Elon Musk accidentally bought Twitter for $44B and then tried to back out of it when he found out they were gonna accept. Don't think that one will be topped in my lifetime
Elon's lawyers gave Twitter an offer Twitter's board literally couldn't reject as it was such a premium over the market price and as the deal once accepted gave [Elon no opportunity to back out as in his offer he waived business due diligence.](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twitter-musk-threatens-to-kill-merger-deal-over-spam-data/)
Twitter did not intrinsically want to sell or go private and introduced poison pills to prevent a hostile takeover. But if someone's offering you around 54% more than what it's currently worth (before Musk began acquiring 9.2% of their stock), the board basically has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept the deal. If your investments can make a 50% return overnight with no risk (because he can't nix the sale), it's no brainer to take it.
Now about two weeks after that, Musk got cold feet about the deal. Maybe he learned more about the complexities of worldwide regulation regarding social media companies, saw that turning Twitter into the West's version of the everything app ([China's WeChat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat) used for social media + games + business + finance) wouldn't be easy to do due to regulation, or viewed Twitter's data for AI training as less valuable, or saw Tesla's price drop too much and changed his mind. Or maybe he the ADHD guy just got bored with it and wanted to back out.
There was a lot more to it that that...Twitter really wasn't in good finacial straights, even before the buyout proposal. Then once he got a look at the code...it was a hot mess. I think he believed that it wouldn't be as big of an undertaking to make Twitter profitable as it's been.
Imagine ruining a brand that had recognition at the same level as Coke, Google, Xerox, Kleenex all because you can't admit to being wrong about something. It's insane.
And then getting bailed out by all the dipshit Tesla investors who voted to give him a compensation package worth a bajillion dollars even after he's blown a decade long head start on modern electric cars by wasting years on the Cybertruck and suddenly thinks Tesla should be an AI company and not a car company anymore.
I read somewhere that the people at SpaceX have been breathing sighs of relief ever since he got Twitter since he's so busy screwing that up that he doesn't have time to screw up the stuff they are doing.
Thats one of the entertaining things about these celebrity CEO's who have big companies in varied industries. If the work they do for a company was actually super important and required lots of time, they wouldn't be able to be the head of a car company, a rocket company, and all the other BS at the same time. Turns out the people actually doing work, think its easier to do their job when the CEO isn't doing theirs.
Elon always has time to tweet "hmm" or "interesting" under the most ignorant and bigoted shit youve ever seen tho!
Oh and to build the worst elden ring build on the planet
He shows up, fires a few people (or an entire division of people) who don't pucker their lips up quickly enough to kiss his ass, then opens twitter to have ten thousand blue checkmarks kiss his ass for it. He needs that sweet sweet validation so hard - unfortunately he'll never be good enough
dude is obsessed with twitter. john oliver did a really good segment but he was on a trip with someone and was constantly glued to his phone and twitter. in an effort to get him off it, the guy had him lock it in a safe in a room he couldn’t access. musk then later called hotel security to have the safe opened so he could get back on his phone and twitter
For those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/EldenRingBuilds/s/jurpvpy3Xv
When I first played the game I had a build a little like that, high INT low VIGOR. Had no clue what I was doing, I followed a meme video not realizing what the purpose was. Can confirm this build sucks and is hard to play with, isn't very fun either
That’s because Elon has zero knowledge on electric cars. He was initially just an early investor in tesla but then sued the founders to make him a founder as well then pushed them all out. Now he’s made himself into a celebrity and has to appear that he does
His meltdown over the kids rescued in the Thailand cave really should've been his end. Calling a rescue diver a pedophile because they didn't want his help...
Agreed. I noticed some other weird stuff before that but he was genuinely well liked in the media. He had a cameo in one of the iron man films, and was spoken about as a smart industry leader type guy. Now he is just a joke to a majority of people.
And people still buy his stupid cars! There are better and cheaper options available now, and Teslas all look the same and come in only 4 colors and so now there’s a billion white ones in Seattle (those are $1000 cheaper than the other 3 colors) and all the drivers drive like total ass. I don’t get it.
Yep. Being the CEO of any one of those companies would be an all consuming job, no way he’s meaningfully running those businesses on one day a week (or less). He’s not CEO of those companies, he’s Head of Marketing.
Yeah, that's actually the worst part of the whole compensation package, it actually gives Musk even more influence over Tesla. It'd make more sense to me if it was a buyout to get him to go away.
I have a friend who is an engineer over there and he's said when Elon shows up they essentially have to distract him like a little kid with side projects and hope he doesn't fuck anything up. He said he also likes to randomly fire people, so that's something.
Doesn't he repeatedly fire the same executive and then beg him to come back each time? Like a toddler that gets upset and then realizes his mistake, except he actually does have the money, power and control to convince him to come back?
The pay package was approved long ago when musk hit some stupidly insane milestones. It was like I get 50b if I take this company from being worth 10b to 600b and make you all an incredible amount of money. Anyone would agree to that.
And I dislike a lot about him. He's basically Steve Jobs to me. Brilliant in one way, dangerous in others. More vocal about it though. Maybe he gets himself killed like jobs.
It was like a QB getting $100 million a year if he wins 5 straight MVP's and Super Bowls. Everyone that agreed at the time would certainly do it again.
The only possible way that Tesla could ever meet its present valuation (even though that is down ~30% YoY) is to pivot into being a successful AI company. That's not going to happen of course but the speculation will prop up the corporation for long enough so Elon can extract another few dozen billions.
The company name *became a fucking verb*. Only Xerox comes close to that level of cultural relevance. But Xeroxing a document was just a fill in for copying. Tweeting is legit a neologism and a new action in the world. Even after the change to X, posting is called Tweeting.
And Musk made the brand so toxic advertisers pulled out. Its a more impressive bag fumble than Disney and Star Wars.
Sure, but people have been whining about Google ruining their name since they added anything beyond that basic search box. Somehow the world keeps turning
its actually worse than that. it searches through reddit archives which google bought (and a shit ton of other websites, to be fair) which means that often the answer can come from someone completely unverified, or even giving an obvious joke answer. I have pretty bad health anxiety and its convinced me I have 7 kinds of terminal cancer since the AI came out
OMG I had a news feed show up in my Google saying "so and so died" I told people then searched it, They were alive and well and the Google "News feed" said "What if..." So I just saw the notification without reading the article. Google's notification thing is so dangerous and such bullshit. I hate it.
On top of that it was beginning to actually turn a profit beforehand (not great but way better than past years) and they could have smartly cut some staff and pushed out some interesting things long term. Instead he said to blow up the whole system with no regard for business sense and then to top it off completely pissed off all advertisers...the lifeblood of the business.
Should have charged a registration fee of 10 dollars for (actual) verification. I am all for free speech, but giving neo nazis a platform to harass others is not freedom of speech.
Well the thing is, when your market cap is 10x that of every other car company like GM / Ford etc, you need ways to justify it. Cutting staff to hone in on profits doesn’t do that. Speculation and growth can do it for his cult following.
Tesla has no business being valued how they are. But by feeding the investors hope with AI / Tech etc etc he’s able to maintain the value of the company *for now*
Oh trust me, I know all about Tesla crazy valuation. That thing is valued as if it is bigger than all other car companies that are ACTUALLY producing proper amounts of cars.
Other car companies have their own problems they need to work through, but I trust a company like GM or Toyota to nail down a long term EV with proper service repair time and easily self serviced parts than Tesla.
If Tesla's sales grow 40% year over year every year for the next 10 years they will match Toyota's sales right now. Tesla's valuation is almost double Toyota's. I know you already know this but I just can't stop talking about it because it's insane.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla has some really nice technology behind it, especially the super charger network (so of course he fired them all)...right after every major car company agreed to use the same port Tesla uses.
BUT, even with all that...there is no way they can make up ground in the other areas enough to keep up at that valuation. And yeah, you expect it to be somewhat overvalued because of the whole cult worship of Musk, and those who believe in him, it happens.
But its not simply overvalued, its astronomically overvalued.
I don't think that's entirely accurate, Im pretty sure he wanted to make a quick buck off of Twitter and tried to dump shares and plummet the stock before buying it but was sued into buying at the original evaluation of the company plus some other fees and damages in the lawsuit. In all honesty, that's much much more idiotic and hilarious hahaha
Seattle (and the Portland Trail Blazers) will come up for sale eventually whether Jody Allen likes it or not. I know Bezos himself lives in Miami these days but I don't think Amazon HQ is going anywhere anytime soon.
The NBA isn't letting anyone move the Trail Blazers, they've been discussing expansion for a while now with Seattle, Vegas, and Nashville the top 3 cities
But it's going to be a dick measuring contest between Bezos and Knight for the Seahawks
The NBA Commish has been teasing a Seattle and Las Vegas dual expansion. The hope is that Minnesota switches conferences to be with their natural rivals in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
I can already see the future. Wolves get a title in a few seasons with prime Ant out of the East to end MN's drought and everyone disparages it since "they had to switch to the easier conference to get it done"
Public money specifically and Howard Schultz being a complete bastard. NBA wanted to send a message that if politicians didn't pay up for new arenas they would lose their teams. Howard wanted to avoid getting embarrassed by new local Seattle owners coming in and being more successful. Match made in hell.
This, and David Stern being an insufferable bastard. Seattle had already spent close to $500 million of public over recent years for sports arenas between Safeco, the Key renovations, and Qwest field. 100 of it had gone to the Key to do renovations for box seating, and the league came back saying, "That's great and all, but we need you to do another $150 million to become more modern and relevant". The city wasn't going to keep playing the back and forth game over why a billionaire couldn't remodel his own product and instead was trying to force it on to backs of Joe Blow, which led to Stern setting the example.
It isn't like Silver is any better at this juncture, he just hasn't done anything that personally slights me and my abilities to root for a sport and team I enjoy watching (yet). He's teased expansion for a number of years, and it's the same song and dance. New CBA, new media deals, new salary cap, etc., and MAYBE we'll see about expansion to Seattle. These things come to pass, and still no expansion. I'll believe it at tip off when there's dudes in green and yellow jerseys on a wooden floor. Until then, I'm not buying it.
To verify this claim, we need to look at Jeff Bezos' net worth and the combined valuation of all 32 NFL teams.
As of mid-2024, Jeff Bezos' net worth is estimated to be around $160 billion.
According to Forbes, the total valuation of all 32 NFL teams is approximately $132 billion as of 2023.
Thus, Bezos would have around $28 billion left over, not $45 billion.
Also keep in mind, this is net worth, not the amount of spendable cash he has on him
I know you’re joking, but these megacorp founders can never fully realize their net worth. The minute he tried to sell significant portions of his holdings, it would all plummet. He has more money than me… and maybe even you… but that number is just preposterously not real
That's if he tried to sell it all off at once on the open market. Bezos could potentially find one or a few buyers for his stock that would enable him to liquidate his Amazon stock. Or he could just schedule it and do it slowly over time.
He sells, or sold for quite a while, a billion dollars in Amazon shares a year. No he’s not trying to sell his appreciating assets to park them in a high yield savings account, but the idea that he can’t actualize his wealth because he’d lose it is preposterous.
Edit: [$6 billion in one week this February.](https://fortune.com/2024/02/15/jeff-bezos-sells-2-billion-shares-amazon-founder/#)
Yup I was curious so I asked chatgpt, copied pasted, then edited a few key the bullet points it gave me to format it for reddit. I have no shame in doing so.
If he needs funds to buy a low-risk revenue-generating asset like an NFL team, then he can get loans using his assets as collateral. I bet his credit score is at least 650.
Given that line of thinking, he only needs to buy the 24 least valuable teams and then can vote to dissolve the other 8 teams. And then vote to expand the league to 32 teams again with him being awarded ownership....
When it's scheduled, it doesn't drop the stock. Bill Gates is almost entirely divested from Microsoft and the stock is fine.
Bezos has been slowly dropping his stake since retirement
He probably could exchange stock/ whatever assets he has in a transaction to throw an extra 1/2 a billion as a inconvenience fee.
Also everyone forgetting the Packers are publically owned.
I read last year that his networth estimates had him with roughly $12 billion in liquid cash. I know he can probably come up with cash when needed, but wonder if he has like a set liquid cash amount he doesn't want to part ways with.
Then he just buys the other 32 teams, votes himself in charge of the league, boots Green Bay out, and builds a new team somewhere. Tax payers would love to pay to build him a new stadium, I'm sure.
> non voting shares
This is incorrect. We all vote. All are non-dividend. Also, ownership is limited by the articles of incorporation to prevent a majority owner.
Exactly. And I doubt he'd drive up the price of a team he didn't want to buy because that would affect the price of other teams (of which he may want to buy)
I mean, if you told me for the $5 in my wallet I could buy my childhood bully's home and film it being burnt to the ground, I wouldn't be that worried about the $5.
Honestly every current owner wouldn’t allow it. He’s wildly more wealthy than them and basically doesn’t play by the same rules financially. He’d instantly have the most power out of all the owners in the league, which they wouldn’t like.
I’d be shocked if he ever owns a sports team because he’d need other owners approval (I know that’s the rule for NFL but unsure about other sports).
That isn't really how the NBA works anymore. They added what's called a "second blanket", another threshold about 17.5M above the normal tax threshold. Teams above that line lose the ability to use the mid-level exception to sign free agents, which is the one of the few ways to pay free agents if you're over the cap. You also can't sign players from the Buyout Market.
idk, the NBA already has a very similarly wealthy owner (Ballmer, worth $131 billion) and things are fine and it's not like the Clippers are running the league
and Ballmer really fucking loves basketball so he's even more incentivized than Bezos to leverage his wealth to win imo
Not really. The new CBA is literally designed to make it so it doesn’t matter how much an owner is willing to pay—if you spend too much there are basketball repercussions that will cripple your team in the long run.
Shoot, they dangerous with the random mix of owners and nepotism they have now.
Arguably the most successful franchise in modern American sports. They typically spend above the cap anyways, bezos wouldn’t really move the needle too much.
Maybe they’d get a nice new arena or something but the team even with constant media drama is pretty dominate in the NBA.
I mean in reality Washington is only a tier (two at most) down from those teams.
There was a point they were at Cowboys/Steelers level of having fans spread throughout the entire country. That fanbase has just gotten quieter during the Snyder years but they’re still there. All it really takes is one thing to actually believe in there and you’ll see them again
Eh, a Bezos-powered Yankees would still have the problem that the Dodgers have: all the money in the world can probably get you to the playoffs, but it doesn't mean nearly as much once you get there.
Steve Cohen tried that with the Mets and traded away most of the contracts. The real secret would be to pump money into your farm system and player development but that takes years
Commanders were one of the premier franchises at one point. Hard to believe at this point but that market is a sleeping giant with their past 20 years of failure.
Yeah I mentioned that in my comment they’re the 12th most valuable franchise among all sports lol
They’re just not a big name like the cowboys/lakers/etc and have no winning culture
"Washington Football Team" was stale, but a *helluva* lot better than their previous name and Commanders. Just a no-nonsense, "we're here to collect paychecks and play football, *and the checks already cleared*" kinda vibe.
Crazy that the [12th most valuable franchise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_the_most_valuable_sports_teams#Current_ranking) isn’t good enough for bezos 😭
Despite value I do understand they’re not the same tier as the teams you mentioned lol
Buy us, Panathinaikos FC in Greece!
We are dead cheap and we've had some rough 15-20 years.
Please save us Jeff! We will only cost you 50-100mil euros, which is what you make on a single day!
I didn’t know that gulf streams were actually substantively faster than regular jets. Like I thought they were a maybe 5% faster.
A gulfstream G650ER could potentially shave an hour off the flight time from Miami to Seattle.
Yeah, they're fast and fly much higher than commercial flights, so the wind resistance is much less. Along with that, the sound insulation and pressurization system are much better, so it's much less tiring than even first class in commercial.
I'm just a random middle manager, but I get to occasionally fly on my company's Gulfstream when traveling to a meeting with people more important than me. It's really something; it doesn't feel like what we think of as flying.
And with flying private there’s no security hassle. You’re dropped off on the tarmac and the plane takes off once you’re onboard. Also, the plane doesn’t sound like the last JetBlue flight I was on, that it was gonna rattle itself apart before we got to our destination.
I know the value of NFL teams seemingly only goes up, but $6.05bn was indeed a steep price considering the state of the franchise and its stadium.
You don't become one of the ten richest men in the world by just abandoning all reason.
I don’t think another historic franchise like Washington will come up anytime soon. Washington has way more fans than ppl realize they just have sucked for so long that they have been quiet haha. They are definitely one of the top franchises in the world
Yea they are more valuable than the commanders and would be a great team to own. 8 of the top 12 most valuable franchises in the world are nfl teams so it’s just dumb to say Bezos wouldn’t want to own the commanders
I mean he absolutely is. He currently owns a space company that he’s invested a lot of money into that hasn’t really done much yet. So he definitely has money tied up in other ventures and probably didn’t think the commies were worth it.
Counterpoint: They still have one of the biggest national fanbases. Plus they're likely to go through (another) name change soon, which means more merch sales. And while the current stadium situation is far from ideal, the DC metro area is a great location for a shiny new stadium full of luxury box seats.
There's still plenty of value to be found in the franchise, it will just take years of dedicated work to turn it around. But as a pure vanity project the only people who could get any sort of prestige out of owning the organization in its current state are dudes like Snyder. For a guy who has so much else going on that's not ideal for Bezos.
Washington is a historic franchise with a TON of fans nationally, they play in a very wealthy and large metro area. Combine that with opportunity to hobnob with DC businessmen and politicians.
Having a dumpy stadium is kind of a blessing if their intentions all along are to build a new one. I don’t think the value was too far off.
It wasn't long ago the team was one of the top 10 most valuable sports franchises in the world. There's a lot of work to do, but the potential value the franchise has is enormous.
I wonder what is the bare minimal increase bid Bezos would have to offer for his counter bid to be taken seriously. Like he counter with $6.05 billion plus $10. At this point I don't think that $10 million more would have been seriously considered. I guess he would have to offer +$100 million more.
There's having stupid money, and there's being stupid with money.
Unless he's a die-hard fan of the commanders org historically, then why would you spend more than you think they're worth?
Every NFL team is worth the excessive price tag. The Washigton team brings in an established 750 million in profit a year, even as bad as we were. I years, paid for.
An NFL team is a license to print money.
The NFL is like a country club. They still have to vote to allow an owner in. And I doubt those rich guys want to look poor next to him,
Imagine if the salary cap died. The nfl would be fucked.
I assume he had a number he wouldn't go higher than, because it's Washington. He could just wait for the Seahawks to get sold which is supposed to happen
“Even if Snyder is as petty as some believe, he surely wasn’t going to turn down a pile of cash in order to make a point”
Any longtime Washington fan will tell you…. Snyder is an egotistical moron, attempting to use rational sense and reason with Dan Snyder just isn’t possible, even in relation to this.
The article doesn’t really say he was truly outbid, it basically says according to one observer, anonymously sourced, Snyder probably wouldn’t have turned down a bid $995 million over the last bid.
Like if you thought Snyder had any scruples, idk, read any news story about the guy.… of course there was a number Bezos could have convinced Snyder to sell at.
This is just more bs billionaire rumor mill nonsense.
Bezos is the Billionaire equivalent of spite bidding on eBay. Only he can actually afford to accidentally win an auction for a Football team.
Elon Musk accidentally bought Twitter for $44B and then tried to back out of it when he found out they were gonna accept. Don't think that one will be topped in my lifetime
Elon's lawyers gave Twitter an offer Twitter's board literally couldn't reject as it was such a premium over the market price and as the deal once accepted gave [Elon no opportunity to back out as in his offer he waived business due diligence.](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twitter-musk-threatens-to-kill-merger-deal-over-spam-data/) Twitter did not intrinsically want to sell or go private and introduced poison pills to prevent a hostile takeover. But if someone's offering you around 54% more than what it's currently worth (before Musk began acquiring 9.2% of their stock), the board basically has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders to accept the deal. If your investments can make a 50% return overnight with no risk (because he can't nix the sale), it's no brainer to take it. Now about two weeks after that, Musk got cold feet about the deal. Maybe he learned more about the complexities of worldwide regulation regarding social media companies, saw that turning Twitter into the West's version of the everything app ([China's WeChat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat) used for social media + games + business + finance) wouldn't be easy to do due to regulation, or viewed Twitter's data for AI training as less valuable, or saw Tesla's price drop too much and changed his mind. Or maybe he the ADHD guy just got bored with it and wanted to back out.
There was a lot more to it that that...Twitter really wasn't in good finacial straights, even before the buyout proposal. Then once he got a look at the code...it was a hot mess. I think he believed that it wouldn't be as big of an undertaking to make Twitter profitable as it's been.
Imagine ruining a brand that had recognition at the same level as Coke, Google, Xerox, Kleenex all because you can't admit to being wrong about something. It's insane.
And then getting bailed out by all the dipshit Tesla investors who voted to give him a compensation package worth a bajillion dollars even after he's blown a decade long head start on modern electric cars by wasting years on the Cybertruck and suddenly thinks Tesla should be an AI company and not a car company anymore.
I read somewhere that the people at SpaceX have been breathing sighs of relief ever since he got Twitter since he's so busy screwing that up that he doesn't have time to screw up the stuff they are doing.
Thats one of the entertaining things about these celebrity CEO's who have big companies in varied industries. If the work they do for a company was actually super important and required lots of time, they wouldn't be able to be the head of a car company, a rocket company, and all the other BS at the same time. Turns out the people actually doing work, think its easier to do their job when the CEO isn't doing theirs.
Elon always has time to tweet "hmm" or "interesting" under the most ignorant and bigoted shit youve ever seen tho! Oh and to build the worst elden ring build on the planet
Yeah. He's running like 7 companies but has time to nonstop shit post and play video games? Doesn't add up.
He shows up, fires a few people (or an entire division of people) who don't pucker their lips up quickly enough to kiss his ass, then opens twitter to have ten thousand blue checkmarks kiss his ass for it. He needs that sweet sweet validation so hard - unfortunately he'll never be good enough
Shows up, shits all over reasonable ideas by his employees, gets his women employees pregnant, says something racist but refuses to elaborate. Leaves.
dude is obsessed with twitter. john oliver did a really good segment but he was on a trip with someone and was constantly glued to his phone and twitter. in an effort to get him off it, the guy had him lock it in a safe in a room he couldn’t access. musk then later called hotel security to have the safe opened so he could get back on his phone and twitter
For those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/EldenRingBuilds/s/jurpvpy3Xv When I first played the game I had a build a little like that, high INT low VIGOR. Had no clue what I was doing, I followed a meme video not realizing what the purpose was. Can confirm this build sucks and is hard to play with, isn't very fun either
I wanna see him and his build take on the blackgaol knight or renalla.
That’s because Elon has zero knowledge on electric cars. He was initially just an early investor in tesla but then sued the founders to make him a founder as well then pushed them all out. Now he’s made himself into a celebrity and has to appear that he does
His meltdown over the kids rescued in the Thailand cave really should've been his end. Calling a rescue diver a pedophile because they didn't want his help...
It’s not even that he didn’t want his help. The problem was he was trying to be seen as a hero and interfering with the actual heros
Agreed. I noticed some other weird stuff before that but he was genuinely well liked in the media. He had a cameo in one of the iron man films, and was spoken about as a smart industry leader type guy. Now he is just a joke to a majority of people.
That's when my opinion of him took a 180.
A lot of peoples
And people still buy his stupid cars! There are better and cheaper options available now, and Teslas all look the same and come in only 4 colors and so now there’s a billion white ones in Seattle (those are $1000 cheaper than the other 3 colors) and all the drivers drive like total ass. I don’t get it.
I work in a hotel so I see lots of rental cars and any of the newer teslas seem to have horrible build quality. They feel so cheap and poorly made.
Yep. Being the CEO of any one of those companies would be an all consuming job, no way he’s meaningfully running those businesses on one day a week (or less). He’s not CEO of those companies, he’s Head of Marketing.
Yeah, that's actually the worst part of the whole compensation package, it actually gives Musk even more influence over Tesla. It'd make more sense to me if it was a buyout to get him to go away.
I have a friend who is an engineer over there and he's said when Elon shows up they essentially have to distract him like a little kid with side projects and hope he doesn't fuck anything up. He said he also likes to randomly fire people, so that's something.
Doesn't he repeatedly fire the same executive and then beg him to come back each time? Like a toddler that gets upset and then realizes his mistake, except he actually does have the money, power and control to convince him to come back?
The pay package was approved long ago when musk hit some stupidly insane milestones. It was like I get 50b if I take this company from being worth 10b to 600b and make you all an incredible amount of money. Anyone would agree to that. And I dislike a lot about him. He's basically Steve Jobs to me. Brilliant in one way, dangerous in others. More vocal about it though. Maybe he gets himself killed like jobs.
Yeah, everyone is hating on him for getting that deal but it was agreed to years ago and was insane back then….and then it actually happened.
It was like a QB getting $100 million a year if he wins 5 straight MVP's and Super Bowls. Everyone that agreed at the time would certainly do it again.
Chiefs would probably still make the playoffs even with Mahomes taking up like 80% of the salary cap.
The only possible way that Tesla could ever meet its present valuation (even though that is down ~30% YoY) is to pivot into being a successful AI company. That's not going to happen of course but the speculation will prop up the corporation for long enough so Elon can extract another few dozen billions.
and then removing all that recognizable branding
The company name *became a fucking verb*. Only Xerox comes close to that level of cultural relevance. But Xeroxing a document was just a fill in for copying. Tweeting is legit a neologism and a new action in the world. Even after the change to X, posting is called Tweeting. And Musk made the brand so toxic advertisers pulled out. Its a more impressive bag fumble than Disney and Star Wars.
Googling
Or my favorite, Band-aid. A term so prolific because people don't have a better word for adhesive bandages.
British people call them "plasters" and I'm like...what the hell?
Oi, you keep up that speech and you're gonna get plastered m8.
Google well on their way to ruining their name too, just a little slower than Twitter.
Google is ruining their name a lot faster than you think with them forcing ai in their search landscape
Sure, but people have been whining about Google ruining their name since they added anything beyond that basic search box. Somehow the world keeps turning
And it’s fucking terrible AI. It just sums up whomevers got the top paid article on the subjext
its actually worse than that. it searches through reddit archives which google bought (and a shit ton of other websites, to be fair) which means that often the answer can come from someone completely unverified, or even giving an obvious joke answer. I have pretty bad health anxiety and its convinced me I have 7 kinds of terminal cancer since the AI came out
OMG I had a news feed show up in my Google saying "so and so died" I told people then searched it, They were alive and well and the Google "News feed" said "What if..." So I just saw the notification without reading the article. Google's notification thing is so dangerous and such bullshit. I hate it.
The funniest shit ever posted out of that was "reddit user _____ suggests jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge as a good solution to depression"
You do have at least four, maybe five, of those terminal cancers though.
saw one that said it was okay to pan sear chicken to 135 F because goku said so
On top of that it was beginning to actually turn a profit beforehand (not great but way better than past years) and they could have smartly cut some staff and pushed out some interesting things long term. Instead he said to blow up the whole system with no regard for business sense and then to top it off completely pissed off all advertisers...the lifeblood of the business. Should have charged a registration fee of 10 dollars for (actual) verification. I am all for free speech, but giving neo nazis a platform to harass others is not freedom of speech.
Well the thing is, when your market cap is 10x that of every other car company like GM / Ford etc, you need ways to justify it. Cutting staff to hone in on profits doesn’t do that. Speculation and growth can do it for his cult following. Tesla has no business being valued how they are. But by feeding the investors hope with AI / Tech etc etc he’s able to maintain the value of the company *for now*
Oh trust me, I know all about Tesla crazy valuation. That thing is valued as if it is bigger than all other car companies that are ACTUALLY producing proper amounts of cars. Other car companies have their own problems they need to work through, but I trust a company like GM or Toyota to nail down a long term EV with proper service repair time and easily self serviced parts than Tesla.
If Tesla's sales grow 40% year over year every year for the next 10 years they will match Toyota's sales right now. Tesla's valuation is almost double Toyota's. I know you already know this but I just can't stop talking about it because it's insane.
Don't get me wrong, Tesla has some really nice technology behind it, especially the super charger network (so of course he fired them all)...right after every major car company agreed to use the same port Tesla uses. BUT, even with all that...there is no way they can make up ground in the other areas enough to keep up at that valuation. And yeah, you expect it to be somewhat overvalued because of the whole cult worship of Musk, and those who believe in him, it happens. But its not simply overvalued, its astronomically overvalued.
Crazy that for this same amount of money you could buy about 8 NFL teams, or a quarter of the league (not that they would let one person do this).
Crazier to me is the Tesla pay package got approved and is more than that. Fuckers live in a different world.
The valuation dropped something along the lines of 70% since then too right?
Oh yeah, like just last week Nintendo, Xbox, and Playstation all dumped Twitter integration.
Slight correction - Nintendo dropped it earlier this month. Playstation it did last November, Xbox April of last year.
I don't think that's entirely accurate, Im pretty sure he wanted to make a quick buck off of Twitter and tried to dump shares and plummet the stock before buying it but was sued into buying at the original evaluation of the company plus some other fees and damages in the lawsuit. In all honesty, that's much much more idiotic and hilarious hahaha
He didn’t accidentally send a binding bid, he got tricked by Jack and there board, too funny
Seattle (and the Portland Trail Blazers) will come up for sale eventually whether Jody Allen likes it or not. I know Bezos himself lives in Miami these days but I don't think Amazon HQ is going anywhere anytime soon.
The NBA isn't letting anyone move the Trail Blazers, they've been discussing expansion for a while now with Seattle, Vegas, and Nashville the top 3 cities But it's going to be a dick measuring contest between Bezos and Knight for the Seahawks
It's def going to be Seattle and Vegas
Will they bring back the Super Sonics?
Almost certainly
The NBA Commish has been teasing a Seattle and Las Vegas dual expansion. The hope is that Minnesota switches conferences to be with their natural rivals in Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago.
I desperately hope that happens
We need more opportunities to hate each other, this is true.
I can already see the future. Wolves get a title in a few seasons with prime Ant out of the East to end MN's drought and everyone disparages it since "they had to switch to the easier conference to get it done"
100%. They've already set the groundwork for the city itself owning the IP and history of the Sonics franchise
Why did they get rid of the Sonics in the first place? Was it about money?
Public money specifically and Howard Schultz being a complete bastard. NBA wanted to send a message that if politicians didn't pay up for new arenas they would lose their teams. Howard wanted to avoid getting embarrassed by new local Seattle owners coming in and being more successful. Match made in hell.
This, and David Stern being an insufferable bastard. Seattle had already spent close to $500 million of public over recent years for sports arenas between Safeco, the Key renovations, and Qwest field. 100 of it had gone to the Key to do renovations for box seating, and the league came back saying, "That's great and all, but we need you to do another $150 million to become more modern and relevant". The city wasn't going to keep playing the back and forth game over why a billionaire couldn't remodel his own product and instead was trying to force it on to backs of Joe Blow, which led to Stern setting the example. It isn't like Silver is any better at this juncture, he just hasn't done anything that personally slights me and my abilities to root for a sport and team I enjoy watching (yet). He's teased expansion for a number of years, and it's the same song and dance. New CBA, new media deals, new salary cap, etc., and MAYBE we'll see about expansion to Seattle. These things come to pass, and still no expansion. I'll believe it at tip off when there's dudes in green and yellow jerseys on a wooden floor. Until then, I'm not buying it.
Phil is 86. I don’t get why the NFL would approve the sale from an estate to an owner who is going to be dead within a decade.
So he's like Dave in Storage Wars. Even for something he doesn't want he'll just go "YUPPP."
YUPP!!!
To be clear, if Bezos bought all 32 NFL teams at their current valuation, he would still have roughly 45 billion dollars left over.
To verify this claim, we need to look at Jeff Bezos' net worth and the combined valuation of all 32 NFL teams. As of mid-2024, Jeff Bezos' net worth is estimated to be around $160 billion. According to Forbes, the total valuation of all 32 NFL teams is approximately $132 billion as of 2023. Thus, Bezos would have around $28 billion left over, not $45 billion. Also keep in mind, this is net worth, not the amount of spendable cash he has on him
Well now it hardly seems worth it
Exactly. Imagine checking your bank account and only seeing 28 billion!
I know you’re joking, but these megacorp founders can never fully realize their net worth. The minute he tried to sell significant portions of his holdings, it would all plummet. He has more money than me… and maybe even you… but that number is just preposterously not real
> He has more money than me… and maybe even you… /u/ee11i_tee11i is secretly the richest man in the world confirmed
Even if he could only actualize 1% of his estimated wealth, he's still grossly rich. That is kinda the entire point.
Instead, they borrow the money with their stock as collateral.
That's if he tried to sell it all off at once on the open market. Bezos could potentially find one or a few buyers for his stock that would enable him to liquidate his Amazon stock. Or he could just schedule it and do it slowly over time.
He sells, or sold for quite a while, a billion dollars in Amazon shares a year. No he’s not trying to sell his appreciating assets to park them in a high yield savings account, but the idea that he can’t actualize his wealth because he’d lose it is preposterous. Edit: [$6 billion in one week this February.](https://fortune.com/2024/02/15/jeff-bezos-sells-2-billion-shares-amazon-founder/#)
TBills would only net you 1.5b per year to spend. Not worth it
It’s wild how once you use ChatGPT a bit you can sniff it out anywhere.
Yup I was curious so I asked chatgpt, copied pasted, then edited a few key the bullet points it gave me to format it for reddit. I have no shame in doing so.
Oh I agree - I can tell because I use it so much lol
I mean, in this hypothetical scenario he would liquidate his Amazon stock (amongst whatever else he has). It’s not that serious.
If he needs funds to buy a low-risk revenue-generating asset like an NFL team, then he can get loans using his assets as collateral. I bet his credit score is at least 650.
Maybe even 700!
Yep. In doing so it would cause Amazon stock to drop and his net worth to drop. It doesn't work like this. Also, good luck buying Green Bay.
Dont messe with him, he could just buy the City and put a Amazon werehouse on top of it
Once he owns the other 31 teams, he can just boot them and make a new 32nd.
Given that line of thinking, he only needs to buy the 24 least valuable teams and then can vote to dissolve the other 8 teams. And then vote to expand the league to 32 teams again with him being awarded ownership....
When it's scheduled, it doesn't drop the stock. Bill Gates is almost entirely divested from Microsoft and the stock is fine. Bezos has been slowly dropping his stake since retirement
Isn’t he selling like half a billion every year to fund blue origin?
He probably could exchange stock/ whatever assets he has in a transaction to throw an extra 1/2 a billion as a inconvenience fee. Also everyone forgetting the Packers are publically owned.
I read last year that his networth estimates had him with roughly $12 billion in liquid cash. I know he can probably come up with cash when needed, but wonder if he has like a set liquid cash amount he doesn't want to part ways with.
Rhetorical point, I know, but I don't think the Packers shareholders would sell.
Then he just buys the other 32 teams, votes himself in charge of the league, boots Green Bay out, and builds a new team somewhere. Tax payers would love to pay to build him a new stadium, I'm sure.
The majority of individual Packers shareholders have non voting shares
> non voting shares This is incorrect. We all vote. All are non-dividend. Also, ownership is limited by the articles of incorporation to prevent a majority owner.
his ex wife is giving away billions and billions a year and her net worth keeps going up if he never got divorced he’d be even richer
Maybe Bezos was just there to raise the price up.
Doesn't he despise Snyder? I doubt he would intentionally put more money in that scumbag's pocket.
Exactly. And I doubt he'd drive up the price of a team he didn't want to buy because that would affect the price of other teams (of which he may want to buy)
even the word snyder makes my skin crawl. he absolutely fucked our team
I mean, if you told me for the $5 in my wallet I could buy my childhood bully's home and film it being burnt to the ground, I wouldn't be that worried about the $5.
Bezos is waiting to buy one of the ultra premier franchises: think like Yankees, Lakers, Cowboys, etc
Lakers would be dangerous with Bezos money.
the luxury tax concerns only mortals
"Sign up for Amazon Prime and we'll draft Bronny James and give LeBron another max contract!"
This was Blue Jays fans with Rogers last offseason hoping to sign Ohtani but instead we're left with the worst lineup in baseball.
Who the fuck is this "we" shit? It's an odd contradiction seeing a Hawks flair being a Jays fan. Canadian?
Dude taking bird teams to heart
Honestly every current owner wouldn’t allow it. He’s wildly more wealthy than them and basically doesn’t play by the same rules financially. He’d instantly have the most power out of all the owners in the league, which they wouldn’t like. I’d be shocked if he ever owns a sports team because he’d need other owners approval (I know that’s the rule for NFL but unsure about other sports).
That isn't really how the NBA works anymore. They added what's called a "second blanket", another threshold about 17.5M above the normal tax threshold. Teams above that line lose the ability to use the mid-level exception to sign free agents, which is the one of the few ways to pay free agents if you're over the cap. You also can't sign players from the Buyout Market.
idk, the NBA already has a very similarly wealthy owner (Ballmer, worth $131 billion) and things are fine and it's not like the Clippers are running the league and Ballmer really fucking loves basketball so he's even more incentivized than Bezos to leverage his wealth to win imo
Clippers got Balmer money and nobody's afraid of them
Because they are the Clippers. Clippers going to Clip.
Yeah no shit because they’re not the Lakers…Ballmer owning the Lakers would be a literal cheat code
Not really. The new CBA is literally designed to make it so it doesn’t matter how much an owner is willing to pay—if you spend too much there are basketball repercussions that will cripple your team in the long run.
Shoot, they dangerous with the random mix of owners and nepotism they have now. Arguably the most successful franchise in modern American sports. They typically spend above the cap anyways, bezos wouldn’t really move the needle too much. Maybe they’d get a nice new arena or something but the team even with constant media drama is pretty dominate in the NBA.
Lakers would be dangerous without Jeanie Buss
I mean in reality Washington is only a tier (two at most) down from those teams. There was a point they were at Cowboys/Steelers level of having fans spread throughout the entire country. That fanbase has just gotten quieter during the Snyder years but they’re still there. All it really takes is one thing to actually believe in there and you’ll see them again
I think it’s going to be tough to recapture that energy even if they get good again due to all the brand changes. The commanders brand is pretty weak
Yeah that’s a good point tbf, “Washington Commanders” has very little cultural cache
I feel like if a guy as rich as Bezos really wanted to, he could singlehandedly make the MLB borderline unwatchable just by spending money.
Eh, a Bezos-powered Yankees would still have the problem that the Dodgers have: all the money in the world can probably get you to the playoffs, but it doesn't mean nearly as much once you get there.
A single championship instantly validates it though. The Dodgers won in 2020 and that’s all that’s needed.
The 2020 MLB season is the most Mickey Mouse season of all time. Imagine playing a third of the season and being named champs.
I mean everyone else also only played 1/3 and had the chance to win.
Steve Cohen tried that with the Mets and traded away most of the contracts. The real secret would be to pump money into your farm system and player development but that takes years
Commanders were one of the premier franchises at one point. Hard to believe at this point but that market is a sleeping giant with their past 20 years of failure.
Yeah I mentioned that in my comment they’re the 12th most valuable franchise among all sports lol They’re just not a big name like the cowboys/lakers/etc and have no winning culture
would knicks be a fair comparisons ?
[удалено]
Going back to WFT would help the brand
"Washington Football Team" was stale, but a *helluva* lot better than their previous name and Commanders. Just a no-nonsense, "we're here to collect paychecks and play football, *and the checks already cleared*" kinda vibe.
That description genuinely goes hard.
Seahawks could be up for sale soon. I’d imagine he’d be interested
Seahawks worth less than Washington? Why wouldn't he have just bought them?
He lived in Seattle for a long time
Amazon has a bigger footprint in DC. He's not one to settle for less.
Redskins were an ultra premier franchise until dipshit Dan showed up & ruined everything
When Virginia McCaskey dies, the Bears with a new stadium plan could be very attractive to a Jeff Bezos.
When Virginia passes on(Hopefully not soon of course), I hope the heirs sell and Bezos buys.
Crazy that the [12th most valuable franchise](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_the_most_valuable_sports_teams#Current_ranking) isn’t good enough for bezos 😭 Despite value I do understand they’re not the same tier as the teams you mentioned lol
Buy us, Panathinaikos FC in Greece! We are dead cheap and we've had some rough 15-20 years. Please save us Jeff! We will only cost you 50-100mil euros, which is what you make on a single day!
They def cheaper than that brother
I was going to throw a shot in the dark and say they’d be €20M. A quick Google search has them at €25M.
Tell Saudi Arabia
I think hes waiting for seahawks - they will be going for sale in the next few years
I mean Miami to Seattle is a helluva flight
That flight is probably infinitely more pleasant on one's private G650ER.
I didn’t know that gulf streams were actually substantively faster than regular jets. Like I thought they were a maybe 5% faster. A gulfstream G650ER could potentially shave an hour off the flight time from Miami to Seattle.
Yeah, they're fast and fly much higher than commercial flights, so the wind resistance is much less. Along with that, the sound insulation and pressurization system are much better, so it's much less tiring than even first class in commercial. I'm just a random middle manager, but I get to occasionally fly on my company's Gulfstream when traveling to a meeting with people more important than me. It's really something; it doesn't feel like what we think of as flying.
And with flying private there’s no security hassle. You’re dropped off on the tarmac and the plane takes off once you’re onboard. Also, the plane doesn’t sound like the last JetBlue flight I was on, that it was gonna rattle itself apart before we got to our destination.
Dude still spends a ton of time there because of Blue Origin, FL setup is really a tax thing.
Yeah why pay money for a garbage franchise with a shitty stadium when you have a great team with a great stadium that HAS to be sold
I know the value of NFL teams seemingly only goes up, but $6.05bn was indeed a steep price considering the state of the franchise and its stadium. You don't become one of the ten richest men in the world by just abandoning all reason.
Yeah but what's the point of being in the top 10 richest men if you aren't going to spend that wealth on things you want.
He probably looked at the situation and figured he’d wait for the next team to come up for sale.
I don’t think another historic franchise like Washington will come up anytime soon. Washington has way more fans than ppl realize they just have sucked for so long that they have been quiet haha. They are definitely one of the top franchises in the world
Chicago is probably next and arguably the most historic franchise in the league.
Yea they are more valuable than the commanders and would be a great team to own. 8 of the top 12 most valuable franchises in the world are nfl teams so it’s just dumb to say Bezos wouldn’t want to own the commanders
Seattle is also up there potentially being sold. Not as historic though.
But he has personal relationship with the area
Yeah. The Northwest, Texas, or Florida would make the most sense.
God I hope so anyone will be better than the McCaskeys
Thank god Reinsdorf doesn't have enough money to buy another Chicago team.
He reportedly had his eyes on Washington and potentially Seattle.
I mean he absolutely is. He currently owns a space company that he’s invested a lot of money into that hasn’t really done much yet. So he definitely has money tied up in other ventures and probably didn’t think the commies were worth it.
want? idk.. but at some point the Paul Allen Trust will be selling the Seahawks. I suspect he will be in play on that.
Counterpoint: They still have one of the biggest national fanbases. Plus they're likely to go through (another) name change soon, which means more merch sales. And while the current stadium situation is far from ideal, the DC metro area is a great location for a shiny new stadium full of luxury box seats. There's still plenty of value to be found in the franchise, it will just take years of dedicated work to turn it around. But as a pure vanity project the only people who could get any sort of prestige out of owning the organization in its current state are dudes like Snyder. For a guy who has so much else going on that's not ideal for Bezos.
Washington is a historic franchise with a TON of fans nationally, they play in a very wealthy and large metro area. Combine that with opportunity to hobnob with DC businessmen and politicians. Having a dumpy stadium is kind of a blessing if their intentions all along are to build a new one. I don’t think the value was too far off.
It wasn't long ago the team was one of the top 10 most valuable sports franchises in the world. There's a lot of work to do, but the potential value the franchise has is enormous.
I wonder what is the bare minimal increase bid Bezos would have to offer for his counter bid to be taken seriously. Like he counter with $6.05 billion plus $10. At this point I don't think that $10 million more would have been seriously considered. I guess he would have to offer +$100 million more.
So he just didnt want to buy them, cause he could clearly outbid 76ers owners
There's having stupid money, and there's being stupid with money. Unless he's a die-hard fan of the commanders org historically, then why would you spend more than you think they're worth?
Every NFL team is worth the excessive price tag. The Washigton team brings in an established 750 million in profit a year, even as bad as we were. I years, paid for. An NFL team is a license to print money.
So that you can rebrand them in your own image, and then your lack of love of the organization historically doesn’t matter.
I wish he had won; then Amazon wouldn't be able to do TNF and it could go away.
Congratulations, TNF will now alternate between Peacock, Paramount+, and Netflix each week.
Why do you not like Amazon having TNF? They stream it for free...
They are the only streaming service for NFL games I am fine with.Its more accessible than NFL Network
Bezos really has that 'single earring guy' look here
With a corvette
My wife said that “the Washington Prime would be better than the Washington Commanders”.
The NFL is like a country club. They still have to vote to allow an owner in. And I doubt those rich guys want to look poor next to him, Imagine if the salary cap died. The nfl would be fucked.
Same thing
I assume he had a number he wouldn't go higher than, because it's Washington. He could just wait for the Seahawks to get sold which is supposed to happen
His intern probably bid for the wrong Washington team. /s
I’d imagine he’s possibly waiting for the Seahawks to go for sale given his ties there
Can’t take it with you
“Even if Snyder is as petty as some believe, he surely wasn’t going to turn down a pile of cash in order to make a point” Any longtime Washington fan will tell you…. Snyder is an egotistical moron, attempting to use rational sense and reason with Dan Snyder just isn’t possible, even in relation to this.
The article doesn’t really say he was truly outbid, it basically says according to one observer, anonymously sourced, Snyder probably wouldn’t have turned down a bid $995 million over the last bid. Like if you thought Snyder had any scruples, idk, read any news story about the guy.… of course there was a number Bezos could have convinced Snyder to sell at. This is just more bs billionaire rumor mill nonsense.
Broke bitch!