The Twitter-Elon Musk deal has taken another turn as the social media platform is now suing him to force completion of the $44 billion acquisition. This latest action follows months of drama between Twitter and Mr. Musk that began shortly after he purchased a 9.2% stake in the company and then announced he would buy it entirely. At one point three senior Twitter employees left over concerns with the deal, two of which were Vice presidents. Most recently Mr. Musk changed his mind claiming that Twitter had not provided enough data on bot and scam accounts forcing him to announce he would be pulling out of the deal.
In the complaint filed Tuesday, Twitter’s lawyers say they are seeking to prevent Musk from further breaches of the agreement, and to “compel consummation of the merger upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions.”
“In April 2022, Elon Musk entered into a binding merger agreement with Twitter, promising to use his best efforts to get the deal done,” the complaint states. “Now, less than three months later, Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”
A lengthy, and potentially costly, forthcoming court battle is now expected following the filing of the claim in the Delaware Court of Chancery. After weeks of unusual silence on the matter Mr. Musk replied yesterday by posting on his twitter page.
Oh the irony lol
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2022
Source: CNN
Discussion (16 replies)
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From most Delaware cases of this nature - the sale ends up proceeding but at some renegotiated lower price.
I'm convinced Musk had no intention of buying twitter. It was just a convenient way of dumping billions worth of TSLA stock, without getting scrutinized for it too closely.
This was a very convincing ruse on his part even I believed it for a moment after he actually signed the deal. And I hope this finally bites him in the arse.
It's funny how quickly they went from "heck no, stop him from taking over the company" to "lets sue him to force him to take over the company".
I'll enjoy watching Musk squirm a little though.
Well, it was the users that were against it from the beginning. Staff were concerned. Management and shareholders were the only ones celebrating it.
Management are obliged to look out for the shareholders best interests.
Actually many of the users were for it, who are tired of the one sided moderation and censorship.
I just heard a good thought about what's the real problem with these monolithic social media platforms, that includes twitter, youtube, etc. That their database is not searchable, the users get served something by their algorithms, and the algorithm is not fair, or open. What, you say youtube has a search function? No, that is not a search function, that is a highly censored and curated list you get served disguised as search results.
Youtube search has been useless for years in my experience, it tries to serve me irrelevant stuff or worse the exact opposite of what I searched for. Because it is weighted to favor videos generating more ad revenue. So you don't get results from low view but potentially relevant videos, you get served spam and fake content by it that has terrible user approval rating.
It is actually so bad now, that there are fake channels uploading bot generated content and it gets traction by youtube.
If youtube was to serve users it would not have hidden the approval rating of videos, and it would not put restrictions on search results. And it would promote all content equally and fairly.
And this last bit was the hope of most users for Elon buying twitter. To get a fair and unbiased playing field out of it. Now I imagine twitter staff is doing the exact opposite of that frantically to engrain the censorship and bias even deeper, so even in case of a hostile takeover they couldn't get rid of it that easily.
Users were REEEE'ing, staff was in mental breakdown mode, management was curled up in a corner crying, board was in panic mode and shareholders were like "YES $$$$$$$$"
Exact experience for me. The algorithm doesn't work the same for every topic. If you stumble upon say a workers right video, and you subscribe and like, you would expect to get something similar recommended, but that odds are will not be the case... You might get some cnn garbage, or some comedy from john oliver or whatever. What I do now is look from within the content i like for people to recommend ( sometimes in the comments, sometimes in the video itself), or even host similar people producing similar content. Takes longer than it would with the algorithm, but it works... Word of mouth, of the digital age. To search youtube you need near perfect wording to get what you saw/heard when it comes to obviously unfavored contents.
While the uisers were Reeeeing, the staff was breaking down, and the managemnet was curled into a ball the shareholders were in the corner and Musk looked at them and smiled... then the band started playing... IT WAS A BAORDROOM BLITZ!!!!! YA YA YA YA!!!
IMO, the real problem with those sites is that they exist and they make standard people feel like what they have to say should be important with no reason for being so other than they exist as well.
Although, I guess the same analysis could apply to myself and this site…
Reminds me of the “give a thousand monkeys a typewriter” experiment. Sure, you eventually get Shakespeare out of one of them, but the vast, wide majority of it is gibberish. But everyone seems to think their gibberish should matter.
Not even that works sometimes as certain videos / channels get shadowbanned. Even if you search the exact video title it won't come up.
No, it should be entirely up to the audience to decide whose content is interesting, and not youtube suppressing one person while promoting others unfairly.
The exact problem is that often gibberish gets promoted while interesting and insightful content gets pushed down or outright banned by the bots/algorithm. Crap would be organically weeded out by the community if youtube let the users choose, but they don't trust the users, they treat them like children and want to control exactly what you get to watch.
Perhaps. I think I just don't give two $$its about social media in general, as I have the opinion most people are dumb, and whatever content they are creating and sharing and promoting is of equal value -- but I think that really only applies to "mass market" social media. Small niche sites have their audience and place, such as this one, and I encourage that, but once they become "big buisness" the business model changes and it just becomes about getting more content creators/content consumers and the push to monetize those streams... and then it ceases becoming a social function and is a predatory business instead. Except the people using it haven't realized they are both the product and the consumer, and pay for it both ways with various methods.
But you have a point about content moderation (I won't call it censorship, I reserve that term for when the body moderating has some sort of actual meaningful authority over the users)
Moderation is removing content that clearly and objectively violates some terms of service. But on youtube videos get deleted left right and center without even telling the uploader the reason. I think that fulfills the criteria of censorship.
The responses to my post are a perfect example of the selective nature of human beings. My observation was based on the people I interact with and the sources that I saw, others have/had a different experience. I doubt seriously social media is as one-sided as either side contends.
As for search algos, they suck.
You honestly think that the moderation on the big social media platforms isn't one sided? Yes both sides complain, because one side wants even more censoring and silencing of voices that do not agree with them, while the other side wants more free discourse. I'd hate to be on the side that wants to censor more.
That's entirely missing the point. Search algorithms were getting great by the mid 2000s. Now they are useless, because they are deliberately made useless to control what you can and cannot effectively find. As I've said they are not really search algorithms anymore they are mass manipulation algorithms.
This my experience exactly with search.