🦜💸 With Enough Money, You Can Buy Anything
Happy Hump Day everyone,
Another jammed packed edition of Hump Days. This past week, GM is turning their Corvette electric, Top U.S. Officials Meet with Zelensky in Kyiv, CNN+ is Shutting Down After Only a Few Weeks, Netflix Explores a Version with Ads, and U.S. Home Prices hit a New All Time Record.
Also, if you have any questions, reply to this e-mail and we’ll answer as many of your questions in a new Sunday edition of Hump Days!
Enjoy this week’s edition!
- Humphrey & Rickie
In the Markets
Featured Story
Last edition of Hump Days we gave an update on the Elon Musk-Twitter situation but a week since Twitter announced their ‘poison pill’ plan to defend against Musk’s hostile takeover, Twitter accepted Musk’s initial $44B cash offer to buy the company and take it private.
In a statement that was included with the announcement, Musk said
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trusts, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans”
From the outside, it seems that there are two motivators for Musk wanting to buy Twitter:
#1. To bring back freedom of speech on the platform
#2. Take Twitter private to make changes within the company/product
Addressing #1, I know most people’s first thought is “Oh (no/yes)! Elon is going to bring back Trump!” However, with the launch of his own social media platform back in February 2022, Trump has already announced that he won’t be coming back to Twitter and will be, instead, staying on Truth Social.
Where I think Musk could potentially take the freedom of speech aspect would be to make the platform more closely tied with your real-life identity through a more robust verification process. What this would do would eliminate anonymity on the platform so people have real-life consequences to what they say online.
Additionally, Twitter could implement a “karma”-like feature, similar to Reddit, which gives users the ability to upvote and downvote tweets and contributes to a cumulative score that seems to keep Twitter a more civil and positive space.
As for taking Twitter private, I have an analogy that I’d like to paraphrase:
Quarterly reporting for public companies is like having a plant, pulling it out of the soil every quarter to take a look, and then wondering why it’s not growing faster.
By taking Twitter private, Musk allows himself greater flexibility to plan and invest in the long-run instead of prioritizing for short-term quarterly profits. It’s unclear as to what Musk plans to change or where he’ll start but something that should be obvious within the first few months is a decline in the amount of bots. When Twitter was a public company, the bots added to engagement numbers and were included in usage statistics on the platform which made it seem a lot more attractive to outside investors. A private company is less concerned with inflating usage numbers and can therefore take the hit in engagement numbers in return for improved user experience.
I’m genuinely optimistic for where Twitter goes from here as a private company! It’ll be really exciting to see changes on the platform as they happen.
Weekly News Roundup
Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Buyout Deal (CNBC)
Twitter’s board accepted Elon Musk’s $44B cash offer at $54.20/share to buy the social media company and take it private. Musk has indicated that his primary interest in Twitter has to do with what he views as the company’s censorship of free speech.
HY: I created a Tik Tok on the full timeline of this purchase, so be sure to check that out. In the meantime, we need to wait and see how this all plays out within the Twitter platform.
Tesla Expects Gigafactories to Run Below Capacity Through 2022 (TC)
Tesla announced Wednesday that a prolonged supply chain crunch has limited production capacity at its factories and expects the pain to continue through the rest of the year. Tesla included the warning in its first-quarter earnings report, which beat analyst expectations and sent shares higher in after-hours trading.
RH: I don’t think I’m getting my Cybertruck for a while…
NFTs Stolen After Bored Ape Yacht Club Instagram, Discord Hacked (CoinDesk)
Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Instagram account and Discord server were both hacked on Monday with a fake “mint” link being sent out to followers. The wallets of those who clicked the link have now been compromised, with a series of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes being transferred to new wallets by the hackers. An estimated 54 NFTs valued at ~$13.7M have been stolen.
HY: This happens a lot! I know someone who lost a $30k NFT because of spam bots on Twitter that were seemingly real. Anyone can be a victim so if you are involved in the NFT space… trust no one, lol.
RH: Seems like this happens every few weeks or so. You guys stay safe out there!
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