- Elon Musk purchased shares of Twitter after unsuccessfully petitioning the CEO to remove a Twitter account tracking his private jet.
- Musk’s personal gripes played a key role in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
- Musk banned the account after promising not to, highlighting his prioritization of getting his way over free speech.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/ttBv9
Incidentally… https://mastodon.social/@elonjet is still going strong.
Does that also get posted to Threads or now Bluesky?
The profile is “elonjet . net” (without the space) on bluesky.
Since Threads is federated, it should be accessible from there.
Threads isn’t federated yet. It’ll be a while before fediverse accounts can be seen on threads
If Musk saw this carbon would literally be shooting out of his ears like an old bugs bunny cartoon
I don’t get this. What is the point? Why would anyone care where a billionaire is flying to and from? Just for kicks?
I think it’s mostly aboit the massive carbon footprint of a private jet and Elon has a rep for really short frequent flights.
Yeah, no. Musk bought Twitter because he HAD to. He very publicly made comments about buying Twitter at absolute meme-stock prices, but didn’t disclose that he already owned a LOT of Twitter stock. So, when his comments predictably increased the price of Twitter stock, he had two choices: Either it was just talk, and he was BLATANTLY guilty of stock manipulation and the Feds put a target on his back, or he acts like he totally meant it.
So he went with option two, acted like he was serious and wanted to buy twitter. Then he tried everything he could think of to kill the deal, accusing Twitter of all sorts of wrongdoing and lies, but Twitter was more careful than that. They got their shit right, and Musk couldn’t back out. So he bought Twitter, rather than go to prison.
The fact that he could also kill the tracking twitter account was completely incidental. Musk is an idiot, but even he isn’t that stupid. Musk initially offered $5,000 to the account holder to stop, and then balked at the return offer for $50,000. Now, I may not be a billionaire tech-bro, but I’m pretty sure that spending $50,000 to achieve a goal is preferable to spending $44,000,000,000. He’s dumb, but he’s not that dumb.
Ah so Musk was trying to increase his profits super publicly and super illegally.
I honestly don’t think he was TRYING to do anything but shitpost. It didn’t look like a well thought out plan, it looked like an idiot talking out of his ass and realizing that his memes were also crimes.
Elon is the kinda guy to put the meme before the horse
Or however that goes
I think you’re giving him too much credit. The announcement that he owned Twitter shares already hiked the price. If he wanted to
shortpump and dump he should’ve just kept his mouth shut, get on the board and then sell his stocks. The initial hike to his 9% ownership was on par with his buy offer hike. If his plan was to pump the company he could’ve done it without the legal trouble. Also the second price hike was after he had already made a public bid for the company and the company had accepted the offer. At that point he was locked in to buying the company. There was speculation if such a deal is allowed to go through, but the reality is that unless someone else steps in Musk had two options, he either buys the company or he gets taken to court and is forced to buy the company.He had to buy the company, but not because he was risking going to jail. He had to buy it because he screwed himself over by making the bid in the first place. I don’t get the need to make him seem like an intelligent man. He didn’t have any grand schemes or ulterior motives or someone else footing the bill. He simply made a horrible move, probably because he’s a huge manchild who didn’t like that the CEO of Twitter didn’t completely lick his boot.
He wasn’t trying to short Twitter. He was trying to pump and dump. Though the dumping probably would have been done more tactfully than the standard pump and dump. Musk getting publicity for holding the stock helps to keep the value up. Tesla’s been inflated forever, and he thought he could do the same with Twitter.
Yes, the primary reason he bought Twitter is that he screwed up during his pump and dump scheme. There are several reasons he was looking at Twitter in particular, including the jet tracking, how much he loves Twitter anyway, his hate for being told what he can and can not post, etc. I also suspect he’s lost most of the people who will tell him the truth and is now surrounded by right-wing grifters (for politics and aiming his money, they’re smart enough to not try to take the money directly). All these reasons were part of why the pump and dump was plausible as something else, and why it was Twitter that it happened to. Probably not even Musk knows how much of the intent to buy was legit (though not for 44b) and how much of it was the pump and dump.
He had a scheme; I don’t know that I’d call it grand.
He could had pulled out of the bid as well me thinks. Between presenting a bid and closing the deal there should be **due diligence **.
This is what I understand Mr Musk failed to do, after that it would have been nearly impt to cancel the deal.
I don’t remember the specifics but I think it was a sort of a “no questions asked” kind of bid, where he chose to not do the due diligence. He did try to play the “My estimation of Twitter was misled because I wasn’t disclosed to vital information” card and it got him nowhere.
Yep! He explicitly waived it. Corporate equivalent of waiving a home inspection
facepalm genial
50k is a rounding error for Musk, true. I suspect his ego/feelings stopped him from doing the smart thing and taking that kid up on the offer
Yes AND he’s desperate for approval from those he sees as peers. Twitter enabled things like the Arab spring and was a useful tool for protest organizing and shining a light on horrific things - it was a lot of bullshit too, but it was also that.
The Saudis and other authoritative, fascistic dickheads with billions all over the world benefit from a useless Twitter and the decreased threat that it can be a tool used to coordinate where the guillotines get set up. And long story short, we now have a useless joke of a Twitter.
It was win win for him and the people propping him up, either his delusions that he would be successful with Twitter came true (they didn’t) or his likely failure makes all those ghouls happy and he sees indirect benefit from unrelated investment/contracts and someone telling him, “you’re the coolest, bro” and him replying, “watch, hey look, are you looking? Look how fast I can run, are you looking? I’m probably the fastest dinner ever actually” [Proceeds to run slow, trip and fall on his face]
IIRC he was fighting “tooth & nail” to get out of the deal…until they made a request for some of his e-mails.
Suddenly he’s done fighting and carried through with the purchase.
(Sorry but I’m going into an appointment so no time to look up this new event…)
I thought it was more than emails, it was all communication around it?
Really wish he’d kept fighting do we’d see that.
If he had really cared about the jet tracking thing, he wouldn’t have burned $44b buying twitter to handle it. He just would have bribed / lobbied politicians to put a “public safety” exemption into effect for public data about flights. Make it so that private jets aren’t available in the public feeds / databases. Getting a law like that passed would have cost him tens of millions rather than tens of billions.
Likely story. Rich people don’t go to prison, you think I was born yesterday?
Yeah whatever the reason given as to why he bought it will never not be stupid or funny.
I don’t think he would have gone to jail, he’s too rich for that and that’s not how justice works apparently but I thought there was a heap of stuff that was going to come out in discovery during the trial that was so embarrassing and damning that he preferred to pay the money
Also the part where Twitter has invested in s tier lawyers and brought and iron clad contract that heavily favored them. Which being an entitled idiot he agreed to. So when he tried to back out he literally couldn’t afford the penalties because he didn’t have enough cash and getting it would loose him control of his companies.
Definitely not him being dumb and entitled. Surely it was a petty $50k grudge.
This
Ok. Musk offered the kid $5,000 to delete his account, the kid countered with $50,000. Musk refused so he spent $44 billion instead to get rid of the account.
That’s the definition of “fuck you” money.
Yeah $50k isn’t even that much to Musk, what an idiot.
He’s still worth $200B.
Spending $44B? $88B? $100B. Doesn’t matter. The dude never, ever has to think about money again. If he lives to 85 and doesn’t earn another cent between now and then, he can splash 6 billion dollars a year every year until he dies.
To give you some understanding of that kind of money, he could roughly buy two Lamborghini Diablos every single day for the rest of his life.
Mind you that’s mostly non-liquid accounting of his stock and assets. Not that he’ll have to worry about what he spends, but it’s not cash in the bank billions.
That’s the point.
He could burn 40 billion buying Twitter just to spite a kid over 50 grand because money is meaningless for Musk. He essentially has infinite wealth.
He could spend the 50 grand the kid asked for every minute for 7 and a half years and still have 3 billion dollars.
Elon Musk burning billions of dollars to not have his public information publicly posted is one of the biggest Ls he’s ever taken and that’s a long list to fight to the top of.
And totally on par for him.
I love that for him 🥰
And you know the worst part about it? Burning that amount of money makes basically zero difference in his life.
But you forget the best part. The tracker still exists and everyone still knows where his fucking jet is flying to because that shit is public information by air navigation regulation. There’s still bots that regularly posts the MuskJet location both in Twitter and Mastodon. So he spent all that money and still failed.
Just fucking stop.
Elon Musk was forced to buy Twitter after doing several incredibly stupid things publicly.
Quit assisting this fascist dumbass in his attempt at laundering his reputation.
I don’t see how claiming he bought Twitter to try and shut up a teenager does anyting to help his reputation.
I think he was trying to get out of Twitter and wanted to do a real life version of his Dogecoin pump and dumps. You know, talk a big game, hype up how the stock is gonna go to the moon after he brings his genius to bare on the company, then dump the stock and pull out of the deal. However, during the hype phase he managed to say some legally binding things and suddenly found himself forced to honor what he thought was going to be empty hype.
He did more than say legally binding things. He signed a contract. That had a clause in it to prevent him from backing out, because the management at Twitter fully expected him to try it. I think he had made several gestures at buying before to try and get some kind of influence over how it was being run, so they drew up the contract to make him put up or shut up.
Makes you wonder what the og twitters guys are doing now besides drinking mai tais on the beach
I’m also convinced the entire purchase was an accident but I think he was doing the usual far-right “try and shame people for standing up to nazis”.
Pretty sure that’s illegal
That’s his entire business model. Just look at starship, hyper loop, solar roofs and Tesla semi. Overblown Tesla stock bubble too. All complete vaporware, but he profits greatly from the hype alone. He belongs in prison as he is a classic conman.
As much as I personally dislike Musk, Starship does not belong on that list. It is the largest and most powerful space vehicle humanity has ever launched successfully and landed! It is re-usable and can potentially carry up to 100 people or 300,000 lbs of cargo.
Nothing like that has ever been done before, and the advancements in science that will follow humanities expansion into space cannot be overstated.
100 people are, like, 19,000 lbs. Why the weight difference between 100 people and just cargo? Because of life support systems?
1 ton per person for living quarters, supplies, etc. I’m not sure if life support is part of that, and also not sure how exactly they settled on 1 ton.
SpaceX has stated that Starship, in its “baseline reuseable design”, will have a payload capacity of 100–150 t (220,000–331,000 lb)
So is racking up debt in shell companies and claiming bankruptcy on them but it didn’t stop Trump either.
When has that stopped billionaire dummasses?
People who control the organs of communication usually end up writing the laws, even if it’s at arm’s length.
I honestly thought this was common knowledge.
It’s worse than that. The usual way of buying a company is a memorandum of understanding followed by due diligence, followed by signing a contract and then the actual completion. Elon went straight to signing the contract and then had big old shit fit when the Twitter board held him to the terms of the contract and the penalties for pulling out.
Stop talking about this guy.
Citizens say go
Muskrat bought it because he has poor impulse control. There’s no “grand design,” just a man child who desperately needs a mommy to protect him from himself.
Made a legally binding decision to massively overpay what the company was worth, or probably ever would be. Of course the current owners are going to take it
I think the deal was so good for Twitter that it may have been illegal for them not to sell to Musk because their job is to maximize profits or value for the shareholders or whatever. As a publicly traded company, not doing the deal would be choosing to not maximize profits.
Now in hindsight the idiot is killing current stock value, but that still has nothing to do with the shareholders who had stock when Twitter was sold. Those shareholders were thrilled to sell all their stock well above market price. Corporate ethics.
So is Taylor Swift going to buy it next?
Probably. She’ll change it to eX. Tweets will be called ditty and you’ll be required to sing them.
She would keep the pay to play mentality though, as that’s how she got her start after all
snap snap snap and dance fool
What a snowflake
A visionary snowflake.
How is he visionary, exactly?
I mean, I didn’t think it needed an /s because does anyone take the term “visionary” seriously anymore?
My bad
So the full story would be that Elon stayed up until 5:30 a.m playing Elden Ring in a Vancouver hotel - was very stressed, saw on Twitter that people knew he was raging in Vancouver based on the Jet Tracker - stressing him out even more -
Though “Fuck it, maybe I can’t beat Malenia, but at least I can beat this asshat on Twitter tracking me!”…If only FromSoftware had added some pay-to-win elements… Like “For A Small $1 billion Micro-Transaction you get the uber Malenia slayer sword!” -
We would be living in a totally different timelineEven when he wins he does it like such a loser. Fuck this guy.
Jesus Christ this is low point even for him.
LOL. There’s a silicon valley bigwig jet tracker that I see pop up on my Reddit account, and I’m not even that interested in it.
Called it! 100% called it!
Yep. I called that too. Talk about burning money…
Yes this makes far more sense then the brain dead “bought it to kill it” theory that’s just cope for phony stark
Here we are talking of very debatable definitions of “making sense” tbh
