Elon Musk and Twitter Reach Deal for Sale (3 Viewers)

[SaintForLife]

Elon Musk struck a deal on Monday to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world’s richest man to take over the influential social network frequented by world leaders, celebrities and cultural trendsetters.

Twitter agreed to sell itself to Mr. Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price this month before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder. It would be the largest deal to take a company private — something Mr. Musk has said he will do with Twitter — in at least two decades, according to data compiled by Dealogic.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Mr. Musk said in a statement announcing the deal. “Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

The deal, which has been unanimously approved by Twitter’s board, is expected to close this year, subject to a vote of Twitter shareholders and certain regulatory approvals.

The blockbuster agreement caps what had seemed an improbable attempt by the famously mercurial Mr. Musk, 50, to buy the social media company — and immediately raises questions about what he will do with the platform and how his actions will affect online speech globally.

Elon Musk and Twitter Reach Deal for Sale

Twitter agreed to be taken over at $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the share price before it was revealed that Mr. Musk had been buying up the company’s stock.

www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org

If Musk does what he claims he wants to do it will be a big improvement and good for free speech.

 

[SystemShock]

While we're at it, I'd like to get your acknowledgment and condemnation of a couple of things that have happened recently that should surely draw the ire of any free-speech, First Amendment defender.

First, United States Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) sent a letter (link below) yesterday to the Attorney General demanding that DOJ charge Washington Post journalist Robert Kagan with inciting an insurrection under the federal criminal code, 18 U.S.C. for a recent column in Post where Kagan laid out various premises upon which Trump and his supporters have promised to act in ways that Kagan believes amount to dictatorship, perhaps even unconstitutional dictatorship, and discusses possible ways in which these impulses can be resisted . . . none of which involves violence or insurrection, and none of which has actually happened or been organized. Vance goes on to claim that Kagan's wife, Victoria Nuland - who has been with the State Department and US diplomatic apparatus since 1993 except during the Trump administration and has served in such roles as US ambassador to NATO under George W. Bush and assistant Secretary for European Affairs under Obama - is compromised by her relationship with her journalist husband and her security clearance should be reviewed based on her alleged inability to judge the best interests of the United States.

You certainly agree that Vance's letter is wildly inappropriate and a patent demand for the Justice Department to violate the First Amendment?

Second, a week ago Donald Trump claimed that because MSNBC "uses free government airwaves", the government should "come down hard and make them pay" for what he calls illegal political activity - because the network is always criticizing him. Not only is this concerning from an academic standpoint about the nature of First Amendment protection for the press, it is also alarming that the presumptive nominee for the Republican nomination thinks that being broadcast over the air (which MSNBC is not, by the way) somehow comes along with content limitations beyond the First Amendment and that the government (i.e. the executive branch that Trump is trying to become the chief of) should punish a media outlet for its content.

We should note that Trump has a well-documented history of outright rejection of the First Amendment, primarily because he hates that people can say negative things about him and he would like to use both executive power and legal process to squelch such content . . . but for the pesky First Amendment. This is not the first time that he has called for punitive action against a media outlet or reporters, and he has complained at length about the legal standard in NYT v. Sullivan, which most consider to be a bedrock of First Amendment protection for the press in the United States.

Just want to make sure that a free-speech warrior such as yourself condemns these demands about what the government should do regarding these examples of content in the public discourse.

https://www.vance.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/120623_RobertKaganInsurrection.pdf

Truth Social

Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.

truthsocial.com

You are wasting your time.

 

[SystemShock]

Shouldn't this thread be merged with the misinformation police thread? OP's just making the same arguments on both, just with different tweets. (Or is it X's?)

 

[SaintForLife]

You are wasting your time.

You obviously have a reading comprehension problem. I already responded to his post.

 

[SaintForLife]

 

[bird]

Nah, Musk is just an infantile azzhat.

 

[SystemShock]

You obviously have a reading comprehension problem. I already responded to his post.

Yeah, you gave a cursory "oh, I agree", then you went right back to the wall of tweets, "Biden this, Biden that, laptop", and how the greatest threat to humankind is removing Q-Anon, rightwing, and foreign misinformation from Truth Social 2.0. But not a peep from you when laws are being passed by Republicans that do censor not just speech, but facts.

 

[MT15]

There isn’t any proof offered that Biden has directed any actions against Musk at all. It is all just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories again. Musk himself has been skirting the law and regulations for years, yet when he finally gets called on some of his crap, his fanboys yell that he’s the victim. Typical.

 

[superchuck500]

There isn’t any proof offered that Biden has directed any actions against Musk at all. It is all just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories again. Musk himself has been skirting the law and regulations for years, yet when he finally gets called on some of his crap, his fanboys yell that he’s the victim. Typical.

If the administration wants to rethink its funding of Starlink, I doubt it has anything to do with Twitter.

Elon Musk's refusal to provide Starlink support for Ukraine attack in Crimea raises questions for Pentagon

SpaceX founder Elon Musk's refusal to allow Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch a surprise attack on Russian forces in Crimea last September has raised questions for the Pentagon.

www.pbs.org

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

well, it's a good thing they revoked that grant. because if he took govt money, that would make him a govt funded media agency and would have had to brand himself such like he did to all the other media..

 

[MT15]

well, it's a good thing they revoked that grant. because if he took govt money, that would make him a govt funded media agency and would have had to brand himself such like he did to all the other media..

Oh, too late. Musk has been rolling in government money for years now. He’s totally compromised. lol.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

Oh, too late. Musk has been rolling in government money for years now. He’s totally compromised. lol.

yea, but "thats different"...lol

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

how long before Moosk reinstates Nick Fuentes?
Most Republicans don't want him involved with him, but very few of them will actually condemn him...

MSN

www.msn.com

 

[efil4]

If the administration wants to rethink its funding of Starlink, I doubt it has anything to do with Twitter.

Elon Musk's refusal to provide Starlink support for Ukraine attack in Crimea raises questions for Pentagon

SpaceX founder Elon Musk's refusal to allow Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch a surprise attack on Russian forces in Crimea last September has raised questions for the Pentagon.

www.pbs.org

And yet Elon (and Saacks) keep toting Kremlin line. ( In replies, Elon says " your assessment is correct imo" )

 

[UriUT]

If the administration wants to rethink its funding of Starlink, I doubt it has anything to do with Twitter.

Elon Musk's refusal to provide Starlink support for Ukraine attack in Crimea raises questions for Pentagon

SpaceX founder Elon Musk's refusal to allow Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch a surprise attack on Russian forces in Crimea last September has raised questions for the Pentagon.

www.pbs.org

Not to mentioned that he basically exhorted the US government and Ukraine with starlink. He charged way over nominal fees for the equipment and services, but then rejects how Ukraine chose to use it.

 

[bird]

And yet Elon (and Saacks) keep toting Kremlin line. ( In replies, Elon says " your assessment is correct imo" )

David Sacks, looks like another “tech-bro” man-child.

 

[SaintForLife]

If the administration wants to rethink its funding of Starlink, I doubt it has anything to do with Twitter.

Elon Musk's refusal to provide Starlink support for Ukraine attack in Crimea raises questions for Pentagon

SpaceX founder Elon Musk's refusal to allow Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch a surprise attack on Russian forces in Crimea last September has raised questions for the Pentagon.

www.pbs.org

Elon Musk on why the Starlink cells were never turned on for Ukraine in Crimea:
"Starlink cells were not turned on in Crimea because of US law that would prevent us from doing so. There was a Ukrainian attempted attack on a fleet in Sevastopol. I got an emergency call: 'Hey, we need to turn on the cells around Sevastopol'. I'm like 'Well that's currently a US sanctioned zone, we would need permission from the US government to do so. It would also mean we were directly complicit on the Russian fleet directly. There's no plausible deniability here.
I'm not the biggest fan of President Biden but if President Biden called and said 'As the president of the United States I'm asking you to turn the cells on' I would have done so. But we did not get any such call. We were only called by the Ukrainian government. The Ukrainian government is not my boss"

Moreover, our terms of service clearly prohibit Starlink for offensive military action, as we are a civilian system, so they were again asking for something that was expressly prohibited.

 

[superchuck500]

X offered Reporters Without Borders €25K in ad credits and they turned it down - citing X as a “haven for disinformation.”

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/14/1219274980/reporters-without-borders-says-x-twitter-does-not-support-it

 

[superchuck500]

Threads is the number 2 downloaded app this week and top 5 over the last month. X is 96th and Apple only publishes the top 100.

Whatever happens with X will happen - but I do think Elon misunderstood what Twitter was and what he could do with it from day 1. I commented, particularly on the SR thread about it, that Musk's comments and stated plans seemed to indicate to me that he didn't understand what Twitter really was for the vast majority of users, including how and why they used it. I think his understanding of Twitter was based on how it appeared to him as a user and what he heard about it from what we know now is a fairly small, viewpoint-specific community.

But a social media site like Twitter/X doesn't own anything that drives its success. The sole driver of its success is one metric: do people actually want to be there? If they don't, they won't and the site will enter a death spiral because user counts (daily active being the most prominent metric) drive everything about the business.

It isn't like companies that create products and hold patents - such that a turn in social sentiment about a company like Apple, for example, or even something like Chick-Fil-A will be existentially harmed by . . . people really like those products based on their quality or place in their segment as a matter of the product, distinct from sentiment about the company. But in social media, there are alternatives and as Meta has shown, creating a new one wasn't particularly challenging - no social media site can simply presume that it holds some kind of position that transcends user sentiment. User sentiment about the site is everything.

Musk has shown very little concern about user sentiment - or at least chose to align himself with the sentiment of one kind of user that isn't mainstream. Early on he began to dismantle the features of Twitter that formed the backbone of what appeared to me at least to make the site a mostly reliable, mostly enjoyable site (provided that the user spent some time curating their experience with the algorithm). And it only got worse, and worse . . . and these things happened before he doubled-down on his "this is free speech deal with it pussies!" approach.

But as more and more users looked for an alternative, an alternative became more likely - the spiral began in earnest. Advertisers and other large organizations may have decided to pull their activity from X based on certain specific issues (such as inflammatory content routinely posted by the site's owner) but they will stay away because there's no value there anymore. The user base is steadily eroding, making it less and less important for anyone to be there. Perhaps those who remain will be support their own X ecosystem, who knows. Or perhaps Elon's plan all along will have some value that I'm just not seeing.

Otherwise, it's remarkable how quickly everything changed - but at the same time, it isn't. It's the very nature of social media.