I guess if Musk does in fact end up owning Twitter he’s not gonna unban Trump now.
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Not following but would Elon want Twitter at 40 or 45? Would Twitter turn down 45?
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He operates in such bad faith twitter would be crazy to accept anything, chances are he’d just bail again.
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Maybe they do when it’s billionaire vs. billion dollar company? But yeah still doubtful
This is TERRIBLE journalism. Jesus fucking Christ how does this get printed in the WSJ!?
THIS IS IRRELEVANT!!!
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Musk being forced to buy twitter then running twitter into irrelevance a massive positive for society.
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Yeah I can’t think of a way this doesn’t go great for “us”.
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EM buys Twitter at 45B, puts in his stupid hate speech shit, celebs and non crazys either flee to Twitter2 and he loses everything or it becomes Parler2 and no one uses it and it goes to bankruptcy/irrelevance.
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EM forced to pay difference between 45B and actual market cap, doesn’t get shit for it.
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EM pays 1B+ to get out of it (worse case for us)
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EM goes crazy, flees USA (russia? lol), kicked off Tesla board, who knows, he’s gone.
Would be sick if he tried to flee to Mars and then just floated off into space
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I think that argument fails because there’s no reason to think Elon actually wants to run Twitter into the ground nor that he is likely to do so through incompetence
1.) Elon’s current antics are a ruse to get out of his commitment to overpay for the company. His feelings about Twitter itself haven’t likely changed since the agreement was initially signed. He loves using it! He will love the power it gives him over guys like Trump to own it!
2.) Despite being a blowhard narcissist Elon actually does a great job running his companies to success. Tesla is the more valuable than most of the rest of the auto industry combined. SpaceX is the dominant player in their industry.
3.) Many of Twitter’s users will probably cheer Elon’s takeover from the boring guys running it today
4.) Whatever negatives there are to the “community” from Elon running the company there are other negatives for the community if the deal fails to close. Is it in their community’s interest if he starts a competitor company with the benefit of all the data that was handed over? Is it in their community’s interest if the company gets a stream of shareholder lawsuits for failing to consummate this deal?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1546639772621365248?t=8vdpu6HyHvHC-J0bKoaw0w&s=19
Context is Starship test failure.
I think the biggest reason Musk wouldn’t destroy Twitter is that despite how rich he is - $30 billion or whatever amount he’s going to pay - is a big chunk of his free capital (unless he wants to start liquidating his TSLA shares, which doesn’t seem like the case). I doubt he wants to just blow that much money for nothing. It’s one thing to spend (or waste) that much to reshape Twitter - another to spend it and then decide to run Twitter into the ground.
He’s not going to intentionally run twitter into the ground.
But it’s likely the current board is doing something resembling a profit-maximizing risk-averse management strategy–like most mature companies. The only value Twitter has is that it is the preferred forum for ~everyone important in the public sphere, and it’s very important to them to maintain that status. It’s inherently a pretty boring role.
Musk’s whole point is to mash buttons making twitter a beacon of free speech or whatever, which is at odds twitter’s value proposition as a business. He’s overpaying for Twitter so that he can make it perform worse in the long run.
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Matt thinks he’s in trouble.
The fact that Musk has been acting in transparently bad faith all along — that he started this process by violating SEC disclosure rules, that he agreed to join Twitter’s board and then backed out of that agreement, that “bots” were the reason he wanted to buy Twitter before they became his excuse for getting out of the deal, that he has disparaged Twitter and its executives from the time he signed the deal, that he violated his nondisclosure obligations and then boasted about it on Twitter — these things are not all relevant as a legal matter (some of them are), but they are as an equitable matter. They make it clear that Musk does not care about contracts, that he ignores the law, that he will not live up to his word. The point is to make the judge angry at him, so that she will make him do what he promised to do.
This guy is one of the best computer vision engineers on the planet, this is a big loss for Tesla.
I have been a long time mega-skeptic of the idea that Tesla can crack actual full self driving with cameras alone. It can probably get you 95% of the way there but that last 5% is a bitch. This is fuel on the fire of my skepticism. This dude is hardly going to quit if he thinks FSD is on the verge of happening.
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Random guy on Reddit:
I think this is really bad news. As I understand from multiple sources, including some statements by Elon, Elon forced this vision only approach on the autopilot team not because the team complained about radar noise or was not making progress, but because of Elon had a core belief that all you need is vision. And as we see with the whole Twitter mess, Elon can make some impulsive decisions.
As you read various sources, this decision was fought by the autopilot team. In Elon’s interview (you can see it on YouTube) with the Silicon Valley Tesla Club, he, again, says as much.
I think the program is in trouble. I believe that the current hardware suite will not get Tesla to anything approaching level 4/5 and my in most instances struggle with level 3. Perhaps they can get to level three on divided highways, but that’s going to be the extent of it.
I had my new S in Florida and it did ok on most roads with the beta. I brought it to Manhattan for the summer and it’s a joke. It quite literally cannot perform basic maneuvers in one of the easiest places to drive. Traffic lights on every corner in a grid setup. The issue here is the sheer number of pedestrians make FSD so skittish as to be worthless.
That last paragraph is why Google’s FSD subsidiary Waymo have taken the approach they have, i.e. high-resolution LIDAR 3D maps of neighbourhoods. The problem of keeping track of what has been added to surroundings and how it is moving is a hell of a lot simpler if you already have an extremely good idea of what the surroundings are supposed to look like.
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Did he quit, or was he fired?
I can’t imagine they would fire him given how important he is to FSD and how important that is to the company (Elon is on record as saying that solving FSD is “the difference between Tesla being worth a lot of money and being worth basically zero.”). The only scenario where he might have been fired is if it got to the point where he refused to go along with Elon’s strategic direction on FSD, which amounts to the same thing as quitting, i.e. that he doesn’t think FSD is going to work.
After logging quite a few miles in Tesla’s autodrive and having a good idea of its limitations (obvs not paying for FSD), I tend to agree.
You need:
- High res LIDAR 3D maps of entire subject area
- Real-time evolving database of what NON-self-driving drivers are doing, and algorithms to constantly use their decisions as a baseline. There’s just way too much variation in roadways, pavements, and traffic patterns to simply “read” the surroundings and have AI do the rest. You need human brains to weigh in on why, for instance, people suddenly and unexpectedly are moving over half a lane in a construction area, or move over into the shoulder before a right turn lane begins in a particular busy intersection during rush hour.
- Really, really good on-vehicle sensors. Hard to say whether what they’ve got will cut it or not. But I have had the car lurch around with mediocre reaction times at not seeing the person two cars in front brake—enough that I only use autodrive in dense traffic when it’s <20mph. (It’s also useful for a long drive on an empty interstate.)
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Do Tesla’s cameras have some sort of high speed autoclean function or something? My backup camera stays usable for about 27 seconds when driving on slushy winter roads. I can drain the windshield washer fluid reservoir in less than a week sometimes.