I found this part most interesting. Public awareness of the Delaware Court of Chancery is about to skyrocket during this court battle.
The fact that Musk is working in such bad faith here — that he seems so unconcerned with law and the contract he signed — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it will certainly annoy a Delaware chancellor; Delaware likes to think of itself as a stable place for corporate deals, with predictable law and binding contracts, and Musk’s antics undermine that. On the other hand it might intimidate a Delaware chancellor: What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? They’re not gonna put him in Chancery jail. The guy is pretty contemptuous of legal authority; he thinks he is above the law and he might be right. A showdown between Musk and a judge might undermine Delaware corporate law more than letting him weasel out of the deal would.
> What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no?
I can't believe people are taking this very silly statement seriously. This is utter nonsense. There are remedies for people who disobey court orders. Having assets makes you more vulnerable to a court's authority because you have something to lose.
If a court orders specific performance and he doesn't do it then he's liable and the court will take his assets to compensate.
Is Levine seriously suggesting that US courts don't have the authority to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets? This is such an absurd thing to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.
Anytime the idea of a wealth tax is brought up, I see commenters coming out of the woodwork to say that it would be impossible to actually collect it from the wealthy. Though I will note that it seems like we are able to collect yachts and planes from Russian oligarchs now, so perhaps our techniques have advanced in the last few months.
This is a different problem and has to do with privacy. The government can't compel you to disclose everything you're doing without cause, and without due process.
Having a court ordered judgement entered against you is cause and is a result of due process. It's an entirely different scenario.
Assuming that a wealth tax was passed, wouldn't the cause here be proper reporting and collection of said tax? You can declare illegal income on your federal return and pay taxes on it. They're not (in this hypothetical I guess?) asking what you're doing, just how much it's made you.
The issue is that people can change how they own things so they don't have to disclose. The law is necessarily public and people can adjust the way they structure ownership accordingly.
We see this all the time already. For example, Medicaid won't pay for your extremely expensive end of life care if you have assets. So, people give away their assets (to a trust, to family) before applying for Medicaid to cover their nursing home. It becomes a game of cat and mouse. People will adjust where they can to avoid tax.
This also already happens with income tax. For example, executive compensation is primarily provided as capital gains rather than income because it's much more tax efficient. Everything is in the open.
The other issue here is one of cost. The IRS has to fund the cost of analyzing filings and deciding to audit. This is very different from a post-judgement scenario.
And the added problem that the assets need to be valued to tax them - for liquid assets this will be much more challenging than income. Things like CGT or income tax happen at the same time as a transaction in dollars so they are easy to value. Wealth taxes would be open to gaming using the same process you describe here.
I don't think there's really any way around this. It just lowers the maximum amount you can extract via that tax. You have to tax at a rate low enough where it's not worth the expense to get around it in the first place. Maybe this is enough to make a wealth tax altogether not worth it federally (how much does it cost to set up a trust and transfer assets? can't be a lot), I don't know. But I think that's all part of the calculus of whether or not it's reasonable to institute the tax in the first place.
The IRS has no trouble prying and finding out that you have unreported income. The idea that they can’t find out you have an unreported Picasso painting that you bought for 40 million or a beachfront mansion is silly.
Roe's finding of a fundamental right to privacy in the 14th amendment is VERY different from the rights provided by the 4th amendment, against unreasonable searches and seizures.
1. A surprising departure from the rules and norms - I assume probably illegal.
2. Part of a campaign designed to ruin Russia.
You might have misunderstood the argument the anti-taxers (pro-property?) people are bringing up. There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all. The fact that wealth confiscation is being deployed against Russians is no surprise from that perspective and not undermining the core argument.
However, if it makes you feel better, I do agree that given that the War on Terror was pointed inwards fairly quickly I expect the techniques used in the War on Russia's Economy will also move to US home soil in the next decade and there may well be large scale wealth confiscation in the US.
>There isn't a physical problem with taking wealth away from people, that part is very easy to execute. The problem is the 2nd order effects where it will turn into an unfair confiscation and do substantial damage to the ability of the host country to invest and prosper, bringing general ruin to us all.
But this does not apply to us when we seize Russian assets? By your very logic if seizing wealth is so problematic, well we just seized a whole lot of wealth. I don't think this example actually works here.
We want to damage ourselves by sanctioning others? You said that taking others wealth makes people lose trust in you and therefore hurts yourself. So I don't see why we would do that on purpose.
I think you're confusing me with someone else. I didn't say anything about trust.
But, I suspect the other guy was referring to trusting in economic stability. I don't think there's any reason why sanctions against bad actors like Russia might undermine trust in American investments.
I dunno. I'm not a lawyer. Possibly one of the ones against piracy?
If you want to make the argument that it is literal and raw might-makes-right on the high seas, ok. But that type of barbarian world is not one I encourage and it'd be a bit stunning to find someone who wants the world to work that way.
The US wouldn't do well in a world like that either, US citizens have more assets to seize than foreigners do.
Has stealing random stuff from Russians helped? I'm not a maritime lawyer or an expert on how war in the 2020s looks, but I don't think Russia was sailing troops into the Ukraine on billionaire pleasure yachts.
There is a pretty good chance this is just making people feel bad and making it harder to normalise the situation. This is action is literally not helping, and is a breach of good norms against stealing. It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.
> It means the Russian billionaires will be forced to spend more of their money in Russia and have a great reason to bear a grudge against the more Western powers.
Any Russian billionaires that don't realize that this is more of Putin's incompetence than western antagonism deserve a random punitive gesture.
In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
I'm still not following. How do you think this has helped the situation? What do you expect to happen differently in the future that will be to our benefit?
Maybe I've missed out on some life experiences, but I've never seen petty theft help defuse a tense situation. It is not going to be beneficial to achieving a sane outcome.
> In reality the majority of them will see this as a great reason to bear a grudge against Putin.
This is wishful thinking. All of the thievery was done by NATO - there is a very high chance that they will identify NATO as the threat to them.
And if they do blame Putin (which I think is unlikely, groups tend to close ranks when threatened) how is that supposed to help? What are the billionaires supposed to do that the Ukraine military or US State Department can't do? Billionaires aren't that big compared to a government military.
Why would you expect your day to day interactions to act as framework for how members of a warring nation displacing millions and killing innocents under the guise of "nazi hunting" should react to things?
Putin may have them under his thumb, but that doesn't mean they should be left to their comfort rather than forced to face the direct consequences of Putin's actions.
1. You're linking the Washington Post. Do you want me to go find an article on RT that says the Oligarchs are united against the US? That is a long article claiming to know things that they can't and don't know and is political propaganda to help push this terrifying US proxy war.
2. What do you expect to happen here? How do you think these thefts have helped the situation? Even if you want to argue that these people now hate Putin, they are powerless. The west just stripped them of all their assets.
There's an entire profession who's job it is to go full scale threat modeling on assets held directly or indirectly by the extremely rich. Seems likely they either didn't account for war sanctions or thought the impacted assets would not be worth putting behind 10 proxy legal owners for the unlikely case of such sanctions. Yachts and planes seem like they'd be particularly hard to turn into assets owned by a local proxy entity, since they move around so much.
Yachts and planes are physical objects and represent a tiny, tiny fraction of a billionaire's wealth.
Wealth is actual ownership interest in valuable companies, which can be moved offshore or the person can renounce citizenship and relocate to a country with friendlier tax laws in the extreme case.
Might still be worth it if there were a significant wealth tax and you did it in advance of an IPO or other event that greatly increased your net worth.
A wealth tax would also have the effect that people expecting to generate lots of wealth would just move somewhere else to do so, or not come to the US in the first place.
Wait, is that what you always see as the argument against it?
Whenever I've seen it brought up it's always that it would require a constitutional amendment (specifically in the US). The federal government isn't allowed to do taxes that way under the current system (Article 1 Clause 2 Section 3).
Hell, the feds weren't even allowed to do a straight income tax until the 16th amendment.
Yes, I mostly see people saying that laws don't matter because billionaires are beyond law at this point. Who knows, perhaps that's astroturfing by troll teams employed by billionaires to try and discourage the masses. As you said, they've already got plenty of lawyers to work on it from the constitutional end - including 6 of the lawyers on the Supreme Court.
It’s easier to collect from foreign billionaires who don’t have the connections. Igor will probably not fund your re-election campaign, but Musk might.
Russian oligarch yacht seizures are a better argument for them than for you. They're worth tens of billions of dollars, and all the US can get is a nine figure boat.
So, 10% of their net worth by leveraging what was thought to be illegal and unexpected seizures? Most of which was done by the EU. Sounds like a ringing endorsement of how the US would implement a tax that the wealthy can prepare for and happens within the rule of law.
Levine has addressed this in past columns. Of course the courts have such authority, but individual people have to enforce the court's decisions, and sometimes those people are reluctant to take on Musk.
Musk is a special case because he has done things like threatening to ruin the careers of SEC lawyers who have come after him, and he has the power to make that happen.
Is this illegal? Probably. Does Musk get away with it? Yes.
You're talking about Musk pressuring Cooley to fire a lawyer who previously worked against him at the SEC. But the result was that Cooley told Musk no. Hardly a success story for Musk.
There's no shortage of law firms willing to go up against billionaires. Hell, there's no shortage of firms willing to go up against criminal enterprises like drug cartels.
The idea that Musk is somehow more threatening than the types that the US court system regularly puts under their thumb is simply laughable.
So what? This is business as usual for law firms. They will lose clients every time they take a case due to conflicts of interest and so on, even if everyone has a happy outcome.
What Musk did was petty and questionable, but it didn't fundamentally change anything for Cooley.
It's unlikely Musk expected Cooley to cave to his ridiculous demand. It's very likely the intended target for this action was every person who deals with Musk's future illegal actions.
"“What are they going to do if there is a judgment and he says, ‘Well, I’m still not going to buy it’?” said Zohar Goshen, professor of transactional law at Columbia Law School. “They don’t really have tools to force him to go through with it. You don’t put people in jail because they don’t buy something.”"
1) The court would issue a judgement for Twitter, against Musk, for $44b.
2) Musk would either voluntarily pay it by selling his own assets, or he would refuse. If he refuses, then:
3) Twitter would go about seizing and selling Musk's assets, until they have raised funds to cover the $44b judgement.
Twitter could levy whatever brokerage or account Musk uses to hold his shares. Somewhere there is an account which records the shares. Twitter would serve the entity managing the account with a levy, and order the shares be liquidated.
1) Sure, but this wouldn't give him any protection. On the contrary, there would be a ton of extra liability and exposure if he were to refuse to process a levy.
Shares don't need to be held in a brokerage. There's always a process to identify and seize the property in question.
2) There's no such thing. TSLA is a US public company, traded on US exchanges. It's simply not possible for shares of the company to exist outside of US jurisdiction.
Just having a share certificate doesn’t make it s bearer form. The corporation would have to set up this ahead of time. I don’t know the status of Tesla shares that he owns but it would be very weird if they aren’t registered securities. It would also raise a ton of questions if they started issuing bearer shares after a court injunction.
Order the legal entities which possess the shares to transfer ownership of them. Actually keeping track of stocks is complicated but ultimately a boring bureaucracy.
The one used by most is DTCC, it’s basically owned by the banks who use it, not something that could be bought.
The legal entity which maintains the list of teslas owners is ultimately tesla, but that duty will be likely given to dtcc.
A stock is ultimately just an entry on a list maintained by the company, most offload the managing of the list to DTCC and usually the pointer isn’t to you but to your broker dealer.
There is no sense of being able to hide ownership overseas, we’re talking about an American company keeping a list that points to someone, that list can’t be offshored.
A little more nuanced take: the transfer agent maintains a list of shareholders at the company's behest, the DTCC is one step further down the chain, operating as a clearinghouse between brokers and banks. The list of shareholders is managed by the company or it's bookkeeper, the "transfer agent". Insiders and people who own paper certificates are on the list kept by the transfer agent, directly owning their shares on the company's books, alongside Cede & Co (a partner of the DTCC), who owns the bulk of all publicly traded shares. Cede & Co, and it's partner, the DTCC, then maintain a list of which shares beneficially belong to each of the DTCC members (brokerages, banks). The brokerages and banks in turn maintain lists of which clients beneficially own the brokerage's shares.
Yeah for every explanation there’s another more complicated one, it’s a pretty crazy mess. A long chain of abstractions and not every one uses the same stack.
Note that the last time I checked, DTCC had over one quadrillion dollars of assets under management. They operate at a financial scale unlike any other entity on the planet.
For them, $44b is the crumb left behind after you've eaten the small potatoes.
Totally agree with not being able to hide owner ship (especially when are a director, major shareholder, and ceo) but I think DTCC is really only in the mix when you buy/sell shares via an exchange, and their focus is the settlement between brokers and exchanges. The registrar and transfer agent is who maintains the list of share holders (Computershare is the resgistrar and transfer agent for Tesla).
He (or an entity he owns and controls) owns the shares, and and another company (computershare in the case of Tesla) maintains a list of all the shareholders (registrar and transfer agent). No one else “owns” them
He may just own the shares directly with the company (we’ve largely done away with paper share certificates). Or he may have transferred them to his broker (Morgan Stanley?) (who in turn might custody them with a custodian BNY Mellon?) who holds them on his behalf. If he then transferred those shares to say DBS in Singapore MS/BNY is going to inform computershare “fyi we just sent all those Elon musk shares to DBS in Singapore” and DBS is going to say (FYI we know have custody of all those Elon musk shares)..,and when you go looking for those shares all you have to do is go to computershare with a court order and say where are Elon’s shares, and they’ll be like, oh over at DBS in Singapore… and for all I know the registrar can probably just send a note to DBS in Singapore and be like (ahh we got a court order to transfer these shares to some other guys so we did, subtract $44b from his account)
All of this is a long winded way of saying that “shares” are just entries on a ledger maintained by the company or someone else on their behalf, which makes seizing them, typically pretty easy…
Who cares, why would Tesla be beholden for the actions of its largest shareholder? Musk is acting in a capacity completely outside of Tesla. To think that Tesla is somehow connected is disinformation.
Yes, and they need to get paid in order to do something. Nobody really thinks that Elon Musk did something greatly terrible to Twitter by not buying it, this means Twitter will always get more crap from chasing Elon than not chasing him. It just happens to be that the payout will be big enough for them not care about the flak.
BUT, if Elon fights back hard, Twitter will have to stop.
Contempt of court is independent of the original cases criminal vs civil distinction.
You can have criminal contempt in a civil case and criminal contempt in a civil case. The rules vary by state but in PA it’s civil contempt is used to force people to comply where criminal is punishment for disobedience.
Are you under the impression that judges presiding over civil cases cannot exercise their inherent power (in some jurisdictions) to jail those in (severe) contempt of court?
There is no ability to not comply. Seizure of assets is handled with financial institutions complying, and with the police backing up court seizures for physical assets.
No one is going to assault a cop, or have their bank shut down due to non compliance.
Where I am, what often happens is the damaged party has papers showing debt owed. It then becomes a colllection issue, sometimes, in some jurisdictions court takes an active role, in others, you have to do the work yourself.
Eg, you have to find their bank, hire a sheriff(the seizure kind), and go get what is now "your stuff".
If there was then a lot of America would become slaves by not paying their debts. There may be contempt here though if Elon does something to really piss off the courts.
Perhaps it's just a general sense of disillusionment, but I've come to see that "court orders X" and "X happens" are entirely orthogonal. I will be personally surprised if Musk pays a single cent.
Depends I guess on how 007 you think the world operates (reference to James Bond) - X will happen, but maybe 2-10 years after various counter-suits.
Case studies are what has happened e.g. with Microsoft, other large businesses - long legal battles are fought, nothing happens while things are in limbo.
When the rubber finally hits the road, things happen fairly quickly, but until then it does look a bit like "nothing happens".
This is of course, a problem, perhaps one that needs innovating around.
What has happened to Microsoft? They still have a default browser pre-installed, Office wasn’t spun-off to another company… and I don’t remember the Java stuff anymore but I think nothing happened either, even though it’s a lot less relevant now.
> Is Levine seriously suggesting that US courts don't have the authority to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets
No. He’s suggesting that Musk’s wealth and power will make the people who work in US courts reluctant to impose financial penalties, find liability, and seize assets.
Not to mention his bizarre hold on the public imagination. He's the worlds most simped compulsive liar. I think authorities may also be afraid of looking like Nazi jackboots on the neck of this innocent guy who would be in federal prison serving long sentences if he was just some obscure hedge fund dude, known only to other hedge fund dudes, like Bernie Madhoff.
I can't believe people are looking at this from such a silly angle. It's obvious that no court can order you to buy something. That goes against the personal freedom we have in this country, and if a court tried it, it would be an easy appeal. But that misses the point, because nobody is going to order Elon to buy Twitter. What MIGHT happen is, a court declares "Congratulations! You already bought Twitter! It has nothing to do with us, we just interpreted the contract. Again, congrats on your purchase, don't go getting buyer's remorse now winky face"
What are you trying to assert is false about this viewpoint? Specific performance is actually a kind of legal remedy and it can in fact be ordered by a court. It might be one of the last tools in a judge's toolbox, but I don't think it's anywhere near a "silly angle" after a quick googling of "specific performance".
That was a stupid order that would never survive scrutiny under prior-restraint doctrine. Specific performance is something different, though... I can't think of any constitutional problems that might block enforcement of that.
If he had the cash to buy it, they could force him to. But if he lined up financing and those people bail, what then? Would the court make him liquidate all his Tesla stock, without regard to how that would injure other Tesla shareholders? Having assets does make one more vulnerable to court judgments, but savvy birch people will set themselves up to remain in the driver’s seat when possible.
Note that in TFA, the continuation of this very silly statement is footnoted [6], which literally starts with "I made this joke before...", so none of us ought to be taking it seriously.
The footnote only applies to the "Chancery jail" bit, not the suggestion that the court may not want to risk a public showdown: "A showdown between Musk and a judge might undermine Delaware corporate law more than letting him weasel out of the deal would." - this sentence is after that footnote.
Well, throwaway09223, you certainly sound like as much an authority as a former Wachtell and Goldman Sachs associate. Strong arguments like "this is utter nonsense" and "this is so absurd [that I can't actually argue against it]" are sure to sway the educated crowd on HN.
If you would like to go see ways in which the government fails to penalize powerful entities, look no further than the financial crisis fines. What you were told were 10 figure fines ended up becoming a few million dollars in consumer relief headaches
> This is such an absurd thing [for Matt Levine, a former 3rd Circuit clerk, Yale Law grad, and Wachtell M&A attorney] to say it's hard to find a way to charitably respond.
If your interpretation of the post suggests that a highly qualified attorney is getting the basics of US law absurdly incorrect, you might want to reconsider whether you're understanding the intended meaning.
(Here, Levine is making a specific claim about the remedies that the Delaware chancellory court typically employs, not about the authority of US courts)
This is an appeal to authority that is not valid: there are plainly a lot of lawyers out there who's legal opinion leaves a lot of daylight against the actual law. Rudy Giuliani took a long time to get disbarred.
> This is an appeal to authority that is not valid
I'm open to that criticism; I'm typically pretty skeptical of appeals to authority myself.
But to be clear: the appeal to authority I'm making isn't "legal opinion of a lawyer" (I agree that's very weak) but rather "opinion on corporate law by a Wachtell attorney who practiced corporate law" (Wachtell is probably the best corporate law firm in the world, and clearly in the top handful)
It doesn't matter if they're affected. A judgement is going to be for a dollar amount. A court will rule that Musk must pay twitter X billion dollars. Twitter can then pursue Musk, taking basically anything he owns in terms of business.
They could contact the broker holding his shares and restrain them, order them sold, and collect the proceeds.
They could seize and sell at auction the real property of any of his businesses. SpaceX rockets? Office chairs? Servers? Anything.
All of this enforcement costs money. Twitter would account for the money spent seizing assets and charge those expenses to Musk as well.
Assets seized in this way (including stock) are often sold for much less than they're ideally worth. It's Musk's problem. Twitter would be empowered to seize seize seize until they've raised enough cash to cover the judgement plus expenses.
> They could seize and sell at auction the real property of any of his businesses. SpaceX rockets? Office chairs? Servers? Anything.
They could not, because he does not own those businesses outright. Doing so would violate the other owners rights. They can seize his shares in SpaceX, but not SpaceX property.
I’m having it hard taking you seriously given you making such a basic mistake of thinking they could seize spacex property directly. What industry do you work in?
Oh give me a break. Property of a privately owned company can be directly seized.
I have not done an analysis on exactly which of Musk's private companies are jointly owned, and how the ownership is structured. It's a comment on hn for crying out loud.
SpaceX is well known to have a bunch of investors. Put a little effort in before explicitly calling out that the government could seize rockets. It’s as silly as saying they could start just taking Model 3s from the Tesla factory to get their money back.
I think you're misunderstanding. It's absolutely possible to seize rockets, or model 3s, etc. That part isn't silly at all.
The only question is regarding which entity is liable. If a judgement were entered against SpaceX, for example, then absolutely rockets and real property owned by SpaceX can be directly seized.
Without looking, I'm certain there are at least a few companies owned by Musk which could have their assets taken directly.
We’re talking about Elon, not spacex. I don’t get how you’re confusing the two so easily. You claimed they can seize spacex property for Elon debt, which is 100% unadulterated bullshit.
If they take all of Musk's shares in SpaceX and acquire a voting majority, they can then use those shares to vote to sell off the company's assets at the next board meeting.
They could simply keep selling Elon's Tesla stock it until they had the money to cover the court order.
Why should the court or Twitter care if they end up converting 10x more of Elon's stock to cash?
I guess some day traders would get rich (and people that had to sell for the day or so when the stock tanked would take a bath), but that's the biggest problem I can come up with.
No, they still own the stock, the government hasn’t taken anything from them. The stock might be worth less money the same way a house might be worth less money if a city government decided to stop repairing the road in front of it, or if the city relaxed zoning laws, but the price of assets in the market isn’t a responsibility of the government, and it generally does not incur liability when it causes them to change.
I think a more appropriate example would be if the government did some work around the house and in the process damaged the house, thereby lowering the value. The thing being damaged is shareholder confidence, which I thought (but IANAL) taps into different securities-related laws.
If the government damages physical property it is frequently liable for the cost of repairs, but to the extent that a share of Twitter stock represents something that can be damaged, that thing is Twitter itself. If through illegal meddling of some sort the government impaired Twitter’s ability to do business (say, for example, by flagrant targeted refusal to grant work visas), then the company or shareholders could have a cause to sue the government. The government is under no obligation to avoid impacting Twitter’s share price, especially as a side effect of some unrelated fully legitimate exercise of government power like auctioning off seized assets.
Elon and Twitter have a contract. Elon wants out; Twitter doesn't want to let him out; the contract only has limited conditions to allow Elon out. The court is simply deciding which of two options is the case:
1. Elon's reasons are valid; he gets out of the contract for a $1B payment.
2. Elon's reasons are not valid; he has to satisfy the contract and pay $54.20/share for Twitter.
If the judge decides in favor of #2, it is Elon's responsibility to come up with the money. (If he doesn't do so willingly, someone court-appointed will step in and do it for him.) If that tanks Tesla, that has nothing to do with the court.
Now, Tesla shareholders can sue Elon for getting the company into this pile of stank....
If someone's car is seized by the government, it doesn't cause the value of everyone else's cars to drop by 50%, and if it did, I think people would sue the the government.
It's not like the shares are destroyed or immediately sold. If anything, they are prevented from being sold under pain of contempt, so could increase prices by limiting the supply.
You just continue seizing assets until the accumulated cash value realized from the sale of the assets matches the value of the financial judgement against the guilty party.
The drop in share prices as you do this is not your concern.
The Twitter board would have a tough time explaining why they didn’t enforce the rock solid agreement allowing the shareholders to sell their shares for an extreme premium.
But tech workers don't need unions, right. Must be fun for twitter employees to completely powerless spectators with no seat at the negotiating table while the lunatic has a chance at becoming their new King and turning their labour in to an election-swinging doomsday machine at the end of human civilisation.
He absolutely has the ability. He's demonstrated that publicly, with his verified presentation of having raised the $44 billion a few weeks ago (through a combination of financial instruments).
I don't think so, I mean, you are not just going to place a single market order for $44bn of stock, you are going to have liquidity problems because there is not that much buy-side volume in the market, so the price must fall drastically to attract new buyers. Also I assume musk has legal obligations not to do stuff like that to begin with, as an executive with fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders. If Musk can tank Tesla, Exxon execs can dismantle Exxon to save the environment. But there's also the fact that a lot of his Tesla shares are already leveraged on loans. The most likely course would be for him to take out loans on the remaining unleveraged stock, but he doesn't have enough of that at the rates the banks are offering.
Anyway, I'm no expert on Musk, and I have almost zero interest in Tesla, or Twitter, or any of this clown show. So maybe my ballpark guesstimations of all the relevant numbers are way off. So take it all with a huge pinch of salt. I am just some uninformed spectator watching two lizards fight in the dust and speculating who will win or whatever :)
To the extent that Elon Musk might represent a corner case w.r.t. the legal system even more than you’re average billionaire it would most likely be because of the national security tie-ins around SpaceX.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I don’t think it’s insane.
It appears that that's the remedy for failing to get funds, not for cold feet; there's a performance clause for the latter, so Levine suggests "Musk’s goal here is presumably to walk away from Twitter and pay only $1 billion in damages." - that Musk is negotiating by making a stink to even be able to pay instead of going through with the deal he signed.
Your repeating opinion of someone with extreme biases for clickbait. This fantasy of forcing musk to buy the company doesn’t exist in any contract. Your asking the court to make up a new contract and enforce it.
That’s not how the court works, except in extreme circumstances which don’t apply to this twitter acquisition attempt.
Also, Musk asserts that upto 50% of twitter users are bots, which is totally believable. So the chances Musk will have to pay anything is actually remote, since twitter would have to produce evidence that would reveal trade secrets.
Here’s my prediction: Musk will pay nothing because Twitter has allowed itself to be infiltrated with bots and revealing this will be far more damaging than losing out on a billion. Musk will walk away.
Ok let’s say he has a bunch of stock as well as paintings, cars, etc. how do you divvy that up? Cut the painting in half and give it to Twitter? The rich are very wise at hiding money in assets that cannot be evenly divided nor distributed. That’s why the vast majority of taxes in the US comes from the middle class, they usually sit on piles of cash and have salaries from which to levy fines to.
Most of the middle class in America has a salary, or at least a paycheck, but distressing little cash saved.
But they do pay the taxes that pay the bills.
This is one of those things that could genuinely cause problem for the entire US (corporate) legal system. There’s a genuine danger that the result of this case will be “some people are too powerful to be regulated by the US system, and this is now obvious”.
If this court doesn't have real power against clever C-suite types, maybe it's better that we find that out. In terms of compensation and personal money management, Musk isn't doing anything that other wealthy execs haven't done. (For example, Steve Jobs famously took a $1.00 per year salary for a long time.) Either there's an enforcement mechanism that works or there isn't.
Steve Jobs also famously illegally parked in disabled parking spots and paid the fine because he didn’t care. And he famously leased a new car every 6 months because he didn’t want to put license plates on his car.
And tangential to that kind of behavior, Apple recently was paying a weekly 5 million Euro fine in the Netherlands rather than comply with an order from regulators.
Jail. The consequence needed here is jail. Put these clowns in jail with junkies and wife beaters and gang bangers. While we’re at it, treat them the same as their local pd treats the most vulnerable in their community. They deserve no better than the most vulnerable and marginalized.
Jail for parking multiple times in disabled places or for buying a car every 6 months? Hard no from me. Both of those things are not the same as beating people.
If he Wants the space that bad he should buy it. The city should make the fine proportional to the sum of wealth and income over 100,000,000 to deter shenanigans. Repeat offenses should be points on license. DMV should adjust their policies to prevent this for the rich only abuse through fines that reflect the above metric. Try thinking through a problem and not just jerking your knee.
I think its clear that there is a set of people well are willing to violate certain laws because the consequences of such are trivial. That scales up with wealth because most misdemeanors result in a fixed monetary fine - which is less impactful for someone with wealth.
When the consequences of a law violation are trivial, it’s no longer serving as a deterrent. So I think we need to find a way to deter everyone, kind of on a sliding scale or something?
Likewise, there needs to be real consequences for corporations which take advantage of paying fines as a cost of doing business. One violation can be a mistake, but it sure as heck better give you a solid reason to never do it again.
> There’s a genuine danger that the result of this case will be “some people are too powerful to be regulated by the US system, and this is now obvious”.
This should have been obvious by now. Cash rules everything around me.
I’m in a white and homogenous area of the us. Cash does indeed rule every thing around me. There’s not a problem that can’t be solved with cash. Kill a few kids drunk driving or shooting recklessly? Cash in the right pockets and the evidence will be inadmissible and the case goes kaput. Want some more privacy? Your neighbors might suddenly find the neighborhood inhospitable with cash in the right hands. Want your kid to start for a team or graduate? There’s palms out. Very few people are principled enough in this economy to refuse a bribe. If you want to remain principled I suggest you think through your price before you’re asked if $1,000, some blow, and a cheap lap dance is enough and you end doing more for free when you’re extorted.
There’s a tendency for sheltered and privileged people to be aloof to the corruption all around them.
I'm not sure how much the first line really matters, as I grew up in a rather diverse top 25 city, but yeah, experience was about the same.
In high school, everyone knew exactly who to call if you got a DUI. 10k was the going price to get a certain lawyer who gets the case in front of a certain judge and however that worked, the charge was dropped to a moving violation. Kinda sick how the system works.
Justice in America isn't a right, it's a product you buy. Public versions should be non-existent or inferior. This is so that the best people get access to the best version of the product that money can buy. By definition in America, the best people are rich people. God rewarded them with money after all. Therefore they are closer to god and thus superior. Why be rich if you can't spend money buying things like justice, health care, education, and clean water?
The first line only matters to racist whites that assume only BIPOC are corrupt when data shows white wealthy people commit far more crime and more substantial crimes at that.
Not the parent, not just cash, but capitalism literally means capital is (political) power. Just because you don't bribe police officers with cash that doesn't mean your political system isn't corrupt. In the West we just find it more comfortable to talk about lobbying and public-private partnerships instead of calling it what it is.
That is a great point and I'm not disputing it at all.
We all know monarchy is tyranny, but in that category there is quite a difference between a cult ruler with a bag of shrunken heads who is getting his orders from God vs. a stable, well managed, system in which the institutions basically function, including to some extent for the poor, and yet in which which the ruling class still basically dominate and exploit everything and everyone in order to enrich themselves and maintain their power.
The latter is a social malady, the former is completely chaotic. I think people are concerned that the US is resembling the latter less and less, and resembling the former more and more.
US law obviously works in favor of billionaires. I doubt even Musk would want to expose it further, and the other parties involved in this deal surely don't.
They will set their lawyers at it and come to a settlement. The super rich know better than to be at each others throats, that sort of behavior is for the poor...
Except that some of the ultra-rich have major personality disorders which cause severe cognitive distortions and erratic and impulsive behaviour. Their power and influence tends to allow their cognitive distortions to spread in to the general population, which eases the cognitive dissonance that would be a problem for normal people. But anyway, these people cannot be compelled in to psychiatric treatment, and who could convince them? Who do they listen to? We're talking about a category of people who are notoriously difficult to get to enter treatment, even when they are not princes and emperors, but average Joes.
I mean, if a street sweeper thinks he is King, you might convince or compel him to get treated when he comes in to contact with the system. But when the King thinks he is King... that is a much more difficult problem to deal with.. usually the kingdom joins in with his madness so as to keep him happy.
History says that these people likely reside in impenetrable bubbles. The idea that he is so special as to avoid the court system sounds a bit like “let them eat cake” as there is no bread.
I have no insight into this but it looks that it will happen eventually. ( the degradation of the US gov authorities on the conduction of large financial arrangements)
>According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Stewart avoided a loss of $45,673 by selling all 3,928 shares of her ImClone Systems stock on December 27, 2001, after receiving material, nonpublic information from Peter Bacanovic, her broker at Merrill Lynch. The day following her sale, the stock value fell 16%.[49]
Martha Stewart went to jail for 5 months for a meager case of insider trading. Musk manipulated Tesla stock in front of, literally, the whole world and got a slap in the wrist (i.e. a fine that comes to about 0.1% of its net worth). A citizen would to go jail forever for a similar thing.
> Martha Stewart went to jail for 5 months for a meager case of insider trading.
I believe she went to prison for lying to investigators. The insider trading they couldn’t make stick. So in the end, maybe the cases aren’t so different?
Facts. She also just paid a fine for the insider trading. Her criminal case was due to conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators.
Smoking weed makes you lose your security clearance, Musk did it on camera and still has his because of "reasons". That is one example of the rules that apply to most others not applying to him.
you're missing the point of the rule. the issue with smoking weed isn't really about having impaired judgement, it's that weed is still illegal at the federal level. there are all kinds of low-level crimes that can put your clearance at risk. which kinda makes sense... they want the kind of person who strictly follows the rules for cleared positions.
I agree it's a dumb rule, but that seems orthogonal to whether Musk should have to follow an established rule. Repealing the rule would be best, but while it's in place equal enforcement is much better than enforcment for everyone except petty billionaires.
> still has his [security clearance] because of "reasons".
Does he? I don't remember any resolution to that, but I thought they "temporarily" suspended it pending an investigation and then never completed the investigation.
> ...I thought they "temporarily" suspended it pending an investigation and then never completed the investigation.
that's the theme of this entire thread : rich person has a slap on the wrist announced publicly but then the punishment is never successfully fulfilled.
I'm saying the opposite. I thought they suspended his clearance pending an investigation and then the investigation never ended. Just like if you're in jail pending your trial and the trial date keeps getting pushed back. Sure, you haven't been found guilty, but you're stuck in jail so does that matter?
I might be wrong that they suspended his clearance or that the investigation wasn't done, but that would be a different point tag. What you're making.
Agreed, this situation is uncomfortably similar to a number Trump crises. Much of our legal system is based on norms and good faith, which a sufficiently motivated and powerful psychopath can pervert to their advantage.
I have no idea what will happen here. Musk is clearly in the wrong both legally and ethically, but I suspect he will weasel out of resbonsibility for the damage he's caused. That alone will be bad enough, but the much larger risk is that it opens the floodgates for slightly less powerful scumbags to flout the law.
US law and democracy are shakier than I've seen in my lifetime, and Musk is actively taking a sledgehammer to a piece of that foundation for his own greed and whim.
It's wild to me that people think that Elon might actually face legal consequences for this.
The Delaware court isn't some magical place run by elves. It's a court in the US. You know what's a lot cheaper than $34 billion dollars, or heck even $1 billion dollars? $200k for 3-4 judges.
The Supreme Court just changed the law of the land based on a right-wing political campaign. You think a billionare, let alone the richest billionare is going to be subject to any serious consequences? It's absurd to even entertain this.
> The Supreme Court just changed the law of the land based on a right-wing political campaign. You think a billionare, let alone the richest billionare is going to be subject to any serious consequences? It's absurd to even entertain this.
You know who has the authority to overturn that decision? Our democratically elected legislature.
Are you referring to the legislature where one house is deliberately unrepresentative of the people, and where the other house has been gerrymandered into unrepresentative oblivion, and whose bills are signed by an executive position who has preposterously lost the popular vote in two out of the last six election cycles?
Yeah, the one completely controlled by the party that says it's pro-choice.
> executive position who has preposterously lost the popular vote
What does the popular vote have to do with the presidency? Neither party strategizes to win the popular vote because the popular vote is meaningless. Therefore, the outcome if the popular vote has no value in determining who would win a popular vote should that be the metric by which the president is elected.
I wouldn't be so sure a hypothetical federal law enshrining a Roe-ish right to abortion would itself survive the inevitable challenge to its own constitutionality.
Yes, the supreme court decided that the rights of women were up for democratic election. That's fucking great when you have an anti-women's rights party.
I think it's more about the people who murdered Epstein getting away without consequences or even an investigation than the fact that a rich guy, eventually, after repeatedly sexually abusing and trafficking children for years, finally was facing serious legal risks which he might've evaded.
It would mitigate the problem if institutions could be strengthened by design to be less sensitive to corruption or special treatment.
There are lots of successful examples - constitutions, voting, term limits, separate judiciary, non-political commuters, etc
The big problem I see in the design of egalitarian systems, is explicitly addressing the need for continuous response to new forms of centralization. I don’t know of any significant systems that were designed with any explicit statement of prioritizing that (vs. just general support for fixes, amendments, etc.)
For instance, the centralization of US political power into only two parties, where (temporary) single party rule of three branches is actually a practical possibility should have triggered some major reforms before it spun out of control.
A simple requirement that no coordinated individual or organization have sway over more than 25% of political seats, and political organizations at the federal and state levels must be separated, would do wonders for decentralization and better representation.
But the constitution is silent on any guidance or requirement on addressing new power centralization problems.
It is the hard root problem of power, but not systemizing progress on it is to accept inevitable dystopia
> But the constitution is silent on any guidance or requirement on addressing new power centralization problems.
The federal constitution says that voting is left up to the states, so arguably the centralization problem is ~50 different experiments which have all gone wrong in the exact same way.
You could say that the federal constitution should have put some guidance in place to stop exactly this correlated failure, but ironically that would introduce more centralization as there would be one rule forced on all the individual states.
Whether that's a good idea or not I think depends on how good the rule is in practice. Unfortunately the rule you suggest highlights just how difficult it is to write a good one. For example, how do you define "coordinated organization"?
If both major parties split into 50 different organizations that all happened to endorse the same candidate for president (but for nominally different state-specific reasons), should the SCOTUS have the power to ban those political organizations (and perhaps ban one and not the other)?
Fortunately we can look to other countries that have managed to avoid political duopoly by using voting systems which don't penalize people for voting for new parties. Even better, some US states have already implemented such a system[0], and, going back to your point about constitutions, the people of Maine managed to introduce RCV not because of a constitutional requirement, but despite a narrow (state) constitutional prohibition.[1]
> Fortunately we can look to other countries that have managed to avoid political duopoly by using voting systems which don't penalize people for voting for new parties. Even better, some US states have already implemented such a system[0], and, going back to your point about constitutions, the people of Maine managed to introduce RCV not because of a constitutional requirement, but despite a narrow (state) constitutional prohibition.[1]
I think you are right, voting systems are the best place to start.
That and prohibitions on justices and congressfolk from weighing in on matters they have a personal or political interest in, such as receiving political funds or assistance.
Imagine if donating to a politician whose influence you want will make it more likely they cannot help you. That leaves donations reflecting people's assessment of who will better run the country in a more general sense. Those donations look more like "free speech" than the rampant influence purchasing that overwhelms the system today.
> The federal constitution says that voting is left up to the states, so arguably the centralization problem is ~50 different experiments which have all gone wrong in the exact same way
If the constitution forbid parties from operating across state lines, or operating in more than 20 states, or holding more than 20% of seats in either Federal legislative body, … there would never be single party rule at the Federal level which is where it would matter most.
> If both major parties split into 50 different organizations that all happened to endorse the same candidate for president (but for nominally different state-specific reasons), should the SCOTUS have the power to ban those political organizations (and perhaps ban one and not the other)?
While collusion (meaning surreptitious coordination, in this case) between 50 state level parties would certainly be possible, it would be substantially more difficult than coordinating 50 state offices of a single political party as it is today.
Today, all senate campaigns are basically running for one shared constituency: big money from anywhere in the US, and political support from the same party, across the US.
The tight link that should exist between a politicians power base and the politicians electorate has been broken, for state level elections of Federal positions.
Nobody "designs" institutions. They are fought for by factions within the societies. The idea that some benevolent hand will come up with a better design is simply an absurd non sequitur. If there is going to be a significant change to the system, one which alters the political landscape, it is going to have to be fought for. And it will have to overcome bitter resistance from all those who benefit from the current order. To suppose otherwise is to engage in a pure flight of fancy.
I don't think the onus is on any one of us to come up with fixes to a problem this large. The government employs hundreds of incredibly smart people whose job it is to fix these types of issues. I, and I think most other people as well, would even be fine with small corrections here and there that tested what worked.
A fundamental problem, that we are all burdened to solve, is how do we get from an ideological government to a scientific one. Until we do that, we're all just plugging holes in a sinking ship.
>A simple requirement that no coordinated individual or organization have sway over more than 25% of political seats, and political organizations at the federal and state levels must be separated, would do wonders for decentralization and better representation.
Musk owns about 25% of Tesla, mostly after investing about $50M in Tesla's early funding rounds.
His wealth today comes largely because Tesla (under his leadership as CEO) has become a company that investors now believe is incredibly valuable, and they've driven up the stock price. At what point in this process did Musk "accumulate" this ownership of Tesla, and exactly what do you propose should have happened to stop him?
It has become so valuable, more valuable than the rest of the auto industry combined at one point despite much lower revenue and sales numbers, because of loose monetary policy by the Federal Reserve creating artificially inflated asset prices. The Federal Reserve is directly responsible for Musk’s disproportionate wealth as Tesla stock zoomed past ridiculous levels.
Tesla has been successful in many of its lines of business and succeeded when many thought they couldn’t, that is undebatable. The failure of our system is that its stock price is completely out of line with the reality that reflects that success.
Because car companies are boring, and in an era of cheap money the meme wins. “Sexy” automakers also got insane multiples, look at where Lucid and Rivian were trading. But the capital is diverted to whatever asset people think will keep going up, not the one that will create value in the form of profits. This is also why GameStop, AMC, DogeCoin, Shiba Inu, NFTs, Pokémon cards, etc. were trading so high, the meme is the only thing that matters.
Elon Musk knows this and is a master at harnessing this power, which is why he’s shamelessly pumped DogeCoin and Shiba. He continually pushes his company to be the most popular brands by promising impossible futuristic products that cannot exist, but build excitement. Countless examples of these, but a few are Full Self Driving, a flying Roadster, the Tesla semi, solving transportation issues with tunnels, the Tesla bot, $25k model 3, solar roof that costs less than a normal roof, robotaxi, etc etc etc. It’s all calculated.
Why is what other people do with their money a problem for you?
I think NFTs are stupid, but I don't think they're "a problem".
People spend lots of money on stuff I find stupid. I would never buy a Gucci handbag, they have about as much value as an NFT. But if someone else wants to, it doesn't hurt me, so, so what?
Because it added fragility to the economy, just like people over paying for mortgage backed securities in 2008. If it was a few foolish individuals that would be different, but reckless speculation has been actively encouraged by the Fed across the whole economy, NFTs are just one example.
Because Tesla is in major indexes like the NASDAQ composite, and S&P 500, as well as many major/popular funds/ETFs. Additionally, many funds are weighted by market cap (so more expensive companies get even more disproportionate investment). And the majority of stock investment activity happens through these investment vehicles today.
Generally, anyone who puts money into a 401k, will likely have some of it going to Tesla and disproportionately over other auto companies - simply because how funds are typically weighted.
You say that like it’s natural that Tesla’s success makes billions flow to the one person at the top. Musk obviously isn’t making cars and managing the entire company by himself and doesn’t deserve to be richer than literal countries for making the right bet at some point in his life.
What should have happened is wider distribution of profits among Tesla employees, who are the ones actually doing the work. It’s fine if the CEO is considered an extremely valuable employee and gets a larger share, within limits. Pretty sure he could live a great life with a few million dollars, which would both limit his undeserved power and benefit everyone doing the work.
Musk has sold billions in stock at this point, so this whole "it's stock that's increased in value independent of Musk" line of thinking is a bad misdirection.
Yes, but how much? Most of the rich pay taxes, but how much "should" they pay? Should someone worth 100M pay higher income taxes than someone worth 1M if they make the same income in a given year? Should there be a "limit" on the amount of wealth one can transfer in a given year as which point taxes hit 100%?
Tax schemes and how they affect wealth, inequality, consumption, etc. is an interesting line of thought, and a necessary one, if you accept that the current one has allowed some individuals to get so rich that the rule of law breaks down in their presence.
It’ll entirely be long term gains, so I wouldn’t say huge as a percentage. I would also venture all kinds of other things are being written off to reduce the tax burdens. Typically people like Musk don’t sell stock but use it as collateral to take out low interest loans, which avoids taxes.
I continue to be super concerned about this. I do not understand how the U.S. government does not view these billionaires as serious ideological threats to democracy, the court system, national security, etc. Makes one realize just how bought out Congress is.
Once a person has wealth over, say, $500 million, then there should be a 100% tax.
Meh the government doesn't need more money to conduct frivolous and corrupt spending with.
However it might be interesting to explore an option that required people who own a stake in a company that has grown beyond a certain size to be required to siphon off some of those shares to employees over time in a way where it was not conducted on the open market and would not affect share price.
I also question whether corporate entities should be allowed to own shares and what the benefits are of that. Should private investment firms be allowed to accumulate massive stakes in public companies?
I don't think we should avoid something just because there are more problems. We should fix those other problems as well. The primary issue is that there is a single extremist party, not unlike those found in the Middle East, that is hell bent on undermining America for want of power. By systematically undermining education, public health and services, infrastructure, treating government projects as jobs programs, etc., they are creating a worse America and a sort of political Stockholm syndrome among their constituents. But there is indeed corruption across the board in America.
Local governments are starved for money, and almost all of their funding comes from local property taxes, that is, normal people. So, these mega-rich are allowed to get unboundedly wealthy, while normal people have to pay to keep society running as a minimal level. The mega-rich's money, as well as corporations', needs to flow back through the system. It does no good to let it concentrate so heavily and ultimately do nothing while it sits there.
Is it ironic I don't even know which party you are referring to because it accurately describes both in my opinion?
But I disagree in that I think we absolutely should avoid it because a larger federal government has been heavily correlated with less local funding (so much so that the SALT deduction was once a thing). It's given rise to globalization and large multi-national conglomerates. It creates a situation where power & money is too concentrated.
I'm not sure it's ironic as much as it is either not paying attention or not being honest with the situation. One party being extreme does not make the other party the good party. It just means that one party is extreme, which is a fact. The Democrats are not a paragon of a political party. They are as inefficient, middle of the road moderate, corrupt, etc. as any political party. But the Republicans, or at least a powerful subset of them, have become an extremist group. And they are well-funded by conservative and libertarian ideologues who care about nothing other than power and money and can use their wealth to avoid any downsides in their quest.
Once you start looking into the ideologies of people like the Koch brothers, Robert Mercer and his family, Peter Thiel, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, Sheldon Adelson, Ronald Cameron, Steve Wynn, and others, you start seeing very weird and strange beliefs that are incompatible with a functional society. The primary thread is that these people do not care about others. Just look at the Koch brothers' political donations and the businesses they run. Is it then any surprise why the Republicans might not care so much about climate change and policies to mitigate it?
We have one extremist political party, and then the other, somewhat incompetent, party spends all their energy fighting back against the extremism of the other.
I just do not agree that one party is more extreme than the other, sorry. I also don't believe you are being honest with yourself over the situation either. It's clear you have dug your heels into a particular set of beliefs and have no interest in discussing real solutions (instead just want to play the blame game). Frankly it is just not interesting discussion.
That can be your opinion, but I think it stands in disagreement with several events and facts of the Republican party. There are oodles of articles and books addressing the growing extremism of the Republican party, so I don't think it's even a controversial opinion. By just saying "oh, they're just another political party with different beliefs" is enabling their extremism. Any rational discussion with a Republican, at least those that I know, which includes family members, can often not be had. I understand that there are actual conservative political beliefs, but from what I can tell, they are not the ones driving the power dynamic of the Republican party. The discussions I have had quickly turn weird because it quickly becomes a case of religion, sexism, racism, or something else deep down affecting their political beliefs, which mainly consist of wanting everyone else to be like them and to do what they want (how they want).
A certain Republican sect literally tried to overturn the presidential election, threatening to hang the vice president, killed a capital cop, ransacked the capital, and only one Republican had the guts to vote against the president. Then that same party will decry people marching for human rights and supports violence against those groups. The Republicans are the same party that supposedly stand for small government but are hell bent on telling people what they can do with their own bodies and forcing religion to be taught in public schools. Republicans' reaction to mass shootings is more guns, while they are the ones that block any investigation into why these are happening or preventing people that should not be buying guns from buying guns. I happened to drive across the country during COVID. You could tell the Republican states from the amount of masks being warn. The Republicans blocked a third supreme court nomination by a two-term president in Obama that was 10 months ahead of the presidential election, meanwhile they rushed a third supreme court appointee by a one-term president just two months before an election, throwing out every reason they used to block Obama's nomination. These are all extreme positions that don't have analogs in the Democratic party.
> have no interest in discussing real solutions
Mind pointing that out? In fact, I've elaborated quite a decent amount. I'm not sure what you've brought to the discussion other than just stating disagreement and making bad faith statements. You are free to contribute or elaborate on what you mean by the Republican party not being extreme.
The solutions I believe that could help things are: increasing tax on the wealthy, limiting the amount of political donations including to interest groups and think tanks (i.e., get private money out of politics and government), abiding by separation of church and state, and increasing primary and secondary education.
You are pissing in the wind. This place is essentially r/conservative and most of these people are totally fine with how things are progressing. I think the US is completely fucked and no rich people I know care, at all
Yeah, this place is so conservative that you can't even say that Republicans are extremists who are intentionally undermining the country and that everyone who supports them is suffering from a rare mental disorder without people calmly disagreeing. /s
- a legitimately won election was almost overturned by a violent mob incited by Trump at the time
Have the Democrats ever incited a mob to violently overturn an election?
The fact that people like Trump, Greene, Boebert and others with extremist and narcissistic values can rise to power / influence points to major systemic failures, which eventually destroys democracy if not stopped.
How do you avoid those destructive people rise to power?
Or do something useful and somewhat efficient with the money. Eg: good, reliable public school, roads, network infrastructures, renewable energy sources.
I’m a US tax payer since less than a decade. My experience is that I pay a significant portion of my incomes to taxes that only marginally benefit me or folks around me.
Recent uptick of direct distribution is nice.
But a leadership in the stewarding of the land would be tasteful and send the right message IMO.
It’s fascinating to see the Western European countries I’m familiar with being blinded by the economic might of the US but not realizing how little the average citizen benefit from it.
According to the Laffer curve it should probably be 70% or so to maximize government income, but yes.
If you tax them 100% they'll just stop working or bail to another country, and then you collect zero tax revenue from them. At 70% most of them will just suck it up and pay.
(I realize France is a counterpoint here, but I'd argue it was a half-assed attempt, and they have neighboring French-speaking tax havens that have no real U.S. equivalent.)
The Laffer curve is a fact-free zone except for at it's two end points.
The reality is that nobody knows for sure what the curve of revenue vs. tax rate looks like other than at those two end points, which makes the entire concept completely useless.
The most amusing thing about the Laffer curve folk is they mention it, and a breath later will talk about cutting taxes so they can drag the government to a tub and drown it in the bathwater: they don't even pretend to believe that we're at the point on the curve where cutting taxes will increase revenue.
It’s fascinating. Not only that is fact free, but it’s based on an assumption that the purpose of the government is to collect maximum tax value from the citizens. Is it thought?
It's not based on this assumption at all. In fact, the Laffer curve is named after an economist who did his best to provide "intellectual heft" to politicians who wanted to reduce taxation as far as possible (and maybe a little further than that), later summarized by one of them as "shrink[ing] the government to the point where we can drown it in the bathtub".
>Once a person has wealth over, say, $500 million, then there should be a 100% tax.
Your inability to conceive of a useful purpose for such a quantity of money does not justify prohibiting its existence.
>I do not understand how the U.S. government does not view these billionaires as serious ideological threats to democracy, the court system, national security, etc
Cooperation. A government that can't handle the idea of powerful citizens has all the tools it needs to make almost all those people (hard to banish all the Christian missionaries, and martyring them is the surest way to grow more) leave or fall in line, but I don't think many people look at Venezuela or North Korea as ideal places to govern in terms of democracy, the court system, national security, etc.
> Your inability to conceive of a useful purpose for such a quantity of money does not justify prohibiting its existence.
What inability and where was it demonstrated? Are you referring to a useful purpose if it was taxed or a useful purpose for individuals to have such wealth? If the latter, then I propose that an individual containing such wealth is less useful than it being returned.
Those things and countries you mentioned have nothing to do with this discussion.
It's so many layers of delightfully nested irony. Give more money to the federal government so they give more big tax credits for Tesla purchases, but Tesla can't exist any more in this fantasy world where nothing outside of the federal government can grow beyond $500 million in scope.
As someone who grew up in a communist country with literally zero rich prople - it’s not about wealth, it’s about power and influence. We’ve had just as many, if not way more, people above law as in capitalist countries.
> Maybe this is a good reason a single human being shouldn't be so fucking rich.
if you look at this as a problem with the rich, you're not being creative enough.
Speaking as if we're assuming Musk gets away with this, this is a justice enforcement problem -- when all the mega-rich are gone the justice system that displays this level of corruption will just skim the highest payers available to them; they won't just give up these corrupt practices because there isn't a local billionaire to tap.
But that's not how it works when you simply owe money (usually, modulo things like probation violations and child support, but lets ignore that for now). We don't have debtors prisons). They can seize his money though, garnish his wages (lol in this specific case though), etc.
He should see jailtime for the market manipulation. We'll see what happens. This isn't even a thing the SEC is known to be pursuing presently, so don't hold your breath.
This is the thing. I feel like the Delaware Chancery Court is going to compel specific performance and the incentives for all other parties here are tilted deeply towards compliance.
On a practical level, every large financial institution with dollar assets (I mean this literally) has a far greater vested interest in maintaining a productive relationship with the Chancery than they do with Musk.
On a political level, could easily see the Delaware governor getting a kick out of sending the state police to arrest Musk for contempt, impound his assets.
Assuming that is the appropriate penalty (I know nothing about Chancery law), why exactly can’t they just issue a warrant for his arrest and put him in jail? He doesn’t have a private militia or anything like that
I was thinking this was a case of white privilege that we consider the conduct of Musk as “rich people just wanna have fun” and not a criminal conspiracy. But the more I think the more I realize the privilege is not that , the privilege is that a white successful immigrant is loved by so many people in this country , a brown or black successful immigrant is not loved in the same way in this country. And that my friends is indeed a privilege.
"There is not a whisper of evidence for this claim, no hint that there might be evidence, no acknowledgement that a reasonable reader of this letter might want to see evidence."
This is completely wrong, right? The evidence might not be terrific but it's definitely more than a whisper.
The $1B is it he walks away and Twitter is ok with it. Another clause allows Twitter to force the deal to close so long as they are operating in good faith.
The purchase price of 54.20 per share would net a lot more than a billion given the current share price.
It seems like a common misunderstanding because the reporting around this is so bad.
> Musk and Twitter agreed to a so-called reverse termination fee of $1 billion when the two sides reached a deal last month. Still, the breakup fee isn’t an option payment that allows Musk to bail without consequence.
> A reverse breakup fee paid from a buyer to a target applies when there is an outside reason a deal can’t close, such as regulatory intermediation or third-party financing concerns. A buyer can also walk if there’s fraud, assuming the discovery of incorrect information has a so-called “material adverse effect.” A market dip, like the current sell-off that has caused Twitter to lose more than $9 billion in market cap, wouldn’t count as a valid reason for Musk to cut loose — breakup fee or no breakup fee — according to a senior M&A lawyer familiar with the matter.
He is obligated to close the deal and Twitter can force him to do so. If some external force stops the deal from happening - or if he can show that Twitter egregiously violated the agreement - he can get away with not buying Twitter, but he still has to pay them $1B.
The point is that paying the ‘fine’ doesn’t give him the right to walk away for ‘no reason’. If he does he may end paying damages for much more than $1bn.
The fact that Musk is working in such bad faith here — that he seems so unconcerned with law and the contract he signed — cuts both ways. On the one hand, it will certainly annoy a Delaware chancellor; Delaware likes to think of itself as a stable place for corporate deals, with predictable law and binding contracts, and Musk’s antics undermine that. On the other hand it might intimidate a Delaware chancellor: What if the court orders Musk to close the deal and he says no? They’re not gonna put him in Chancery jail. The guy is pretty contemptuous of legal authority; he thinks he is above the law and he might be right. A showdown between Musk and a judge might undermine Delaware corporate law more than letting him weasel out of the deal would.