Despite previously declaring loyalty to his knockoff Twitter platform, former President Trump appears to now have an interest in only partially restricting his Twitter usage in the near future.
“In addition, he may make a post from a personal account related to political messaging, political fundraising or get-out-the-vote efforts on any social media site at any time,”
That covers, uh, everything?
2 nanoseconds after he’s allowed back on Twitter, despite saying he’s not interested in it, TFG will say “my people want me back there.”
Face-saving? I think we know Trump doesn’t abide by rules.
Here’s a fun tidbit: There’s a filing with an agreement that nothing he does, “even if such conduct could reflect negatively on TMTG’s reputation or brand or be considered offensive, dishonest, illegal, immoral, or unethical … shall be considered a breach of the license agreement.” They seem to understand what they’re dealing with.
“Negotiating” the terms of engagement keeps up the illusion of progress towards TMTG being a real thing that will someday have value. The DWAC acquisition of TMTG has yet to go through, though they’ve given themselves until Sept 22nd (this year).
Poor Devin Nunes is about to find out what it feels like to be just another one of Trump’s ex-wives.
OK, I might be reading this wrong, but Musk doesn’t have twitter yet, and his position is not great. He doesn’t have the money to pay what he offered, and as it is a hostile takeover nobody really has an interest in helping him out. He is attempting a Trumpian song and dance (and endangering the value of tesla at the same time).
Trump this morning suggested that he should get paid for his pieces on TRUTH, and is implying he will also not be exclusive, as he’s open to going back to Twitter.
It’s fun to watch him wraith Devin Nunes, but think of this-no TRUTH, no Twitter for Trump, and Elon Musk cut off at the knees.
Thanks. I don’t know jack about the stock and bond markets, even the basics, much less the smoke and mirrors part.
According to the filing, the former president is “generally obligated” to post on TRUTH Social — but can make the “same post on another social media site” as long as he waits six hours before doing so.
Does this apply to Harrington (his current spokeswoman)?
Hey, DWAC finally filed their S-4 today, something that’s kind of required when a SPAC does an acquisition. One little thing jumped out at me. What the fuck is TMTG spending money on?
During 2021, TMTG incurred a net loss of $59 million. Digital World reported a net loss of $1.3 million. DWAC Stock Pops 6% After Finally Filing S-4. 12 Things to Know. | InvestorPlace
Musk seems to be getting cold feet about the whole thing. Twitter stock is trading below Musk’s offer, so that means that the markets don’t believe he is going to buy.
From Matt Levine’s review of TMTG’S SEC filing:
Donnie ALWAYS gives himself an out. He has no morals, no backbone, no ethics, no manners, no fidelity to the law, no decency, and hence he ALWAYS can rationalize a self-serving out. He is a compulsive and unrepentant liar. It’s called “The Art of the Schlemiel.”
Musk is very committed to buy, and Twitter is committed to make him buy. This deal is baked.
and Elon Musk cut off at the knees.
And owing $1B to Twitter for violating the terms of the agreement. Opening Arguments podcast has been covering this recently and with the value of Tesla below $800/share, Musk is in deep yogurt.
Matt Levine today:
I guess today is Day 4 of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter being “temporarily on hold”? I mean, as I said on Friday, “temporarily on hold” is not a relevant category for a deal with a signed merger agreement: Musk has committed to buy Twitter and Twitter has committed to sell to him. There are conditions that need to be met to close the deal, but both sides have committed to work diligently to meet those conditions. There is no reason to think that Musk can get out of the deal, or even delay it.
But on Friday Musk did tweet that the deal is on hold “pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent 5% of users.” Today Twitter’s poor lawyers filed that tweet with the SEC, since it is after all a public communication in connection with a pending merger. It’s a terrible filing. Ideally Twitter and Musk would get together and put out a joint statement explaining what is going on. Failing that, Twitter would put out its own statement explaining, to the best of its knowledge, what is going on. Even “Elon Musk tweeted this, we have no idea what it means, we are working in good faith to close the deal and still hope that will happen but Elon’s gonna Elon” would be a decent statement under the circumstances. But they just filed the tweet. (And the follow-up tweet in which Musk, confusingly, says “Still committed to acquisition,” and onefrom the chairman of Twitter’s board saying “We are too. We remain committed to our agreement.”) Twitter doesn’t know what’s going on any more than you or I do, and they are afraid to hazard a guess, or even to publicly admit “we won’t hazard a guess.” Just confused silence.
Musk’s complaint here is so obviously fake and pretextual that it is hardly worth talking about. Twitter has been saying in its securities filings “that false or spam accounts represented less than 5%” of active users for at least eight years , and it has always qualified those statements by saying that it is an estimate and “may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts.” Musk signed a merger agreement without doing any due diligence on that number, and nothing has changed since he signed the agreement — three weeks ago! — that would create additional cause for doubt. Was Musk on notice about the problem of spam accounts at Twitter? Buddy, in the press release announcing the deal, Musk said that his future plans for Twitter include “defeating the spam bots.” For him to announce, three weeks later, that he can’t buy Twitter because there might be spam bots is just offensively stupid. (As is his supposed methodology for checking Twitter’s numbers, which I cannot bear to discuss, but you can read people making fun of it here and here. And here is Twitter Chief Executive Officer Parag Agrawal’s discussion of bot evaluation.)
But I suppose that’s the point. He is not trying to create a good record so that, if he tries to walk away from the deal, he can argue in court that the closing conditions were not satisfied and he doesn’t have to close. He is trying to create a bad record, so that Twitter gets the message “I am going to ignore my legal obligations so you’d better give me what I want.” If Twitter goes to him and says “you are legally obligated to close this deal,” that counts for nothing. If Twitter goes to him and says “here is airtight proof that spam accounts are 3.69% of active users,” that counts for nothing. All they can do is (1) give him what he wants (presumably renegotiating the deal at a lower price) or (2) gear up for a long risky miserable fight in court to hold him to his obligations; they are right but there is no guarantee that they’d win.
Musk meanwhile keeps disparaging Twitter, in violation of the terms of the merger agreement. Of course there’s nothing Twitter can do about it. Are they going to take him to court and get an injunction that he has to stop tweeting? Musk is already subject to a court order about his tweets, which he openly ignores. Are they going to cancel the deal? They don’t want to cancel the deal. Musk is already right now in open violation of his contractual obligations , which is a powerful warning to Twitter that they have no ability to hold him to his obligations. To drive the point home, Musk tweeted on Saturday:
Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100!
This actually happened.
He’s gonna violate every agreement he has with Twitter, just to prove that he can.[8]
I don’t know why he’s doing this, but the widespread assumption is that he wants to renegotiate the price. Since Musk agreed to buy Twitter (three weeks ago!), comparable stocks have fallen, and a Texas bill has gone into effect that makes it harder and riskier to run a social media company. Why shouldn’t Musk try to get a lower price? Sure he signed a contract to pay $54.20 per share, but that doesn’t matter to him.
Still, as several people pointed out to me (on Twitter), Twitter has one important point of leverage. Here’s how I would do this negotiation:
Musk: I don’t want to pay $54.20 per share anymore, let’s do $42.
Me, the chairman of Twitter’s board, in this hypothetical: No, you signed a contract, pay us our money.
Musk: I’m going to ignore the contract and say some nonsense pretext about bot accounts, and my fans will believe me and somehow think that I’m the victim here. If you sue me, I’ll wage a scorched-earth fight and drag it out for years as the company implodes. I will blow up my financing, so I might be able to avoid closing and end up paying you a $1 billion termination fee, which is like $1.30 per share, basically nothing. Your shareholders will be much happier with $42 than with that catastrophic outcome.
Me: You’re not going to do that.
Musk: Oh yeah? Why not?
Me: Because we run Twitter . And if you walk, we are going to kick you off Twitter permanently. This will make it harder for you to connect with your fans and sell Teslas and keep up your company’s stock price; losing access to Twitter will cost you considerably more than the $46 billion you agreed to pay for it. Also though it will take away the main source of joy in your life. Without tweeting memes and trolling people, what will you have left? Sure, two hundred billion dollars, but what good does that do you if you can’t tweet?
Musk: Oh.
Me: Sixty bucks a share.
Obviously Twitter’s actual board of directors would never do this, because they are constantly forgetting that they run Twitter[9]; they don’t use it themselves, so they can’t imagine that the product might be important to people like Musk. But it is! His leverage in this negotiation is that, if he doesn’t get what he wants, he can walk away from buying Twitter. Twitter’s leverage is that he could never actually walk away from Twitter.
Yet TWTR closed at $37.39 today, whereas the deal acquisition price is $54.20. So 10 billion dollars worth of somebodies doesn’t think it’s going to happen.
Well, there is nobody who cares about rules less than Musk, and there is no company run as obliviously as Twitter, so I guess it might get unbaked.
There might be one person.
“Look, until you get in there and wipe out everything that’s been happening in the company in the last several years, Twitter right now is nothing but a PR wire,” Nunes continued.
One which the TFG campaign AND presidency used very successfully.
Yeah, TFG is coming back to Twitter.
Now how many real accounts will be shut down, as the owners want nothing to do with that guy?