Elon Musk Versus Donald Trump: An Epic Battle Of The Sh*t Posters

Plus there's that whole unpleasantness with Twitter.

Looking for further proof that we're living in the End Times? Well, Donald Trump just inserted himself into the Elon Musk-Twitter fiasco. Wheeee!

Okay, let's talk about this ridiculous shitpile, shall we? But first, raise your hand if you want Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

Oh, nobody? Right .

Because if you're not a Twitter shareholder looking for a big payday, then there's absolutely no reason to want to put the world's richest man in charge of the social media site where journalists yell at each other all day to hash out what's important. Particularly when that man is an ungoverned id, susceptible to the most insane conspiracy theories about censorship of conservatives, and plays footsie all day with guys like Mike Cernovich. (Yes, we realize that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post . It's sub-ideal, but he at least appears to keep the editorial interference at a bare minimum.)

And yet, Twitter sued Musk yesterday in the Delaware Court of Chancery to force him to do just that. WTF?

 Long story short:  Musk started secretly buying up shares of Twitter in January without making the mandatory SEC disclosures. After some unpleasant back-and-forthing, where Musk made unsubtle threats and Twitter tried to fend him off in various ways, the Tesla CEO made Twitter an offer it couldn't refuse: $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, a substantial premium over the $45.08 it was trading at on April 14, the day Musk announced his intent to buy the company and take it private. Because Twitter's board has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for its shareholders, it had little choice but to accept. Also, 420,get it get it get it ?

Since then, there's been a massive downturn in tech stocks, and Twitter is hovering somewhere in the $37-range. At the same time, Tesla, which was trading at upwards of $1,100 when Musk started this shit, is currently at $722. And you don't need to be a math major to see that this deal is starting to look pretty bad for Musk.

But Musk seems to have done a pretty bad job negotiating said deal, in which he waived both due diligence and a financing contingency. The only way he can get out is if Twitter is in breach of the contract, so he lobbed a giant pallet of cash at a team of fancy lawyers and told them tomanufacturefind one. Which is how we wound up with Elon Musk, who three months ago charged into this idiocy promising to clean up Twitter's bot problem, arguing today that he doesn't have to buy Twitter because it's rife with bots . Honestly, it's just too stupid — read the filing if you want to really plumb the depths!

All the while, Musk has been shitposting about Twitter on Twitter , which certainly isn't helping the share price, even going so far as to tweet a poop emoji at Twitter's CEO Parag Agrawal in response to a long thread explaining the site's bot calculation methods.

“@paraga 💩”

— Parag Agrawal (@Parag Agrawal) 1652718370 

In a rational world, Twitter's board would say, "Oh, thank God that we don't have to put our baby in the hands of this lunatic manchild! Dodged a bullet there." But we don't live in a rational world. We live in a world where Twitter's shareholders have every incentive to sue the board for walking away from a deal to buy the company for $54.20 a share, a very significant premium over its current trading price. And so the board more or less has to sue Musk to get specific performance, i.e. to force him to buy the company on the agreed upon terms, if only to avoid being sued themselves for failing to try.

Yeah, it's really, really dumb. But wait, because if there's one thing that Donald Trump is good at, it's make things even dumber.

If we might paraphrase Daily Beast's rundown ...

Donny called Elon a "bullshit artist" during a pep rally in Alaska on Saturday. Then Elon was like "it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset" and said Trump was "too old to be chief executive of anything, let alone the United States of America." Then Donny started talking shit about Elon's "electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere" and said he's, like, so desperate for government subsidies that he'd have totally done it if Trump said "drop to your knees and beg" in the Oval Office. Plus he dissed Elon for being such a loser that he's going to wind up paying "44 billion for something that’s perhaps worthless." Which is, like, a weird thing to say when you own a social media site that competes with Twitter and would probably benefit if the Musk fanboys decided to decamp for greener, less "censored" pastures. But, anyway, Elon was all "Lmaooo" and Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds. So maybe after fifth period they'll meet behind the gym and give each other wedgies or something, if humanity survives that long.

In summary and in conclusion, the richest, most powerful people on earth are a bunch of feckless toddlers, God only knows what's going to happen to Twitter, and everything is mind-numbingly stupid all the time.

OPEN THREAD.

[ Bloomberg / Daily Beast ]

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