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Tag: Twitter

  • Elon Musk’s deposition in Twitter dispute postponed amid revived talks to complete acquisition | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s deposition in Twitter dispute postponed amid revived talks to complete acquisition | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Lawyers for Elon Musk and Twitter have agreed to postpone the Tesla CEO’s deposition in the court fight over their $44 billion acquisition agreement, a source familiar with the negotiations told CNN. The decision comes as the two sides renew negotiations to complete the deal.

    Musk’s deposition had been set to begin Thursday, per a notice filed earlier this week.

    The two sides are in the midst of negotiations over how to proceed with the deal after Musk on Monday sent a letter proposing to complete the acquisition on the originally agreed upon terms. In the letter, Musk said his offer to proceed was contingent on staying the litigation proceedings over his initial effort to pull out of the deal and adjourning the trial that is set to begin in less than two weeks.

    As of Wednesday, the two sides had yet to reach a deal, a separate source told CNN. Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the judge who is overseeing the litigation, said in a Wednesday court filing that neither side had filed to stay the proceedings and she was continuing to prepare for trial to begin on Oct. 17.

    On Thursday, McCormick filed a letter to both sides laying out deadlines for responding to discovery motions, noting that the “trial is fast approaching.”

    Legal experts have said that Twitter

    (TWTR)     may want to continue the litigation process as a way to keep pressure on Musk until the acquisition is completed. But the postponement of Musk’s deposition may be a sign that the two sides are nearing an agreement, some legal experts say.

    It’s not clear whether a new date has been set for Musk’s deposition, but Twitter could end up pushing to complete it early next week if a deal is not reached.

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  • Elon Musk draws rebuke by suggesting Taiwan accept rule by China

    Elon Musk draws rebuke by suggesting Taiwan accept rule by China

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    Taiwan’s premier on Tuesday said Elon Musk “doesn’t know much” about the self-ruled island, after the billionaire suggested it should become part of China. The world’s richest man has sparked anger in Taiwan over an interview he gave to the Financial Times which touched on Taiwan’s fraught relationship with its giant neighbor.

    Taiwan lives under constant threat of invasion by Beijing, which claims the democracy as part of its territory, to be taken one day. 

    “This is not a matter of if they will invade, it’s a matter of when they will invade,” Admiral Lee Hsi-min, who used to head Taiwan’s armed forces, told correspondent Lesley Stahl about China on “60 Minutes” on Sunday amid escalating tension between the democratic, self-governing island and China. 


    Life in Taiwan with China flexing its military might | 60 Minutes

    13:33

    In the Financial Times interview published Friday, Musk said he believed Taiwan should strike a “reasonably palatable” agreement with Beijing to become a “special administrative zone” of China.

    That model is used by Beijing to run Macau and Hong Kong.

    Beijing’s leaders have long suggested the same model for Taiwan although it has always been a non-starter for the vast majority of Taiwanese.


    Hong Kong observes 25 years of independence from British rule

    02:15

    Premier Su Tseng-chang — Taiwan’s most senior politician after the president — became the highest-ranking official yet to address Musk’s comments, which he dismissed on Tuesday.

    “Musk is a businessman,” Su told a parliamentary session. “He has a big car factory in Shanghai and he wants to promote his electric vehicles… a businessman may say this today and say that tomorrow”.

    “Musk only speaks for himself but he really doesn’t know much about Taiwan and he also doesn’t understand cross-strait relations,” Su added.

    Bloomberg Pictures Of The Year: Extreme Business
    Elon Musk, center, reacts as Robin Ren, vice president of sales, second left, Ying Yong, mayor of Shanghai, second right, and Wu Qing, vice mayor of Shanghai, right, applaud during an event at the site of Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, January 7, 2019.

    Qilai Shen/Bloomberg/Getty


    Polls have consistently shown that a large majority of Taiwan’s people have no appetite to be ruled by China, something that has deepened after Beijing deployed a sweeping political crackdown in Hong Kong.

    Musk is a notoriously outspoken business figure, especially on Twitter, where he frequently wades into social and geopolitical causes.

    His comments on Taiwan were praised by multiple Chinese officials, including Beijing’s ambassador to Washington Qin Gang.

    Last week Musk became embroiled in a social media spat with Ukrainian officials including President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over his ideas on ending Russia’s invasion.


    Russia launches biggest attack on Ukraine in months

    07:43

    Musk proposed a peace deal involving re-running under U.N. supervision annexation referendums in Moscow-occupied Ukrainian regions, acknowledging Russian sovereignty over the Crimean peninsula and giving Ukraine neutral status.

    Kyiv’s ambassador to Germany Andriy Melnyk replied bluntly: “F*** off is my very diplomatic reply to you.”

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  • Elon Musk commissioned this bot analysis in his fight with Twitter. Now it shows what he could face if he takes over the platform | CNN Business

    Elon Musk commissioned this bot analysis in his fight with Twitter. Now it shows what he could face if he takes over the platform | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Spam and fake accounts are more prevalent on Twitter than on comparable social platforms, according to a data analysis firm hired by Elon Musk as part of his legal battle with Twitter.

    The claim by Cyabra — in the company’s first public interview since conducting a study commissioned by Musk that found spam and bot accounts make up an estimated 11% of Twitter’s total user base — highlights the headache that may await Musk now that he appears ready to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform.

    Cyabra CEO Dan Brahmy told CNN last week that in addition to studying Twitter

    (TWTR)    , his company has done similar assessments of the company’s rivals — although he declined to name any specific platforms — and that the fake-account problem appears to be comparatively worse for Twitter

    (TWTR)     than its peers. Using a machine-learning algorithm that analyzes “hundreds” of parameters, he said, Cyabra provides estimates of whether certain online accounts and content are authentic.

    “We have a number for all the social media platforms, because that’s our job,” he said, adding that Cyabra’s estimate for Twitter is “definitely not in the low end” relative to its competitors (although the company had more access to data about Twitter when it conducted its analysis for Musk).

    Bots on Twitter have been central to the dispute over Musk’s initial attempt to get out of the acquisition deal. Less than three months after signing the deal, and waiving due diligence in the process, Musk moved to terminate the agreement, citing claims that Twitter had misstated the number of bots on its platform, despite having previously said that he wanted to buy the company to address its bot problem.

    Twitter has for years said that bots make up less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users (mDAU). In a series of tweets in May, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal acknowledged that “spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter,” and added that, “as such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day.”

    Twitter sued Musk to complete the deal, accusing him of using bots as a pretext to exit the deal after getting buyer’s remorse, and the deal was set to go to trial later this month. But last week, Musk told Twitter he is now ready to move ahead with the deal at the original price, and the judge overseeing the case gave the two sides until Oct. 28 to close the deal or face trial.

    The dispute over the true number of fake accounts on Twitter — and how to accurately calculate it — has also shone a spotlight on the small army of data scientists, artificial intelligence experts and misinformation researchers both within and outside tech companies who spend their days hunting for patterns or anomalies that can uncover whether a given account, or a network of accounts, represents a living, breathing human being or, potentially, automated accounts or bad actors aiming to spread covert influence, false information or spam.

    With Musk and Twitter now expected to close the acquisition deal, the public may never get a close look at the evidence each side gathered on the issue or a court ruling on Musk’s claims that bots are more pervasive on the platform than it has let on. But Cyabra is coming forward now, Brahmy said, after the company’s work for Musk’s team was revealed in court filings and hearings in the acquisition dispute. The Israel-based company has roughly 40 employees and counts the US State Department and various consumer brands as customers of its digital authenticity measurement tools, he said. Among its investors is the Peter Thiel-backed Founders Fund.

    Many practitioners in the field caution that estimating spam or fake accounts can be an extremely subjective exercise, and that anyone claiming to have a definite number likely doesn’t grasp the complexity of the issue. Even the creator of Botometer, another service Musk used to estimate of the number of bots on Twitter, has emphasized the challenges behind defining the term “bot” and cautioned that context, intent and even the way an account is managed can complicate matters. There are also good bots designed to share information or entertaining content that are allowed on Twitter and many of which transparently self-identify as automated on the platform.

    In the interview last week prior to the revived deal talks, Brahmy acknowledged there are clear limits to his company’s use of machine learning algorithms to determine whether accounts may be authentic, which is why his firm’s report about Twitter expresses a maximum confidence level of about 80%. The company’s algorithms would likely flag Brahmy’s own grandmother as a suspicious account holder, he said, given her propensity to whiplash randomly from topic to topic and to post at unusual hours with numerous grammatical mistakes.

    Twitter declined to comment for this story.

    Twitter lawyers in a hearing earlier this month said that neither Cyabra’s analysis, nor an analysis Musk commissioned by another firm that estimated with 90% confidence that bots make up 5.3% of the platform’s user base, support Musk’s claim in his deal termination letter that the amount of spam is “wildly higher than the Twitter estimate” of less than 5% of mDAU.

    Cyabra first made waves in May, after Musk’s deal was first announced. Using publicly available data, the company claimed at the time that spam and bot accounts represented 13.7% of accounts on Twitter. Soon thereafter, the company was hired by Musk’s team to perform a second analysis, this time based on the “firehose” of data that Twitter had provided directly to the Tesla CEO, according to Brahmy.

    That second analysis, which has since been referenced in court filings, concluded with roughly 80% confidence that spam and bot accounts represent 11% of Twitter’s total user base. The finding offers a look at the hurdle Musk may face if he takes over Twitter after previously saying he wanted to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.”

    “The request was precise: Spam and bot accounts, tell us the number, tell us the methodologies and tell us the confidence level,” Brahmy said. Brahmy said Cyabra did not work with the other data analysis firms used by Musk’s team, and he declined to discuss whether or how much Cyabra was paid to perform the commissioned analysis.

    The finding can’t be compared directly to Twitter’s own estimate that fake and spam accounts comprise less than 5% of mDAU — Brahmy said Cyabra was unable to make an estimate of the prevalence of bots as a percentage of mDAU rather than total Twitter users. He declined to elaborate on why, but it may be due to the fact that Twitter’s firehose of data used to conduct the analysis does not show which accounts are or aren’t considered mDAU and only shows those accounts that actively tweet rather than those who, for example, only use the platform to read tweets.

    (For its part, Twitter’s disclosures about spam and fake accounts note that its calculation relies on “significant judgment” and the company has not made claims about how the prevalence of such accounts on its platform compares to competitors.)

    Factors built into Cyabra’s algorithm used to measure how likely an account is to be fake or spam include the members in that account’s social network and where they’re located; what the account talks about, how frequently and at what hours; whether the account uses one or multiple languages and how fluently it uses those languages; and the type of engagement the account’s content tends to generate, among many others.

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  • The econ Nobel offers a timely warning about central banks’ power | CNN Business

    The econ Nobel offers a timely warning about central banks’ power | CNN Business

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    This story is part of CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, here.


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    The Nobel in economics is sort of the step-cousin of the Nobel family.

    It came about nearly 70 years after its literature and sciences counterparts, in 1969, and is technically called the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.” It is awarded by the Swedish central bank, in honor of the namesake renaissance man Alfred Nobel who established the prizes.

    Some scholars really dislike the economics prize, including one of Nobel’s own descendants, who dismissed it as a “PR coup by economists.”

    But hey, it still comes with a cash prize. And it’s also pretty useful in reminding the world that economics as an academic field is, frankly, a barely understood hodge-podge of studies that is constantly evolving and so variable it’s almost useless outside of academia. (And I mean that with the utmost respect to economists, who, not unlike journalists, knew what they were doing when they chose their life of suffering.)

    Here’s the thing: Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who guided the US economy through the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession, was awarded the Nobel in economics along with two other economists, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. (Congrats to all the winners, with apologies to Doug and Phil, who will forever be referred to in headlines about the Nobel as “and two other economists.”)

    Bernanke, who previously taught at Princeton and earned his Ph.D from MIT, received the award for his research on the Great Depression. In short, his work demonstrates that banks’ failures are often a cause, not merely a consequence, of financial crises.

    That was groundbreaking when he published it in 1983. Today, it’s conventional wisdom.

    WHY IT MATTERS

    The timing is everything here. The Nobel committee has been known to play politics (see: that time Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize after being in office for just eight months). And right now, it is using its spotlight to call attention to the high-stakes gamble playing out at central banks around the world, most notably the Fed.

    The rapid run-up in interest rates, led by the US central bank, is causing markets around the world to go haywire. And it’s especially bad news for emerging economies.

    Monetary tightening — especially when it is aggressive and synchronized across major economies — could inflict worse damage globally than the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic, a United Nations agency warned earlier this month. It called the Fed’s policy “imprudent gamble” with the lives of those less fortunate.

    LESSONS FROM HISTORY

    On Monday, Diamond, one of the three newly minted Nobel laureates, acknowledged that the rate moves around the world were causing market instability.

    But he believes the system is more resilient than it used to be because of hard lessons learned from the 2008 crash, my colleague Julia Horowitz reports.

    “Recent memories of that crisis and improvements in regulatory policies around the world have left the system much, much less vulnerable,” Diamond said.

    Let’s hope he’s right.

    Oh hey, speaking of the Fed inflicting pain: We’re about to see big job losses, according to Bank of America.

    Under the rate hikes imposed by Jay Powell & Co, the US economy could see job growth cut in half during the fourth quarter of this year. Early next year, the bank expects to see losses of about 175,000 jobs a month.

    The litigation between Elon Musk and Twitter is officially on hold. The two sides now have until October 28 to work out a deal or once again gear up for a courtroom battle.

    The big question now is all about the money.

    Here’s the deal: Not even the world’s richest person has this kind of cash just lying around. Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, which he can’t easily offload for a whole bunch of reasons. He needs to borrow the money, which means he’s got to get banks to pony up.

    By most accounts, he’ll be able to make it happen. But the Twitter deal is a harder pitch to make now than it was back in April, when Musk said he’d lined up more than $46 billion in financing, including two debt commitment letters from Morgan Stanley and other unnamed financial institutions, my colleague Clare Duffy writes.

    Musk has spent the past several months trashing Twitter as he sought to renege on his offer. Meanwhile, tech stocks have been hammered, ad revenues are declining, and the global economy has inched closer to a recession, sapping investor appetite for risk.

    Musk’s legal team said last week the banks that had committed debt financing previously were “working cooperatively to fund the close.”

    Twitter is, understandably, skeptical, given the many curve balls Musk has thrown at them since he got involved with the company earlier this year. The company raised concerns last week that a representative for one of the banks testified that Musk had not yet sent a borrowing notice and “has not otherwise communicated to them that he intends to close the transaction, let alone on any particular timeline.”

    What’s Musk’s endgame?

    No one knows, perhaps least of all Musk. But many legal experts following the case say Musk understood he’d likely lose at trial and then be forced to buy Twitter anyway. He’d rather buy the entire company than be deposed by Twitter’s lawyers and do further damage to Twitter in a trial.

    And the banks may not be able to walk away even if they want to.

    “The only way they could get out of it is to claim a material adverse effect and that Twitter has changed so much since they agreed to the deal that they no longer want to finance the deal,” said George Geis, professor of strategy at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

    Even if the banks succeeded there, Musk may not be off the hook. The judge in the case could rule that Musk was at fault for the financing falling through — not a far-fetched notion after all the trash-talking — and order him to sue Morgan Stanley to provide the funds or close the deal without it.

    Bottom line, it seems like Musk will end up owning Twitter one way or another. And given his only vague musings about what he’d actually do with it, there are a whole host of unknowns lurking in Twitter’s future.

    Enjoying Nightcap? Sign up and you’ll get all of this, plus some other funny stuff we liked on the internet, in your inbox every night. (OK, most nights — we believe in a four-day work week around here.)

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  • How Elon Musk could change Twitter | CNN Business

    How Elon Musk could change Twitter | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Nearly three months after Elon Musk told Twitter he wanted out of his $44 billion agreement to buy the social media company, the Tesla CEO now once again wants to move forward with the deal.

    The reversal, if finalized, not only has the potential to create upheaval for Twitter employees but also for the hundreds of millions of people around the world who use the platform daily.

    In the first weeks after agreeing to buy the company in April, and before his move to bail on the deal, Musk repeatedly stressed that his goal was to bolster “free speech” on the platform and work to “unlock” Twitter’s “extraordinary potential.” He suggested he would rethink Twitter’s approach to content moderation and permanent bans on the platform, with potential impacts on civil discourse and the political landscape. He also talked about his desire to rid the platform of bots, even as he later made the number of bots central to his argument to abandon the deal.

    In private and public statements over the past six months, Musk has tossed out a wide range of other possible changes for the platform, from enabling end-to-end encryption for Twitter’s direct messaging feature to suggesting this week that Twitter become part of an “everything” app called x, possibly in the style of popular Chinese app WeChat.

    There have been more far-fetched suggestions, too. In one text exchange with his brother Kimbal Musk, revealed last week in court documents, the two appeared to discuss the possibility of asking users to pay for each tweet they post with small amounts of the cryptocurrency DogeCoin.

    Perhaps the biggest immediate impact if the deal goes through: Musk has indicated that he would restore former President Donald Trump’s account on the platform, which could be a huge advantage if Trump decides to make another bid for the White House in 2024.

    Now, with a deal that has long been in doubt appearing to be closer than ever to completion, some of those theoretical changes could soon become reality.

    Here’s what users should know:

    For years under former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, Twitter emphasized its work to bolster “healthy conversations.” The company banned many accounts promoting abuse and spam, added labels for false or misleading information and banned the misgendering of transgender people.

    Under Musk’s ownership, Twitter could unwind steps taken to make the platform more palatable for its most vulnerable users, typically women, members of the LGBTQ community and people of color, according to safety experts.

    Musk has said Twitter, under his leadership, would have more lenient content moderation policies. “If in doubt, let the speech exist,” Musk said in one on-stage interview in April. “If it’s a gray area, I would say, let the tweet exist. But obviously in the case where there’s perhaps a lot of controversy, you would not necessarily want to promote that tweet.”

    Musk has also said he wants to make Twitter’s algorithm open source and make it more transparent to users when, for example, a tweet has been emphasized or demoted in their feed. (Leaders at Twitter have previously expressed support for moving in that direction, and the company often makes clear when it is demoting certain tweets or types of content.)

    But the most striking early change could come from who is and is not allowed on a Musk-owned Twitter.

    Musk has said he thinks Twitter should be more “reluctant to delete things” and “very cautious with permanent bans.” That could mean a long list of controversial far right figures and conspiracy theorists, among others, soon find their way back on the platform.

    Musk, for his part, has focused on bringing back one of Twitter’s most prominent former users: Trump.

    “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake,” Musk said in May. “I would reverse the perma-ban. … But my opinion, and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares this opinion, is that we should not have perma-bans.”

    Dorsey tweeted following Musk’s May remarks that he does “agree” there shouldn’t be permanent bans on Twitter users. “There are exceptions … but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don’t work,” he said.

    Trump has said he does not want to rejoin Twitter and will instead remain on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

    But if Trump were to accept a Musk offer to return to Twitter, it could restore a significant following he hasn’t had since being banned from the platform in January 2021, just as the 2024 US Presidential race ramps up. On Truth Social, Trump has only 4 million followers; on Twitter, he reached an audience of more than 88 million followers.

    Another notable change is simply who may be making these sensitive decisions.

    Musk has a mixed reputation in the tech industry. He is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and successful innovators and entrepreneurs of this era, but he is also someone who has courted controversy, often from his own Twitter profile, where he has more than 100 million followers.

    Over the years, Musk has used Twitter to make misleading claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, to make a baseless accusation that a man who helped rescue children from a cave in Thailand is a sexual predator, to mock people who display their gender pronouns on the platform and to make countless jokes involving the numbers 420 and 69. He has also tweeted a (since deleted) photo comparing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Adolf Hitler and has compared Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal to Joseph Stalin.

    Musk also previously sought to remove a Twitter account dedicated to tracking the movements of his private jet by offering to pay off the college freshman running the account (the account owner declined).

    The same day he sent his letter to Twitter attempting to revive the deal, Musk was widely panned for comments he made on the platform about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He suggested making Crimea, a region Russia invaded and annexed from Ukraine in 2014, “formally part of Russia.” Most followers responded “no” to his poll and Ukraine’s Ambassador to Germany Andrij Melnyk replied in a tweet: “F— off is my very diplomatic reply to you.” In a follow-up tweet, an apparently frustrated Musk seemed to blame the results of his poll on a “bot attack.”

    Until now, Twitter has, at least to some extent, been accountable for its policy decisions to advertisers, shareholders and its board. But those guardrails won’t necessarily exist under Musk’s leadership.

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  • Kanye West’s Twitter account locked for anti-Semitic tweet | CNN

    Kanye West’s Twitter account locked for anti-Semitic tweet | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Twitter locked rapper Kanye West’s Twitter account over an anti-Semitic tweet posted on the account on Saturday.

    In the since-removed tweet, West said he was “going death con 3 [sic] On JEWISH PEOPLE,” and also that, “You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda,” without specifying what group he was addressing, according to internet archive records pulled by CNN.

    A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed to CNN that the account was locked for violating Twitter’s policies. The tweet has been replaced on the account by a message from the company saying, “This tweet violated the Twitter Rules.”

    The spokesperson did not say which policy was violated but instead sent a link to Twitter’s rules, which include guidelines against hateful conduct.

    Twitter would not say how long the account would be locked or when the user would be able to tweet again.

    On Friday, West’s Instagram account was restricted for violating the company’s policies, a Meta spokesperson told CNN.

    In a tweet, the Anti-Defamation League said, “Power. Disloyalty. Greed. Deicide. Blood. Denial. Anti-Zionism. All of these are antisemitic tropes that we break down in our #AntisemitismUncovered Guide at antisemitism.adl.org. Many of these myths have influenced @KanyeWest’s comments recently, and it’s dangerous.”

    CNN has been unable to reach a representative for West for comment.

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  • Elon Musk may want a WeChat for the world. It won’t be easy to build | CNN Business

    Elon Musk may want a WeChat for the world. It won’t be easy to build | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk is taking inspiration from China’s top social media platform, WeChat, while planning a future for Twitter. And while he has shared very few details of his ambition for an app for everything, experts say it won’t be easy to achieve.

    The Tesla

    (TSLA)     CEO said late Tuesday that he wanted to create a new app called “X” after buying Twitter.

    “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app,” he tweeted.

    Musk’s comment came on the heels of news that he had once again reversed course and decided to follow through with his bid to buy Twitter for $44 billion, a price originally agreed back in April.

    The acquisition would put the world’s richest man in charge of one of the most influential social networks around, after months of acrimony and bitter U-turns.

    Now, Musk’s intention to build out what’s assumed to be a multipurpose platform has drawn comparisons to “super-apps” in Asia, essentially one-stop shops that do it all for users.

    Several tech companies in the region have already succeeded with their own versions of such applications. Chief among them is WeChat, the platform that is owned by Chinese tech giant Tencent

    (TCEHY)     and sometimes described as Facebook

    (FB)    , Twitter

    (TWTR)    , Snapchat

    (SNAP)     and PayPal

    (PYPL)     all rolled into one.

    More than a billion users, primarily in mainland China, rely on the social network to do virtually everything — from ordering groceries to booking a yoga class to paying bills — without leaving the app.

    Elsewhere in Asia, people have also flocked to apps such as Grab (GRAB) in Singapore and Malaysia, or Line in Japan. Grab was initially best known as a ride-hailing service provider, while Line gained popularity as a messaging app, and both have since branched out significantly to offer other features.

    Musk has not been shy about his desire to emulate the success of WeChat. In June, at a town hall with Twitter employees, he compared the American company’s potential to that of Tencent’s ubiquitous service in China.

    “I think an important goal for Twitter would be to try to include as much of the country, as much of the world, as possible,” said the billionaire businessman. “You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success.”

    Musk isn’t the only prominent US tech leader taking cues from China: Previously, Facebook

    (FB)     CEO Mark Zuckerberg also suggested that WeChat should be a case study for his company.

    For now, Musk has yet to outline his plans for X. But analysts say he would face numerous challenges.

    First: the fiercely competitive landscape. To some extent, WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and practically “everything” are trying “to become super-apps as well,” said Ivan Lam, a senior research analyst at Counterpoint Research based in Hong Kong.

    “To try to become a super-app, it’s actually very hard,” he said in an interview.

    Xiaofeng Wang, a principal analyst at Forrester who focuses on digital marketing and engagement strategies in Asia Pacific, echoed that view, noting that the industry had only become more saturated in recent years.

    “When WeChat first launched extended services beyond social, there weren’t that many established competitors in related businesses yet,” she told CNN Business.

    “For example, when WeChat Pay was first launched, there [weren’t] any well-established mobile payment services in China yet … While in the US, there are already PayWave, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Venmo.”

    Companies trying to branch out in the sector could also face considerable pushback from policymakers, according to Wang.

    “The more flexible regulatory environment in China at the time gave internet companies like Tencent and Alibaba more room to extend to a wide range of businesses. WeChat benefited from that and grew into a super-app,” she said.

    “It would be a lot harder now, given the stricter anti-monopoly regulations in China and it would be certainly harder for Twitter or the future X to do that in the US,” she added.

    Perhaps the core challenge, however, is simply trying to be everything for everyone.

    Lam noted that many successful “super-apps” have typically targeted specific audiences, making it easier to tailor a suite of services to their needs. That would be tough to replicate globally — and could mean that Twitter or X would need to also focus on certain regions to get off the ground, he said.

    Musk has acknowledged the uphill battle. On Tuesday, a Twitter user posited that “it would have been easier to just start X from scratch,” prompting the billionaire to respond that Twitter was an important part of the plan.

    “Twitter probably accelerates X by 3 to 5 years, but I could be wrong,” Musk wrote.

    Wang said that Forrester’s research had shown there were fundamental differences in how Western and Chinese users viewed social media, making it harder for Western companies “to build the same level of trust.”

    “Putting the ambitions aside, it may be a lot more difficult to create a super-app like WeChat in the West,” she concluded.

    — Clare Duffy contributed to this report.

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  • Kanye West Tweet About Going ‘Death Con 3 On Jewish People’ Removed By Twitter

    Kanye West Tweet About Going ‘Death Con 3 On Jewish People’ Removed By Twitter

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    Kanye West’s return to Twitter might be short-lived after the company removed an alarming tweet from the rapper’s account for violating its policies.

    Hours after Meta deleted antisemitic content from West’s Instagram page and placed a restriction on his account, Twitter took down a post from the musician and fashion designer that said he was “going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” He appears to be referring to the U.S. armed forces defense readiness condition DEFCON 3.

    “I’m a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I’m going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE,” West wrote on Saturday night. “The funny thing is I actually can’t be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”

    The tweet no longer appears on West’s account with a notice from Twitter reading that the post “violated the Twitter Rules.”

    However, other concerning tweets from West’s weekend Twitter spree remain on his page.

    The “Donda” rapper, who legally changed his name to Ye last year, returned to Twitter Friday after nearly two years.

    West had been incessantly posting on Instagram since sparking controversy over the “White Lives Matter” T-shirts he displayed during a Paris show for his Yeezy fashion line, which has drawn fierce criticism within the fashion industry and beyond.

    Meta, Instagram’s parent company, restricted his account after West shared screenshots of an alleged text conversation with Sean Combs on Friday, in which he insinuated that the rapper was being controlled by Jewish people alongside the caption “Jesus is Jew.”

    Instagram deleted the post from West’s page and placed a restriction on the account. A Meta spokesperson said West violated its rules and guidelines, but did not specify which content was specifically removed or how long he would not be able to post on the platform, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

    Upon his return to Twitter, West took aim at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the actions taken with his account, writing, “Look at this Mark… How you gone kick me off instagram” alongside a photo of the two appearing to sing together.

    He received a warm welcome on Twitter from the company’s possible future owner, Elon Musk, who replied to West’s post about Zuckerberg with the message: “welcome back to Twitter, my friend!”

    West’s recent comments have been condemned by Jewish advocacy groups, including the American Jewish Committee, which blasted him for making “incoherent rants laden with racist and antisemitic undertones” in a video on Friday.

    The group’s post specifically mentioned West’s “dangerous” exchange with Combs, as well as his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, in which he claimed former presidential adviser Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, negotiated peace treaties in the Middle East during Donald Trump’s administration for the sole purpose of making money.

    “I just think it was to make money,” West said of Kushner’s work in the region. “I don’t know … I just think that that’s what they’re about is making money. I don’t think that they have the ability to make anything on their own.”

    It’s unclear what further actions Instagram and Twitter will take, but the former platform suspended West’s account for 24 hours in March for violating the company’s policies on hate speech, bullying and harassment after he used a racial slur to describe “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.

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  • Elon Musk’s bumpy road to possibly owning Twitter: A timeline | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s bumpy road to possibly owning Twitter: A timeline | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    A board seat accepted and then rejected. A stunning $44 billion takeover offer with uncertain financing. And a surprise early morning tweet putting the deal on hold, temporarily.

    Even by the standards of Twitter, a company that has known plenty of chaos and dysfunction in its history, the weeks-long effort by billionaire Elon Musk to buy the company has proven to be uniquely tumultuous – and there’s no clear end in sight.

    Should the deal go through, it would place the world’s richest man in charge of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms. The acquisition has the potential to upend not just Twitter itself but politics, media and the tech industry. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO has repeatedly stressed that his goal is to bolster what he calls “free speech” on the platform, by which he means all legal speech that complies with local laws in the markets where Twitter operates. He has also said he would reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump.

    But the attempt by Musk, a wildly successful entrepreneur with a history of erratic behavior, to buy Twitter has been viewed with some skepticism from the start. On the day he made his offer, Musk said: “I’m not sure I’ll actually be able to acquire it.” Some have questioned how he would finance the deal, especially as shares of Tesla

    (TSLA)    , which he’s partially using to back his financing of the Twitter deal, and the broader tech sector have declined in the weeks since.

    After Musk recently said he was temporarily pausing the deal so he could assess the amount of spam and fake accounts, it prompted speculation that the billionaire might be looking to renegotiate the deal – or back out of it entirely. His actions in the days that followed only reinforced that thinking.

    Here is a look back at the many twists and turns in one of the most high-profile tech deals in recent memory.

    Musk starts quietly buying up Twitter shares, building his stake in the company. But it would be months before he disclosed this fact to the public.

    Musk’s stake in Twitter tops 5%, but that fact is not disclosed until the following month. Musk was obligated to disclose his stake within 10 days of crossing the 5% threshold, but waited 21 days to do so. During that time, he continued building up his stake.

    The billionaire begins to make pointed statements about the platform from his account. “Twitter algorithm should be open source,” he wrote, with a poll for users to vote “yes” or “no.”

    The following day, Musk tweets out another poll to his followers: “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?”

    Musk reaches out to Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey to “discuss the future direction of social media,” according to a company filing later put out by the company. The two tech founders are known to have a bit of a billionaire bromance on and off Twitter.

    Twitter’s board and some of its leadership team meet with representatives from Wilson Sonsini, a law firm, and J.P. Morgan to discuss the possibility of Musk joining the company’s board, according a later securities filing. Dorsey is said to have told the board that “he and Mr. Musk were friends,” according to the filing.

    In the meeting, the Twitter board discussed wanting Musk to agree to “‘standstill’ provisions”,” according to the filing. This would effectively “limit his public statements regarding Twitter, including the making of unsolicited public proposals to acquire Twitter (but not private proposals) without the prior consent of the Twitter Board.”

    Musk is revealed to be Twitter’s largest individual shareholder, with a more than 9% stake in the company.

    News of the purchase sends shares of the social media company soaring more than 20% in early trading and kicks off a wave of speculation about how Musk might push for changes on the platform.

    Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces Musk will join Twitter’s board of directors. “Through conversations with Elon in recent weeks, it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board,” Agrawal says in a post on Twitter.

    As part of the appointment, Musk agrees not to acquire more than 14.9% of the company’s shares while he remains on the board. His term on the board is set to go through 2024, according to a regulatory filing.

    Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal (left) and former CEO Jack Dorsey in an undated photo.

    Agrawal announces that Musk has decided not to join the board after all. “I believe this is for the best,” Agrawal writes in a letter to the Twitter team.

    The reversal opens the door for Musk to pursue a greater stake in the company – and frees him to tweet his many thoughts about the company.

    Musk stuns the industry by making an offer to acquire all the shares in Twitter he does not own at a valuation of $41.4 billion. The cash offer represents a 38% premium over the company’s closing price on April 1, the last trading day before Musk disclosed that he had become the company’s biggest shareholder.

    “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy. However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company,” Musk writes in his offer letter. “Twitter has extraordinary potential. I will unlock it.”

    Twitter’s board of directors adopts a “poison pill” provision, a limited-term shareholder rights plan that potentially makes it harder for Musk to acquire the company.

    Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks during the official opening of the new Tesla electric car manufacturing plant on March 22, 2022 near Gruenheide, Germany.

    Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing for the deal, including two debt commitment letters from Morgan Stanley and other unnamed financial institutions and one equity commitment letter from himself, according to a regulatory filing.

    The billionaire also reveals that he has not received a formal response from Twitter a week after his acquisition offer. He said he is “seeking to negotiate” a definite acquisition agreement and “is prepared to begin such negotiations immediately” — an apparent reversal from his statement in his acquisition offer letter that it would be his “best and final” offer.

    Although he is the richest person in the world, much of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, and some followers of the company speculate that it could be challenging for Musk to raise debt against the historically volatile stock.

    Twitter announces that it has agreed to sell itself to Musk in a deal valued at around $44 billion. At a conference later in the day, Musk describes his offer to buy Twitter in characteristically sweeping terms as being about “the future of civilization,” not just making money.

    At an all-hands meeting that afternoon, Twitter employees raise questions about everything from what the deal would mean for their compensation to whether former US President Donald Trump would be let back on the platform.

    Filings reveal Musk sold $8.5 billion of his Tesla stock in the three days after Twitter board agreed to the sale for an average of $883.09 per share. The filings did not disclose the reason for the sale, but Musk appeared to be raising funds to buy Twitter.

    Tesla cars sit in a dealership lot on March 28, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.

    Musk raises another $7 billion in financing for the deal. The new investors include Oracle founder Larry Ellison, cryptocurrency platform Binance and venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, according to a filing.

    Musk aims to increase Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year, according to a New York Times report, citing Musk’s pitch deck presented to investors. To achieve that lofty goal, Musk intends to bolster Twitter’s subscription revenue and build up a payments business while decreasing the company’s reliance on advertising sales, according to the report.

    Musk confirms what many have assumed for weeks: he would reverse Twitter’s Trump ban if his deal to buy the company is completed.

    “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump, I think that was a mistake,” Musk said. “I would reverse the perma-ban. … Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice, it will amplify it among the right and this is why it’s morally wrong and flat out stupid.”

    Former President Donald Trump looks at his phone during a roundtable with governors on the reopening of America's small businesses, in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, June 18, 2020.

    Twitter confirms to CNN Business that the platform is pausing most hiring and backfills, except for “business critical” roles, and pulling back on other non-labor costs ahead of the acquisition. In addition, Twitter says general manager of consumer, Kayvon Beykpour, and revenue product lead, Bruce Falck, are leaving the company.

    Musk tweets that the deal is on hold, linking to a Reuters report from nearly two weeks earlier, about Twitter’s most recent disclosure about its amount of spam and fake accounts. The figure cited in the report, however, is in line with prior quarterly disclosures.

    “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.

    Shares of the social media site plummet after Musk’s announcement, dropping more than 10% at market open. Two hours after announcing the hold, Musk says he remains set on purchasing Twitter. “Still committed to acquisition,” he wrote.

    Later in the day, Musk says his team is testing Twitter’s numbers and “picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate

    Musk tweets out that Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement when the billionaire revealed the platform’s sample size for automated user checks is allegedly just 100 users.

    “Twitter legal just called to complain that I violated their NDA by revealing the bot check sample size is 100! This actually happened,” wrote Musk.

    The standoff over bot accounts continues as Musk exchanges a series of tweets with Agrawal over the issue. After Agrawal carefully explains how Twitter attempts to combat and measure spam accounts, Musk responds with a poop emoji.

    Musk follows up with a somewhat more thoughtful question. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk asked. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter,” he added.

    Musk announces that his acquisition of Twitter “cannot move forward” until he sees more information about the prevalence of spam accounts, claiming that the social media platform falsified numbers in filings. Without citing a source, he claims in a tweet that Twitter is “20% fake/spam accounts” and suggests Twitter’s previous filings with the SEC were misleading.

    Later in the day, Musk posts a poll to his Twitter followers: “Twitter claims that >95% of daily active users are real, unique humans. Does anyone have that experience?” before calling on the SEC to evaluate the platform’s numbers. “Hello @SECGov, anyone home?” Musk tweets, in an apparent attempt to get the regulator to look into the matter.

    In a statement, Twitter says it remains “committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.” Later, the company says it intends to “enforce the merger agreement.”

    In a letter to Twitter’s head of legal, Musk threatens to walk away from his purchase of the platform, alleging that Twitter is “actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” as outlined by the deal.

    In the letter, an attorney for Musk accuses the social media company of breaching the merger agreement by not providing the data he has requested on Twitter spam bots, stating that the lack of information gives him a right “not to consummate the transaction” and “to terminate the merger agreement.”

    Musk moved to terminate the acquisition agreement. A lawyer representing him claimed in a letter to Twitter’s top lawyer that the company is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the deal over its alleged failure to provide all the data Musk says he needs to evaluate the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.

    “For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform,’” the letter reads. “This information is fundamental to Twitter’s business and financial performance and is necessary to consummate the transactions contemplated by the Merger Agreement. … Twitter has failed or refused to provide this information.”

    Twitter was not having it.

    “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,” Twitter board chair Bret Taylor said in a tweet Friday, echoing earlier statements by the company that it planned to follow through with the deal. “We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery.”

    Twitter sued the Tesla billionaire in Delaware court in an attempt to force him to complete the deal.

    The 62-page lawsuit, sprinkled with memes, tweets and a poop emoji, effectively highlighted the bizarre spectacle of the deal from the start. The company paints Musk as a non-serious potential owner — alleging at one point that he has “disdain” for the company, and at another saying, “Musk’s strategy is … a model of bad faith” — while seeking to compel him to become its owner. (Twitter’s board has an obligation to its shareholders to try to see the deal through if they believe it is in their best interest. The dispute could also end in a settlement.)

    Twitter’s lawsuit against Musk over his move to terminate their $44 billion acquisition agreement will go to trial on Oct. 17 and run for five days, a Delaware judge ruled.

    The decision came after Judge Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, who is overseeing the case, previously ruled in Twitter’s favor that the proceedings could be expedited and take place in October. Twitter initially pushed for an October 10th start.

    Musk’s legal team had asked for the trial to take place in 2023. Twitter’s legal team argued it was necessary to expedite the case in order to limit the “harm” to its business and to ensure the deal can be completed before Oct. 24, the “drop dead” date by which the two sides had previously agreed to close the deal.

    Peiter

    Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko testifies before Congress in his first public appearance after his bombshell allegations against the social media company were reported in August by CNN and The Washington Post.

    In a whistleblower disclosure sent to multiple lawmakers and government agencies in July, Zatko accused Twitter of failing to safeguard users’ personal information and of exposing the most sensitive parts of its operation to too many people, including potentially to foreign spies. Zatko — who was Twitter’s head of security from November 2020 until he was fired in January — also alleged company executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, have deliberately misled regulators and the company’s own board about its shortcomings.

    Zatko claimed in his testimony that Twitter is extremely vulnerable to being penetrated and exploited by agents of foreign governments, as well as detailed some of the personal information Twitter collects on users and alleged that the company does not know where the majority of its collected data goes.

    Days earlier, a judge allowed Musk’s legal team to add arguments based on the whistleblower disclosure to its case.

    Musk sends a letter to Twitter proposing to complete the deal as originally signed for $54.20 per share, citing people familiar with the negotiations. News of the letter, revealed in a security filing the next day, sends Twitter stock surging more than 20%, approaching the deal price for the first time in months.

    Such an agreement could bring to an end a contentious, months-long back and forth between Musk and Twitter that has caused massive uncertainty for employees, investors and users of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

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  • Kanye West’s Instagram account restricted, returns to Twitter | CNN

    Kanye West’s Instagram account restricted, returns to Twitter | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    After being suspended by Meta on Friday, Kanye West posted on Twitter for the first time in nearly two years – a move celebrated by Elon Musk, who is in the process of buying the social media network.

    West, who has legally changed his name to Ye, tweeted a photograph of a hat that said 2024. Musk responded with his own tweet, reading “Welcome back to Twitter, my friend!”

    West last posted on Twitter in November 2020, just after the last US presidential election. Following his first tweet on Friday, West posted another one which included a picture of himself with Meta Platforms Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, accusing him of kicking him off Instagram.

    In a statement to CNN Business on Saturday, a Meta spokesperson said content from West’s account was deleted for violating the company’s policies and a restriction was placed on his account. It did not specify what was objectionable about the content or what kind of restriction was imposed.

    The move comes after West shared a since-deleted post that included a screenshot of a text conversation with Sean “Diddy” Combs that was criticized by the American Jewish Committee as “anti-Jewish.”

    West was previously suspended by Instagram for 24 hours in March for directing a racial slur at “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah.

    Earlier this week, West stirred controversy for wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt and dressing several Black models in shirts with the same phrase, deemed a “hate slogan” by the Anti-Defamation League, at his fashion show in Paris.

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  • Elon Musk’s Private Messages with Billionaire Pals

    Elon Musk’s Private Messages with Billionaire Pals

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    In Musk v. Twitter, a part of the business life of the richest man in the world is revealed. 

    Private messages exchanged with his inner circle immerse us into his process when he conceives an idea.

    The messages were released by the Delaware Chancery Court as part of the proceedings between the two parties. 

    The revelation of these private messages is undoubtedly one of the reasons which led the billionaire to put back on the table his offer to acquire the platform for $44 billion. And to demand that Twitter  (TWTR)  drop its legal action in exchange.

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  • Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition isn’t a done deal yet | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition isn’t a done deal yet | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Elon Musk appears to be closer to completing his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter than at any point since he first said the deal was “on hold” nearly five months ago. But it’s not a done deal yet.

    Musk earlier this week sent a letter to Twitter

    (TWTR)     proposing to move forward with the acquisition at the original price of $54.20 per share and suggesting the litigation over his initial effort to exit the deal be dropped. Twitter

    (TWTR)     replied saying it had received the letter and plans to close the deal on the originally agreed upon terms.

    But Twitter and Musk on Wednesday had yet to reach an agreement on ending the litigation, which would avert the trial that’s set to take place in less than two weeks, a person familiar with the negotiations told CNN. The source added it was unclear if the two parties would reach an agreement on Wednesday.

    The judge overseeing the case on Wednesday also filed a letter saying that neither party has moved to stay the proceedings in the case and “I, therefore, continue to press on toward our trial set to begin on October 17.”

    As it considers Musk’s revived acquisition proposal, Twitter must also think about how to avoid getting stuck in a situation where the billionaire pulls more shenanigans, and drags the process out even longer. That could mean continuing the legal fight, for now, or adding new provisions to the original contract.

    If Twitter does decide to play ball with Musk, the process could move fairly quickly — anywhere from days to weeks — because the deal already has the sign-off of regulators as well as Twitter shareholders and board members.

    For months, Musk has argued that he should be able to walk away from the deal because Twitter has misrepresented the number of bots and spam accounts on its platform, and later added additional claims from a whistleblower disclosure. Musk’s letter is likely a signal that the Tesla CEO and his lawyers had begun to doubt the likelihood of their success at trial, legal experts say.

    If Musk was going to end up being forced to buy Twitter either way, he may have decided it was better to do that before going to trial and presenting public defenses likely to say, in essence, “‘Twitter is such a horrible company that no one is going to want to work for it, own it, or do business with it,’” said Columbia Law School professor Eric Talley. If Musk had lost at trial, he could have also been forced to pay interest to Twitter for delaying the deal, ultimately making the acquisition more expensive, Talley said.

    Musk may have also “weighed the considerable inconvenience and arguable misery of his upcoming deposition, and decided enough was enough,” according to Widener University Delaware Law School associate professor Paul Regan. “That could also include a sober assessment from his own expert witnesses about the strength of the evidence to support his claim that Twitter significantly underestimated the number of bots or fake accounts.”

    Musk had been set to be deposed starting Thursday, according to a notice of deposition made public earlier this week. However, court filings released Wednesday suggest that Musk may have been trying to avoid deposition. In a letter to the judge dated Sept. 27, lawyers for Twitter said that Musk had agreed “after long resistance” to a two-day deposition starting on Sept. 28, but pulled out, citing “Covid exposure risk.” Twitter’s lawyers immediately sent a new notice to depose Musk starting on Oct. 6 “after any theoretical concern about exposure risk could justify delaying the deposition … Mr. Musk has refused to respond.”

    It’s not clear whether Musk and Twitter have now agreed to proceed with the deposition.

    Musk’s offer to proceed with the deal may not be enough to stop his deposition or the litigation from continuing. In his letter, Musk said he would move forward with closing the deal provided that the Delaware Chancery Court stays the proceedings. But Twitter may have little incentive to agree to such terms.

    “Twitter is probably going to say, look, we definitely want to engage you on this … but we’ve still got a trial on Oct. 17 and until this is signed, sealed and delivered, we’ve got to get ready for trial,” Talley said.

    Twitter has a few potential avenues to help ensure that Musk really does follow through with closing the deal this time, in addition to keeping up the pressure of the continuing litigation. Most likely, Talley said, the two sides could agree that Musk must deposit some portion of the $44 billion payment into an escrow account before hitting pause on the trial, which would immediately be paid to Twitter if Musk tries to pull out again.

    Perhaps the biggest wildcard as the two sides try to negotiate a deal is the lenders, chiefly Morgan Stanley, who agreed to provide $13 billion in debt financing to help Musk pay for the deal and will now have to pony up in order for the deal to close. Twitter is arguably even less valuable now than when the deal was first struck, after Musk has spent months making claims about its flaws and following broader social media and digital advertising market declines.

    “I have been waiting for the lenders to suddenly show up and say they’re no longer willing to fund the deal … we don’t know exactly where they are on this,” Talley said.

    It could be yet another factor that complicates the negotiations. However, like Musk, the lenders do have some legal obligations that could make it hard for them to walk away. And ultimately, if all the pieces are in place, experts expect Twitter to say yes to Musk’s deal.

    “I suspect that [Twitter’s] board will agree to suspend the litigation and accept the deal,” said Vanderbilt University finance professor Josh White. “The very public saga has certainly taken a toll on them and Twitter employees. It is best for all parties to finish the deal and make a quick and seamless transition.”

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  • The Twitter-Musk trial is now on pause | CNN Business

    The Twitter-Musk trial is now on pause | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    The judge overseeing the acquisition dispute between Elon Musk and Twitter on Thursday ruled to pause the legal proceedings until Oct. 28 following a request from the Tesla CEO, meaning the trial that was set to begin Oct. 17 will not go ahead as planned.

    Twitter had opposed Musk’s motion to stay the proceedings and raised concerns that he might not follow through on his word to quickly close the deal.

    “If the transaction does not close by 5 p.m. on October 28, 2022, the parties are instructed to contact me by email that evening to obtain November 2022 trial dates,” the judge, Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick, said in the order.

    Lawyers for Elon Musk on Thursday filed a motion to stay the legal proceedings in its dispute with Twitter and to remove from the court’s calendar the trial that had been set to begin Oct. 17, noting “changed circumstances that have effectively mooted this action,” according to a Thursday court filing.

    The filing — which says the stay is “pending the closing of the transaction” — comes after Musk earlier this week proposed proceeding with the $44 billion acquisition of Twitter at the originally agreed upon terms after having spent months trying to get out of the deal.

    The filing states that Musk is “willing to close the transaction at $54.20, the Debt Financing parties are working cooperatively to fund the close, and closing is expected on or around October 28.”

    But the filing also alludes to resistance from Twitter to halt the legal proceedings. “Twitter will not take yes for an answer. Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation,” according to the letter.

    Lawyers for Twitter issued a sharp response to Musk’s filing. “The obstacle to terminating this litigation is not, as Defendants say, that Twitter is unwilling to take yes for an answer,” the letter states. “The obstacle is that Defendants still refuse to accept their contractual obligations.”

    It notes that for months, Musk has been attempting to exit the deal and “now, on the eve of trial, Defendants declare they intend to close after all. ‘Trust us,’ they say, ‘we mean it this time.’”

    “Until Defendants commit to close as required, Twitter is entitled to its day in Court,” Twitter’s letter states. “Defendants can and should close next week. Until they do, this action is not moot and should be brought to trial.”

    The back-and-forth offers the clearest indication yet that Musk’s financing may now be the central issue in the dispute between the Tesla CEO and Twitter over halting the legal proceedings and completing the deal. Musk has previously said he would pay for the acquisition through a mix of debt commitments from financial institutions, equity financing from investors and his own assets.

    But legal experts have raised concerns that debt financiers may now want to pull out of the deal in light of recent changes to the debt market and declines in value of social media companies. Twitter, according to experts, would likely want to maintain the litigation as pressure on Musk unless he agrees to close the deal with or without the debt financing.

    In the Thursday filing, Musk’s legal team stated that Twitter has resisted a stay based on concerns that Musk has made his offer to close the deal contingent on the receipt of the debt financing, and that payment could fall through. “Counsel for the debt financing parties has advised that each of their clients is prepared to honor its obligations,” Musk’s filing states.

    The filing asks the court to stay the proceedings and order Twitter to complete the deal.

    “Proceeding toward trial is not only an enormous waste of party and judicial resources, it will undermine the ability of the parties to close the transaction,” the filing states. “Instead of allowing the parties to turn their focus to securing the Debt Financing necessary to consummate the transaction and preparing for a transition of the business, the parties will instead remain distracted by completing discovery and an unnecessary trial.”

    In its response letter, Twitter’s lawyers state that Musk’s team has refused “to commit to any closing date.” It added that a representative for one of the banks set to lend to Musk testified Thursday morning that “Mr. Musk has yet to send them a borrowing notice and has not otherwise communicated to them that he intends to close the transaction, let alone on any particular timeline.”

    Twitter’s lawyers added: ‘Defendants should be arranging to close on Monday, October 10.”

    Earlier Thursday, lawyers for Musk and Twitter agreed to postpone the Tesla CEO’s deposition in the court fight, a source familiar with the negotiations told CNN. Musk’s deposition had been set to begin Thursday, per a notice filed earlier this week. It’s not clear whether a new date has been set for Musk’s deposition, but Twitter could end up pushing to complete it early next week if a deal is not reached.

    As of Wednesday, the two sides had yet to reach a deal to close the acquisition, a separate source told CNN. Delaware Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the judge who is overseeing the litigation, said in a Wednesday court filing that neither side had filed to stay the proceedings and she was continuing to prepare for trial to begin on Oct. 17.

    On Thursday, McCormick filed a letter to both sides laying out deadlines for responding to discovery motions, noting that the “trial is fast approaching.”

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  • Musk lawyers say Twitter refusing new $44B bid for company

    Musk lawyers say Twitter refusing new $44B bid for company

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    Elon Musk’s lawyers said Thursday that Twitter is refusing to accept the Tesla billionaire’s renewed $44 billion bid for the social media company, and that they are requesting a Delaware court halt an upcoming trial.

    Musk made a renewed offer to take over to company earlier this week, hoping to end a protracted legal dispute that began when Musk tried to back out of the April deal and Twitter sued.

    Representatives for Twitter did not immediately respond to messages for comment by the Associated Press.

    Twitter said earlier this week that it intends to close the deal at the agreed-upon price, but the two sides are still booked for an Oct. 17 trial in Delaware over Musk’s earlier efforts to terminate the deal. On Wednesday, the judge presiding over the case said she will continue to press on toward the trial because, at the time, neither side had formally moved to stop it.

    Musk’s attorneys said the trial should be adjourned to leave more time for Musk to secure the financing.

    “Twitter will not take yes for an answer,” said the court filing signed by Musk attorney Edward Micheletti. “Astonishingly, they have insisted on proceeding with this litigation, recklessly putting the deal at risk and gambling with their stockholders’ interests.”

    Since Twitter sued Musk to force him to complete the purchase after he tried to back out four months ago, it is unlikely the San Francisco-based company — whose shareholders have voted to approve the deal — will walk away from the agreement.

    Rather, it’s likely Twitter is seeking assurances from Musk’s side that this time he’s serious and won’t walk away again.

    Bloomberg reported earlier that the deal has hit a snag because Musk now maintains his purchase is contingent on receiving financing, which was not a condition of his initial offer. 

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  • How would Elon Musk change Twitter?

    How would Elon Musk change Twitter?

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    Elon Musk’s turbulent romance with Twitter may finally be heading to the altar, with the world’s richest person now close to consummating a deal for the social media platform he first tried to buy in the spring for $44 billion. 

    Musk appears to have plenty of ideas for turning around the beleaguered company, but he has his work cut out for him. Twitter remains controversial, with conservatives accusing it of censorship, while liberals say it turns a blind eye to abuse and harassment. Users of the service bemoan the widespread presence of bots on the platform. Perhaps most uncertain is Musk’s ability and willingness to lead Twitter, which faces major competitive and financial pressures. 

    “The easy part was buying Twitter, the hard part’s going to be transforming it,” said Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Wedbush. “It’s been a third-tier social media platform. Monetization has been extremely difficult. I see a lot of challenges ahead. And then there’s concern that he’s juggling too many balls at the same time.”

    Leadership void

    If the deal goes through, current CEO Parag Agrawal is likely to depart. He and Musk have publicly clashed, and the latter has texted about his dissatisfaction with the Twitter chief, as revealed in messages made public last week. Twitter’s former security head, Peiter Zatko, told the Senate last month that Agrawal ignored huge lapses in security, leading Sen. Chuck Grassley to call for the CEO’s ouster. 

    As to who could lead Twitter, experts are non-commital, with one caveat: It can’t be Musk.

    “He’s the worst guy to put in the chief executive role,” said William Klepper, director of executive education at Columbia Business School. “He’s an inventor, he’s not a manager. He’s kind of like a loose cannon, but he’s a genius.” 

    The ideal leader, Klepper said, would be someone who’s led a startup to a mature stage and who has experience engineering similar turnarounds at other companies, along with a healthy tolerance for chaos.  


    Twitter whistleblower testifies to Senate

    02:26

    “Would you want to be in an organization that’s in decline, that’s sold itself to a new leader who has a track record of being volatile, but extremely innovative?” he added. “That environment needs to retain as much good talent as it can and invite people who are open to change, and Musk is going to have to articulate his vision.”

    Tweeting for users

    Once Twitter is a private company, it will be relieved of some pressure to churn out profits quarter after quarter to appease Wall Street. That’s a positive, since the platform has seen flagging interest from users since the 2019-2020 electoral cycle, according to eMarketer. The marketing intelligence company predicts Twitter’s user base will shrink slightly this year and continue to decline over the next few years.

    But Musk’s involvement could keep the most loyal Tweeters on board. Polling from Ipsos in April suggested that heavy users were the most positive about Musk’s takeover, with a majority believing it would improve the amount of “free speech” on the platform. 

    Notably, Musk has promised to reinstate Donald Trump to the platform, a move that would surely bring back many of the former president’s fans while pushing others to leave Twitter.

    Creating an “everything app” 

    In a few years, Twitter under Musk could be much bigger and more features. He previously said he wants the platform, which now has roughly 238 million regular users, to have 1 billion users and expand aggressively abroad. 

    On Tuesday, Musk again suggested expanding the platform’s services, tweeting: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” 

    Musk has long touted the idea of a “super app. In a June town hall with Twitter employees, he spoke favorably of WeChat — an app popular in China that is used for everything from hailing a ride to buying groceries to chatting with friends. 

    “You basically live on WeChat in China because it’s so usable and helpful to daily life, and I think if we can achieve that, or even get close to that at Twitter, it would be an immense success,” he said. 

    In a presentation Musk sent around in May, he proposed adding a payment platform to Twitter and adding a subscription feature, while moving to boost overall revenue fivefold to $26 billion, according to the New York Times. He also projected that the platform would have 930 billion users by 2028, the Times reported.

    Buyer’s remorse?

    For Musk, however, the first step in revitalizing Twitter would involve repairing the damage caused by his monthslong public feud with the company.

    In Ives’ view, Musk agreed to proceed with the merger to avoid a likely loss in his legal battle to exit the deal, with the case set to commence later this month in the Delaware Court of Chancery. That suggests Musk’s attitude could be the biggest hurdle to rehabilitating Twitter

    “The writing was on the wall,” Ives said. “He was going to lose in Delaware. He would have ended up in the same situation, owning Twitter but with a lot more public embarrassment.” 

    Added Ives, “He now owns a house that he didn’t want to own.”

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  • Elon Musk’s texts show how his relationship with Twitter went sideways | CNN Business

    Elon Musk’s texts show how his relationship with Twitter went sideways | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Days before publicly announcing his investment in Twitter, Elon Musk texted with Jack Dorsey. The former Twitter CEO suggested he no longer believed in the company he founded, according to new court filings in the legal battle between Musk and Twitter.

    Musk had begun quietly building up a large stake in Twitter

    (TWTR)     in January. In a text on March 26, Dorsey told Musk, “a new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. This is why I left.”

    Musk, an avid Twitter user who was often seen as friendly with Dorsey, responded by asking what the platform should look like. Dorsey explained his view that it should be “an open source protocol” and not rely on “an advertising model,” as Twitter currently does. Dorsey added that Twitter “should never have been a company,” saying, “that was the original sin.”

    Musk expressed interest in advancing the idea. In a later text that day, he said: “I think it’s worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that’s decentralized.”

    The private exchanges between Dorsey and Musk are among the many text messages released in court filings this week, offering new insight into the Tesla CEO’s agreement to buy Twitter for $44 billion and his attempt later to back away from the deal. The messages also offer a unique window into Silicon Valley deal-making, as a rotating cast of billionaires and industry execs — from Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff to members of the Murdoch family — slide into Musk’s text messages to discuss Twitter and, in some cases, casually offer financial backing for the deal.

    In the days following his private chat with Dorsey, Musk met with Twitter’s board and leadership. On April 5, Musk agreed to join the company’s board, a move that Dorsey championed publicly and privately. In a text exchange with Musk later that day, Dorsey expressed confidence in Parag Agrawal, his successor as Twitter’s CEO. Agrawal also expressed excitement in private texts about Musk joining the board.

    But the relationship between Musk and the Twitter CEO appeared to sour quickly.

    On April 9, Musk tweeted a question: “Is Twitter dying?” Agrawal followed up that day with a text letting Musk know such comments would make the CEO’s life difficult.

    20220930-HP-Quotes-Twitter_2

    “You are free to tweet ‘is Twitter dying?’ or anything else about Twitter,” Agrawal said in the text to Musk, “but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I’d like you to provide [your] perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how [it’s] hurting our ability to do work … I’d like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don’t get distracted, but we aren’t there right now.”

    Musk responded tersely: “What did you get done this week?” In two follow-up texts, he rescinded his agreement to join the board, saying, “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time.” He added: “Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

    In a separate exchange on the same day with Twitter’s board chair Bret Taylor, Musk said: “Fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won’t work,” Musk said. He added in a follow up text: “Drastic action is needed.”

    20220930-HP-Quotes-Twitter_3

    Musk and Twitter announced an acquisition agreement on April 25. A little more than two months later, Musk said he wanted out of the deal, citing concerns about the number of bot and spam accounts on the platform. Twitter then sued Musk to compel him to follow through with the deal.

    The two sides are set to go to trial over the deal next month.

    After Musk’s initial investment in Twitter was made public, and with speculation mounting about a possible takeover deal, the billionaire began to receive input from some prominent outside voices.

    In a text on April 23, two days before the deal was announced, the controversial podcast host Joe Rogan said to Elon Musk: “I REALLY hope you get Twitter. If you do, we should throw one hell of a party.”

    Musk also messaged with bankers and potential investors such as his brother, Kimbal Musk, and Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, in an effort to line up financing for the deal, as well as potential leaders for the new company if his acquisition bid succeeded. Musk and investor Jason Calacanis discussed the latter becoming a strategic advisor or board member. Someone identified in Musk’s texts as “BL Lee” suggested venture capitalist Bill Gurley as Twitter’s new CEO.

    In the days after the acquisition deal was announced, Musk discussed ideas for the platform with a host of characters, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and tech investor David Sacks. Sacks suggested that former Michigan congressman Justin Amash should be involved in Twitter’s content moderation efforts.

    Musk’s banker Michael Grimes suggested crypto billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried as an investor who could also help advance Musk’s vision of a Twitter built on the blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies.

    The new filing also includes a text from Musk to Grimes that was referenced in a hearing earlier this month by Twitter lawyers, who claim that Musk exited the deal not because of his worries about bots but because he was concerned about the stock market decline and geopolitical issues, neither of which would be legitimate reasons to terminate the agreement.

    In a May 8 message to Grimes, Musk said that the deal process should “slow down just a few days” ahead of a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin the following day that many worried could escalate the war in Ukraine to other countries. “It won’t make sense to buy Twitter if we’re headed into WW3,” Musk said.

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  • Musk deal could see Trump back on Twitter by midterms | CNN Business

    Musk deal could see Trump back on Twitter by midterms | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk’s decision this week to once again move forward with his deal to acquire Twitter could see the return to the platform of former President Donald Trump, once the world’s most influential tweeter.

    While Trump has previously said he would stay on his own social media platform, Truth Social, rather than return to Twitter, the former president may find the lure of tens of millions of Twitter followers difficult to resist.

    “I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

    Despite agreeing to take over the company earlier this year, Musk soured on the idea over the summer and spent months battling to get out of it. Twitter sued him to force him to complete the deal. His U-turn and decision to go ahead with buying the company came to light in a securities filing Tuesday, just two weeks before he and Twitter are due to go to court.

    Twitter said Tuesday it was intent on closing the deal, opening the possibility that Musk could take over the company within weeks, if the deal is completed. The company’s board and shareholders had previously approved the deal, but uncertainties remain. Twitter will have to decide how to play ball with Musk, taking into account his prior waffling on the deal — a negotiation process that could come down to how to ensure the world’s richest man will actually cut a check this time.

    If the deal goes through, it could soon return to Trump what was once his preferred social media platform. Trump, whose tweets as president often drove the agenda in Washington, DC, had almost 90 million followers before he was banned permanently by the platform two days after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. (It’s unclear whether Trump would automatically regain his followers if unbanned.) Twitter said it made the decision “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    Speaking in May, a few weeks after he began his bid to take over Twitter, Musk argued, “Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice, it will amplify it among the right and this is why it’s morally wrong and flat out stupid.” (Musk has also said he’s against permanent bans more broadly, which could open the door for far-right personalities and conspiracy theorists to return to the platform.)

    Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter when the company banned Trump but has since left the company, responded to Musk’s comments saying he agreed that there should not be permanent bans. He said Trump’s ban was a “business decision” and it “shouldn’t have been.”

    Musk’s comments came just as Trump was about to begin posting on his own social media platform, Truth Social. Trump told Fox News at the time that he would not return to Twitter, even if he were allowed.

    “I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News. He added, “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on Truth.”

    But relations between the pair seem to have soured since, with the men publicly trading barbs over the summer. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.” 

    Trump has not commented on Musk’s decision to revive the deal this week.

    Trump’s potential return to Twitter comes just a few months before he could also be allowed to return to Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. Unlike Twitter, which said it had permanently banned Trump, Meta (formerly Facebook) said it would review its ban after two years – meaning the former president could be returning to its platforms as soon as January 2023, just as the next presidential race is set to begin.

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  • Elon Musk proposes closing Twitter takeover deal

    Elon Musk proposes closing Twitter takeover deal

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    Elon Musk proposes closing Twitter takeover deal – CBS News


    Watch CBS News



    Elon Musk has again changed his mind about buying Twitter and now wants to go through with the $44 billion purchase.

    Be the first to know

    Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting.


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  • Who won the Musk-Twitter fight? Lawyers | CNN Business

    Who won the Musk-Twitter fight? Lawyers | CNN Business

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    This story is part of CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free, here.


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    Well, well, well. Look who’s asking to buy Twitter for the exact same price he agreed to pay for it four months ago…

    In a major reversal just days before he was scheduled to give a deposition, Elon Musk offered to complete his acquisition of Twitter under the original terms of the deal both sides agreed to back in May.

    A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the company received Musk’s offer and reiterated its intention to close the deal for the original price of $54.20 per share, or $44 billion.

    It wasn’t clear when, or if, Twitter would accept the offer. The case could still go to trial.

    Twitter’s shares were halted twice on Tuesday, and jumped more than 20% when they resumed trading.

    Let’s step back: Even for a deal that has been defined by unexpected twists and turns, Tuesday’s development is a doozy. A settlement before trial isn’t unusual, but a settlement for the exact same price is.

    Should the deal move forward, it’d be a something of a pyrrhic victory for Twitter. The company will have succeeded in securing the best possible price for shareholders (good work if you can get it). But it would also be handing the car keys over to a mercurial billionaire who’s shown little understanding of how media companies work and whose history on the platform is that of an unfiltered troll.

    Musk would be the clear loser here, having to tap into billions of his own wealth to finance a deal for a company he no longer wants.

    The winners in all of this? The lawyers.

    Twitter sued Musk in July to try force him to complete the deal, setting off months of legal back forth between some of the nation’s most powerful white-shoe law firms.

    Twitter tapped Wachtell, Rosen, Lipton and Katz — an elite New York practice where partners earn about $8 million a year, according to Bloomberg. On Musk’s side is another Wall Street power firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

    The bill for both sides combined could easily reach the low- to mid- eight figures, said Peter Ladig, a Delaware lawyer with extensive experience in the court where the Musk-Twitter battle would take place. (“Eight figures” is just a mind-boggling way to phrase the concept of $10 million. Minimum.)

    “It appears that Twitter is throwing everything they have at this in terms of bodies, and that adds up quickly,” Ladig told me. “You’re talking probably 20 lawyers at least, I would guess. The amount of data is massive.”

    The timing of Musk’s latest pivot can’t be ignored. He was due to sit for a deposition starting Thursday, ahead of a trial scheduled for October 17.

    “That is often the leverage point,” Ladig said. “When it comes down to the CEO… being deposed, lots of cases settle on the eve of that deposition.”

    There’s a lot to unpack here, and my colleague Clare Duffy is all over it.

    For reasons no one really seems to understand, stocks rose sharply again Tuesday.

    The Dow has soared more than 1,500 points in the past two days, coming out of bear territory and rising up above the 30,000 milestone.

    “It almost feels like a panic rally. The market mood got way too sour and people started to jump in,” said Callie Cox, US investment analyst with eToro. “But this rally feels random. It’s great to see stocks go up but these moves are a little disorienting.”

    My colleague Paul R. La Monica has more.

    If you’d made the past few days at Credit Suisse into a movie, you might have opened with scene-setting shots of stock and bond traders looking pained, hands in their heads, neckties askew. There’d be scenes of frantic bankers spending all weekend on the phone with clients, assuring them everything is fine. A CEO would slowly sip a glass of Scotch, reading over a memo assuring employees the leadership is doing everything it can to avoid layoffs…

    As a connoisseur of the Wall Street-in-crisis genre, I would have been all in.

    But it looks like the real-life drama at the Swiss bank may not yield the cinematic crash we’ve come to expect in the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis.

    Here’s the thing: Speculation that Credit Suisse was about to collapse sparked a selloff on Monday, with the bank’s shares hitting a record low. It took no time at all for investors and commentators to start speculating about whether Credit Suisse was the new Lehman Brothers — the first big Wall Street domino to fall in the subprime mortgage crisis, almost exactly 14 years ago.

    That fear is understandable. When faced with a complex, scary problem, we tend to look to the past for solutions, hoping we can see now what we couldn’t see then.

    But, as my colleague Julia Horowitz writes, the hand-wringing over Credit Suisse says more about the market’s ~mood~ right now than it does about the bank’s financial position.

    Credit Suisse has been battered by years’ worth of scandals and fines. And there are still risks ahead. But it’s far from bankrupt. One analyst even described Credit Suisse’s liquidity position as “healthy.”

    That’s partly why, by Tuesday, the panic was subsiding. Credit Suisse shares bounced back, along with the broader stock market.

    “I do not think this is a ‘Lehman moment,’” said Mohamed El-Erian, an adviser to Allianz, on CNBC Monday.

    BIG PICTURE

    It’s not hard to see why investors would be triggered by Credit Suisse’s latest wobbling, triggered by a memo from the CEO that, rather than assuaging nerves, made people worry the bank was on even less solid footing than it seemed.

    Combine that anxiety with the related anxiety of a looming global recession and chaos in UK bond markets and you’ve got yourself a big ol’ anxiety smoothie.

    Everyone on Wall Street wants to get ahead of the next big risk, remembering that it doesn’t always come from where you’d expect. (Few saw the dangers in the subprime mortgage trade that predicated the implosion of the housing market in 2008, for example.)

    The devil is always in what you don’t know, and Credit Suisse, for all we know, could be exposed to risks that the market doesn’t know about, according to José-Luis Peydró, a professor of finance at Imperial College Business School.

    The silver lining: We didn’t emerge from 2008 without some guard rails. Large banks have much higher capital requirements to meet now than they did before the crisis, which should reduce the risk of contagion from any one failure.

    Credit Suisse is far from insolvent, but even if things do go from bad to worse, it’d be unlikely to take the whole ship down with it.

    Enjoying Nightcap? Sign up and you’ll get all of this, plus some other funny stuff we liked on the internet, in your inbox every night. (OK, most nights — we believe in a four-day work week around here.)

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  • In major reversal, Elon Musk again proposes buying Twitter at full price | CNN Business

    In major reversal, Elon Musk again proposes buying Twitter at full price | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk on Monday sent a letter to Twitter proposing to follow through with his deal to buy the company at the originally agreed upon price of $54.20 per share, according to a securities filing on Tuesday.

    In the letter, Musk said he would proceed with the acquisition on the original terms, pending receipt of the debt financing for the deal and provided that the Delaware Chancery Court stay the litigation proceedings over Musk’s initial attempt to pull out of the deal and adjourn the upcoming trial over the dispute.

    A Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that the company received Musk’s letter and reiterated its previous statement that the “intention of the Company is to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”

    Musk on Tuesday night tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.”

    News of the letter was first reported by Bloomberg earlier on Tuesday. Twitter

    (TWTR)     stock was halted twice, the second time for news pending. After the stock resumed trading, it was up more than 20%, topping $51 a share and approaching the agreed upon deal price for the first time in months.

    The news comes as the the two sides have been preparing to head to trial in two weeks over Musk’s attempt to terminate of the $44 billion acquisition agreement, which Twitter had sued him to complete. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal had been set to be deposed by Musk’s lawyers on Monday, and Twitter’s lawyers had planned to depose Musk starting on Thursday.

    It also follows the release on Friday of a trove of Musk’s personal text messages about the deal. The messages offered a look at the cast of Silicon Valley insiders and billionaires — from Larry Ellison to members of the Murdoch family — who contacted him to weigh in on and, in some cases, offer financing for the deal.

    Such an agreement could bring to an end a contentious, months-long back and forth between Musk and Twitter that has caused massive uncertainty for employees, investors and users of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.

    The ball will now be in Twitter’s court to determine how to respond to Musk’s proposal. Twitter’s board will likely agree to move forward with closing the deal, according to Josh White, assistant professor of finance at Vanderbilt University.

    “The very public saga has certainly taken a toll on them and Twitter employees,” White said. “It is best for all parties to finish the deal and make a quick and seamless transition. I suspect it will close quickly.”

    However, Twitter may not want to hit pause on the litigation, per Musk’s proposal, until the deal is officially closed, according to Columbia Law School professor Eric Talley. The company may want to proceed with the litigation process as it negotiates with Musk, in case his offer to complete the deal falls through again.

    “Twitter is probably going to say, ‘look, we definitely want to engage you on this … But we’ve still got a trial on Oct 17 and until this is signed, sealed and delivered, we’ve got to get ready for trial,” Talley said.

    The saga began in April when Musk revealed he had become Twitter’s largest shareholder. Over the next several months, Musk accepted and then backed out of an offer to sit on Twitter’s board, threatened a hostile takeover of the company, signed an agreement to buy the company, started raising concerns about bots on the platform, attempted to terminate the agreement, was sued by Twitter to follow through with the deal and added claims from a Twitter whistleblower to his argument.

    Musk initially moved to terminate the deal citing claims that the company has misstated the number of spam and fake bot accounts on the platform. Twitter claimed that Musk had breached the deal and was using bots as a pretext to exit a deal he’d gotten buyer’s remorse over after the broader market decline, which also hurt Tesla stock and, by extension, Musk’s personal wealth.

    Throughout the back and forth, Twitter had maintained that it planned to follow through with deal at the price and terms originally agreed upon.

    Many legal experts have said that Twitter has the stronger argument heading into court, and that Musk would a face a significant burden in trying to prove that the company had made materially misleading statements in its securities filings or in the deal contract.

    The lawsuit was the final hurdle remaining in the way of the deal getting closed, after Twitter shareholders last month voted to approve the deal. The deal had originally been set to close this month.

    With news that the deal could end up closing, attention may once again shift to what Musk’s control could mean for the social media platform.

    Musk has previously suggested a series of potential changes to Twitter, the most significant of which could be returning former President Donald Trump to the platform and doing away with permanent account bans. Musk has also said he wants to make Twitter more open to “free speech” and could change its content moderation policies.

    Twitter employees have also raised questions about what a Musk takeover could mean for benefits such as remote working and parental leave.

    Twitter General Counsel Sean Edgett said in a message to employees Tuesday that the company had received Musk’s letter and planned to close the deal at $54.20 per share. “I will continue to keep you posted on significant updates, but in the meantime, thank you for your patience as we work through this on the legal side,” he said, according to a copy of the message obtained by CNN.

    Blind, an anonymous private forum popular among Twitter employees, was abuzz on Tuesday amid reports about Musk’s reversal. Reaction on the forum was overwhelmingly negative, according to screenshots provided to CNN by a Twitter employee.

    “Cue the layoffs,” one comment read. Several other employees expressed fear that Musk would roll back Twitter’s benefits package, including the severance offered to departing employees.

    –CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan contributed to this report.

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