In Igbo tradition, elders will remind villagers that just like Diochi, the palm wine tapper, it is only a fool who tells everything he sees while on top of a palm tree! What that axiom is postulating is this: there are powers you have or things you can say, but sometimes, not saying or exercising that power will serve the society better.
Many centuries ago, in England, a queen in a bid to save the kingdom alive, decided not to reveal to England a major family issue she had with the king. Rather, we described it and put it inside a wall, hoping that whenever the palace was being renovated, someone would know what happened. It was a painful thing for the queen but she, like Diochi, did not want to say everything she saw on top of the palm tree.
That brings me to Elon Musk’s new playbook on Twitter: “Months after Elon Musk made a move to acquire Twitter for $44 billion, the Tesla chief executive said on Friday he is terminating the deal over the social media firm’s inability to provide him with accurate information about the number of fake accounts on its platform.”
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People, Elon Musk is not fair to Twitter. He is asking for a solution which may not have an answer: Twitter had told him that bot should be in the range of 5%. But Musk pushed that it was above 20% or so. Twitter gave him a copy of its datasets to make its own call. Magically, Musk’s team could not ascertain. In other words, this is not pure physics because there are REAL humans who are actually bots when you see how they use Twitter!
Elon Musk has tons of money but he needs to behave in better ways. His actions on Twitter should be challenged in the court; as Twitter fades, Tesla valuation is rising as investors believe that he would now focus on Tesla and other empires. But who can tell Twitter small investors that Diochi is abusing his privilege by sharing all the village secrets to everyone? Diochi is a powerful man on that palm tree – he sees women taking baths in the village stream, sees women helping others during childbirth even on the way to farm (Uzoji), etc.
And the community expects him to hold those secrets. Elon Musk and his money must respect society and I support Twitter’s plan to sue him: ‘“The Twitter Board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” tweeted Twitter’s chairman, Bret Taylor. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”’
Twitter had maintained that the information it provided to Musk about the number of users on the platform is accurate, and allowing him access to the company’s data as he requested, will mean exposing private data of users. However, the company succumbed last month, allowing Musk access to its “firehose”, a repository of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.
Musk’s decision to halt the deal means he was not satisfied with the firehose data. But there is belief that the decision may have been informed by pressure from Tesla shareholders. Tesla has lost more than $billions billion since Musk announced his decision to purchase Twitter, prompting the electric vehicle company’s shareholders to take a legal action against the CEO.
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However, while Musk’s decision to back out of the deal will yield good fortune for Tesla and bad one for Twitter, it is going to result in a long legal battle. Tesla’s shares rose 14.51% to close at $752.29 on Friday while Twitter stocks fell 6% in extended trading and it’s expected to plunge further in the coming days.
Of course, Musk is not doing these things because he is the most decent CEO in America. He is simply playing games with micro investors in Twitter. He has got some issues even in Tesla.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has tacitly acknowledged having a romantic relationship with a subordinate employee, conduct that led to forced departures for at least three other high-profile chief executives in recent years and which may have violated Tesla’s own code of conduct, experts say.
Musk silently welcomed twins last November with Shivon Zilis, according to court records obtained by Business Insider. Zilis is currently the director of operations and special projects at Neuralink, which was cofounded by Musk in 2016. Before Neuralink, Zilis also spent two years at Tesla as a project director. “Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted Thursday, following a report that he had twins from his relationship with Zilis.
From 2017 to August 2019, Zilis was an employee at Tesla. Although it’s not clear when Musk and Zilis began their romantic relationship, if it started while Zilis was at Tesla, it “would be a gross violation” of Tesla’s code of business ethics, says Jeffrey Sonnenfield, senior dean of leadership studies at Yale University.
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Comment: Just leaving this here before sleeping off. By the way, I saw many Twitter spaces and headlines from major media calling his bid to buy Twitter wrongful etc. Some said there needs to be an instrument created/activated to stop that bid. Not sure there’s any one way to this though…
My Response: That is the Musk’s Way. But as he smiles and laughs, he is destroying retirement accounts of many. I am not sure he understands that. Twitter is a public company and deserves respect.
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It’s hard to impartially look at what transpired between Twitter and Musk, without tilting one way or another. But we must all recognize that the proposed purchase is not your regular business transaction, it also has a divergent political ideologies to it.
Musk announced he would purchase Twitter and Tesla value started falling, and some were cheering, hoping that he would not be able to close the deal; and now that has become the case. Should Musk sell Tesla so as to honour his original promise of purchasing Twitter? We are talking about a political tool here, with very little in investment returns. Twitter is not growing but lots of fake accounts keep popping up there, it remains just a tool, and not business.
The prolonged court process will still favour Musk, no matter the size of penalty imposed, if Tesla stock increases by 30% within the period, that could offset everything, without getting involved in something that is more political than economic. Let those who wanted to lose their sanity at the mention of Musk’s purchase of Twitter keep the platform above water in the years to come.
We can see that Tesla and Twitter are mutually exclusive, and inversely proportional to each other, and Musk has chosen the better part.
Twitter is actually the one that needs to be careful. If the finding about the bot is true, Twitter may end up going back to pre-IPO level in its valuation. Anyone can say anything they want to say about thenimplications of his decisions on Tesla but the fact is that this is business. Elon Musk can waive all the insinuations off as not based on any objective fact. What is fact is that Twitter has bots. It may even end up becoming more than 20% of users.
When they say they are receiving legal counsel on actions to take, consider that it also includes shutting the hell up and moving on.