Imagine spending 44 billion dollars to buy an unprofitable service and then announcing a year later that you are rebranding and ditching the IP you paid 44 billion dollars for. Madman genius or dude with toilet water in his cranium?
Him spending $44B on Twitter is similar to someone worth $100k spending $18k on a car or a house remodel or something. Its proportionally a decent amount of money, but it’s not gonna break him if he totally loses it all.
Oh no, they might dip severely and he’ll only have $60B or as a little as $10 billion!
His problem seems to be more cash flow. As a prominent shareholder and executive, he can’t sell large amounts of his stocks without PR and legal risk. He could do what people like Bill Gates do and sell them slowly on a set schedule, though.
he has that much in stock, he doesn’t have that much cash. he also has to make huge payments on what he borrowed to buy twitter so that may affect cashflow and then value of his other companies…
Not having that much in cash is a good way to not pay more taxes. If any of his stock is valued 1 cent less than what it’s supposed to be worth in the stock market i’m down to buy all of them.
Hold on…. You’re saying I can take out a loan for $x amount of dollars against a company I don’t own yet and buy it with that money?
Yes
I take out a mortgage for a property before I buy it and I destroy the house; the bank still comes after me for the value.
Not the same, a house can’t be a legal person, the owner is the legal person of the house. The money Musk borrowed in twitter is owed by twitter, not by Musk. To do the same with a house, you need to do it through a company.
That is possible because companies can have limited financial responsibility, meaning the money they owe are not owed by their owners.
It’s a pretty nifty arrangement, to help the rich stay rich no matter what happens.
Am I being stupid or is the game more rigged than I thought?
We are stupid for not being rich enough, and still allowing the rich unfair advantages.
Not quite. The the $33 Billion of equity Elon Musk put up junior to the $13 Billion loan.
That means that if the company starts at $44 Billion then falls to $15 Billion, then Twitter still owes $13 Billion, but Elon Musk only has $2 Billion now.
Leveraged buyouts are… well… levered. It grossly increases the risk of losing everything.
Freedom of information should be a human right, it allows to build consensus crucial for social cohesion. A bit like open access in academia, which is getting more traction recently. But unless this right is guaranteed stealing from authors destroys knowledge industry as such. Except that maybe it helps to transform predatory business models.
While this is great for the one-off article in publications you rarely read, also keep in mind that journalism is expensive and the reason a lot of it is getting so bad these days is that nobody pays for it. So if you have money to spare, please consider having at least one proper subscription in a quality newspaper somewhere to support the integrity of journalism. :)
The Guardian is a good publication to consider as they don't have a paywall to begin with. That's a bold choice, and one I believe they should be rewarded for.
I was donating to the Guardian for a few years until my financial situation changed, is it much the same nowadays? It’s been a while, and in today’s world I feel like it’s much too easy to accidentally support bad actors (like if one joined or stayed in Twitter or Reddit today) just by lacking context.
I don’t read all that much international/English news, but when I do, it seems by habit I tend to just go to the guardian. But really wouldn’t want to support questionable ethics or stances.
Beyond just generally enjoying their journalism, one of the journalists covering Ukraine for the Guardian is the husband of a friend of mine. So I get to see his dedication to his work from relatively close up, and makes it at least very clear to me that they're on a journalistic mission worth supporting.
I think any media outlet of that size (or any size, probably) can be criticized, and some of it will be valid. But that's just in the nature of the craft - it's a challenging field, and it's impossible not to make some mistakes. In my experience the Guardian remains committed to quality journalism, and they have some of the best people out there working for them.
Also keep in mind that paying for news often leaves the poorer community without information. While yes, i agree that journalists should be compensated, news organisations have become profit seeking businesses since the 70s, and not, as they should be, places of information gathering for everyone.
A paywall prices poor people out of information. And things like this still help them.
The guardian should be lauded for their model yes, but that is one company. They can’t write about everything.
archive.is has been down for more than a week now. archive.org doesn’t seem to work as well (at least according to my experience). 12ft wall just gets paid by some news sites to get their site excluded. Is there anything that’s still usable?
(Edit: Turns out 1.1.1.1 has been censoring my internet. I’ll never trust them again.)
Btw, y’all still using this community? The “official” one that migrated from reddit is at !piracy and our community is bigger.
Yo wtf 1.1.1.1 has been censoring my internet all this time? Jeez, I’m never using that ever again. Now I’m having trust issues with internet organizations.
I just did a quick search on DNS that are uncensored and found this: blog.uncensoreddns.org and put that in as my private dns and it worked. I still need to do more research on them before I can fully trust this DNS.
Btw what ISP do you use? I use Comcast/Xfinity and the reason why I switched to 1.1.1.1 was because of perceived censorship issues with ISPs, but didn’t expect 1.1.1.1 to be the ones doing the censorship. My default Comcast DNS server didn’t even block archive.is / archive.ph
(Yes I know there’s Proton VPN with a free tier, but that’s kinda slow.
Edit: Also, I don’t want to be hogging free bandwidth when there are people that need the VPN more than I do, such as people in authoritarian regimes.)
According to cloudflare adminsIt’s a bit more complicated than 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare DNS) censoring your internet, read here news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
edit: So it’s actually the other way around, it’s the archive.is admin who’s blocking people who use Cloudflare DNS, read also their tweet here twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
Old mate can't stop copping Ls, first being forced to buy Twitter and then trying to force Twitters old legal council to pay back the money they were paid. These weird tweets are just the next step in his sad saga
Under screenshots of his tweets it must put also one the source. With him and trump i could never understand if it was a fake edited tweet or a real deranged tweet
(If you start a site like this, you surely can count on that somebody will be after you. Host it in different country, pay with Bitcoin, hide your registrar data etc so they cannot sue you. If you cannot guarantee it, why start it?)
I think you misunderstand what 12ft.io’s business model is – they didn’t bend over for the NYT, the NYT bent over for 12ft.io by paying them to exclude them from the service. Literally the whole point is to extort money from publications to get on the whitelist.
Well, if we look at his successes I don’t think it’s far fetched to say that he is exceptionally good at being a fat wallet. Because his contribution has mostly been throwing money at the thing.
To be fair, a majority of these were OTA fixes and often related to abstruse automotive regulations–e.g., there was a “recall” because you could remotely vent the windows on the car. The recall involved Tesla updating the app so that option was no longer available. The reasoning is a byzantine regulation governing powered windows that was made before remote operation of any vehicle functionality existed. Other recalls? The cars were too quiet (now they have the EV “whine”), several for FSD and FSD-related technology, etc. I.e., it’s a new car with new technology, and most of these recalls were solved by OTA updates. I consider that normal given how new modern EV vehicles are and how feature heavy most Tesla vehicles are-- as silly examples, they can fart and dance to music.
There are also reasonable recalls: seat belt issues, brake caliper issues, but those are diminishingly small. Note that Tesla regularly receives five-star-safety ratings from the NHTSA, and are considered some of the safest cars on the road in crash tests. Elon is a tool, but the engineers that work for Tesla made a very solid electric drivetrain and very safe body. Fit and finish leaves a lot to be desired, I’m told, but that’s what is gonna happen when you prioritize the engineering over the comfort.
Note there are also instructions to make this (partially) work in browsers that are not supported by this extension: gitlab.com/…/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters. I’m using it in Safari on iOS with Userscripts and AdGuard, which works pretty well.
This hurts. I still remember when I rendered our first family PC unbootable. It was a Pentium II 266 with a tiny 3GB HDD running Windows 98, and apparently some sub folder of system32 seemed a good place to start doing some clean up to win back some extra space.
Turns out, it wasn’t.
Now turns have tabled and I’m the stereotypical IT professional who helps out fixing PCs/smartphones
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