Elon Musk buys a big chunk of Twitter

Horace

Has their user base really taken that much of a hit? Or maybe Fidelity is taking advantage of the illiquid private equity markets, which have recently tanked as per a story linked to here yesterday, for an advantageous tax write off.

jon-nyc

They’d need a valuation model that would survive an audit. I doubt they’re fucking with it. Doesn’t mean their model is perfect. Hard to imagine how to value it, it has meme stock potential and you can’t very well model that.

taiwan_girl

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/01/nx-s1-5283271/elon-musk-lawsuit-advertisers-boycott-new

Elon Musk's X broadened an existing lawsuit on Saturday to include several major brands — accusing more companies of illegally boycotting the social media platform in 2022 following Musk's acquisition.

The suit, which was filed last year in a federal court in Texas, initially targeted the boycott organizer, the World Federation of Advertisers, along with companies including CVS and video-streaming platform Twitch.

But early on Saturday, Musk's lawyers filed an amended complaint, adding several new defendants, including Lego, Nestlé, Tyson Foods, Abbott Laboratories, Colgate-Palmolive, Pinterest and Shell International.

taiwan_girl

A group of investors led by Elon Musk is offering about $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit behind OpenAI, escalating a dispute with the artificial intelligence company that Musk helped found a decade ago.

and

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly rejected the unsolicited bid on Musk’s social platform X, saying, “no thank you but we will buy Twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-openai-bid-chatgpt-sam-altman-b1ad37fe4fe70e3b5d283940bd3b8215

taiwan_girl

Morgan Stanley and other lenders to Elon Musk's Twitter takeover yesterday reportedly sold around $4.7 billion of X debt at face value.

This blows away expectations for the deal, in terms of both volume and pricing, and leaves creditors with only around $1.3 billion of their $12.5 billion outlay.

Original plans were to sell $3 billion of debt at a 10%-20% discount.

One explanation is that X has improved its finances, although that's still fuzzy. For example, WSJ recently reported that X's 2024 revenue includes "hundreds of millions of dollars" transferred from xAI, leaving unclear if there's been any organic top-line growth.

Better rationales are Musk's newfound proximity to power and the social media company's equity stake in xAI.

https://www.axios.com/2025/02/14/lenders-elon-musk-twitter-x-takeover

taiwan_girl

Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.

and

Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy's approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump's claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump's viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation.

"It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!" Musk wrote on X.

Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/elon-musk-to-fix-community-notes-after-they-contradict-trump/