Musk sells $3.95 billion in Tesla shares, paid eleven times more for Twitter What's the latest in the life of the world’s richest man? Elon Musk has offloaded almost $4 billion in Tesla stock after buying Twitter, the social media platform that is losing advertisers, money and maybe users. Musk cashed in 19.5 million shares in the electric carmaker between the 4 to 8 November, according to the latest …
The[re] is no way he's using any of that money for a new venture.
You certainly could be right. On the other hand, Starlink in particular has to be chewing through capital at flank speed. It's possible that it needs a modest loan to make it through until payday -- whenever that is.
On the other hand, Starlink in particular has to be chewing through capital at flank speed. It's possible that it needs a modest loan to make it through until payday
I get the feeling SpacX is probably going to be safe, given it's strategic value to the US. I also get the feeling it may end up under new ownership rather soon, if Musk's political usefulness has run it's course. Straight up nationalising is distinctly un-American (and less lucrative) than maybe setting the SEC and/or IRS on Musk, then forcing the sale of SpacX and Starlink to someone more agreeable. If done via Ch.11, would also allow a lot of the debt to be disappeared.
Yeah. It's all happening in the same time frame. It's probably correlated, but there are lots of reasons why he wants or needs to get some liquidity.
I'm curious if it's related to the implosion of FTX, along with it's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried's personal fortune imploding along with it. A while back there was the possibility that SBF was going to chip in $5bn. Or possibly $5bn's 'worth' of FTT, FTX's in-house crypto 'currency'. As the value of FTT seems to be rapidly approaching zero, maybe Musk had to find some real cash (yeh, fiat, but still..) to make up the difference.
I somehow get the feeling lawyers are going to get rather rich (in $, or some more tangible currency or currency equivalent) unravelling all of Musk's transactions, especially when they've involved funny money.
If your teak is that colo(u)r you have grounds to sue whoever refinished it for you ...
Trump isn't a politician. He's a bombastic bumbling boob who managed to get elected President after the third try, when he finally figured out which party's electorate (and potential electorate) was the easiest to fool. He had never held public office before, and it showed. I'm shocked that the Republicans still bow and scrape in the useless idiot's presence.
He wasn't much of a real estate developer, either. How many times has he declared bankruptcy?
This post has been deleted by its author
Tesla shareholders must be getting nervous, if he's the reason for their investments in the company. Selling almost 20 million shares three months after you claimed you wouldn't sell any more is not a good look for a supposed genius inventor/ businessman.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/musk-sells-another-batch-tesla-133550551.html
Musk tweets have not matched reality before and Tesla investors did not care. My guess is he is paying off debt secured by Tesla shares. If Tesla stocks fall below a certain value the banks will sell them for him and crash the price further. By selling now before the price bottoms out he can cut his debt, cut interest payments, delay the banks from foreclosing and can use the excuse "need the money for Twitter" instead of "getting out of Tesla before the fans work out how much trouble Tesla is really in".
Obviously SOME Tesla shareholders care because the stock has fallen by more than half since the beginning of the year, with most of the drop since his "I'm gonna buy Twitter" tweet.
They are selling because they think he's too distracted, or by so openly courting one side of the political spectrum he will reduce sales of Teslas to the other side and hurt its long term prospects. I'm not in the market for an electric car but if I was I would be scratching Tesla off the list for that alone, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a pillow from that crazy Trump pillow guy.
I bought a used one a month ago and it’s freaking awesome. In my 90% blue city I see more and more of them every week.
Musk is garbage, but the cars are nice and you can actually get one, unlike a lot of the EVs advertised on TV.
I suspect his Loony Toons act is a feint. Liberals were always going to go all-in on EVs. To really take over the auto business he needs to also sell to the rednecks, and he’s a lot more likely to do that today than two years ago.
Well I can believe an upsurge in activity last week. Bad news is always good news for social media and Elon is delivering in turds.
I and, I suspect, many others will have re-visited after a long absence to request an archive and add our Mastodon handles. An opportunity to taste how corrupted our timelines have become squeezed, as they are, between ads.
Indeed driving ads away might be Elon's real achievement in improving the UX. Let's hope he doesn't utterly destroy Twitter too quickly. A couple of hundred thousand refugees overwhelmed some of the major Mastodon servers - now slowly recovering. The sudden influx of a couple of million refugees would destroy them. Fast scaling is a real issue. Gradual attrition over time may be the best outcome for all but one.
After Musk railed about how those numbers were inflated, he's probably going to wait for his antics to drive millions of people from Twitter. Then when he makes much lower numbers public he will claim he was right all along and the reason the numbers are low is because he eliminated all the bots, and hide the fact that so many real users have fled.
The best thing though was when he suggested Twitter might move behind a paywall. That would be awesome, hardly anyone would link to Twitter anymore since few would be willing to pay for an account just to read tweets. It would die on the vine and his $44 billion would go up in smoke. The only bad thing is that SOMETHING would replace Twitter, and that something would probably be TikTok which could easily adopt short form messages in addition to the videos.
I'm still not sure why anyone would have wanted to buy Twitter right now?
Of course, I have such an aversion to all the generic social media services.. think it may be due to my advanced age.
On the other hand, when I imagine I were still in my teens/twenties... pretty sure I'd be logging on all the time.
( and using smartphone A LOT more... the current me is not a big fan of those either ).
I imagine [if] I were still in my teens/twenties... pretty sure I'd be logging on all the time
I'm not sure. Granddaughter Major is not quite to the teens yet, but has a phone and tablet and occasional use of the desktop machine. She does spend some time on FB Messenger Kids exchanging messages with friends, but probably most of her social device use is chatting while playing Minecraft. Her peers, from what I've seen, don't spend a ton of time on social media either. For them, reading and posting on soc-med forums is regarded as more of an adult activity. They'd rather be co-op gaming or similar, if they're online.
Well... as long as he's distracted by Twitter, Musk has no time to destroy Tesla with his bipolar ways. This must be it, 18D chess!
Musk seems bent on proving that the Peter Principle does not apply to high tech moguls - with tens of billions to waste they can rise *several* levels above their respective incompetence
Tesla has been "dead man walking" for a long time now, it's just having some intermediate succes before it drives off a cliff. It's just a wait until they get a class action suit over selling "FSD" packages when they knew (or should have known) that they would never be able to deliver that for those cars, nor within the lifetime of the vehicle. It's very obvious now first and second gen Teslas will never get FSD, even IF it ever becomes available. They simply don't have the hardware. So people who paid for Autopilot/FSD just donated (tens of) thousands of dollars for a fart in the wind that Tesla knew or could have known it would never deliver. No manner of contract lawyerese is going to fix that if it becomes a pattern.
This, however, might be:
https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1589413653190938624
Or at least, it would explain why the press are decidedly Not Happy.
For the record: I wouldn't be happy either with one company gobbling up all the advertising money that publishers are fighting for at the moment (which is in turn the spoils left over by Google & Farcebook), but if that's your problem, say so.
Publishing a one-sided narrative doesn't do anyone any favours.
Ah, but here's a fun gotcha that may bite Musk in the balls quite soon:
As a user, Musk could say what he wanted because he was just someone using a public forum. As an owner, what he says becomes the opinion of the company, and THAT can have consequences as a perception of bias may put the company outside the reach of laws that protect content processors for the content their users produce. Musk is no longer as free to waffle in Twitter then he was as a mere user.
I'm just hoping for that reality to eventually hit. No doubt the SEC is already watching.
For several years we've heard about the problems that arise from social media companies being funded by advertising; namely, advertisers want to see evidence of 'engagement' and the easiest way of getting users to engage is to have them outrage each other. It is hard to imagine any advertising business model that doesn't result in this negative behaviour.
Twitter was already a negative force for people's health and happiness. I want to read other peoples opinions (what I really want is to read people's *ideas*, but hey), but I'm frustrated that so much of the current commentary is written as if Twitter and its algorithms have been nothing but good for people.
One thing I have not seen mentioned much in all the chaos is the way Musk seems to have been completely out-negotiated by his counterparts at Twatter.
They locked ELON in at a historically high share price and somehow he was pursuaded to proceed without the recommended due diligence, which would have at least bought him some time. After signing, he seems to have had caught a quick case of "buyer's remorse" based on information that would have come out in such due dilligence (fake users, bots, etc) - but in the end decided to go through with the sale; which surprised me.
i was expecting him to tie things up in the courts in a war of attrition to try and claw some of his money back in a settlement.
It feels to me in retrospect that he paid far too much for twatter (which was not making money) - since then he has not done much to instill confidence that he knows what he is doing so I expect that with time, he will get cash flow problems due to the debt and difficulty of monetising users, not to mention the loss of advertising revenue, which will be much greater than any savings from cutting the work force, with the associated risk for operations and compliance with the remaining resources.
All in all, while the previous management is out of a job, they are certainly enjoying a windfall from the proceeds of the sale. Not to mention missing out on all the "fun"/stress/80 hour weeks, etc. In retrospect, seems not too bad of a landing for them....
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
