Musk can make a tender offer conditioned on Twitter removing the poison pill.
There have been past takeovers of companies that had poison pills. In 2006, Pilgrim’s Pride will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Gold Kist common stock for $21.00 per share in cash. Gold Kist had put in a poison pill but Pilgrim’s Pride succeeded in taking over anyway.
Tender offers direct to shareholders and proxy battles can be used to takeover a company even if the company has taken poison pill measures.
The people currently running Twitter are incompetent. Elon will be able to takeover and increase the revenues of Twitter and grow it into the top or at least a top five social media site. Twitter is currently ranked about 20th in active users for social media sites.
By 2023, Elon will have 5-10 million users of Starlink. This will be up from 1 million at the end of this year. Elon will have 8 million Tesla customers which will be up from 2.3 million today. He will have acquired Twitter and it will have 400+ million active users. This will be up from 215 million today.
By 2026, Elon will have 100 million users of Starlink and 60-100 million Tesla customers. The future Twitter with short video will have over 1 billion users.
SOURCES- NYpost
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture (Brian has shares of Tesla and Twitter)
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Yawn, wasting so much money for some social network which soon will become irrelevant and will be disrupted by new ones. Yes it took some time for tiktok to grow, but in the future it will only get shorter and shorter to become next big thing.
Next TikTok will achieve billion users in a matter of months and old ones(like FB, twitter, snapchats, instagrams, tiktoks) will become disrupted and die. With only few older people as users, who don't want to learn new tech/networks from scratch.
We already seen this – MySpace, dying Facebook, Insta/Snapchat which are mostly alien for gen X/boomers, even a lot of millenials and now TikTok which is alien even for majority of millenials. These $40B could be spent smarter, on so much more important things, like for example funding longevity/anti aging research, advancing nanotechnology, 3d printing industry, fusion research, tons of others
I wonder if he has another $49.95 to buy and fix Truth Social?
https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1517957007411597313
That response is a tad harsh, no?
True to some extent, but I think it's more complicated than this because of the role of the media and corporate advertisers. If "problematic" speech is allowed, the media will go after advertisers that run ads, which puts pressure on Twitter's main source of income. Elon obviously understands this, which is why he has made clear that acquiring Twitter is not about making money.
I think the ad-supported model was a huge mistake for humanity. Ads not only promote unhealthy consumerism, they also promote quantity over quality in content consumption as well.
"he lost fair and square" – you don't say…
Putin was also almost nice when he started…
For a start he could combine Twitter with Starlink and give nearly everybody on earth access to censorship proof internet communications.
Indeed, putting a lifeboat on Mars will run out of time long before putting trillions in Space as per O'Neill. Mars is soooooooo tiny!
What is it with lefties and their belief that their own political opinions cause nausea?
Yeah, but while Musk's promised timelines are in Mars years, Bezos's space timelines are in Neptune years. So Musk is the way to bet.
Are you aware that Bezos has some plans for Space Settlement too? See Gerard K. O'Neill "The High Frontier" for details. "Is the surface of a planet the right place for" Space Settlement?
"Classical liberals" were anti monarchy libertarians, given the context. That word has been lost. So the definition of libertarian is defended, as is the opposite, socialism. There will be great effort to subvert these definitions, as libertarian thot, being now proven in Primal Science, scares the sheet out of socialists. Definitions are important. "Censor", for example.
One of Twitter's resources is an experienced staff of data scientists and AI algorithm developers. Considering his quest for fully autonomous cars – could he be looking to gain control of their talents and contracts? Yes, 10% of them would walk out the door rather than work for him, so what? It may be that he has an idea for mining Twitter data for a competitor to Google Ads. Or thinks Twitter could branch into other social media markets. Whatever it is, his track record says he thinks he can make even more money on it, not just so he has a platform of his own.
The "liberals" in the modern sense are rather anti-liberal in the classical sense (that is, leaving other ways of thought than religion be).
Not really that surprising, given all shades of the left are the most reactionary ideologies that aren't an open fundamentalist cult.
Yep. Rampantly banning people with conservative edges. Not even hate speech or ToS violations.
How is Twitter protecting free speech by selectively banning conservatives?
I think he knows best how to invest his money. There is only so much value available to expansion. Lithium only comes out of the ground so fast, and markets heat up and cool down.
He could build 10 Gigafactories and then find that a year later they need to be retooled because of new technology.
Best to plan a certain production rate and create the infrastructure to meet those goals. He is killing it at the moment.
Or he could use the extra money as payola to help grease the skids.
If he would just get onboard with the rest of Big Tech his regulatory problems would vanish. Maybe even get a sweet self-governing deal (like Disney had) down in Boca Chica.
Yet he persists.
Or maybe the reason you suppose, doesnt make sense because its not the actual reason.
Maybe civic discourse is vital to healthy governance. Maybe twitter happens to be the main public forum right now, in spite of all its flaws.
I think another element of his plans for Twitter is using it as a base for financial/payments system that includes functions like Alipay and Tenpay – reviving his plans for X.com and combining with his long term interest in crypto and digital banking.
A major goal of Elon’s is to eliminate the bots and spam that flood Twitter and have been prominent in his comment threads all along. Censoring bots and troll armies whether commercial, political or criminal in intent is critical to making a platform effective for free speech by individual humans and verified organizations. Verifying accounts will get more attention not less. It will get harder to be anonymous on Twitter not easier because anonymity is the greatest source of the problems Musk is trying to correct.
Yeah, that's what I said: Politically motivated delusions.
He never did that.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Twitter and other social media heavily censored coronavirus discussion. E.g. actively banned people for discussing the lab leak theory and "fact checked" people adding disclaimers, downranking and preventing posts from being shared, usually without any supporting evidence. E.g. Facebook called a peer reviewed British medical journal article (!) partially false and potentially misleading, didn't point out any errors, just downranked people who reposted a straight up link to the article and plastered a fake news sticker on all related posts.
Claiming that women are "adult human females" can get you banned on twitter, as can opposing the invasion of men in female sports for instance. You can be banned for calling people groomers who give hormone blockers (which regularly cause life long issues and infertility) to children without their parents involvement or consent; 80% of whom will with no intervention later accept the gender they were born with. Twitter has decided that mainstream opinions in silicon valley should represent the whole world and any opposition is hate speech.
Supporting Kyle Rittenhouse (who was later cleared of all wrong doing) and showing evidence that he acted in self defense and with remarkable restraint also got you censored or banned.
As does suggesting that maybe islam is why Allahu-ackbar-shouting terrorists did what they did.
One is freedom of free speech and another is telling people to do harm and attack USA senate. Still can't believe people believe and follow such a liar as Trump is.
Perhaps telling people to attack the goverment is something that should get him in jail? Trump fans follow a guy who lies all the time, who wanted to make coup de etat, cause he lost fair and square.
One is protecting freedom of speech and another is hiding under free spech to do as he pleases. He could spend that billions for space tech or something that would matter more. I don't know what is his real motivation. Does he want to earn more money with developing Twitter? Is it business? Does he want to counter that annoying Facebook kid? Or is that his personal vendetta, bacause of some of his tweets and he wants more control?
Brian, please please please moderate the site better. Am excruciatingly tired of these type of posters (guest included).
I just don’t see the rampant censorship there is claimed to be. Yes Trump is banned but how many others?Can someone name ten or e en five people? I would not be risking Tesla or SpaceX for this. No way.
I don't think platforms should make banning decisions based on politically motivated delusions, though.
I don't think the people running Twitter are incompetent. Rather, they're competently pursuing political, rather than economic, goals, to the detriment of the stock holders.
Twitter gets away with this only because fiduciary duties are rarely enforced.
If anything Musk is going to become a trillionaire real quick. There are over 80 million people directly supporting Trump. Think about what that means….the kind of power you're going to have….
Vomit into your face mask. That way you can enjoy it even longer.
So what happens if Trump is allowed back on twitter. Tell me.
Come on Kimhi…. Cyborg mentality? So you genuinely think that this all to make sure that he himself is never censured on Twitter? That's all it is? Don't you think that being on the board and owning 14,5% of the shares would have gotten him that "prize" without having to put more of his money on the line?
But of course the woke people will just claim that it's bad to create "bubbles", by which they only mean bubbles that they don't like. Feed-back loops with kids encouraging each other to transition to other genders is fine, organizing against the patriarchy is also fine. But hearing – possibly inane – claims from conservative senators is absolutely off limits.
I hope that the wokes won't start hounding Elon Musk. Hope he starts by open sourcing the sensor decisions and the algorithm. That alone would make it very difficult to maintain an unreasonable bias.
Twitter actually has great potential. I'm for letting the end user control the filter that he/she is subjected to. Don't like conservative voices? Fine, filter them out, go right ahead.
But it's even better than that. If I don't like crackpots, I just set the filter to "no crackpots", or no "woke people" and I don't have to be irritated. Perhaps I can also filter out people making incompetent claims on technology?
And everybody can speak just as much as they like, and nobody controls what other people are allowed to hear.
Protecting freedom of speech is very important. There has to be at least one major social media company standing up against rampant censorship. Elon is a hero for shelling out to protect freedom.
Is violence always bad?
jesus christ if this means that trump will be back on twitter – even after his constant and persistent instigation of violence – I'm going to vomit.
I wish him luck but since I doubt that if he get Twitter he will think to back track from their “2 factor security” so I won’t be back. Giving a phone number to a company like Twitter may make the account more “secure” but it makes the user far less secure. Between hackers and SJWs who will never be fully cleansed from the company you might as well just dox yourself and save them the trouble.
So you hold a genuine interest in an open public square to be the least likely motive for his bid for twitter?
*Shrugs* Looking at Elon’s words and actions over the last two decades, I think you’re probably wrong.
Then he's really serious about this.
Well, his money, his choice.
My take on this is if this makes him even richer and ends up benefitting space settlement then I'll applaud.
If not, I will cease caring what he does and how rich he gets. Same as I don't really care that much about Jeff Bezos or other billionaires.
I care about what Elon Musk does whenever he furthers the goal of human space settlement. Any personal quests he's on to be the filthiest rich billionaire ever is really not that interesting for me without the space settlement angle.
Call me utilitarian, but what matters for me is what would end up benefitting humankind in the long term, not how many zeroes somebody's bank account has. Billionaires are all still human and they all will be dead in a similar time frame as everyone else.
If all that money doesn't end up saving humankind's future, in real terms it's just vanity.
Yes, Elon places a high priority on having his tweets reach everyone's brain directly and he is moving in this direction on several fronts. His cyborg mentality monkeymen are also trumpeting this message in every direction.