Good morning. Hello. How are you? #685
RIP the Northernmost Dennys in the World, sick cat, a lot of Elon/Twitter stuff sorry.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? I am good. Our kitty, Roy, had a two-day bout of puking and it was very scary, so much puke, oh so much puke. Emma took him to the emergency vet last night while I did Jane bedtime and we are now out a thousand bucks with no real answers. He did not eat a toy or anything, though, so I guess the $300 X-Ray held some null-set value. We don’t know what caused it. He seems better. I had been hiding in my office for a few post-NYC days. Not, like, full quarantine, but being careful, and that meant I was eating my lunch in my office. After lunch one day I left my bowl on the stairs, so I would remember to bring it upstairs later. I am convinced Roy licked it. I even worried about Roy licking it, but figured he wouldn’t be dumb enough to lick something with so much capsacin in it. Plus there wasn’t any food left! Just sauce! Made of fish sauce and Shaoxing wine and a LOT of Thai chili peppers. It has to be a coincidence, right? No cat would be that dumb. God I hope I didn’t almost poison Roy.
Anyway, Roy seems to be better. Fingers crossed.
Mark Burgess of the Chameleons played at my friend Heather’s house in New Hampshire last night. Bunch of friends went, I am so jealous. It seemed amazing. I can’t even imagine seeing Mark Burgess playing in a house. Fantastic.
I have these horrible bites on my arms from gardening on Saturday. Same as I got on my legs a few weeks back. I am 90% sure I get them while I am pruning and trellising the tomatoes. It is really weird. I don’t feel any bites at the time, but minutes later it stings and I think. “oh yeah, I got bit.” My legs sort of made sense — some creepy craelers on the ground or something. But this time it’s just my arms, not my legs, and I was in sandals and shorts, so, wtf. Which leads me to think maybe it’s some sort of mite on the tomato leaves themselves? And when I am moving the vines around, I do see a bunch of little white bugs fly off, but those are just aphids, I think, and aphids aren’t, like, poisonous, are they? It is all very weird.
I did have one squirrel incursion yesterday, but that is down from about 10 the day before so I think my active defenses are having some effect. I need to go out and see how much of the distractionary squirrel corn they’ve eaten and check whether I need to put out more or not.
And I need to run to the food bank today and drop off my thirty pounds of cucumbers.
I have been informed by Frank, in Fairbanks, that the Fairbanks Dennys is permanently closing, which is very upsetting. Can anyone confirm this rumor? I suppose if one actually still lived in Fairbanks they probably don’t go to the Denny’s that much anymore, though I definitely went to Denny’s on my last trip for nostalgia purposes. But, man. We sure spent a lot of time in that Dennys. Very sad. I will dig out one of my NORTHERNMOST DENNYS IN THE WORLD shirts in honor of this sad occasion. Provided, of course, that the rumors are true.
I have learned that Elon’s funding commitments from the banks to fund his acquisition of Twitter expire in April 2023. This is one of the reasons everyone says that a long trial benefits Elon. And I wouldn’t agree otherwise, and have said so, but I can see now that if his funding magically disappears and he still hasn’t bought the company, it would be very hard for him to be forced to buy the company. I don’t think that will be much of an obstacle to a judge that is committed to enforcing the deal, though.
I do think there are two other points working in Elon’s favor in this case that conventional wisdom is discounting:
First, the “he wanted to buy the company because of the bots!” argument will be somewhat harder to argue in court that most people are assuming. I might want to buy a house because it’s a fixer-upper, that does not mean I am okay with the foundation being unexpectedly made of cheese. Of course, in his case he already signed a piece of paper saying “I am cool with this purchase even if the foundation is made of cheese,” so the damage from this point will be minimal to Twitter’s case. But saying “he knew about bots!” as a point of argument for Twitter will be as difficult and nonsensical as it is for Musk to argue about bots. Bots are not the point.
I also think, in general, disparagement is harder to prove since it’s inherenty subjective. Is a poop emoji disparaging? One would assume! Have the courts repeatedly and universally decided this? Not so much! And the whole thing about disparaging them about the “only checking 100 accounts” thing will be tough, because… there’s an argument he’s right! Twitter says they check 9,000 accounts a quarter. A quarter has 90 days. That is… 100 accounts a day. Saying “they only check 100 accounts” will be very hard to prove as disparaging.
All that aside, though, I stand by the view that this case is better for Twitter than not, and they are in the better position. The conventional wisdom that Elon can handle a long trial better than Twitter, the above funding issue aside, is lunacy. Twitter can compartmentalize this case much, much better than Elon can. It doesn’t matter if Twitter is permanently aborbed by this case. It’s probably a good thing! We’ll discuss that in a moment. But it clearly would matter very much to Elon if he was permanently absorbed by this, and he cannot walk away or delegate or pass the baton like anyone at Twitter can.
Furthermore, the case will almost certainly has a positive impact on their stock price. Probably minimal at this point but, if for example, they win their petition for a speedy trial, it’ll probably bounce a bit. Any boost to their stock price through this recession is a good thing.
This seems all very straightforward and it took me a while to realize why other people don’t think this way. And I think I figured it out.
It’s because people are laboring under the misapprehension that Twitter needs to be, or can be “saved.” People love to think there’s just one little thing that Twitter can do and it’ll be magically better. There’s a pervasive feeling that Twitter has lost its way, that the product hasn’t lived up to its potential. There seems to be near-universal antipathy felt toward current leadership.
I do not share any of these views. I do not view the current leadership as inspiring or anything, but I think they’ve handled Elon as well as possible. The commitments and covenants they got in the purchase agreement are rock solid, brilliant, and Elon is repeatedly hoisting himself on his own petard because they (or their lawyers) could see his infantilism coming a mile away and wrote as rock-solid protections into the agreement as possible. They tried to sideline him with a board seat, which was the right move even if a failure in the end. And they would have been almost certainly fired had they rejected the purchase offer. The large shareholders – who are a lot shittier than the current management – said as much, shutting down management’s efforts to institute a poison pill. Now, in hindsight, with the market change, and Elon’s Elonness, would it have been better to force him into a proxy fight, that he almost certainly would not have completed before market conditions changed? Maybe? But not if, as seems not inconceivable, they wring some $10-20 bil out of him first by going down this path.
More than that, though, I am viewing the whole thing from the perspective of a user, and a user who, aside from radically improving the trust and safety aspects of Twitter, does not particularly want Twitter to change. I mean, yes, I am coming from the perspective of being an executive at multiple former glorious internet platforms now consigned to second-tier-ness. But I still use and love those platforms as they are, and so do millions of people. And hundreds of people still use and love Twitter as it is.
(And as for the Trust and Safety aspects, I submit to you that, short of maybe Automattic (ha, do it Matt), there is not a single potential buyer of Twitter out there who would ramp up trust and safety in any visionary, meaningful way. It is an excruciating fact of Twitter that most of the users can see exactly what needs to be done from a Trust and Safety point-of-view, but it doesn’t get done, won’t get done. But the current team, at least, kind of understands this and is kind of making the tools the public wants.)
But there is no magic product featue that will fix Twitter. They should stop trying. I submit that it is okay if a bunch of people leave (except T&S, retain them at all costs). I submit that Twitter does not need to be saved. It does not need anything other than to accept what it is, right-size the company accordingly, and live on as a beloved American consumer product that sticks around for a hundred years in an unchanged form. This is what its users want.
I cannot emphasize this enough. All of the buzz about saving or changing Twitter is misguided. The users do not want this. The users want Twitter to be RC Cola or Cheer Wine, eternal and steadfast. Maaaybe a single product extension into Diet in a decade. They do not want it to be Mountain Dew, with its 16 different flavors of hell, unceasing in its aspirations to be a Coke or Pepsi. And they are certainly under no illusions that it could or should be Coke or Pepsi.
And because I profoundly believe this, I am 100% okay with the company being paralyzed by a protracted lawsuit. It will scare off “bad faith” (to use current internet parlance), hubristic buyers who think they can “fix” it in the same way Elon thinks he can “fix” it. It will scare off the vulture capitalists. It will scare off the normies and boors and finance choads. And if, by some miracle, some actual internet visionary understands all of this and wants to park Twitter and just own it, the way some billionaires want to own newspapers and sports teams, nothing is stopping Twitter from dropping the lawsuit and doing that deal. They could just drop the suit!
The law suit is a suit of armor.
The last thing I’ll say is all this talk about Elon defying a court order is utter nonsense. If his lawyers are even C-grade, they will make this clear to him, and the very basic facts of it should get through his skull: all his companies are registered in Delaware. The state of Delaware has immense power over Elon Musk, the judges will know this, and the judges of the state of Delaware have absolutely no desire to damage Delaware’s reputation as the world-center of corporate law. Plus, the solution is so easy it’s a joke. If Elon defies the court, the court can just bar Elon from being an executive of any Delaware company. And it doesn’t have to, you know, do this only while he’s in contempt, a la Trump recently and his daily fine while in contempt of New York court. That, of course, is a thing pissy juvenile Trump — er, sorry, Elon — might just indulge in. But no no, they can bar Elon from being an executive of any Delaware company forever. Or for a Decade. Don’t think Trump think Henry Blodget. He could not be CEO of Tesla or SpaceX, he could not be on the board of any of these companies. He would be an owner, sure, but he’d have to rule through… shareholder votes? LOL I’m sure those are in the corporate charters of all his companies. Elon does not care about any of this near enough to lose his CEOship of SpaceX and Tesla. And this would not even be an egregious or particularly crazy application of the law!
And this is just the beginning. Virtually every company on which any company relies on is chartered in Delaware. His insurance companies. His stock registries. His banks. None of these people will defy a Delaware court order, not even for Elon.
I’m all for the cynical realpolitik viewpoint of “lol yeah, the super rich are above the law” but this is not Merrick Garland being a wuss about Trump, this is something much more hardcore, this is Delaware.
Man, they oughtta make shirts.
Moody and quiet playlist for you. Old and new. Been learning about Vic Chesnutt really feels like a gap in my musical knowledge. And Letting off the Happiness just got re-issued and I bought a vinyl copy and “June on the West Coast” reminds me of that solo acoustic Conor show at the Coolidge Corner theater in.. (Googles)… 98? 99? Something like that. Amazing show. And that Monkees song came on shuffle yesterday and just so beautiful. Love that song.