> You also don’t do that for a company you don’t truly intend to purchase
You can defend Musk all you want, but you simply cannot make the argument that he is a traditional, by-the-books, conservative business man. He's an impulsive, irrational, self-obsessed, risk-taking billionaire who flouts convention, tradition and consensus. His reckless instincts and his willingness to bend or break 'the rules' have worked incredibly well for him in the past. This time he fucked up big-time.
> ...especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
You think Musk is the kind of person who lets lawyers lead him around by the nose, that he is someone with a well-known and well-established reverence for the legal profession and the rule of law? This is absolutely not the case.
> Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
This is hilarious because the first part of your comment is literally you presenting sharing your view Musk's motivation (eg. "He has every intention of buying Twitter because he signed a purchase agreement! People who sign purchase agreements don't not buy the companies they committed to purchasing!").
Anyway, it's definitely not too early to make an informed judgement about the Twitter conflagration. Musk did everything he could to drag this debacle into the spotlight rather than handling it more discretely. He tried to weaponize public opinion for his own aims, and he also (very publicly) made a series of misleading or patently false allegations about Twitter in order to get his way. It's too late to argue that we should approach this with a neutral perspective.
Nah, I am not defending Musk. Frankly I don’t care if he buys Twitter and burns it to the ground, loses all his cash, becomes a pauper; or spins it into something bigger and sells it for $1T; or doesn’t buy it at all and is penalized and socially destroyed on the world’s stage.
I’m literally indifferent to to the man and his musings and I think that gives me a bit of a different perspective then the binary Musk opinions here on HN. However, my opinions are as uninformed to Musk’s internal intentions as all of the armchair lawyering and MBA’ing that is going on here…I guess I am just willing to admit it.
What is a fact is at the end of the day he is buying a company that he wanted, at a price he was willing to pay, and will do with it what he wants, despite Twitter’s attempts initially to keep him from buying it and apparently half the worlds horror that he is actually going to get it.
> What is a fact is at the end of the day he is buying a company that he wanted...
I appreciate the perspective you take, I think it's refreshing.
I think a lot of this debate centers around exactly this premise - we don't know that. We don't know he wanted it, and we don't know it's a price he was willing to pay. He said that but his actions don't really align with his words.
He has a history of playing fast-and-loose with the truth, either sharing optimistic or totally unrealistic deadlines that had not a chance of being met. Crazy technical solutions like the hyperloop that had to be walked back almost completely for being nutty. And a history of publicly attacking people who cross him ("pedo guy"). While he's got a lot of achievements too, his communication style leads (speaking for myself at least) people not to put quite so much faith into what he says, - and to pay a lot more attention to what he does.
You can defend Musk all you want, but you simply cannot make the argument that he is a traditional, by-the-books, conservative business man. He's an impulsive, irrational, self-obsessed, risk-taking billionaire who flouts convention, tradition and consensus. His reckless instincts and his willingness to bend or break 'the rules' have worked incredibly well for him in the past. This time he fucked up big-time.
> ...especially when being guided by lawyers that only you and perhaps a dozen other people in the world can afford to engage for representation.
You think Musk is the kind of person who lets lawyers lead him around by the nose, that he is someone with a well-known and well-established reverence for the legal profession and the rule of law? This is absolutely not the case.
> Whatever all this drama was…it’s way too early to make any informed judgement about motivations of the parties involved.
This is hilarious because the first part of your comment is literally you presenting sharing your view Musk's motivation (eg. "He has every intention of buying Twitter because he signed a purchase agreement! People who sign purchase agreements don't not buy the companies they committed to purchasing!").
Anyway, it's definitely not too early to make an informed judgement about the Twitter conflagration. Musk did everything he could to drag this debacle into the spotlight rather than handling it more discretely. He tried to weaponize public opinion for his own aims, and he also (very publicly) made a series of misleading or patently false allegations about Twitter in order to get his way. It's too late to argue that we should approach this with a neutral perspective.