Wow! Great disclosure! I find it hard to read though, since the text doesn't properly capitalize the start of sentences. Messes up with the natural language parser I have in my head :)
As the US citizen partner to an immigrant who now has their green card from our marriage, it was anything but simple. It is definitely the simplest way, by far, but it is not simple. It was very eye opening to me to see the journey from the inside.
I've seen this several times and just not really understood the end game.
Surely they'll be pursued for the rent (plus costs) & evicted along the way. The landlords aren't individual employees he can just shit on and assume they won't sue.
For me this was the final nail in the coffin for the "Elon's just playing 4D chess we don't understand" argument and really just shows that he's a dude that thinks he can do whatever he wants with no consequences, because so far there haven't really been any.
If there were a logic to it, I'd guess that it's more important he make the interest payments on the billions of dollars in loans he took out for the purchase than it is to not get sued for non-payment of a lease.
> he's a dude that thinks he can do whatever he wants with no consequences
That's been clear to me for many years, but for me, the nail in that coffin was the whole "pedo guy" thing. It was a great demonstration of what a despicable person he is.
The rationale at the time was that Musk was refusing to pay so that he could cut a better deal with Twitter, which might even be true, but it was still a stupid waste of time (and money paid to lawyers).
The punchline of all this is that his main argument was that bots devalued Twitter, and the bot problem has become so much worse in recent months, to the extent that it's become a meme to mess with the bots that sell t-shirts.
He wasn't really forced to buy it. There was a $1 billion buyout option of the contract apparently. I believe he paid 44 billion it, when it was clearly worth half that after the stock lost value, so he chose to waste 20 billion instead of 1 billion to save his ego. But instead he's destroyed whatever part of his reputation was left.
There was not a 1 billion dollar buyout option, the 1 billion dollar penalty was if he could not obtain financing, which he was perfectly capable of doing, or if a regulator blocked the deal, it wasn't something he had the right to use, just a penalty he would be forced to pay if he couldn't close the deal.
Oh I thank you for the extra information. I think he could have sabotaged the financing if you tried hard. So he agreed to pay for 44 billion odd dollars for Twitter no matter what? That's a very questionable deal.
I don't think it was a questionable deal, at least without 20/20 hindsight. Twitter wasn't looking for a buyer, and Musk really, really wanted to buy it (until he didn't). If you have a highly motivated buyer and a not particularly motivated seller, you would expect the deal to be favorable to the seller. In order to convince Twitter owners to sell the company Musk had to essentially make them an offer so good they couldn't refuse. What other outcome would you expect?
If Musk lost in court, was ordered to go through with the deal, and then sabotaged the financing to try to get out of the deal, potentially a court could have thrown him in jail and said, "You are lying about not being able to go through with the financing, we find you in contempt of court and you are staying in jail until you obtain financing and close the deal." It's not very plausible that the world's richest man can't find financing on the deal.
Potentially a court could have also instead said, "Since you sabotaged the financing, you are in breach of contract. Twitter is worth 22 billion dollars today. You offered 44 billion dollars to buy it. You are hereby ordered to pay Twitter 22 billion dollars to make them whole." Presumably the court could have forced him to sell assets to pay up.
I don't think anyone knows for sure what would have happened in court but it seems he had a very weak case.
I would suspect that if you sabotage funding to get out of a deal that you otherwise couldn’t get out of, the other party has a pretty good case to come after you for damages.
On it being a questionable deal, it’s not a consumer contract. It is assumed that both sides know what they’re doing in commercial deals; there’s little protection for incompetent participants. It might be questionable, but the participants have largely signed away the right to question it.
Maybe the end game is just to drive it to bankruptcy... And then get someone to swoop in with some marginal value. But paying for things would make it happen faster...
They can sue but do you know what the return of the suit is? Do you get your cash or do you spend cash + get less than what you were owed?
Most things settle and they settle for far less than the original amount. "It's just not worth it" the individual says. That's what Musk and others bank on.
In some countries it really is a lot easier to force a company to pay a debt; it can proceed to winding-up/bankruptcy/whatever pretty quickly if the debtor company is uncooperative.
As I understand it, US small claims court is _not_ like this; practical enforcement powers are usually fairly limited.
Also any commercial lease of this size would easily and immediately outstrip small claims' needs.
In general the attitude of big business or HNI is pay a lawyer, reduce the cost you actually pay to the vendor. Get a bulk pricing on lawyer hours (Retainer, tons of active issues anyway, etc)
It looks bad to us because we spend a lifetime being upfront and on it with obligations. We literally never want to be evicted but like any crime that has a fine, it is not really a crime. It is a price of doing business a certain way and the question is simply whether you can afford it.
> Elon appears to believe he just doesn't need to pay for things
He's the equity anchor for the last cycle's top-tick LBO. He's trying to get to unlevered cash-flow positivity so he can renegotiate the debt from a position of relative strength. (That or wait until a regulator fines Twitter out of existence so he can blame them.)
Either way, he's–perhaps rationally–hyperbolically discounting. Cash today is worth more than that cash tomorrow plus court fees and reputation.
"When informed of the risks of termination fees during a meeting on November 3,
2022, Steve Davis said "Well, we just won't pay those. We just won't pay landlords." Davis also told Hawkins, "We just won't pay rent." Twitter specifically directed Hawkins to breach its leases, whether by terminating
without any good faith justification under the terms of the applicable lease, or by simply stealing
from the landlords by intentionally remaining on the premises without any intention of paying
amounts Twitter knew and believed were its legal obligation to pay.
That's how rich people stay rich. I've many a personal anecdote where I've been part of the staff working events for 1%ers where they are squabbling over prices just for the kicks of convincing someone else to take less money or the sense of getting something someone else wouldn't get. Then they joke about it with the friends. This is not unique to Elon by any stretch. He just does it in a much more public manner than I have ever seen. Even more blatant than Trump which is infamous for this business tactic.
What's insane is that it's not actually how they stay rich. They'd be rich anyway. Most humans could live very comfortably with only the interest from one of their cash holding accounts. It's just arbitrary cruelty to other people because it makes them feel superior and salves their nouveau riche insecurities.
FWIW, Reddit's new limits are about 3rd party use of their data/APIs. As a regular user, it doesn't really change anything (unless you consume Reddit NSFW content exclusively through a 3rd party app, I guess), so a pretty different case than Imgur's change here, which fundamentally shifts their user-base.
3rd party reddit apps rival reddit's own app in terms of popularity, and will be significantly hamstrung by these changes if NSFW content can only be accessed in the official app. Lots of non-porn content is marked NSFW. It may end up having a much larger impact than reddit corporate anticipates.
I'm trying to take the most charitable interpretation possible instead of assuming malice on the part of reddit, but it's difficult to interpret it any other way than they have decided to kill 3rd party clients and not be upfront about their intentions.
It wouldn't be so difficult to swallow if the official mobile app was high quality, but it isn't. There are major UX issues with the official app that haven't been fixed for years. The 3rd party app ecosystem is vibrant because of this. Instead of competing and being the best on merit, they have decided to play their platform-owner veto card which is very disappointing, compounded with their dishonesty about the true intent of these changes.
They're a huge company, they could easily acquire five of the third party apps, add ads and keep the developers on payroll to maintain the apps. Banning apps that don't show ads of course.
I use Boost because it's far superior to the Reddit app and to Reddit's website (even old.reddit.com), despite Boost having ads and despite me being able to avoid ads on Reddit due to having an ad blocker.
So at least for me, using a third-party app is well worth it despite seeing ads.
I have leared to ignore any promoted content i.e. ads in my reddit timeline, mostly because they are irrelevant. The app is regardless slow as hell. The Dawn app in comprasion, is extremely smooth and a pleasure to use. I'd guess the difference is the amount of tracking and analytics the official app is trying to do, I'd guess it is also not a native app.
I hate when I’m hovering my thumb on a comment for a millisecond when scrolling the comments sections and accidentally collapsing a thread I’m reading, how can they not test their app with users to catch these simple usability issues?
Seriously. Makes
Me feel like my scroll behavior is weird or something. Or like an idiot because I didn’t know a word and wanted to define it by tapping “Look up.” sigh
"reddit corporate"? Like Steve, who was the original founder and is the current CEO, or Alexis, another original founder, who is the executive chairman?
There is absolutely zero way they're unaware of the impact and I guarantee you they have thought this move through thoroughly.
You mention it like they haven't done a ton of user hostile releases, like the constant UX dark patterns to push you to a mobile app, etc. This argument is so strange, should we refute anything against Meta with "but the original founder is there, there's no corporate"?
I think the argument isn't that Reddit isn't corporate but rather that the original founders have thought it through a lot and have still decided to make this decision.
I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg thinks through all his major decisions a lot too. If you think a lot and your result is dark patterns, does that matter so much?
You seem to be assuming that if one says "they know well what they are doing" that's a defense of their actions, but I'd think it is much more often a denigration of them...
Fair enough, in that case this is Digg v4 levels of arrogance. Tons of moderators depend on 3rd party apps to moderate [1]. These people are providing free labor on an industrial scale to reddit and it might be wise not to frustrate their work.
Reddit moderators are, by and large, terrible people. If they quit, as the guy in your link is threatening to do, they can be trivially replaced. It is not a thing that requires much skill.
There is no shortage of people who would volunteer for something like this. The replacements might even be less terrible, both at the job (reddit is stiflingly over-moderated, as documented on r/undelete and r/redditminusmods) and in their dealings with users.
Given in the announcement thread they got wrong about it affecting third party apps at all and then on calls with third party devs do not seem quite sure if it will effect NSFW content or not, that does not seem to be the case.
Indeed, it seems to be a chaotic mess, as most of Reddit's "throw shit at a walk and hope something sticks" development methodology is.
> As a regular user, it doesn't really change anything
It absolutely does. There is tons of normal content that is tagged as NSFW for various non pornogrpahic reasons, and consdering 'regular users' includes the millions of people that use apollo, Rif, etc , thats a huge amount of the user base negatively effected.
Indeed! Just one example in /r/Diablo_2_Resurrected/ screenshots of very good, very rare items are marked NSFW because they're considered "disgustingly good" and because having to do an extra step to reveal the item provides a "rush" similar to gambling.
I often use spoiler formatting for comedic effect, etc.
It's a recurring joke in /r/AoE2 (Age of Empires II) to label screenshots of particularly aesthetic base/farming layouts as NSFW.
For context, normally you are placing 3x3 tile farms either around 2x2 tile mills or 4x4 tile Town Centers, so you end up with a "pinwheel" at best. But the Poles can build a 3x3 Folwark (like a mill but makes your food come in faster if the farms are close enough) leading to some very satisfying ways to use building space efficiently and aesthetically.
It's a problem on mobile, because old-reddit isn't mobile-engineered and there isn't uBlock for iOS. The go-to Reddit app for iOS is Apollo, and they're going to be affected.
At least on desktop the old UI has a bug in narrow browser windows, but besides that I also use it 99% of the time. The new interface simply doesn't bring any noteworthy value in comparison while being more annoying to use.
I also use old.reddit all the time but come on, you seriously can't mean it's a good mobile experience. The text is tiny and you need to zoom in and out all the time just to be able to read anything. It becomes exhausting reading a comment thread by all the zooming. The image posts also don't have the actual image embedded, which makes it a really bad experience on mobile when you have to go to another URL just to look at it.
I'm with the above commenter, I used the old reddit on mobile for a decade+ and always enjoyed it. Also, there used to be i.reddit.com which was great for mobile - but it looks like they've gotten rid of that.
I've stopped using Reddit now. I liked the freedom of speech and the curiosity of the users. Freedom of speech had been eliminated totally. Curuisity can presumably be found in some niche subreddits - but even the niche subreddits I used to frequent have fallen.
I agree, yet old.reddit is still 100x better to use than the main Reddit site, which really illustrates just how awful and user hostile their main website is (especially on mobile).
Definitely. I don't use main reddit at all, but on mobile there are no good alternatives now when i.reddit.com is gone and third party clients being restricted. Saying "just use old reddit" is not sufficient for me at least.
The new reddit is so bad I'm sort of shocked it still exists. I really wonder what goes through people's heads when they build these things that are universally hated.
You generally don't make an ad-supported business if you respect your users as human beings, but the old -> new Reddit redesign is something really special - going through with it, and then sticking to it for so many years now, pretty much requires seeing your users as cattle.
My college professors in economics / business taught me that customers and employees are numbers from which I must extract the maximum amount of value for the minimum amount of input. People are more like cow nipples in capitalism driven societies.
The new UI enforces age gating via sign-in (switch to the old UI, and you can get away with "Continue"), which is better for engagement.
The new UI is mobile friendly, which is WAY better for engagement. (Most users are mobile users, even though mobile devices are worse than desktop PCs in every way except convenience.)
I honestly think you might just be "holding it wrong"... instead of zooming in on the text, can you try just moving your phone closer to your head and see if that helps? I honestly use old.reddit.com on mobile because the font size is better: I am not zooming in and out, and I appreciate being able to see more of the thread at once. The "mobile optimized" version of the site feels like I am being forced to have tunnel vision and it makes it really difficult to read anything.
They've also relatively recently killed off i.reddit.com (the .compact view that looks like really old iOS). That was good for mobile when old-reddit was too wide.
This happened to me as well. bunch of random @yahoo addresses (I don't have one of those) and rando phone numbers, none of which were mine. Welp.... who knows wtf they have in there then, I guess.
Having spent a long time on medication for depression in the past, I can verify this. There's a lot you can do to help yourself before trying medication. Exercise and learning to manage your emotions are a great place to start and can help a lot more than most people think. It definitely has a time and place, but the side effects can be a lot more drastic (and sometimes detrimental) than a lot of people expect.
I think the overall design does looks great; very polished and well done. Although I will admit, the background is a tad retina burning at night on a bright screen (at least for me).
Doesn't it count as paranoia if it already happened?