Traster

The point is that UST had significant rallies- that indicates a massive effort to support it that failed.

That's where it gets incredibly funny. They persuaded everyone that UST was worth $10Bn dollars and then went and bought $3Bn of BTC with the profits. At which point the obvious question is "Hey - isn't this asset by definition worth $3Bn"? And the answer is "Oh, no, by the time it drops from $10Bn to $7Bn we've burned all our collateral and it's worth 0".

On the second point, to be fair you can look at the UST graph and see that someone did indeed burn a tonne of Luna to support UST. It's probably impossible to really prove that every penny went to supporting it, and it's probably impossible/unlikely that Do Kwon really bankrupted himself for this, but at the very least we can say someone decided they were going down with the ship and set a lot of money on fire. Difficult to see who would've done that other than LFG.

The problem for the twitter board was that no one else was interested at the valuation. The problem for Musk is that if he walks away first he has to pay $1bn - which he doesn't want to do, and second that if he comes back the board can find someone else to buy it, or just say no to him on the basis that he's not acting in good faith.

So to get this straight - SparkToro have decided to burn their reputation down chasing a spurious irrelevant claim from someone else's merger. It'll never cease to amaze me how many people will take obvious trolling and treat is as reasonable. This is like conducting a serious analysis into whether the US election was stolen.

I hope they like law suits:

> Our analysis found that 19.42%, nearly four times Twitter’s Q4 2021 estimate, fit a conservative definition of fake or spam accounts

Ok great, I hope you have fun proving that in court. Especially the part where you have to prove that Twitter's definitions which you don't know match yours.

>SparkToro is a tiny team of just three

Then I applaud your bold decision to interfere with a $45Bn merger.

>Our definition (which may differ from Twitter’s own

Any lawyers in the house? How obviously do you have to renege on your libelous claims before you're in the clear?

Sure, and UST is another example of this, it built a multi-billion dollar market cap by obfuscating the fact you were buying a perpetual motion machine. The incentive created by "trust the code" is "lie about the code". Which is why you'll hear several thousand reasons why BTC is valuable but none are as compelling as "Those bunch of guys over there will shoot you if you try and undermine it", and most of them aren't even as compelling as "Number goes up".

The theory is that the market can efficiently decide whether the code actually does work. But the practice is that you can make billions tricking people about what the code does. And often it's people who have never even glanced at the code telling you what it does. I would wager good money that there was no one invested in UST that understood the code.

It's true that the software kills the theoretical performance that the hardware makes available. But I actually think this is an indictment of hardware not software engineers. It's basically "We've created this incredibly difficult problem for you, good luck" from the hardware engineers. How the hell is the OS meant to know whether this thread is going to turn out to be a rendering operation or a logging thread?

With these architectures I think often what the management should really look at is: "We currently employ 100 hardware engineers, and 30 software engineers, with this architecture, we're going to need 50 hardware engineers and 500 software engineers. Do we still think this is the right call?"

Russia raised interest rates to 20% at the beginning of the war to support the ruble, they also had built strong foreign capital reserves to support their currency, they've also instituted capital controls. The average person in Russia can't buy dollars, and the average person outside of Russian unable to sell any of their shares or short any stocks.

Essentially, the Ruble suffers when people flee to USD, but since both the US and Russia are preventing this, the Ruble is stronger. This is then further supported by extremely high gas prices, which allows Russia to run a trade surplus, exporting expensive oil but unable to import anything.

People are claiming this as a win for Putin - but if you look below the surface there's an obvious fact: The Ruble is only strong because no one is allowed to sell it.

I may not be able to perform a floating point operation, but I can add one third to two thirds.

You get a bunch of smart hardware guys into a room, they design this funky exotic architecture. Then the software goes "Allocate these threads to whatever is idle" and suddenly you've completely lost any possible advantage and are thrashing around with no idea what you're doing. The big-little architecture from Apple was accompanied by software that basically handles that for you. From what I heard there were similar problems with Xeon Phi - great theoretical performance but a very difficult programming model and as a result very challenging sales for the Intel sales guys.

What you're describing is totally different in scale though. When the British pound got displaced as the currency for international trade it didn't suddenly lose 99.9999% of its value in a weekend. And whilst the Dollar isn't guaranteed to be the most popular currency for international trade, it's still going to be the currency a bunch of guys with guns insist Americans pay taxes in. There are real reasons people must hold real currencies. There are no reasons that anyone needs to hold crypto.

I'm not saying crypto has no value, but I'm saying it's not comparable to a modern currency. You might be right that it's similar to some historical examples of weak upstart currencies most of which failed, but even those were backed by a lot more than just... what? In this case we're literally comparing to currencies that are often backed by nothing.

I feel like the headline mis-states the actual case - and implies something that people believe but probably isn't true. Which is that it's better to found a company in a recession. I don't see any reason to beleive that, and it's certainly not the case for most companies.

The obvious thing though is that the only really important things are: Are you reliant on discretionary consumer spending, and are you dependent on investment capital. If either of those two things are true you're going to have a tough time during a recession.

I think the reason I'm so critical of this is that you can do the same thing in other contexts and it often works out badly because very often the things that are easiest to measure are the least useful.

My theory is that he is actually just acting like the deal won't close. The plans they put in place after the activist shareholder have largely failed and now the market conditions are way worse. So he's going to bring in some new people and make a big pivot to some other revenue streams. I don't know what that is yet, but I think that'll emerge over the next 6-12 months.

I don't think he was pressuring them to close the short, I think he was hinting that it'd be good for him if he could reprice the deal.

Well this certainly makes what Parag did make sense. The market conditions have essentially dictated that Musk is now massively overpaying for twitter, and he's doing it from a weak position with the value of Tesla dropping. It would be insane for him to close at this price, and the other people who bought in to finance it will also be very hard to keep on board. So Musk needs to walk away at this price. The question is whether he can either find an out that doesn't involve paying the break up fee, or bully Twitter's board to accept a lower price. Given how Parag is behaving I think that's unlikely.

It's important to remember though, if Musk walks away and then comes back with another offer it's going to be extremely hard to convince of a new deal, since Musk no longer has any credibility.

The other thing to consider is that no one else wanted to buy Twitter for $45Bn. But let's say Musk walks away and Twitter drops back to where it should be at around $25 per share. Now you could easily see someone coming in and picking it up for $35-40 per share.

Honestly I've not heard anyone say that Twitter's current state is good. Yo're literally taling about a company that has somehow managed to stay flat whlist all their competitors are up multiples. Sure, people think Musk won't make it better, but no one thinks twitter is doing well.

The UK has 28 days minimum, that includes "bank holidays" (USA: Public holidays?) which are days decided by the government as holidays for everyone - like Christmas. So it's more like 5.6 weeks total in the UK, and the UK aren't particularly generous - your final year in Google, an exceptional comapany, barely meets the statutory minimum in the UK.

Co-ordinated effort is much more valuable than raw engineer effort aimed scatter-gun at a project. There's so much more to meetings than the author covers in this. For example, in a meeting you're made aware that engineer X is working on Y, you have prior experience in Y. Immediate win. Does this happen 100% of the time? Of course not, but there's a probability it will. Hell it doesn't have to be experience, it could just be an interestin insight - what are we paying you guys for anyway.

Communication often is the most valuable thing you can foster as a manager, and this article just seems naive. Sure, there are bad meetings. But we don't measure the thousands of hours of wasted engienering hours that could've been saved by having 1 decent meeting.

It's not like he was an outsider, he was CTO for about 5 years before he became CEO. He knew what was going on in the company.

But what's changed? If Parag wanted to go this direction why didn't he do it when he took over as CEO?

So there's two options right - the first is that Parag is for some reason making big strategic decisions about the direction of the company despite the fact that we all know he'll be gone if the deal closes. Or he's making big strategic changes at the behest of the acquirers before the deal closes.

Neither of these things seem particularly kosher moves to make. The question is how to figure out which one it is.

It would seem weird for Parag to be following Musk's orders given how Musk has behaved. It also seems weird for Musk to already have the insight into the company to know specifically who to fire. There's not much advantage to making these changes now.

On the other hand, going rogue and making big strategic decisions about the company really has the potential to burn Parag's reputation for wherever he would move next.

I guess there's a third option - that Musk has expressed a specific view, Parag has a different view, but that they both think that this move is necessary anyway so just got on and did it.

Yeah the point I'm making is this: It's fine for you to have that opinion, but if you don't find other ways to resolve Kutchers concerns he's going to continue pushing for this policy, and because he's a rich celebrity pushing a policy that the state is already pretty keen on, it's likely he's going to succeed. So on a practical level if you actually want to stop this becoming policy, it would be much more effective to actually to find different solutions.

One thing I think is important to highlight here is people often make the argument that this sort of legislation is just a grab for power using child exploitation as a cover. But if you actually take seriously the arguments made by people like Ashton Kutcher there's no doubt that there are people who genuinely are trying to solve the problem of child trafficking and this would actually help them do that.

That's not to say that there aren't significant draw backs of this type of legislation, nor that on balance this type of solution is correct. I'm simply pointing out that there are genuine policy reasons to endorse this and if you oppose this it would be wise to find other ways of solving the concerns people like Kutcher are raising.

I'm certain that with billions of dollars on the line a creative lawyer will find some avenue to attempt to get the money back. At the very least there's an arguable case that they've committed some level of fraud by mis-stating how well backed it is. The question of whether you'd win, and whether you'd be able to enforce any judgement are different issues.

The thing that I think some people miss about Tether is that it's not about whether it is backed enough it's either fully backed or it isn't. If it's not, it's not a question of whether it's back enough to weather this storm, it's about whether the people running it think they can weather this storm. If they think they can keep it running they'll sell whatever backing they have and keep the peg. But if they even think there's a decent chance they can't permanently sustain the peg then the best thing for them to do is take the backing and run, not sink it into a stable-coin they now know isn't going to work. That's going to happen way before they run out of money.

Let's say for example, Tether is 20% backed and there's $100Bn of coins so the backing is $20Bn, and people start flooding out of it. Let's say $10Bn floods out. So the guys running it have handed out $10Bn. They now have $10Bn left, and money is still flooding out. Do they really continue to hand over the cash or do they say "Well, the whole thing is about to explode anyway, I'd rather keep the $10Bn cash I've got left". At which point the holders of the coin have to play "Find these fuckers and sue them" which will be difficult since they've got $10Bn to fight/flee/hide.

Sorry, how can they lever their VC funds, surely with VCs you’re getting highly speculative valuations and terrible liquidity? That sounds like a terrible thing to lend against?

Netflix is charging $10 a month at the moment. If it can't generate $10 of revenue per user by showing adverts then what do you expect them to do?

Mr Traina had already invested in the start up and had set up a dinner for Breslow to network with Thiel and Hoffman. Both of those guys are massive VCs that any founder would be massively keen to get connections with. Thiel ended up Angel investing. This wasn't a test, it was a massive gift.

There seems to be a disconnect here:

> 75% wanted to be in the office three days a week or more; only 34% of non-executives felt the same way.

They go on then to talk generally about people might need to be in the office. This is missing something really obvious though - Executives think executives need to be in the office. Not everyone. It makes sense that Executives - people whose role is primarily about co-ordinating the organisation obviously are better off being in the office because the office is good for all the things you need to do as an executive. It is great for high bandwidth communication. Meanwhile, individual contributors work is primarily solitary and so enjoy far more benefits from working at home in a more controlled, isolated environment.

Executives think they themselves should be in the office 3 days a week. That doesn't necessarily mean that executives think everyone else should be in the office 3 days a week.