves it or not).

[Cauliflower Of Love]

OK ?

Yup!

[VomKriege]

Seems a little weird to disparage the company you just bought on the basis of an obscure, mysterious metric that have a couple of really mundane common sense explanations.

Like Truth being still in launch and early adoption mode versus a years old app that may be even pre-installed on a non trivial number of phones.

[VomKriege]

Not ruling out it's a galaxy brain level scheme of some sort by Musk.

[Kurt Russell]

[Cauliflower Of Love]

Seems a little weird to disparage the company you just bought on the basis of an obscure, mysterious metric that have a couple of really mundane common sense explanations.

Like Truth being still in launch and early adoption mode versus a years old app that may be even pre-installed on a non trivial number of phones.

Why is it weird?  It's refreshing to have an owner of a company not be a blind cheerleader about the deficiencies of their products.

[Occam]

Insightful article, good summary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/business/twitter-elon-musk-board.html

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Elon Musk to Buy Twitter

Common sense
Selling Twitter to Elon Musk Is Good for Investors. What About the Public?

The company’s decision to sell seems to have been based purely on the financials, with little if any regard for other stakeholders.

By James B. Stewart
April 26, 2022

Twitter is “the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” a triumphant Elon Musk proclaimed in announcing his deal to buy the social media platform.

In other words, Twitter is no ordinary corporation. It serves as something akin to a public utility, a unique global means of communication.

So should Twitter be governed like a conventional public company, with a board of directors focused primarily on reaping the greatest amount of money possible for shareholders, with little regard to the interests of other groups?

In the eyes of some influential business and legal experts, the answer is no. The company’s directors should have also evaluated the qualifications of Mr. Musk to serve as a responsible steward for a vital public communications channel — and, based on the public comments made by Twitter’s board of directors, there is no evidence that it did so.

“The board should have considered the interest of stakeholders like employees and users in evaluating the long-term value of the company,” said Lenore Palladino, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute in New York.

Mr. Musk is a polarizing figure. He is a world-changing entrepreneur, responsible for companies, like PayPal and Tesla, that have revolutionized enormous industries. He has used his considerable influence — he has 85 million Twitter followers — to inveigh against what he sees as a censorious liberal culture in technology and media.

He is also at times reckless and capricious — traits that have landed him in trouble with federal regulators and on the receiving end of a defamation lawsuit, among other troubles. Just last week, he mocked Bill Gates’s beer belly after the Microsoft co-founder was said to have bet against Tesla’s stock price.

The question is whether any of that actually or should have factored into the decision by Twitter’s board of directors to sell the company to Mr. Musk.

In recent decades American corporations and their boards have operated under a legal doctrine known as “shareholder primacy,” which posits that corporate boards should focus on a single goal, which is maximizing returns to shareholders.

Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, hewed closely to that doctrine on Monday when he said that the board had evaluated Mr. Musk’s offer by focusing on “value, certainty and financing” and that the deal would deliver a “substantial cash premium.”

He might as well have been talking about a tool-and-die manufacturer.

There wasn’t even lip service paid to Twitter’s other stakeholders — its users, employees and advertisers, to name a few — or its profound importance to public discourse. It’s unclear whether the board members, in what appears to have been a whirlwind weekend of deliberations, even touched on these topics.

Under current law, mostly established by Delaware courts, boards have “the discretion but not the obligation” to consider the interests of people other than their investors, said Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. But few, if any, have exercised that discretion, she said.

In recent years, this shareholder primacy model has come under attack from critics who contend it has enriched shareholders at the expense of just about everything and everyone else: workers, customers, innovation, the planet.

“Corporate leaders and practitioners have been increasingly pledging to pay close attention to the interests of stakeholders, such as customers or society in the case of Twitter, and not only shareholders,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even so, a study of more than 100 recent $1 billion-plus deals that Mr. Bebchuk recently completed found that there had been little impact, with “large gains” for shareholders and corporate leaders and little or nothing for other constituencies.

The Twitter situation shows how “we need to fundamentally change the approach to corporate governance,” said Ms. Palladino, the Massachusetts professor.

Mr. Musk has said he isn’t buying Twitter to make money (even as he claims that he has plans to “unlock” the company’s potential). That is arguably cause for concern. Public shareholders, like any other owner seeking to maximize profits, have a financial incentive to attract and maintain the broadest number of users. That means management needs to bar extremists, in order to avoid offending or driving away many more users, while seeking to prohibit as few others as possible, in order to increase the platform’s value to advertisers.

On the other hand, it leaves the company’s management hostage to the whims of Wall Street, whose interests may not be well aligned with those of the broader public.

Since his takeover bid became public earlier this month, Mr. Musk has been talking up his plans to promote Twitter as a bastion of free speech. On Monday, he said he hoped that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

While Mr. Musk’s public comments so far have been soothing to champions of free expression, especially those on the right who claim that Big Tech has silenced conservative viewpoints, there’s no guarantee that Mr. Musk will continue to espouse those broad-minded views once he’s in control.

Having forsworn the profit motive, Mr. Musk might not care whom he offends, either by welcoming extremists or by banning people who denounce him. This is a man who once called a rescue worker a “pedo guy” after the worker criticized Mr. Musk. He has been careful not to say where he would draw the line between free expression and hateful or violent speech, which Twitter’s existing management has, with a notably imperfect record, tried to curtail.

In one sense, it’s easy to sympathize with the eagerness of the Twitter board to get out of this hornet’s nest while enriching shareholders. Turning down a takeover offer at a premium to the company’s current share price would have been a recipe for litigation. Accepting the bid was the path of least resistance, and Ms. Fisch said it was unlikely to be successfully challenged in court or held up by federal regulators.

On the other hand, there’s far more at stake with Twitter than in a normal corporate transaction (though you could make a similar argument about CNN, whose parent company was acquired this month by Discovery Inc., or for that matter any other company that purportedly serves the public interest).

Perhaps Mr. Musk will prove a fine steward of the digital town square he will soon own; it’s certainly plausible that the board, if it had seriously considered the likelihood that Mr. Musk would meddle to suit his ideology or personal interests, would have concluded he was a relatively safe pair of hands. After all, it’s not as if Twitter, in its current cacophonous state, is some utopia of mild-mannered civic discourse.

But the board’s response to Mr. Musk need not have been based on any subjective evaluation of his character or motives.

As Ms. Palladino points out, the board could have taken the position that serving the public interest matters most to Twitter’s long-term value, and that selling Twitter to any single, private buyer wasn’t in the interests of anyone other than short-term speculators and Mr. Musk himself.

[close]

[Uncle]

So should Twitter be governed like a conventional public company, with a board of directors focused primarily on reaping the greatest amount of money possible for shareholders, with little regard to the interests of other groups?

In the eyes of some influential business and legal experts, the answer is no. The company’s directors should have also evaluated the qualifications of Mr. Musk to serve as a responsible steward for a vital public communications channel — and, based on the public comments made by Twitter’s board of directors, there is no evidence that it did so.

Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, hewed closely to that doctrine on Monday when he said that the board had evaluated Mr. Musk’s offer by focusing on “value, certainty and financing” and that the deal would deliver a “substantial cash premium.”

He might as well have been talking about a tool-and-die manufacturer.

ok, but

Mr. Musk has said he isn’t buying Twitter to make money (even as he claims that he has plans to “unlock” the company’s potential). That is arguably cause for concern. Public shareholders, like any other owner seeking to maximize profits, have a financial incentive to attract and maintain the broadest number of users. That means management needs to bar extremists, in order to avoid offending or driving away many more users, while seeking to prohibit as few others as possible, in order to increase the platform’s value to advertisers.

so the board evaluated his offer based purely on financial gain, which is bad, but musk says he's not interested in owning the platform for financial gain, which is also bad?

 

imagine the exact opposite: musk's offer is a bad deal that loses the board a bunch of money, but they award him the platform anyway because they truly believe he'll be a good steward for it, and then musk says he can't wait to warp the platform into a moneymaking machine

one would think this would be an ideal result for the author of this article 

Since his takeover bid became public earlier this month, Mr. Musk has been talking up his plans to promote Twitter as a bastion of free speech. On Monday, he said he hoped that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

While Mr. Musk’s public comments so far have been soothing to champions of free expression, especially those on the right who claim that Big Tech has silenced conservative viewpoints, there’s no guarantee that Mr. Musk will continue to espouse those broad-minded views once he’s in control.

since when did this ever matter? there was never any guarantee that any given entity with controlling power over twitter would espouse those views or others

 

[Cauliflower Of Love]

puBLIC SquareE!

[Uncle]

honestly it's an apt phrase

most people are too busy working, playing, enjoying their lives to mill around in the public square holding protest signs

[Himu]

Good news and love seeing the liberal reaction to it. It's interesting to see the liberal overreaction. Even more interesting is how it becomes a political chess game overnight with the likes of Warren weighing in. Liberals of course are running to daddy government to censor or limit. In this case what has the left in shock is that they've lost a digital chess piece in the political arena, or so they think, hence the overreaction. Better to overreact than not react at all. Now that they can't limit you or give you a misinformation warning for sharing a Will Smith meme, they now view it as a political loss because this is how they motivate voters: with an echo chamber of fear and outrage.

Twitter is also where the Biden administration has been digging its claws in so they are scared of losing an avenue of power and influence. They have almost zero reason to react in this manner and their fears are mostly baseless but it's another opportunity to sell the "save our democracy" line that we've heard so much about the last seven years. Conservative viewpoints being more reasily seen means liberal viewpoints are no longer the default. This is a threat to their power in an age where they have near uniform control of the narrative.

Cue Pocahontas. She's fine Bezos owns WaPo but when Musk buys Twitter suddenly our democracy is in peril and we need to get the government involved. Liberals. Like clockwork, except it's an empty clock full of cobwebs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/warren-calls-for-tougher-tech-regulation-after-musk-twitter-deal

Saudi Prince having a stake in Twitter, fine. Musk buys it and it's an existential threat.  Nevermind the other forces that owned stake in Twitter. But the Saudis make good allies despite being, well, Saudis. Oh and Vanguard. It's about control. That's why they're pissed. The every day liberal thinks it's about free speech or whatever. The higher up liberal knows it's about losing game space in the war of ideas. Liberals control and own tech. More conservative viewpoints (Musk isn't a conservative but these days anything right of Bernie Sanders is right wing so have at it) and libertarian viewpoints of the old internet means losing more game space. Liberal camp is fighting this on two fronts. The sheep are going one way but the politicians know it's about power. Hence, daddy government.

[Nintex]

I wish nintex was here to grace us with his take on this

It's actually pretty simple.
They can explain it to themselves however they like but Mr. Musk has owned the libs beautifully and will continue to own them in the weeks, months and perhaps even years ahead even on this very website.

That NYT word salad is just another fantasy brainfart of someone who hangs around Starbucks during the day and watches CNN on repeat at night.
Apparently missing the flamethrower sale, Elon's SNL skit about Peach cheating on Mario, him backing DOGE coin as the worlds new reserve currency and many other great endeavors of Mr. Musk.

Will he try to attract top billing talent that has recently left or was fired from Twitter Corp?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519367926708588545

I dunno

[Himu]

Let's laugh at the libs and how pathetic they are.

https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1518828430988435456

Preview for 2022 and 2024 election results? 👀

[Tuckers Law]

 
Damn.  If Musk buying Twitter can bring back Nintex, maybe he really can resurrect the MiiVerse

[Occam]

Considering Muskrat has promised to end anonymity on Twitter, at least European "conservatives" are going to start having a lot of fun with local law enforcement. That is, unless they continue to censor themselves.

[Nintex]

Damn.  If Musk buying Twitter can bring back Nintex, maybe he really can resurrect the MiiVerse

It's like being a former crack addict and the Easter Psaki and Joe Biden are handing out free crack pipes on every block

[Occam]

Furthermore, the EU just passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which will of course apply to Muskrat's Twitter, too.

[Occam]

Who could have seen this coming? I for one am shocked.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/27/musk-twitter-attacks/?itid=mr_technology_1

[Himu]

Oh no, people Elon doesn't control did something bad because he made very valid criticism!

LOL. Hyuuuuck

[Nintex]

Twitter has never been the worst offender of all these social media things because you can't really create your own bubble like you can on Reddit/Facebook/Telegram etc. .
It's all public so even the comments below prolific Tweeters (be it left or right) end up in a free exchange of ideas so to speak. People on the fringe don't really get the traction or rather positive response they might expect.
Satire is often the most popular type of content on Twitter above all else. I think people forget that Gab was founded not because of Twitter censorship but because that particular brand of wankdad was just bullied away by the community.

The increased censorship and blue checks haven't really made things better over the years but arguably worse, much like ResetEra actually.
The biggest problems on Twitter are the spam/scam bots and government controlled actors (be it Russian, Iranian, American or Chinese) and they did fuck all against that.
Elon plans to verify all the humans.

Furthermore, the EU just passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which will of course apply to Muskrat's Twitter, too.

In the end member states still need to set up government bodies and regulators to uphold these laws and pass them in their parliaments. Not to mention this act lines up with much of what Elon Musk wants:

the possibility to challenge platforms' content moderation decisions and seek redress, either via an out-of-court dispute mechanism or judicial redress;

i.e. no more shadow banning

transparency measures for online platforms on a variety of issues, including on the algorithms used for recommending content or products to users;

he wants to open source the algorithm.

New safeguards for the protection of minors and limits on the use of sensitive personal data for targeted advertising.

he wants to reduce the advertising

[Cauliflower Of Love]

Considering Muskrat has promised to end anonymity on Twitter, at least European "conservatives" are going to start having a lot of fun with local law enforcement. That is, unless they continue to censor themselves.

Verifying real person interaction is not the same as ending anonimiity.

[Uncle]

it doesn't make a whole lot of sense as even elon would see the value in bot-based posting when it's harmless or entertaining, like an AI generating goofy polls

https://twitter.com/WYR_bot/status/1519040337368555520

https://twitter.com/WYR_bot/status/1518903949645987840

or informative bots that automatically create tweets based on other feeds or data elsewhere

as he seems to revel in nerd things I don't see him ending the nerd fun of useful bots by forcing literally every user to tie themselves to a living being

it sounds like specifically he wants to get rid of artificially inflated follower counts or the more insidious/subversive legions of bots

[VomKriege]

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/elon-musk-probably-wont-buy-twitter-2022-04-27/

It probably speaks more of people's projections than of new information about whether the deal will hold and go through in practice but 

[who is ted danson?]

it doesn't make a whole lot of sense as even elon would see the value in bot-based posting when it's harmless or entertaining, like an AI generating goofy polls

https://twitter.com/WYR_bot/status/1519040337368555520

https://twitter.com/WYR_bot/status/1518903949645987840

or informative bots that automatically create tweets based on other feeds or data elsewhere

as he seems to revel in nerd things I don't see him ending the nerd fun of useful bots by forcing literally every user to tie themselves to a living being

it sounds like specifically he wants to get rid of artificially inflated follower counts or the more insidious/subversive legions of bots

He wants to ban the ElonJet bot without looking like he wants to ban the ElonJet bot

[VomKriege]

Twitter is releasing its quarterly results today but they cancelled the usual remarks from the board.

[Uncle]

He wants to ban the ElonJet bot without looking like he wants to ban the ElonJet bot

buys twitter, bans jetbot, immediately sells twitter back

[VomKriege]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519495072802390016

[Pissy F Benny]

That ship has long since sailed bruv

[Cauliflower Of Love]

I don't know the plane tracking thing is creepy as fuck.

Yes it's all public data, but like ew

[Occam]

Quite interesting. The day before yesterday Muskrat flew 296 miles in his private jet, from Austin to Brownsville.

Flight Fuel Info
~ 371 gallons (1686 liters).
~ 2,483 pds (1,126 kg) of jet fuel used.
~ $2,298 cost of fuel.
~ 4 tons of CO2 emissions.

Yeah, that man truly cares about the environment.

[Cauliflower Of Love]

should have taken a bus

[Uncle]

 

[Tasty]

[Nintex]

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144

 

[Occam]

The right didn't stay where they were, though. They moved to la-la land.

[james]

Tesla stock...

-222.06 (-20.20%)
past month

lol

[VomKriege]

Not sure it's meaningful (beyond possibly indicating people have shaky confidence in it because of all the recent antics) or lasting though. Still higher than in Jan.2021. Famously people bet on shorting it for a while now and never really got their wish.

Tesla stocks deflating could be a blessing though.

[Potato]

Quite interesting. The day before yesterday Muskrat flew 296 miles in his private jet, from Austin to Brownsville.

Flight Fuel Info
~ 371 gallons (1686 liters).
~ 2,483 pds (1,126 kg) of jet fuel used.
~ $2,298 cost of fuel.
~ 4 tons of CO2 emissions.

Yeah, that man truly cares about the environment.

Imagine thinking Musk is the true enemy of the environment...

[Occam]

Who said he was?
Only that he created 4 tons of CO2 in 40 minutes the other day, twice the amount an average person is responsible for emitting per year.

[benjipwns]

Insightful article, good summary:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/26/business/twitter-elon-musk-board.html

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Elon Musk to Buy Twitter

Common sense
Selling Twitter to Elon Musk Is Good for Investors. What About the Public?

The company’s decision to sell seems to have been based purely on the financials, with little if any regard for other stakeholders.

By James B. Stewart
April 26, 2022

Twitter is “the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” a triumphant Elon Musk proclaimed in announcing his deal to buy the social media platform.

In other words, Twitter is no ordinary corporation. It serves as something akin to a public utility, a unique global means of communication.

So should Twitter be governed like a conventional public company, with a board of directors focused primarily on reaping the greatest amount of money possible for shareholders, with little regard to the interests of other groups?

In the eyes of some influential business and legal experts, the answer is no. The company’s directors should have also evaluated the qualifications of Mr. Musk to serve as a responsible steward for a vital public communications channel — and, based on the public comments made by Twitter’s board of directors, there is no evidence that it did so.

“The board should have considered the interest of stakeholders like employees and users in evaluating the long-term value of the company,” said Lenore Palladino, associate professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a fellow at the progressive Roosevelt Institute in New York.

Mr. Musk is a polarizing figure. He is a world-changing entrepreneur, responsible for companies, like PayPal and Tesla, that have revolutionized enormous industries. He has used his considerable influence — he has 85 million Twitter followers — to inveigh against what he sees as a censorious liberal culture in technology and media.

He is also at times reckless and capricious — traits that have landed him in trouble with federal regulators and on the receiving end of a defamation lawsuit, among other troubles. Just last week, he mocked Bill Gates’s beer belly after the Microsoft co-founder was said to have bet against Tesla’s stock price.

The question is whether any of that actually or should have factored into the decision by Twitter’s board of directors to sell the company to Mr. Musk.

In recent decades American corporations and their boards have operated under a legal doctrine known as “shareholder primacy,” which posits that corporate boards should focus on a single goal, which is maximizing returns to shareholders.

Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, hewed closely to that doctrine on Monday when he said that the board had evaluated Mr. Musk’s offer by focusing on “value, certainty and financing” and that the deal would deliver a “substantial cash premium.”

He might as well have been talking about a tool-and-die manufacturer.

There wasn’t even lip service paid to Twitter’s other stakeholders — its users, employees and advertisers, to name a few — or its profound importance to public discourse. It’s unclear whether the board members, in what appears to have been a whirlwind weekend of deliberations, even touched on these topics.

Under current law, mostly established by Delaware courts, boards have “the discretion but not the obligation” to consider the interests of people other than their investors, said Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. But few, if any, have exercised that discretion, she said.

In recent years, this shareholder primacy model has come under attack from critics who contend it has enriched shareholders at the expense of just about everything and everyone else: workers, customers, innovation, the planet.

“Corporate leaders and practitioners have been increasingly pledging to pay close attention to the interests of stakeholders, such as customers or society in the case of Twitter, and not only shareholders,” said Lucian Bebchuk, a professor at Harvard Law School. Even so, a study of more than 100 recent $1 billion-plus deals that Mr. Bebchuk recently completed found that there had been little impact, with “large gains” for shareholders and corporate leaders and little or nothing for other constituencies.

The Twitter situation shows how “we need to fundamentally change the approach to corporate governance,” said Ms. Palladino, the Massachusetts professor.

Mr. Musk has said he isn’t buying Twitter to make money (even as he claims that he has plans to “unlock” the company’s potential). That is arguably cause for concern. Public shareholders, like any other owner seeking to maximize profits, have a financial incentive to attract and maintain the broadest number of users. That means management needs to bar extremists, in order to avoid offending or driving away many more users, while seeking to prohibit as few others as possible, in order to increase the platform’s value to advertisers.

On the other hand, it leaves the company’s management hostage to the whims of Wall Street, whose interests may not be well aligned with those of the broader public.

Since his takeover bid became public earlier this month, Mr. Musk has been talking up his plans to promote Twitter as a bastion of free speech. On Monday, he said he hoped that “even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.”

While Mr. Musk’s public comments so far have been soothing to champions of free expression, especially those on the right who claim that Big Tech has silenced conservative viewpoints, there’s no guarantee that Mr. Musk will continue to espouse those broad-minded views once he’s in control.

Having forsworn the profit motive, Mr. Musk might not care whom he offends, either by welcoming extremists or by banning people who denounce him. This is a man who once called a rescue worker a “pedo guy” after the worker criticized Mr. Musk. He has been careful not to say where he would draw the line between free expression and hateful or violent speech, which Twitter’s existing management has, with a notably imperfect record, tried to curtail.

In one sense, it’s easy to sympathize with the eagerness of the Twitter board to get out of this hornet’s nest while enriching shareholders. Turning down a takeover offer at a premium to the company’s current share price would have been a recipe for litigation. Accepting the bid was the path of least resistance, and Ms. Fisch said it was unlikely to be successfully challenged in court or held up by federal regulators.

On the other hand, there’s far more at stake with Twitter than in a normal corporate transaction (though you could make a similar argument about CNN, whose parent company was acquired this month by Discovery Inc., or for that matter any other company that purportedly serves the public interest).

Perhaps Mr. Musk will prove a fine steward of the digital town square he will soon own; it’s certainly plausible that the board, if it had seriously considered the likelihood that Mr. Musk would meddle to suit his ideology or personal interests, would have concluded he was a relatively safe pair of hands. After all, it’s not as if Twitter, in its current cacophonous state, is some utopia of mild-mannered civic discourse.

But the board’s response to Mr. Musk need not have been based on any subjective evaluation of his character or motives.

As Ms. Palladino points out, the board could have taken the position that serving the public interest matters most to Twitter’s long-term value, and that selling Twitter to any single, private buyer wasn’t in the interests of anyone other than short-term speculators and Mr. Musk himself.

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lol at thinking this willfully ignorant gibberish is "insightful"