Submitted 2 months ago by AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-bought-twitter-settle-his-jet-tracking-beef-1851248192
Archive link: archive.ph/ttBv9
Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn’t disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn’t back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn’t that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I’m pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.
Ah so Musk was trying to increase his profits super publicly and super illegally.
I honestly don’t think he was TRYING to do anything but shitpost. It didn’t look like a well thought out plan, it looked like an idiot talking out of his ass and realizing that his memes were also crimes.
I think you’re giving him too much credit. The announcement that he owned Twitter shares already hiked the price. If he wanted to short he should’ve just kept his mouth shut, get on the board and then sell his stocks. The initial hike to his 9% ownership was on par with his buy offer hike. If his plan was to short the company he could’ve done it without the legal trouble. Also the second price hike was after he had already made a public bid for the company and the company had accepted the offer. At that point he was locked in to buying the company. There was speculation if such a deal is allowed to go through, but the reality is that unless someone else steps in Musk had two options, he either buys the company or he gets taken to court and is forced to buy the company.
He had to buy the company, but not because he was risking going to jail. He had to buy it because he screwed himself over by making the bid in the first place. I don’t get the need to make him seem like an intelligent man. He didn’t have any grand schemes or ulterior motives or someone else footing the bill. He simply made a horrible move, probably because he’s a huge manchild who didn’t like that the CEO of Twitter didn’t completely lick his boot.
He could had pulled out of the bid as well me thinks. Between presenting a bid and closing the deal there should be **due diligence **.
This is what I understand Mr Musk failed to do, after that it would have been nearly impt to cancel the deal.
He wasn’t trying to short Twitter. He was trying to pump and dump. Though the dumping probably would have been done more tactfully than the standard pump and dump. Musk getting publicity for holding the stock helps to keep the value up. Tesla’s been inflated forever, and he thought he could do the same with Twitter.
Yes, the primary reason he bought Twitter is that he screwed up during his pump and dump scheme. There are several reasons he was looking at Twitter in particular, including the jet tracking, how much he loves Twitter anyway, his hate for being told what he can and can not post, etc. I also suspect he’s lost most of the people who will tell him the truth and is now surrounded by right-wing grifters (for politics and aiming his money, they’re smart enough to not try to take the money directly). All these reasons were part of why the pump and dump was plausible as something else, and why it was Twitter that it happened to. Probably not even Musk knows how much of the intent to buy was legit (though not for 44b) and how much of it was the pump and dump.
He had a scheme; I don’t know that I’d call it grand.
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
Yes AND he’s desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.
The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.
It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn’t) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, “you’re the coolest, bro” and him replying, “watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I’m probably the fastest dinner ever actually” [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
If he had really cared about the jet tracking thing, he wouldn’t have burned $44b buying twitter to handle it. He just would have bribed / lobbied politicians to put a “public safety” exemption into effect for public data about flights. Make it so that private jets aren’t available in the public feeds / databases. Getting a law like that passed would have cost him tens of millions rather than tens of billions.
Likely story. Rich people don’t go to prison, you think I was born yesterday?
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.
Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.
(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
Really wish he’d kept fighting do we’d see that.
Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
This
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn’t afford the penalties because he didn’t have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.
Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
Just fucking stop.
Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter after doing several incredibly stupid things publicly.
I don’t see how claiming he bought Twitter to try and shut up a teenager does anyting to help his reputation.
It re-enforces the idea that he is a “genius” who is playing “4D Chess” and that he “has a plan” and not that he’s a fucking drug addled freak who is making decisions based on his emotional state at the time.
There was no plan, there’s never a plan. Rich people just play this game where, because they have enough money to insulate themselves from their bad decisions, they pretend that “this was always their plan.”
Pretty much Musk:
Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.
That’s the definition of “fuck you” money.
Yeah $50k isn’t even that much to Musk, what an idiot.
For perspective, $30 billion would afford the food and freight to feed every human on Earth for a year.
Less than that would make him a god in Haiti (that is, elevate the nation out of crisis and put a bronze statue of Musk in every state park commemorating how awesome he is.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide. Curiously Musk considered this, but then wondered how to get everyone to pay fees for it.
I’m having trouble figuring out the math for this. My assumptions lead me to divide $30b by 8b people, which is about $4/person. I’m not confident that people can eat on $4 for a year.
What am I getting wrong?
I just did the math myself before seeing your comment and you’re right that math is fucked lmao.
Maybe it’s to provide food security just for those who don’t already have it
That the costs scale down the more massive the production. If you’re in the industrialized world, the money you pay for food is almost all profit. Not the cost of agriculture, not the cost of harvesting and packaging, not freight time, maintenance and fuel, not logistics and accounting. Profit.
Most of our money spent is bribes goes in the pocket of each of the capitalists along the way taking their bit of rent.
A few billion could provide free high-speed internet to everyone worldwide
Since there is about few billion people on earth, does that mean that high speed internet costs about a dollar per person? You did not think this through, did you?
There are eight billion people on earth, so it’s even cheaper. Internet access is one of those things that requires infrastructure that gets cheaper per user as it scales up. At a global level, yes, internet should be ridiculously cheap per capita.
The cost we pay here in the US is mostly profit for the oligopolies that control the last mile. Licensing fees because they control access via legal obstruction. If I were to create a community server, it could be much cheaper as a non-profit cooperative, but for the cost defending from litigation from the established chains.
In other words, cost of the internet is inflated by force, not because internet access is expensive to construct and maintain.
Yea, now $30B will buy everyone on earth a McDonald’s hash brown, including tax.
Becase it’s false and the math severely wrong.
Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he’s ever taken and that’s a long list to fight to the top of.
And totally on par for him.
I love that for him 🥰
And you know the worst part about it? Burning that amount of money makes basically zero difference in his life.
But you forget the best part. The tracker still exists and everyone still knows where his fucking jet is flying to because that shit is public information by air navigation regulation. There’s still bots that regularly posts the MuskJet location both in Twitter and Mastodon. So he spent all that money and still failed.
I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.
He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try and pull that.
Makes you wonder what they’re og twitters guys are doing now
I’m also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right “try and shame people for standing up to nazis”.
Pretty sure that’s illegal
That’s his entire business model. Just look at starship, hyper loop, solar roofs and Tesla semi. Overblown Tesla stock bubble too. All complete vaporware, but he profits greatly from the hype alone. He belongs in prison as he is a classic conman.
So is racking up debt in shell companies and claiming bankruptcy on them but it didn’t stop Trump either.
When has that stopped billionaire dummasses?
People who control the organs of communication usually end up writing the laws, even if it’s at arm’s length.
I honestly thought this was common knowledge.
It’s worse than that. The usual way of buying a company is a memorandum of understanding followed by due diligence, followed by signing a contract and then the actual completion. Elon went straight to signing the contract and then had big old shit fit when the Twitter board held him to the terms of the contract and the penalties for pulling out.
Oh no: mastodon.social/@elonjet
isnt he also back on twitter?
Stop talking about this guy.
Citizens say go
Muskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There’s no “grand design,” just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.
So is Taylor Swift going to buy it next?
So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though “Fuck it, maybe I can’t beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!”
…If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements… Like “For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!” -
We would be living in a totally different timeline
If they weren’t doing anything wrong they shouldn’t care who watches where they go, right?
What a snowflake
Yes this makes far more sense then the brain dead “bought it to kill it” theory that’s just cope for phony stark
LOL. There’s a silicon valley bigwig jet tracker that I see pop up on my Reddit account, and I’m not even that interested in it.
Called it! 100% called it!
this is so astoundingly petty, it might just be true.
although i doubt that’s the only reason he bought it, i wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a major factor that got him serious about buying it.
Or really, he wanted to talk shit and pump and dump, and he got caught by some savvy lawyers at twitter.
Then he tried to turn it into a political tool sprinkled with his narcissism, hoping foreign governments would pay him to manipulate narratives. But now nobody gives a shit, he has lawsuits left and right and is likely going to go broke, and he’s scared away all the advertisers who were his life blood.
He tried to pull a trump but nobody actually backed him up, and they’re likely going to let him fall.
I’ve read all his texts. He definitely bought it because d-list celebrities in his chat groups begged him to.
So… it was a really good call from the CEO to not remove the account?
All that money could have gone to something useful that would have benefited everybody and instead it went into investors pockets all to protect this idiot’s fragile ego
Considering that…
…I have a hunch that he also served the interests of certain political actors with the acquisition. Public town square my lower backside.
Elon is first and foremost a con man.
He gives them the old razzle dazzle, and even tech investors get so impressed with his confidence and his technobabble and his statements like “This is ready to ship today” that they’ve just lined up to give him money.
I think what’s happening now is that the blush is coming off the rose. Elon first got his money because he was I volved as a founder in a company that he was fired from because of incompetence, but kept a large enough founder equity stake that he cashed out a billionaire. Then, because money was cheap and because you hit a tipping point where it’s easier to make money than lose money, he failed upwards.
Now reality is starting to catch up with him, and he’s in a panic. He’s psyched himself out enough that he’s turned pure Trump, doubling down and becoming more outrageous instead of taking his responsibility to his companies into account.
If that’s true, Saudi Arabia probably wouldn’t have given him $22B of their dollars with no expectation of a Return on Investment. They have no horse in the “does Elon look foolish?” race.
So Taylor Swift is going to but it next?
Why settle your jet-tracking beef when you can just eat it?
Pretty sure ended up buying Twitter because the courts made him.
Assuming this is true, there are methods to have the same result that are way less expensive…
I wouldn’t doubt that was his initial motivation for making the suggestions.
I also remember that he tried to back out of buying Twitter multiple times. While doing so he was pretty public about all the crazy crap he would do with Twitter.
Despite all that Twitter went to a judge and got them to force Musk to complete the sale. He’s a crappy CEO for Twitter but it’s kind of on the former Twitter leadership for forcing that situation.
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 2 months ago
Incidentally… mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
Holy shit this dude fucking lives on his plane. Like I feel guilty about the 2-3x per year I fly to see family but this fucker has flown that far already in the past week. Why? Does he not know how to do a video call?
PureTryOut@lemmy.kde.social 2 months ago
Ugh, I feel the same. I know the top 1% of the world or whatever emits tons and tons more CO2 per year than the other 99%, but I didn’t know it was this bad. That plane is flying multiple times per day. Sure Musk is probably not in it all the time, but that doesn’t matter.
Private jets should be banned all together, let’s see how quickly they suddenly find out the internet exists.
Neato@ttrpg.network 2 months ago
You shouldn’t really feel guilty about anything like that. Asking hundreds of millions to billions of people to drastically change their lives and practice austerity is insane while billionaires do whatever they want and corporations push legislation that makes it harder to conserve. Our meager efforts won’t matter much if the biggest offenders go pollute wantonly.
Individual’s biggest efforts are pushing for legislation and politicians who will curb corporate abuses. Everything is a drop in a bucket that’s already overflowing.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Others use the jet as well, but I imagine it’s still heavily Elon
anarchyrabbit@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Dude takes a 22 minute to n flight. My god how small do you need to feel to boost your ego to do that instead of video.
CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This follows classic maritime law: You don’t have to pay taxex if you live in the air. That is what my lawyer Chareth Cutestory said. I have the best lawyers
Empricorn@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Do your bosses (and their bosses) support work-from-home? They know how, but it’s about control for these people.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
The profile is “elonjet.net” on bluesky.
MajorHavoc@programming.dev 2 months ago
Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
zcd@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
PlainSimpleGarak@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I don’t get this. What is the point? Why would anyone care where a billionaire is flying to and from? Just for kicks?
WaxiestSteam69@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think it’s mostly aboit the massive carbon footprint of a private jet and Elon has a rep for really short frequent flights.