Yes, many of us enjoy it all the time, the pure and the flicker. Some of us (like me) have it 3-4 months a year, two around Christmas and two around summer. And there are who do not like it at all, or they settle around Disney, Hulu or Stan. They are all in a seemingly stand-off. They all vie for the same population. As such, members will shift. I wrote about it before, it was always going to happen. This time there is more and there are a few sources. Lets take a look at two of them. In this we have 9 News who gives us ‘Netflix loses more than $US60 billion in minutes as investors flee’. Here we see “Shares of Netflix are imploding after the company reported its first quarterly loss of subscribers in more than a decade. The report far underperformed expectations, worrying investors who had been betting that a handful of big tech companies would continue to grow at a rapid clip. What’s happening: Netflix’s stock dropped 30 per cent when the market opened on Wednesday, instantly wiping more than $60.54 billion off the value of the company.” It is merely one part, channel 9 also gives us “Netflix said it shed 200,000 subscribers in the first three months of the year, when it had been expecting to add 2.5 million”. Here we have the first issue. You see ‘it had been expecting to add 2.5 million’ based on what expectations? You see there are two parts here. The first is that the covid era is sort of ending (sort of is the best I can give you). As such people are now expected to work, they cannot stay at home watching TV, so as millions go back to work, they will slide their subscriptions. As such the adding of 2.5M is one part, the loss of 200K makes sense and both numbers are up in the air. We can end up anywhere between plus 2.5M and minus 200K. Neither bother me, so the loss of $60B seems like an overreaction. But then we have the second article by the Guardian giving us ‘No wonder Netflix is bleeding subscribers – it’s become the new cable’ and they give us “Netflix posited everything from the war in Ukraine to people sharing passwords. But what if the reason is much simpler – that Netflix just isn’t really making much people want to see any more? It’s been a long time since Netflix was the total package: the home of cherished sitcoms like The Office, buzzy dramas like House of Cards, the exclusive venue for cinematic events like Bird Box and all for less than 10 bucks a month. Now, as the streaming service’s value nosedives, the big question is: are you still watching? And if so, what exactly?” It is a fair question and the stage I predicted well over a year ago is now coming to pass. One year prescription, spread over three providers. That is the reality of cramped budgets and these so called analysts with their expectations should have seen that coming a mile away, I saw it a year ago in my article ‘Choice, can you choose?’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/01/09/choice-can-you-choose/) and there was another article. So the minus 200K is not too surprising and I do not understand the ‘scared’ investors. This was ALWAYS going to happen. But I am also not surprised. You see the statement “investors who had been betting that a handful of big tech companies would continue to grow at a rapid clip” shows us the American who is short sighted. The one who does not comprehend that markets saturate and as such they have this dumb believe that numbers can only go up. And until 5G is a national solution for a lot of countries this will happens and worse will happen when internet congestion starts biting, because that too will be a factor. As such I personally see the overreaction on Netflix as a storm in a teacup and only the scared investors can make it worse for themselves.
Let’s have some fun
Yup, we all get trolled, I am no different. People making claims, creating havoc. If I want to prove I am the man I claim to be, I will give them the IP proving who I am. Yeah right! But then I had an idea. Why not put billions in revenue online making it public domain? Watch them all running with this IP and thinking they got rich by being smart. But any opposition can show this article making the case that I made it public domain and that is exactly what I will do, just for fun (I am in 5G and a few other areas anyway).
So it is time to play:
Who wants to be a billionaire?
To get to this point we need to understand some statistics. The first one is that well over 40% of the planet is a sports-fan of some sorts. Then I remember that I published parts of this idea 1-2 years ago. Now 40% gives us 3.2 billion people now lets say that the idea for them costs $3, that gives us almost $10,000,000,000. So lets get cracking.
The bulk of all fans are spread over the NBA, NHL, NFL, IHL, AFL, UEFA, KNVB, EFL and a whole range more. But the first hint was given. You see when I was young I dreamt of being on a football card. OK, I never really liked the sport, but the feeling was still there. Even now, half a century later I wish I was on an NHL card as a goalie (Maple Leafs, Washington Capitals) We all have this. Millions wish they are the NFL quarterback card. And there we have the start.
In the first there were a few apps, they are not great, but nice. And over all these years none of the NHL, AFL and NBA teams set up a filter so that fans can have their own card for their team. A way to make your team your team. This is the simple side of it all. Dozens can do this and through this you have the options to entice billions of dollars. Would it not be nice that this card could be exported to a special file that can be printed at a place for lets say $3, on thick paper like a sports card, get your card printed and get it properly sized. A setting where tens of thousands of specific printers are placed in malls, in print shops and all these people want a sports card as a memento. If only someone had set a station where people could be appeased. Revenue through some effort and lets face it, EVERY SPORTS CLUB IN THE WORLD would like that program on their website to appease their fans. And the program can print to a USB stick and these sticks could be pushed into the reader of a printer. With some effort we set the stage for billions of revenue. Proving that the believers of “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost” are missing out and some others are raking in the cash because they thought outside the mould and now I have done the same and made it public domain. So the people who can set up such a printer will have a real stretch towards serious revenue and the rest are looking at the pile of cash going in some other direction.
I hope you liked this episode of ‘Who wants to be a billionaire?’ And the next time someone tries to push my buttons, remember, I can always make it public domain. Enjoy the evening!
Comedy Capers it is not
There was news in the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/weather/2022/apr/14/iranian-born-woman-fake-officers-elnaz-hajtamiri-canadian-police) almost a week ago. I saw it yesterday and it has me baffled. There is no wrongdoing by the police, there is no wrongdoing by the media, yet something is off. Consider ‘Case of Iranian-born woman abducted by fake officers baffles Canadian police’. The message there is “On a cold winter night, three armed men disguised as police officers arrived at a suburban home in a small Canadian resort town and knocked on the door, claiming that they had an arrest warrant for a 37-year-old woman who was staying there.” The situation is weird and brazen, but not in a good way and as we are given “Nearly three months later, police admit they are no closer to locating Hajtamiri, in a case that has baffled investigators” we want to blame someone, but who? The police did no wrong and with ““I have never, never come across a case like this,” Ontario provincial police detective inspector Martin Graham told reporters this week, adding that investigators had not determined a motive or received any ransom demands. They also have not located the white Lexus SUV vehicle used in the abduction on 12 January, nor have they identified its owner.” We see a different field, and there is no blame, but it seems to me that Elnaz Hajtamiri had caught the eye of someone. Either from her past, or towards someone else’s future. We all would want to be the sleuth, the Sherlock that hands the police the answers they seek, but that is unlikely to come. The fact that the White Lexus is not found implies that it was not stolen, or the owner was optionally aware of what was going on. So how many white Lexus SUV’s are there in Ontario? There will be a few, but these ruddy things go for more than $50K, so if none are missing through theft it becomes a larger game, then there is the setting that any owner of a white Lexus SUV might have gone skiing in Whistler and when they returned the car was where they left it, as such no alarm was raised.
It did give me an idea for a new piece of IP, but more about that later.
All these facts tend to give me the feeling that this was not some simple abduction, it was a targeted event. So why was Elnaz Hajtamiri important to some? I can make some empty gesture, I can make some claim, but that would be folly. The Canadian police is more than able, and when we see that they never face this before gives rise to this being more than a unique thing. It was as I personally see it either a very old crime or a very new one, but I keep on brooding on who could profit of her disappearance. It is easy to accuse Riyasat Singh and I do not know if he is a party of interest for the police, it could be, I do not know. I am wondering on “Two other tracking devices were found in her car when she brought the vehicle in for servicing in November.” You see, if it was as simple as a jealous ex, or boyfriend we see the reason for one of these trackers, it is the second (and third) tracker that is the issue and it makes me believe that she was an intentional target, but for what reason, I do not know. There was a third device, so it leaves me with questions. There is little about these devices, so it can go in every direction, but they are the clue I am brooding on. Not merely what they were, but where they came from, where ordered, when ordered and what was mapped. All questions that remain in the dark, but I keep on wondering, because 3 devices give a different light than one device, so was she being monitored by more than one, or by one professional? That is the question that rises in my mind and I could very well be extremely wrong on this. Then there is the part of “After overpowering the homeowner” gives us that they were ready for violence, so they had purpose, as such she was the target, not the opportunity. That is as far as I can get with the data available and I feel certain that the Canadian police got further than I did.
I hope that the Canadian police will be able to resolve this, and preferably with Elnaz Hajtamiri still alive, but the time gap is making that less and less realistic.
800,000,000 failures and a home-run
This is what I faced today, but the two are not connected, well not directly, optionally even indirectly. They are connected by the smallest sliver of thought. To start, the first part comes from the BBC. The article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61080536) gives us ‘Sanctioned Russian oligarchs linked to £800m worth of UK property’, which sounds nice, but lets take a deeper look. We get “Some of the individuals deny ownership of the mansions, which may mean they are beyond the reach of the sanctions. To get to the bottom of who owns what, we carried out a detailed trawl of leaked offshore documents, the Land Registry and court papers – as well as previous reporting.” It comes down to the first part. There we see “Because of the system of secrecy here in the UK and in relation to the Overseas Dependencies it’s really easy for people to hide their assets and their funds in the UK and not even the police necessarily have sight of where those assets are,” these people are skating around the central issue ‘What they did was perfectly legal’ a setting of creating actual tax laws is at the heart of this and this is decades overdue. It should have started in the age of Gordon Brown (2007), there is a stage where we could agree that Tony Blair (1997-2007) should have started it, but the pressure was not on for the UK at that point, the meltdown in the US should have been a clear signal, but from 1997 onwards NOTHING was done to rewrite tax laws into the laws the UK needed to have in 2010, and now a decade later we see “To get to the bottom of who owns what” and there hiding behind the Panama Papers is jut a farce. This should have been adjusted in the EU, UK and US by 2010 but none of them did ANYTHING to clear the waters. They merely pretended to do so to appease political friends, they all did. And now when we see the laughingly weak “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains” this implies that laws were broken, so is he just incompetent, stupid or both? And this matters, because it is all linked.
Roman Abramovich, has a vast property portfolio in the UK with more than 50 luxury residences, most on Fulham Road in west London. Through his UK company Fordstam Limited, he owns dozens of apartments in Chelsea Village, plus the hotel and residential complex around Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, according to the Land Registry. On Roman Abramovich we see “He has a vast property portfolio in the UK with more than 50 luxury residences, most on Fulham Road in west London. Through his UK company Fordstam Limited, he owns dozens of apartments in Chelsea Village, plus the hotel and residential complex around Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge stadium, according to the Land Registry. His most expensive London property is a 15-bedroom house on a street that is nicknamed Billionaires Row. With its vast stucco-faced Italianate mansions, it is home to royalty and ambassadors – as well as oligarchs.” The one element missing (two actually) were any laws broken? More important we see sanctioned by UK and EU, not the US. Then we get to the main event. It is Alisher Usmanov, sanctioned by all three and the desert of all this is more than a Medovik. We are given “a spokesman for Mr Usmanov said most of the billionaire’s UK property, plus a $600m (£456m) yacht, had already been “transferred into irrevocable trusts”, potentially putting them beyond the reach of sanctions.” A stage that is perfectly legal and the laws were never rewritten making this a sliding scale of discrimination, a scale of injustice and no laws were broken. The law makers were too stupid, too lazy to do anything about it. In the UK, the US and the EU. The lawmakers appeased THEIR friends as I personally see it and the oligarchs merely used the laws available to THEM TOO. A stage we need to accept and respect if we are a nation of laws. More important, which of these oligarchs ACTIVELY supported the war by Putin? I am asking, I actually do not know and the media merely surrounds itself with emotional BS, not a fact in sight and it is time to call these media players out on that too. The BBC article is actually quite good, but where do we see ‘Laws were broken’? We see “Ravenmorrow Limited was set up in December last year and no individual is identified on UK company records as the beneficial owner.” A clear failure of UK Laws, a setting where it was allowed to do this and no one is to blame but British Parliament and the House of Lords. The BBC does not really state that do they? As. I see it I see not the acts of Oligarchs, I see the failures of governments not overhauling tax laws when they could and as I see it all parties are guilty (except the greens), unlike the others the green parties all over the world seem to be oblivious on what a rudder is or does, so they are going Hades knows where at a speed no one can predict to arrive at some location no one knows.
Home-run
Yes, like the side we saw before there is another side and it makes more of a case towards the end of Microsoft, all whilst Adobe is getting more and more in place of taking over 25% of their office business. It is depending on two elements, and when these elements are out I will happily hand them over what I have if Google or Amazon buy the other IP and give me permission to hand that over to Adobe, I will gladly do that, just to see Microsoft squirm a little more. 5 markets lost to stupidity, 5 markets lost to shortsightedness and Adobe will be one of the winners. The setting that comes has been out for a while and the lost sides (four at present) are things that Microsoft should have seen years ago, their inaction is now more than enough. If you are asleep at the wheel you lose the ship, it is that simple and unlike the Ever Given, others are not in the Suez Canal, we can go around this Microsoft vessel and let it sink. A home-run out in the open and Microsoft just will not wake up, well let them sleep, I reckon that Adobe is more than ready to take over a chunk of the Office users. Consider that after all this time and all these follies, people do not merely gain a program, they gain a suite of options to tantalise their creativity.
There is no telling where the creative people are going to end, but it will be ahead of where Microsoft hoped they would be, a lag that only intensifies the losses they will face. The setting reminded me of an article I saw in LinkedIn.
There we see a person objecting to the discrimination of scouting. There we see “The announcer labelled the boy scouts as ‘Future leaders of America’ and the girls scouts as a group that were ‘just having fun’” This is what we see as a setting for Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe instills and propagates creativity, whilst Microsoft merely sets a mediocre foundation of presenting. Yet if there is one thing I have seen from Adobe, it is a clear stage where presenters can create works of art, whilst Microsoft sets a stage of mediocre joyous presentations, but in this day and age presentations are serious business, it sets the tone for corporate stories, sales events, propagating new projects and products. Joy gets us nowhere and Microsoft joy is close to a decade old. Adobe is on the verge of setting the next generation of presenting tools. So where do YOU wanna be when your idea is ready to be shown to the world? At the edge of what is possible, or in a joyous looking meadow, one that we have seen a million times over? I will let you decide on where you want to be and be honest, do you really think that Microsoft has any serious relevance left?
Escalations
Things escalate, this happens and sometimes it is part of a plan, at times it is not. The Ukraine issues can only escalate. If Vladimir Putin states that it is up to the other side we can safely conclude that he is massively delusional. In between headlines like ‘Russia’s unspeakable horrors in northern Ukraine: Torture, murder and cluster bombs’, ‘Russia’s mass rapes in Ukraine are a war crime. Its military leaders must face prosecution’ and ‘Second British soldier captured in Mariupol is paraded on Russian TV’ we see little other path than the path of escalation. Of course there was good news too.
As speculation goes, the Russian navy is just as dependable as Russian tanks. They are both equally effective in adhering to gravity and the Russian cruiser Moskva is giving testimony of that at the bottom of the Black Sea. The Slava class, Soviet designation Project 1164 Atlant, a class of guided missile cruisers designed and constructed in the Soviet Union for the Soviet Navy, and currently operated by the Russian Navy. Well there were two, now there is one, so 50% of their guided missile class has been destroyed. Is that what they mean with ‘Slava Ukraina’?
Anyway, escalation. The Dutch are possibly restoring their active duty needs, and many nations are adhering to this as well. There is every thought that Russia woke up a setting they were not ready for and their Nuclear arsenal is all they might have between defeat and utter defeat. With all the Nazi claims they made, we see more and more that their actions represent the Nazi activities. So in the end, will we see a Nuremberg like trial in Strasbourg where the defendants will all respond in the same similar way? We will hear all of them state “Я выполнял приказы”, but in the end in Nuremberg 161 were convicted, and 37 were sentenced to death. I wonder how many Russians will end up with a death sentence. We see rape, torture, murder of civilians, we see the bombing of hospitals, the deployment of cluster bombs and the indiscriminate executions of people trying to flee the war-scene. The drones recorded a lot more than that and the Russians will face the rim reaper in many ways. That and the stage that life of a Russian outside of Russia (or Cuba) is now a thing of the past. These are all escalations that are happening now and will be happening more in the next month. Even now as Forbes is contemplating a G20 without Russia, we see the long term damage and that turns Russia in a 3rd world nation. It was going good and then it turned nearly every nation on the planet in another direction. You see commerce requires trade and how much trade can Syria, Belorussia and Cuba offer? That and the end of Gas-exports are making for a nasty treasury coffer and whilst Russia depends on its army, the hardware that army needs is sinking, destroyed or out of gas. Escalations can go in any direction, yet history shows us that most escalations go in the wrong direction and Russia is experiencing this the hard way. We sometimes forget WW1. My Grandfather was there and as such I keep tabs on that event. Does anyone remember the fallout of WW1? The Treaty of Versailles (signed in 1919) and the 1921 London Schedule of Payments set a massive bill for Germany after WW1, I reckon that Russia faces an even steeper bill on the damage they did to Ukraine. I reckon that 90% of al Russians will pay 20% taxes on their income for 30 years to Ukraine. That is the setting of escalation and that is the consequence of waging war, its invoice has always been the harshest message. And as I consider what might be next, we might see a new NATO, an EU army with France leading it, it is the most ready and the best equiped at present. A setting both the UK and Germany would not have held possible a year ago. What a difference 53 days can make.
I wonder if older and very grey Vladimir Putin has any idea what is coming his way in the short term?
They say that confidence cannot escalate to arrogance, it only happens if the blood of pride is running through your veins. Knowing that picking a fight with Ukraine was not the best idea to have, but it seems he is learning that the hard way. You can doubt me and it would be fair, just ask the captain of the Moskva, he is in the Black Sea somewhere.
What’s a Barbarian?
It is a serious enough question. Is it a person who pretends to be educated and then decides to burn a book? What’s up with that? So you first buy a book, to burn it afterwards? That seems like a massive waste of money and gain. But here we are (at https://nos.nl/l/2425417) where we see ‘Unrest again in Sweden, politician who wanted to burn the Koran hit by stone’ questions come forth. It seems to me that a person is intentionally creating strife, intentionally is stirring up people towards acts of violence. Why is that allowed? So why is the Danish politician Rasmus Paludan, a man who was found guilty of racism in 2021 allowed to stir up the people. This is not the expression of freedom, of a person expressing himself by burning a book. If that was the case he wold be burning a bible, would he not? This is of course beside the point of burning books in the first place. But he took that path by INTENTIONALLY angering a muslim community. Why?
\And it seems that this is a one trick pony. Viborg (April 2019), Norrebro (2019) under police protection no less), Linkoping (2022) and now Malmo (April 2022). A one trick pony seeking attention, that is what remains of someone once heralded as the number 9 law graduate. After which we get the accusations through Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet, the simple set that he engaged in fetish sex with minors ranging in age from 13 to 17. So why exactly is this man not in prison? It seems that even in Scandinavia 13 year old boys have little to no protection under the law, unlike book burners who get to do this with police protection.
In all this, how is angering a non-violent community any kind of solution? I am a catholic, I have looked in a Quran and found it interesting, propelling good sentiments. I never read it all and I never read some of the anti-Quran books mainly because I never read the Quran. Christians have over 1000 years of transgressions based on greed, on envy, on wrath, on gullibility, on lust and on Pride. It started before the Crusades and the transgressions are still active today. I reckon that we have little hold over Muslims. It seems that they have a much larger hold on them. The Crusades came with people drenching in Greed, in Envy, in Lust and undirected wrath. The Church made very sure that Muslims (Saracens) were seen as the guilty party. Yet no one is willing to look that the 500 lords in their castles were squeezing the population beyond poverty. So in all this, what makes the Quran so evil? Catholic Pedophiles go unpunished. A Cardinal with a $412 fraud case. Well over a thousand times the amount of greed that we saw in the Crusades. Yet I believe that Rasmus Paludan is in denial of those settings, don’t you agree?
As I personally see it, on the 17th November 1095 the Catholic Church found a way to appease the nobleman and get rid of the peasants in a drive to rob Jerusalem and various places around it of riches. The movie Kingdom of Heaven only shows part of this, but it shows parts of what was wrong then and it shows how envy to some degree continues to this day.
Filed under Uncategorized
Economic arrogance of Achieving
This is a station I recently came to and it has nothing to do with the bravery of Ukraine, or the stupidity of Russia. Even though that setting might have touch-points the larger station is NOT war. The thoughts came from the Art of War by Sun Tsu. There we learn ““The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”
Yet this quote was subverted by economists and wannabe economic strategists into smething like: ““The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost” “If you know the final cost and profit, you need not fear the result of 100 investments” If you know the profit but do not know the cost, for every profitable endeavour achieved one will fail.” This is a side I feel is going on in business, but now also in mobile gaming. A stage where games work but only if you watch advertisements. I tried a game and even as it has repetitive sides, it also has campaign sides and those sides are limiting, but if you watch 37 advertisements you are on your way to get to 50% in a three day event. Consider that 37 advertisements. To game, to play a free game, but it is hindered, not by repetition (well that too), but to get anywhere you need to watch that many advertisements. Now you can limit yourself by BUYING ad free settings, by buying elements in EVERY campaign. And I am not against these settings, just the statin that to get anywhere in that game will require you to invest in advertisements. Now this is not against any rules, not against any law and the makers are not doing anything wrong. Now consider the advertisement. The advertisement in SOME cases will allow for you to play a level, or part of a level, but in many cases should you touch the mouse or the pointer, the install screen is called for. A side I call deceptive conduct, but that could just be me. What is seen is iteration after iteration of “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost” and it is deceptive, there is always a cost, in this case at the expense of the game.
It is the idiocy of “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost”, it is a fictive state of exploitation and nearly all the larger players are involved in that. Do you think that I would have so much IP? Some people at Google, Amazon and even Microsoft should be running circles around me, around people like Elon Musk. But they are all in that pretentious state where “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost” is the solution to everything. It is not, it really is not.
My stage of 5G comes from a state of rejecting the obvious and inverting the funnel and then looking the other way. The stage of gaming came from looking in a direction no one was willing to look towards and none of them adhere to the stage of “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost” And that is where I found optional billions, one of them has question marks, but if done right could amount to a lot more than even I had in mind and it does depend on a stage, but that stage is being catered to. So when it all comes out, I can look at players like Microsoft and laugh out loud. Consider that the wealthiest corporations are Apple (1), Microsoft (2, for now), Google/Alphabet (4) and Amazon (5) and I am the one with the IP? Consider that they should be ahead of the curve, but they are not, because I am speculating that their economic advisors told them “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost”, and because of that Tesla has a mobile phone coming, a market that Microsoft pretty much lost to Google and Apple and now there is a third player. There am I with my 5G and gaming IP and a few more IP options, one directly opposing Sony and Fujitsu and it is based on technology of the 90’s. So how much did these companies lose by relying on “The supreme art of profit is to gain profit without cost”, I merely go by the old statement “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs”, a truth that has been out in the open for centuries. What else did these players overlook?
I will let you figure that out, I at least saw one additional failure, but no spoilers, it is up to you to see what they cannot see.
What’s the name, what’s the game?
I saw the news a few days ago, and for the most it does not matter to me, but there is an awful lot of hypocrisy going around and the media is (as I personally see it) as tainted as anything else. The stage is set to Elon Musk, or better stated is set against Elon Musk. Why? Don’t really know the man, but he seems the modern day Midas. Whatever he touches turns to gold. He made an upheaval in the battery market, the mobile market, the energy market. The man is (allegedly) an inventor like me, or he can see proper innovation just like Steve Jobs. How is this a bad thing? Consider the news that he was getting involved in social media. Why not? I do not know if it is a bad idea. But he has the dough to become part of it. Yet the Sydney Morning Herald gives us ‘Elon Musk launches $58 billion hostile takeover of Twitter’ (at https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/elon-musk-launches-hostile-takeover-of-twitter-20220414-p5admv.html) as such lets take a look at what constitutes a hostile takeover? The definition gives us “A hostile takeover occurs when an acquiring company attempts to take over a target company against the wishes of the target company’s management. An acquiring company can achieve a hostile takeover by going directly to the target company’s shareholders or fighting to replace its management” is this true? CBS gives us ‘Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $43 billion’, so who is giving us the truth and who is giving a stakeholder a blow job? You think this is rude? You ain’t seen nothing yet. We can argue until the sun goes down, but the setting of finance is clear. If a company is worth it, or could become worth it, you buy it. This has been the case in many occasions. Yet no one is saying that about Microsoft and Blizzard. There we get ‘Activision Blizzard/Microsoft Deal Discouraged by Letter Penned by SOC Investment Group’, how quaint.
So it was today when I saw (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-adopts-poison-pill-fight-musk-2022-04-15/) ‘Twitter adopts ‘poison pill’ as challenger to Musk emerges’, it is the Guardian version where we see “The method, known as a “poison pill” in the finance world, suggests Twitter will fight Musk to prevent a hostile takeover. It would go into effect if a shareholder were to acquire more than 15% of the company in a deal not approved by the board and expires 14 April 2023.”You see my issue is with the ‘hostile takeover’ part. The guardian gives us those goods with “Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder and former CEO, noted in a tweet on Friday that such surprise purchases are always a risk for the company. “As a public company, Twitter has always been ‘for sale’,” he said. “That’s the real issue.” Musk is already facing legal action for his Twitter purchases, with one investor suing the Tesla executive in a potential class action lawsuit for failing to disclose his buy-up of shares before the required deadline to do so. The lawsuit comes as Musk faces a number of investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his investment activities, including insider trading allegations related to his own tweets.” So we see ‘insider trading’, we see ‘hostile takeover’ but we are given no real evidence of either. Merely the word ‘allegations’ that everyone is overlooking.
The stage becomes even weirder as we consider the actions that Microsoft unleashed on the gaming industry and it is casually trivialised by too many media outlets.
In all this the statement “he wanted to release its “extraordinary potential” to support free speech and democracy across the world.” Is trivialised by “Twitter’s board on Friday unanimously approved a plan that would allow existing shareholders to buy stocks at a substantial discount in order to dilute the holdings of new investors”, there is no real setting of who these board members are, the media seemingly forgot about that part. These members that include Bret Taylor (SalesForce), Parag Agrawal (CEO Twitter), Mimi Alemayehou (Mastercard), Egon Durban (Silver Lake), Martha Lane Fox (House of Lords), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (Stanford), Patrick Pichette (Google), David Rosenblatt and Robert Zoellick (AllianceBernstein Holding L.P.) there was a unanimous objection to the purchase by Elon Musk and no media outlet had anything from these members with the simple question ‘Why oppose?’. There might be a very valid reason, but I and all others were not informed, so what gives?
We can speculate on why it was done. Elon Musk sees that the US is going after the billionaires. As such he might be buying anything he can to drop the tax rift, and lets face it, he has been turning things to gold and Twitter is a golden idea. So whilst we see all kinds of objections on how analysts see (and say) things like “KeyBanc Capital analyst Justin Patterson downgraded the social media company in the wake of Elon Musk’s buyout proposal. Patterson cut his rating to sector weight, after being at overweight since January 2021, saying that the potential for the Musk bid to “go up in smoke” will turn investor focus on a more challenging macro environment that elevates downside risk to financial estimates.” I personally honestly do not know what will happen, but when a person buys a company, a person that has transformed several companies into powerhouses, I wonder what really is going on. It could be simple, it could be complex, yet the larger station is that people laughed at Tesla and now we see “As of April 2022 Tesla has a market cap of $1.018 Trillion. This makes Tesla the world’s 6th most valuable company by market cap according to our data.” So as I see it, the joke is on them. What was an idea is now 6th on the most valuable companies on the market and that is behind Apple, Microsoft, Aramco, Alphabet, and Amazon and as I gave voice to Microsoft, there is every chance that it will head of Microsoft in the next 3 years. And that is whilst no one has a clue where Meta will end, because they will become part of the top 7 soon enough (2024), and that too is out into the market. So I have questions and the media is not asking the board members of Twitter, or Elon Musk a clear set of questions. And all that before someone decides to ask KeyBanc Capital a few uncomfortable questions. So what is in the name Twitter, what is in the name Elon Musk and what is in the shares game being played now. No matter what is happening, I feel certain that the media will not properly inform us, that mush seems a personal given. Yet in all this we see the approximation of “to support free speech and democracy across the world”, it seems to me that Elon Musk is giving us options, options in mobile technology and energy technology. Who else has been giving us that? I see questions and no one asking them, it is weird, is it not?
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 