What a gut check. I'm sure this is an obvious comment by now, but seeing the board's response to turning down something like this is going to be an olympic level display of mental gymnastics. Exciting times.
The board has fiduciary duty to test is seriously - usually by forming a committee, getting external advice, trying to get a better price and a solid case if they decline the offer. They will likely be advised that this will end up in court one way or the other, and making sure the process is solid is their way of avoiding liability.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/14/cramer-twitters-board-has-no...
No competent board would accept an offer lower than recent prices. Remember you only get one chance to sell the whole company.
Shareholders have had numerous opportunities to sell at this price and higher, so it makes no sense to recommend the sale at this price for all shareholders.
Given a provision like that, you can see why (financing clauses are a convenient escape hatch when making big purchases).
Plenty of shareholders have sold at the offer price or lower, which is why TWTR was ~$38 pre-Elon.
Musk wants to exit his Twitter position, and is using this offer to pump the price before he dumps stock, under the justification of "they rejected my painfully, obviously low offer so now I need to exit".
Except the market has already jumped back down.
There will be no exit liquidity, it’ll go sub-30 if anyone catches a whiff of Elon dumping his shares.
I do see this as a way for him to save face. kind of "I bought $4B of stock on a whim and that was a bad idea, but if I pump it and come out ahead I'll feel better"
There's a premium expected for a total buyout, but I don't see how they justify ~80% higher than their current/previous rating.
> Cramer also warned of potential “personal liability” if the board accepts Musk’s offer, which would value the company at around $43 billion.
That seems to be a much stronger argument.
I wouldn't take financial advice from CNN's Jim Cramer.
To catch folks up MS offered Yahoo $44B in their CHOICE of cash or stock (58B inflation adjusted). Yahoo said no, then imploded.
After that who knows. Well, apparently Elon Musk knows.
But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated.
the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me.
MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs.
> they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?
if advertising works - installation of new beliefs is a huge successful industry.
Do you think advertising works?
Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly.
And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.
MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc).
Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained.
The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time.
Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B.
There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.
https://www.forbes.com/2007/10/23/alibaba-ipo-pricing-market...
https://news.microsoft.com/2008/02/01/microsoft-proposes-acq...
MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake.
Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.
https://www.reuters.com/article/tech-alibabacom-ipo-dc/aliba...
Eventually Marissa made amends with Jack Ma and Yahoo was allowed to keep 24% of their stake, and then BABA went public. But before Marissa came on board, there was Carol Bartz who was a total fuck up of the highest order; a potty-mouthed prick if there was one. She pissed Jack off when they first met, and Jack took Alipay from out of under her. I'm surprised more people don't blame Bartz for the screwups at Yahoo.
Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.
As far as I can tell, that's because you're blocked by the commenter or the commenter is a private account.
People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.
This leaves such a poor taste in my mouth. Perhaps the proper UX is to then _not display comment counts_ if your performance/cost tradeoff has determined that you can't display comment counts accurately. For higher comment counts it might be fine where a user isn't expected to read all 5000 replies(ignoring the edge case where its 5000 private/blocked accounts replying), but if a tweet has 2 replies then the user who clicks it expects to see those.
Other large platforms have been able to solve this issue either in UX or implementation, so "web scale" isn't a good excuse.
I understand the idea but it feels a little too online for my taste. I'm probably not the target audience. Just feels like someone decided the tea leaves falling a certain way MUST indicate something.
Yes.
Also I feel like I should add that "ratio" is a confusing term, because it can refer to the above example `reply-count / likes`, but can also be when a reply gets more likes than the tweet it's replying to: `reply-likes / OP-likes`.
If you have proof that other platforms have solved this problem at scale, I would be very interested to see it. Fundamentally, those totals are never going to be perfectly correct because a) people will be adding and removing tweets continuously, and b) even if continuously updating the numbers were worth the resources, people would hate having the numbers changing frequently.
What if everyone could see full edit history of each twitt?
100% this. People are always confused why Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram, and this was, I think, a bit part of why.
Vine was completely destroyed by Twitter's incompetent management, and prevailing wisdom was that Facebook would do the same to Instagram. "Okay Facebook has filters now! Time to shut down Instagram!"
8.2 million shares of Google didn't hurt either.
They could actually make a phenomenal amount off of subscription revenue tho off of that model, doesn't really make sense for any of the FAANG's strategies but I could see it making a lot of money with competent management. Twitter Blue is one of their best ideas in a long time, but should be more expensive and have more features.
Reddit gold is an example of how to nail something like this, because it was done with tremendous sensitivity to the culture of the site. It's quirky, slightly ironic, riffs on the obvious silliness of a 'gift' that goes 99% to Reddit's coffers, and it's perfectly pitched to the user at the point where they are already feeling the value of Reddit's product & the other user's content. Twitter's, by contrast, is an example of how not to do it, for the converse of all those reasons and more besides.
Putting both together could be incredibly lucrative but also would be treated very cautiously because of potential deplatforming.
Musk actual commitment to minimal moderation (what my mental model is for his free speech bent) could thread that needle and at the very least be a fascinating experiment to watch from the sidelines.
So there probably won't be a competing offer.
Making something people want to pay for, of course, is the challenge, and Twitter Blue is a very limited start to that. But for the position Twitter has come to occupy in culture, a bold product vision could leverage that to incredible effect.
The fact that you don't know about it should say something about how enthusiastically the feature was received. Most creators are probably happier with their existing Patreon/OF platforms.
It's clearly not, since it's still one of the largest social networks in the world.
I'm not a fan of twitter or social networks in general, but it's clear that they are used by a teeny hundreds of millions of people more than some celebrities.
Ironically, this suggests that people like Elon Musk are exactly the problem with Twitter.