In other hostile takeover Tweets...
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
But we know he has the money. The third parties who were going to lend Musk the money have come out publicly and said that they were going to give it to him.
What parties?
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@MrL said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
But we know he has the money. The third parties who were going to lend Musk the money have come out publicly and said that they were going to give it to him.
What parties?
Morgan Stanley.
Musk stated that he would personally provide $21 billion, financed through equity in his own name. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, would finance $13 billion through debt facilities, as well as $12.5 billion in marginal loans. Musk said he had received commitment letters from Morgan Stanley for both these offers.
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This post is deleted!
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@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
As in, it’ll drag on so long and uneventfully that we’ll all fall asleep?
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@kazitor said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
As in, it’ll drag on so long and uneventfully that we’ll all fall asleep?
Or it will release so many toxic chemicals into the
atmoblogosphere that the world as we know it will end.
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@kazitor said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
As in, it’ll drag on so long and uneventfully that we’ll all fall asleep?
@izzion said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@kazitor said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
As in, it’ll drag on so long and uneventfully that we’ll all fall asleep?
Or it will release so many toxic chemicals into the
atmoblogosphere that the world as we know it will end.Both of you offer opinions I agree with. I would like to subscribe to your news letters.
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@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Both of you offer opinions I agree with. I would like to
subscribe tolike and retweet your newsletters.
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And he didn't even change the colour of the Like button to Twitter blue like he promised.
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@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@LaoC said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Gribnit said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@dcon said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Surprise!
Musk Scraps $44 Billion Twitter Deal Over ‘Misleading Representations’
Oh mang, here come the lawsuits.
Yeah, the good stuff is coming now. If he doesn’t relinquish that billion easily and twitter chases it, whatever twitter wasn’t giving up to Musk could end up on the record. It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
You mean what Musk claims they didn’t give him.
That doesn’t add up, though. If they have statistics they need to keep secret, they wouldn’t have agreed to the deal in the first place. However, Musk just claiming shit to weasel out of the deal is perfectly believable.
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@topspin said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@DogsB said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@LaoC said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Gribnit said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@dcon said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Surprise!
Musk Scraps $44 Billion Twitter Deal Over ‘Misleading Representations’
Oh mang, here come the lawsuits.
Yeah, the good stuff is coming now. If he doesn’t relinquish that billion easily and twitter chases it, whatever twitter wasn’t giving up to Musk could end up on the record. It’s going to be a fantastic tire fire.
You mean what Musk claims they didn’t give him.
That doesn’t add up, though. If they have statistics they need to keep secret, they wouldn’t have agreed to the deal in the first place. However, Musk just claiming shit to weasel out of the deal is perfectly believable.
Not statistics, but yes, they've said that they can't release the data to demonstrate their claim:
[Twitter's CEO] said it’s not possible for external groups to calculate the exact number of spam accounts on the platform because it requires both public and private information that Twitter can’t share.
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@boomzilla said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
private information that Twitter can’t share.
I'm pretty sure that if you tender an offer to buy a business, due diligence requires getting everything, public and private (under NDA, of course). "We won't give you relevant info that affects the true value of the business" is very reasonable grounds for canceling the offer.
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@HardwareGeek
Though that raises an interesting legal what-if... Musk had previously been playing out the merger in a very public fashion, and in a way that could be construed as deliberately trying to embarrass the existing Twitter management. So could the board make a reasonable argument that they did not believe that Musk would honor the conditions of the NDA if he thought that he could embarrass the Twitter board with the private data, and thus the board had a duty to their customers / stakeholders to protect the private information, since Musk was going to back out of the deal either way and at least this way Twitter didn't violate its customers' privacy on top for no good reason?
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There was at least one news outlet (independent.ie) reporting that Elon's Twitter was suspended but they fell foul of a different account being suspended that looks like Elon's because
eIonmusk
looks a lot likeelonmusk
in their sans-serif font.I can imagine a good few people would have been quite pleased if he'd been suspended for a bit.
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@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@MrL said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
But we know he has the money. The third parties who were going to lend Musk the money have come out publicly and said that they were going to give it to him.
What parties?
Morgan Stanley.
Musk stated that he would personally provide $21 billion, financed through equity in his own name. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, would finance $13 billion through debt facilities, as well as $12.5 billion in marginal loans. Musk said he had received commitment letters from Morgan Stanley for both these offers.
He never had those 21 billion.
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@loopback0 he seems very confident that courts won't find him to be in violation of the contract or SEC rules.
Well, I probably would too if laws didn't apply to me.
And the revival of an older meme:
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@topspin math is hard, let’s go (Twitter) shopping!
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@boomzilla there's more here:
Twitter was required to "seek and obtain consent before deviating from its obligation to conduct its business in the ordinary course and 'preserve substantially intact the material components of its current business organization.'" The lawyer's letter argues that didn't happen:
Moreover, three executives have resigned from Twitter since the Merger Agreement was signed: the Head of Data Science, the Vice President of Twitter Service, and a Vice President of Product Management for Health, Conversation, and Growth.
Should've held them hostage until Musk agreed they're allowed to leave.
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@boomzilla well, it's a Delaware court, so at least it'll be impartial. What with so many companies organically forming there and all, the judges must be sick of their shit already, even.
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The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don’t have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to. Bots have recently become central to Elon Musk’s attempts to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company (although Twitter denies Musk’s claims).
More general LOLworthy TDWTF material:
But, the disclosure says, Zatko soon learned “it was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did…. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.”
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@boomzilla said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
The whistleblower also says Twitter executives don’t have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform, and were not motivated to. Bots have recently become central to Elon Musk’s attempts to back out of a $44 billion deal to buy the company (although Twitter denies Musk’s claims).
More general LOLworthy TDWTF material:
But, the disclosure says, Zatko soon learned “it was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did…. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.”
I read an article about it where it said that pretty much everyone from the board down had full access to everything.
And he also said that bots were plentiful that if an accurate number was public, it'd probably torpedo the company. I doubt the torpedoing, since twitter being utter shit has failed to do so so far so.
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@Carnage the problem with the bot count is that it potential advertisers will understand that they're paying for fewer eyeballs than they were promised.
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@boomzilla Just program the bots to buy random stuff that's advertised.
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@boomzilla said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Carnage the problem with the bot count is that it potential advertisers will understand that they're paying for fewer eyeballs than they were promised.
There's been plenty of advertisment studies that say that there is no measurable benefit to paying for ads directly on social media. Doesn't seem to have taken down the shit.
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@boomzilla said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Carnage the problem with the bot count is that it potential advertisers will understand that they're paying for fewer eyeballs than they were promised.
How would that work? I assume ads are being paid per impression or per click (or both), not by “we have 50 billion viewers who could potentially be displayed your ad, but won’t.” And bots probably don’t amount to false impression or click counts either.
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@topspin said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
And bots probably don’t amount to false impression or click counts either.
If Twitter don't care about even tracking how many bots are on the platform, they can't prove whether bots do or don't make up false advert views or clicks or whatever.
Ultimately they can't give potential advertisers confidence that they're getting what they pay for.
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@loopback0 said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
If Twitter don't care about even tracking how many bots are on the platform, they can't prove whether bots do or don't make up false advert views or clicks or whatever.
Ultimately they can't give potential advertisers confidence that they're getting what they pay for.Arguably, smart advertisers would pay more attention to traceable purchases than to unverifiable claims of Twitter.
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@jinpa said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
smart advertisers
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@topspin said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@boomzilla said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@Carnage the problem with the bot count is that it potential advertisers will understand that they're paying for fewer eyeballs than they were promised.
How would that work? I assume ads are being paid per impression or per click (or both), not by “we have 50 billion viewers who could potentially be displayed your ad, but won’t.” And bots probably don’t amount to false impression or click counts either.
I always figured it was "we have 50 billion viewers so we can charge 100x per impression than shit-platform that only has 100 million"
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@loopback0 said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Ultimately they can't give potential advertisers confidence that they're getting what they pay for.
Which is what? Placing value on a metric doesn't make it an effective metric, although it can grant it irrational value.
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@MrL said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@GuyWhoKilledBear said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
But we know he has the money. The third parties who were going to lend Musk the money have come out publicly and said that they were going to give it to him.
What parties?
Awesome parties. 4 kegs. And the Loestermann's are out of town all week.
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@Gribnit said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@loopback0 said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Ultimately they can't give potential advertisers confidence that they're getting what they pay for.
Which is what? Placing value on a metric doesn't make it an effective metric, although it can grant it irrational value.
Add some blockchain and you've really got something!
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More stuff from that whistleblower...
First up... folks have known for awhile that tons of Chinese advertisers were/are buying Twitter ads... But no one had pieced it together that those Chinese advertisers would be using *Twitter Custom Audiences to doxx VPN users who verified with real contact info...
...
"Twitter executives opted to allow Twitter to become more dependent upon revenue coming from Chinese entities even though the Twitter service is blocked in China....""Twitter employees were repeatedly found to be intentionally installing spyware on their work computers at the request of external organizations. Twitter learned of this several times only by accident, or because of employee self-reporting."
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"...The Indian government forced Twitter to hire specific individual(s) who were government agents... it was believed by the executive team that the Indian government had succeeded in placing agents on the company payroll..."
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@boomzilla @ 9300K
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Musk claims that Twitter has failed to provide enough detail about the number of fake accounts on its platform, and argues that up to 30% of Twitter's "monetizable daily active users," or mDAU, could be spam or bot accounts. Twitter says the mDAU metric helps it measure the number of accounts on its platform that advertisers can target, thus making them "monetizable."
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@boomzilla he’s like a 5 year old.
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@topspin he thought tweeting a at the CEO was a good idea at one point, I believe.
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Wait, what? Musk actually did it?
From now on, if somebody criticizes my money spending, I will just dismiss it with "yeah, but, Musk bought twitter, remember".
Musk has talked about using Twitter to create "X, the everything app." This is a reference to China's WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform, but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments to gaming. "You basically live on WeChat in China," Musk told Twitter employees in June. "If we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a great success."
Ah, yeah, hard pass on that. (Can Musk even pull that off, or is this going to be another Hyperloop or
spandexTesla bot?)
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@cvi said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
"You basically live on WeChat in China," Musk told Twitter employees in June
Needs more metaverse.
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@cvi said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
Ah, yeah, hard pass on that. (Can Musk even pull that off, or is this going to be another Hyperloop or spandexTesla bot?)
He'd basically be adding online payments, QR Code payments, and one-to-one chats to Twitter's cellphone app. The one-to-one chat is... something that Twitter is already capable of, isn't it? So that leaves the online payment functions.
Twitter has a huge userbase, and PayPal just made itself undesirable to get on anything important, so in theory shops should be very eager to accept PayElon as a form of payment. Adding QR Code scanning for payment requests is trivial once that's done.
It's a bit chilling, really. Once the trifecta of online payments, local (QR code) payments, and verified identity chats exists in a single, convenient app, it's very likely that it ends up de-facto mandatory for normal life. Like, WeChat is slowly replacing cash in China, only limited by cellphone network coverage. And the government of China controls it. The potential for abuse by government actors is enormous.
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@acrow said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
These terms didn't stand for long due to widespread outrage and the subsequent tanking of their stock value. But needless to say, people don't feel very safe linking their account to PayPal right now.
From what I saw, the penalty remains, and has been in there since 2013.
(I don't know if it's anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be, considering it's been in there forever. The safe bet is of course to assume companies will indeed abuse their T&C's to the maximum extent possible, but people never do that and are always surprised when they find out that, e.g., Microsoft owns your computer, all your data, and can turn stuff off whenever they want. Not sure how Paypal is any different in that regard.)
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@topspin said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
@acrow said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
These terms didn't stand for long due to widespread outrage and the subsequent tanking of their stock value. But needless to say, people don't feel very safe linking their account to PayPal right now.
From what I saw, the penalty remains, and has been in there since 2013.
(I don't know if it's anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be, considering it's been in there forever. The safe bet is of course to assume companies will indeed abuse their T&C's to the maximum extent possible, but people never do that and are always surprised when they find out that, e.g., Microsoft owns your computer, all your data, and can turn stuff off whenever they want. Not sure how Paypal is any different in that regard.)
ETA:
people don't feel very safe linking their account to PayPal right now.
Paypal has always been extremely sketchy, acting like a bank when it suited them, and acting like "not a bank" when that would grant their customers rights due to banking regulations.
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@acrow It's not like PayPal ever had great business practices. They were maybe useful on occasion, but that's long in the past anyway. Trusting PayPal with money that you needed was pretty much always a mistake.
Edit: Not sure why people would expect TwitPay to be any better. If it ever exists, it'll do its best to shirk any responsibility and dodge whatever consumer regulations/protections exist too. Besides, wasn't Musk involved in early PayPal?
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@cvi said in In other hostile takeover Tweets...:
"Musk has talked about using Twitter to create "X, the everything app." This is a reference to China's WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform, but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments to gaming. "You basically live on WeChat in China," Musk told Twitter employees in June. "If we can recreate that with Twitter, we'll be a great success.""
Ah, yeah, hard pass on that. (Can Musk even pull that off, or is this going to be another Hyperloop or
spandexTesla bot?)I doubt he can make it as dominant but it definitely needs other revenue streams and that might be the way to get it. It's certainly better than just buying it and not doing much of anything with the business model. He also has the advantage of an already big user base plus his super name recognition.
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@topspin It got headlines recently. I understood that the major change was that they extended their fining policy over what you may do on other platforms. But I didn't look in that deeply.
First Google result https://viewfromthewing.com/paypals-objectionable-terms-are-back-2500-fines-for-content-they-dont-like/ says that PayPal's terms are a reflection of how the U.S. administrations have abused the banking sector for domestic power politics.