The deal includes a "specific performance" clause, which allows Twitter to force Musk to carry out the deal. He can't simply pay $1 billion and walk away, he's in for a very messy legal fight. This pretext about bots is incredibly weak and he's in no way guaranteed to win.
If this really were part of some grand master plan, I think he would have left himself an easier out.
It also depends on what the Twitter board and shareholders want. Will they want to get bought out and owned by someone who clearly doesn't want to own the company, and may run it into the ground out of spite? Certainly some shareholders will just want to take the money and run (the agreed-upon buyout price is quite a premium over the current stock price), but others will be more interested in protecting the future of Twitter as a company and platform.
Agree that there will be a massive legal fight, but my guess is that it will be over how much extra Musk has to pay to get out of the deal (beyond the $1B breakup fee), than over making him perform. But who knows; only time will tell.
He's constantly dragged the company and founders through the mud and the stock dropped 7% once he called the deal off.
I'd sued and settle for a few billion instead of taking the one billion backout
He uses his wealth as a weapon against companies he doesn't like, just the mere threat he may get involved causes massive changes in the stock price
and in turn causes investors to suffer financial lose.
> He uses his wealth as a weapon against companies he doesn't like, just the mere threat he may get involved causes massive changes in the stock price and in turn causes investors to suffer financial lose.
Reminds me of Bitcoin "whales". It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars.
> It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars
That's just more BS from him. He'll just keep kicking the can, resuming the project with some spectacular stunt every time he needs it. Everything Musk does or says is just a performance to manipulate the markets.
I think the Mars stuff is the least likely to be BS. There's been ongoing, real advancement towards the goal for over a decade now, advancement serious enough that NASA's picked them to land their astronauts on the Moon with their Mars rocket.
A permanent colony seems like the sort of thing he'd get bored with, though.
Establishing a colony on another planet is going to require a monstrous amount of money, time and resources. I doubt a single country could manage it (look at what it takes to run the ISS, and that's a joke comparse to Mars), but there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task.
Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
> there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task... Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible.
Musk doesn't have to build the colony to have made it possible, and it seems to be the thing his attention is genuinely invested in.
> Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible.
It doesn't. Getting a few people to Mars alive does not a colony make. And even that sentence is misleading because while getting to Mars orbit is certainly challenging but that's something I can see humanity capable of overcoming with current technology. Although we never kept humans in space for 2-3 years before which is just the travel there so we don't really have any idea what will happen to them but let's pretend.
Landing very fragile humans on Mars, however, is a much, much formidable challenge. The heaviest object we have managed to soft land on Mars, so far, is the 1025kg Perseverance rover. The Apollo Lunar Module carried two people and was 4280kg dry weight. Of course, you don't need to ascend -- getting those people back to Earth is not even considered by anyone sane -- but still, it shows there's a problem here. And that was two people. And you need everything for them to live on the surface, including air and water and that's even more weight that you can't just slam those into surface at the ~20 000 km/h the spacecraft will approach either.
It would be just about infinitely better if he tried to show off with climate change combat projects. If you want to show off, a vast forest would be much better, much easier to achieve and so much cheaper. He could build storage for renewable energy, these are also sufficiently massive to be good for showing off. And so forth. There are easy but significant things one such as him could do. For a more formidable challenge, elevate the Brazilian people so they don't need to burn the Amazon.
We already have a terraformed planet but the climate is changing in a way which is incompatible with the way humanity currently exists. It would be prudent to change both -- while the change is inevitable it could be slowed and humanity could change too. Once we bought time, we can wait until material and other sciences make space elevators possible and then we can send robots to Mars to build a space elevator too and then we can begin to think about colonizing Mars.
If Starship can get reusable, zero-disposable flight working, and on-orbit refueling, all of those issues become quite surmountable. Mass to Mars (or the Moon) ceases to be "what's the most we can fling in a single launch", and the flight can be shorter if you can depart Earth orbit with a lot more fuel. I can't find numbers for the current iteration, but they were batting around 90-110 day transits with the older ITS proposal.
You start talking about being able to build propellant depots in Earth orbit, build Aldrin cyclers, send large amounts of supplies (or even a whole station on the slow, efficient route) in advance to Mars, etc.
Mars landing of objects is now a TRL9 problem that has been solved already, and the science has moved forward greatly [1]
Recent rover landings happened at what, < 1 M/S ? which is well within the capacity of the human body.
Considering that Mars atmosphere is substantially thinner, and gravity there much weaker, landing there would be different from Earth anyways.
We are not currently employing any of the more cost efficient methods of getting things to orbit in the first place, for large scale missions of epic size, nor are we currently employing the most efficient propulsion types.
The way I see it, the biggest problem is not one actually being discussed which are the longterm effects on the human body of living on a planet without a protective atmosphere, and protective magnetic field [2]. If getting mass to space becomes less of a financial constraint due to more efficient launch mechanisms, then, shielding would much less of an issue because mass in space would be cheaper [3]
I think that much of these problems come down to the huge capital cost, and unsolved problems around low cost launches; the novel technologies that need to be developed & turned into a new space launch system, and no, i am not talking about traditional rockets.
There’s no problem with landing. The weight limitations you mention are entirely a factor if the current “it has to all fit in one rocket launch” limitation.
Our current technology is capable of doing everything you listed and more. The problem is their cost. There is no point to doing it while the cost is this great and there is absolutely no monetary return from doing it. And Musk's effort has been for reducing that cost so that he could do it with the capital he has.
If need be, large countries that have the technology like China, Russia, US could do it. But it would still require gigantic amounts of capital allocation and effort at this stage. So no one will do it. The biggest thing that is happening right now is China and Russia signing an agreement to build a base on the moon. (yes)
The hard part is getting significant amounts of material into space. Once you do that you can do anything there. Go to Mars, build O'Neil cylinders or even make your own asteroid mining factories up there.
Likely is putting it quite mildly - it's likely to cause a premature death in the same way that throwing yourself off the empire state building is likely to cause some injury.
The Americas were divided among people (original inhabitants, and later colonies), and many countries & people weren’t recipients. But I’d still say that humanity has reached America.
Your second sentence makes no sense. If the board and shareholders sell the company, "they" aren't owned by anyone. The board is no longer the board and the shareholders are no longer the shareholders. They're just a bunch of regular people holding big bags of money.
It's like if you sell your car to a dangerous driver: you have no financial stake in whether they go on to crash it.
> It also depends on what the Twitter board and shareholders want. Will they want to get bought out and owned by someone who clearly doesn't want to own the company, and may run it into the ground out of spite?
Uh, yes?
The shareholders, and the board as their agents, care about the company as a means to an end: and that end is making money. They’ve already concluded the sale achieves that goal.
If Musk wants to burn the company to the ground after they cash out, they don't care.
Heck, some of them may invest in competitors after the sale banking on that to make even more money.
The board already willfully agreed to sell him the company and the deal is even better now than at the time they made it. Why would they also want to drop the deal?
The notion that the board is all of a sudden worried about what Musk might do with Twitter is about as silly as Musk thinking he can weasel his way out of a binding contract he already signed.
If you talk to random people in a democracy, they can't vote their interest even if they wanted to, because they don't know what's actually affected by politics and what isn't.
Some people switched to culture/values voting (ie, telling other people what to do), some people just enjoy winning and so vote for whoever they think is going to win.
Never underestimate the incompetence of the average human. Doubly so if they are rich and powerful. In fact if a master plan has several fatal flaws on closer inspection, then that’s just evidence that the perpetrator just didn’t think it all through before executing.
If you watch an amateur chess game you’ll find that most players actually have some master plan, but don’t have the skills to see the flaws, or even if the plan is perfect, they don’t have the skills to play it through either.
My sniff test for any conspiracy theory actually involves incompetence. The more competent the plan and execution need to be, the less likely it is to be a conspiracy.
I don't see how you can simultaneously believe that this is some 4D chess move from Musk to allow him to cleverly liquidate his Tesla holdings without tanking the stock - and also believe he is too incompetent to make sure he could actually back out of the Twitter deal which he never intended to complete in the first place.
The fact that his supposed plan here has some flaws is not _further_ evidence that it was planned from the beginning, that's absurd.
It seems much more likely that buying Twitter was just an impulsive decision for him that he is now regretting and looking for a way out of.
I agree with you that many supposed conspiracies require too much competence in order to pull off, and can usually be dismissed as impossible to achieve in practice. But it doesn't follow that, as a consequence, any action that would be incompetent as part of a conspiracy should be considered evidence that a conspiracy exists.
I don’t know if you’ve ever played chess against a more skilled player. But when I play, I usually think I have a sure way of taking my opponents rook for a knight, only to realize too late that I’m stuck in a trap.
You only need to be competent enough to realize how markets can be manipulated to initiate a conspiracy, however successfully executing one requires a whole new master level of skill set. Off course the people with such skill set exist (as evidenced by the numerous market manipulation schemes successfully executed in today’s business world) and if Musk was smart he would hire such an expert to scheme it for him.
What we might be witnessing here is a business person that is smart enough to realize that market can be manipulated, and see a position to where they can execute such a manipulation, but not competent enough to execute a non-trivial plan without flaws. And worse not smart enough to hire a person with the correct skill set to do it for him.
For me, flat Earth. The sheer skill necessary to bribe or convince so many governments to gaslight their population, the incredible optics and geodesics work necessary to fake a curved horizon in a plane window and have consistent flight durations, and the maintenance of shadow power across millenia, paints the picture of a group of people way beyond what human competence can achieve.
Of course, there are simpler examples, like John Titor, or Pierre de Fermat’s last theorem proof that he would have done all in his head.
The fake moon landing conspiracy is a good example. Then number of people involved would be pretty big, and the science is complicated. The logistics behind such a big secret operation requires such skill that it is hard to believe anyone would be able to pull it off. If the moon landing was truly fake surely they would have messed up somewhere.
On the other hand many things went wrong in the actual moon landing. There were liftoffs that failed, experiments that went nowhere, targets that were missed, and even people that died. The actual moon landing was a hard task they succeeded at while making a ton of mistakes in the process, just like humans do in the real world when we are at our best.
Indeed it is different. My point was simply that incompetence is not evidence against conspiracy. My sniff test was simply emphasizing this point. Further, a sniff test is—by definition—not supposed to be your only marker in evaluating a theory, it is merely supposed to be a marker determining if evaluating further evidence is even worth your time.
The conspiracy theory that Musk is using this twitter scheme to manipulate the markets in his favor does not fail any sniff tests that I’m aware of.
It's a pretty universal reason to dismiss or at least cast serious doubt on conspiracy theories. A close cousin of Ockham's Razor and Hanlon's Law
The amount of competence required to prepare a controlled demolition of a 110 storey trade center which is occupied 24/7 and full of cameras without anyone noticing and associating this prep work with the much publicised plane crashes that happened afterwards would be staggering, even before considering the insanity of such a scheme.
At the risk of opening a can of worms, the best evidence against the considerably more plausible "lab-leak" COVID theory is that manufacturing an alternative chain of evidence that convinces most unconnected foreign experts of an alternative theory (which still points at Wuhan and Chinese market regulations) when they have plenty of reason to find fault with it requires a lot of competence, as well as totally the opposite approach to China's usual way of suppressing stories.
His legal team maintains Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of the Agreement and appears to have made false and misleading representations.
Is Twitter going to spend the next few years litigating this just to force someone to buy the company that doesn't want to? Elon's team can drag this on and on.
What will happen to the value of Twitter's stock in the meantime? What will happen to the value of working at Twitter? It'll become a zombie company.
Yes, that's exactly what will happen. If Twitter were to say now "OK, let's forget this whole thing happened" the stock would drop massively: not only are they losing any chance at the $44B buyout, they are also admitting they (1) lied in their current contract, and (2) likely have huge bot issues that they would rather not litigate.
The only option for Twitter to continue existing is to sue Musk for the amount he promised.
It's worth north of $20B to Twitter shareholders and they have an (almost) rock-solid case. You can bet your ass they're going to spend the next few years to fight for it.
The downvotes on this comment are the clearest evidence that people will downvote verifiable facts presented neutrally if they don’t like the facts, the people or companies involved in the fact.
The karma hit at-fates-hands takes because people are irrational is collateral damage.
The downvotes are most likely because it's a specious claim that Elon's legal team is making, not supported by fact. He waived the due diligence phase. Twitter provided his team with information. He's just trying to get out of the deal because he made an impulsive and stupid decision.
Parroting the statements of his legal team without adding the context around those statements is going to garner downvotes.
If this really were part of some grand master plan, I think he would have left himself an easier out.