Here's How Elon Put Twitter's Board In Checkmate
Hey everyone,
This morning, news broke that Elon will buy Twitter for $43 billion dollars.
Elon and the board spent most of April trying to outmaneuver each other for control of the company.
In the end, the Dogefather’s memes were too powerful for the suits.
Let’s take a look at how Elon’s play for Twitter went down.
X
Elon has been battling the Twitter board for control of the company for the last month.
After Elon declared his original attempt to buy Twitter two weeks ago, the board adopted a 'poison pill' to sink his bid.
This past week, Elon countered by announcing a tender offer directly to Twitter shareholders to take place within ten days.
He confirmed the rumors on Tuesday with a reference to the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel 'Tender is the Night.'
Elon raised the pressure on the board with a Thursday SEC filing that showed he had raised $46.5 billion for the offer, including a $25.5 billion commitment from Morgan Stanley and 11 other banks. Most banks signed commitment letters on April 20th.
The bank financing letters made reference to something called Project X and a trio of recently formed shell companies with the title X Holdings.
Elon has talked about bringing Tesla and his other ventures under a parent company since 2012, and has owned the domain X.com since the 90s.
When asked to comment on the tender offer by the New York Times, he responded by writing only "X."
The holding companies, bank funding, and tender tweets were signs that Elon wasn't backing down from the board, but all this wasn't enough on its own.
While working Twitter's board into checkmate, Elon waged a simultaneous meme warfare campaign against the ruling class to win popular support for the takeover.
Did memes tip the scales in his favor?
Virus
Elon pushed ahead with his Twitter bid because he views the erosion of free speech as a "civilizational risk."
His plan for Twitter almost certainly involves eliminating woke censorship, which has become one of the main threats to speech in recent years.
Elon has been a growing critic of wokeism, which has become a powerful meme for the ruling class to silence dissenters of its agenda.
In December, he criticized woke ideology and asked where it came from.
This past week, he called out Netflix for going woke.
He may have been referencing the release of a show about male pregnancy.
"Birthing people" is one of the latest woke memes.
Netflix wasn't his only target. He also highlighted SNL for choosing sanctimony over comedy.
Finally, Elon continued his attack on the corporate ESG movement, which attempts to fuse wokeism with climate science. Under ESG metrics, Shell oil has a higher rating than Tesla due to social and governance policies.
He wrapped up the week by roasting Bill Gates, who promotes environmentalism while maintaining a $500 million dollar short position against Tesla.
Gates has been getting a lot of heat lately.
Earlier this year, Joe Rogan criticized him for modeling poor health while acting as a representative for the official Coronavirus response.
Gates has also drawn attention for his messy divorce, connections to shady financiers, influence over media, predictions of future pandemics, and proposal to block out the sun.
The Gates-funded WHO was behind efforts to censor non-mainstream information during the pandemic, much of which has since turned out to be factual.
In short, Gates is a spokesman for the ruling class agenda.
Friday, Elon posted a meme about Gates that tied together many of these threads.
The dustup raised some intriguing questions.
Is Gates representing the same pro-censorship agenda that tried to stop Elon from buying Twitter?
Does public health censorship emanate from the same source as woke censorship?
Is Gates involved in TESLAQ, the online collective of anonymous Tesla short-sellers?
Surprisingly, putting Gates side-by-side with a pregnant man emoji was deemed in-bounds by Twitter's censors.
The meme caused Gates to trend on Saturday with more than a hundred thousand tweets, though bot armies make it difficult to accurately gauge the public sentiment towards Elon's sick burn.
On Sunday, news broke news that the Twitter board was reconsidering Elon's original $43 billion dollar offer for Twitter, and this morning Reuters reported that the deal could be done by the end of the day.
The only question now is what caused the board to change their minds.
The tender offer?
Or the meme?
Love Me Tendies
Once Elon consummates the Twitter deal, he could use Dogecoin as a tool to promote free speech, and free speech as a Trojan horse for Dogecoin.
Part of the problem with the current iteration of Twitter is that bots and censorship warp discussion to such a degree that the debate visible on the platform rarely represents what the public actually thinks.
A Doge tip jar would allow tweets to be upvoted in a financially meaningful way, leaving an uncensorable record of which arguments are the most popular, with tips acting as a value-laden proxy for public support.
In this model, if corporations and elites want to play a role in public debate, they'll have to buy and use Dogecoin to do so, financially empowering the DogeArmy in direct proportion to the influence they want to exert over the discussion.
Once the Twitter deal is officially complete, Dogecoin could spread like wildfire across Twitter, transforming social media as we know it.
Buckle up!
Dogey Treats: News Bites
Robinhood posted a yearbook photo of Vlad with a happy Doge over his shoulder.
Jack Dorsey's new job title is Block Head.
Tesla's Q1 earnings appeared to show that it was holding 1 million dollars worth of Dogecoin.
Ukrainian Deputy PM Mykhailo Fedorov, who previously appealed to the Dogecoin community for funds, tweeted that "Crypto can save life" along with pictures of surgery performed on Ukrainians funded by donations.
MyDoge Wallet made a million Doge tip to the Dogecoin Foundation, perhaps the largest Doge tip ever.
The Boring Company raised $675 million dollars at a $5.6 billion dollar valuation.
The Dogecoin Nascar hood sold for 1.8 eth.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a survey concluding that NASA should prioritize a mission to Uranus using SpaceX's Falcon rocket as its top mission for the next decade.
Temporary Dogecoin art was constructed on an Ireland beech on Doge Day.
Russell Brand did a segment about Elon's battle with Twitter's board.
Elon reiterated his belief that the Optimus robot will become more valuable than Tesla's car business.
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said there was a link between money printing and civil unrest.
Coinbase launched the beta version of its NFT marketplace.
Elon liked a tweet from the influential account Libs of TikTok linking to a Babylon Bee article.
More details emerged about Tesla's fleet of autonomous robotaxis.
Axe released a Dogecoin-themed deoderant for Doge Day.
SpaceX aims to build 1,000 starships and offer a $100k ticket price to Mars.
Tesla is on track to deliver 1.5 million vehicles in 2022.
Israel's Central Bank reduced its reliance on Dollars and Euros while adding the Chinese Yuan to its currency reserves for the first time ever.
Doge Dev Patrick Lodder made a detailed post on Reddit on different routes for scaling Dogecoin.
Elon tweeted, "The Instagram curse: Water everywhere, yet always thirsty."
Thank You!
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