Looks like he found a way to back out of the Twitter deal…he will claim they have a significant number of fake accounts. All he had to do is see Julie’s 38,000 followers and determine 37,000 were bots.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

But but but I thought that doge to the moon 42069 man was for free speech? Why would Elon do this to me personally?

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

Maybe he should have done some due diligence.

i didn't think Musk was actually serious about buying it. The billion dollar walk-away provision felt like he was paying a billion dollars to troll the planet. Possible he's serious and just realizes twitter ain't worth 50 billion and is trying to negotiate a lower price.

Watch Musk walk-away, pay the $1 billion dollar fee and that ends up making 2022 twitter's most profitable year ever.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

i didn't think Musk was actually serious about buying it. The billion dollar walk-away provision felt like he was paying a billion dollars to troll the planet. Possible he's serious and just realizes twitter ain't worth 50 billion and is trying to negotiate a lower price.

Watch Musk walk-away, pay the $1 billion dollar fee and that ends up making 2022 twitter's most profitable year ever.

I guess today is Day 4 of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter being “temporarily on hold”? I mean, as I said on Friday, “temporarily on hold” is not a relevant category for a deal with a signed merger agreement: Musk has committed to buy Twitter and Twitter has committed to sell to him. There are conditions that need to be met to close the deal, but both sides have committed to work diligently to meet those conditions. There is no reason to think that Musk can get out of the deal, or even delay it.

But on Friday Musk did tweet that the deal is on hold “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent 5% of users.” Today Twitter’s poor lawyers filed that tweet with the SEC, since it is after all a public communication in connection with a pending merger. It’s a terrible filing. Ideally Twitter and Musk would get together and put out a joint statement explaining what is going on. Failing that, Twitter would put out its own statement explaining, to the best of its knowledge, what is going on. Even “Elon Musk tweeted this, we have no idea what it means, we are working in good faith to close the deal and still hope that will happen but Elon’s gonna Elon” would be a decent statement under the circumstances. But they just filed the tweet. (And the follow-up tweet in which Musk, confusingly, says “Still committed to acquisition,” and one from the chairman of Twitter’s board saying “We are too. We remain committed to our agreement.”) Twitter doesn’t know what’s going on any more than you or I do, and they are afraid to hazard a guess, or even to publicly admit “we won’t hazard a guess.” Just confused silence.

Musk’s complaint here is so obviously fake and pretextual that it is hardly worth talking about. Twitter has been saying in its securities filings “that false or spam accounts represented less than 5%” of active users for at least eight years, and it has always qualified those statements by saying that it is an estimate and “may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts.” Musk signed a merger agreement without doing any due diligence on that number, and nothing has changed since he signed the agreement — three weeks ago! — that would create additional cause for doubt. Was Musk on notice about the problem of spam accounts at Twitter? Buddy, in the press release announcing the deal, Musk said that his future plans for Twitter include “defeating the spam bots.” For him to announce, three weeks later, that he can’t buy Twitter because there might be spam bots is just offensively stupid. (As is his supposed methodology for checking Twitter’s numbers, which I cannot bear to discuss, but you can read people making fun of it here and here. And here is Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s discussion of bot evaluation.)

But I suppose that's the point. He is not trying to create a good record so that, if he tries to walk away from the deal, he can argue in court that the closing conditions were not satisfied and he doesn’t have to close. He is trying to create a bad record, so that Twitter gets the message “I am going to ignore my legal obligations so you’d better give me what I want.” If Twitter goes to him and says “you are legally obligated to close this deal,” that counts for nothing. If Twitter goes to him and says “here is airtight proof that spam accounts are 3.69% of active users,” that counts for nothing. All they can do is (1) give him what he wants (presumably renegotiating the deal at a lower price) or (2) gear up for a long risky miserable fight in court to hold him to his obligations; they are right but there is no guarantee that they’d win.

Musk meanwhile keeps disparaging Twitter, in violation of the terms of the merger agreement. Of course there’s nothing Twitter can do about it. Are they going to take him to court and get an injunction that he has to stop tweeting? Musk is already subject to a court order about his tweets, which he openly ignores. Are they going to cancel the deal? They don’t want to cancel the deal. Musk is already right now in open violation of his contractual obligations, which is a powerful warning to Twitter that they have no ability to hold him to his obligations. To drive the point home, Musk tweeted on Saturday:

Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!
This actually happened.

He’s gonna violate every agreement he has with Twitter, just to prove that he can.

I don’t know why he’s doing this, but the widespread assumption is that he wants to renegotiate the price. Since Musk agreed to buy Twitter (three weeks ago!), comparable stocks have fallen, and a Texas bill has gone into effect that makes it harder and riskier to run a social media company. Why shouldn’t Musk try to get a lower price? Sure he signed a contract to pay $54.20 per share, but that doesn’t matter to him.

Still, as several people pointed out to me (on Twitter), Twitter has one important point of leverage. Here’s how I would do this negotiation:

Musk: I don’t want to pay $54.20 per share anymore, let’s do $42.
Me, the chairman of Twitter’s board, in this hypothetical: No, you signed a contract, pay us our money.
Musk: I’m going to ignore the contract and say some nonsense pretext about bot accounts, and my fans will believe me and somehow think that I’m the victim here. If you sue me, I’ll wage a scorched-earth fight and drag it out for years as the company implodes. I will blow up my financing, so I might be able to avoid closing and end up paying you a $1 billion termination fee, which is like $1.30 per share, basically nothing. Your shareholders will be much happier with $42 than with that catastrophic outcome.
Me: You’re not going to do that.
Musk: Oh yeah? Why not?
Me: Because we run Twitter. And if you walk, we are going to kick you off Twitter permanently. This will make it harder for you to connect with your fans and sell Teslas and keep up your company’s stock price; losing access to Twitter will cost you considerably more than the $46 billion you agreed to pay for it. Also though it will take away the main source of joy in your life. Without tweeting memes and trolling people, what will you have left? Sure, two hundred billion dollars, but what good does that do you if you can’t tweet?
Musk: Oh.
Me: Sixty bucks a share.

Obviously Twitter’s actual board of directors would never do this, because they are constantly forgetting that they run Twitter; they don’t use it themselves, so they can’t imagine that the product might be important to people like Musk. But it is! His leverage in this negotiation is that, if he doesn’t get what he wants, he can walk away from buying Twitter. Twitter’s leverage is that he could never actually walk away from Twitter.

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

Musk: I don’t want to pay $54.20 per share anymore, let’s do $42.
...
Me: Because we run Twitter. And if you walk, we are going to kick you off Twitter permanently. This will make it harder for you to connect with your fans and sell Teslas and keep up your company’s stock price; losing access to Twitter will cost you considerably more than the $46 billion you agreed to pay for it. Also though it will take away the main source of joy in your life. Without tweeting memes and trolling people, what will you have left? Sure, two hundred billion dollars, but what good does that do you if you can’t tweet?
Musk: Oh.
Me: Sixty bucks a share.

"Elon Musk's personal presence on twitter is worth more than $46 billion" seems like a bit of an overstatement, and not the kind of thing you'd like to try to bludgeon the eccentric billionaire buying your phony baloney "service" with. Though E.F. I am not.

Are you stoned or pissed off, or both, when you create these postings?

I don't think he can exercise the walk-away provision unless he fails to get funding...which seems hard to fathom.

From Matt Levine's column today:

"Elon Musk's personal presence on twitter is worth more than $46 billion" seems like a bit of an overstatement, and not the kind of thing you'd like to try to bludgeon the eccentric billionaire buying your phony baloney "service" with. Though E.F. I am not.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Weird, I see Dolphin looking in my asshole

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Because you are stupid, maybe read some books educate yourself.

We walk, talk, and won't shit our pants

Yep.

The ESG meme needs some workshopping but I’m quickly going from neutral on Musk to big fan.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

There’s still time not to become a weird nerd

Because you are stupid, maybe read some books educate yourself.

We walk, talk, and won't shit our pants

Yeah but on the other hand, Tesla's trillion dollar valuation seems like an overstatement as well and I suppose 5% of that could be due to Musk's fanboys and followers.

Weird, I see Dolphin looking in my asshole

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.

Keep climbing that cross Elon.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

The menstrual cycle changes among Hassidic Jewish women was something as well.