Are those scam auto warranty robocalls gone yet?

benfell

Robocalls

Ina Fried, “FCC cracks down on spam ‘auto warranty’ robocalls,” Axios, July 7, 2022, https://www.axios.com/2022/07/07/fcc-spam-auto-warranty-robocalls

Twitter

[William D. Cohan] asked if, in his forty-plus years of M&A [merger and acquisition] experience, this banker [a longtime Wall Street banker friend] had ever seen anything before like what Elon [Musk] had just done: thoroughly embarrassing and discrediting himself by signing a merger agreement to buy a company and then reneging on that deal in a fit of buyer’s remorse. “Yeah,” he replied. “When he tried to take Tesla private,” a reference to Elon’s last pathetic M&A failure, in 2018, when he tweeted that he was going to buy Tesla for $420 a share and that he had “funding secured” to do it. Elon did not, of course, have “funding secured,” and paid a $20 million fine, among other penalties, for misleading shareholders.

But Elon has well and truly screwed the pooch this time. As a result of this little stunt, he and his companies—Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company—will now be as big pariahs on Wall Street as Donald Trump, as a result of all his shenanigans over the years. Who on Wall Street is going to want to do business with Elon after he ginned up a takeover of Twitter, signed a legally binding agreement to do so for $44 billion in cash, put the biggest banks to work on the deal (and thereby used their credibility to help legitimize his offer) and then manufactured a half-assed excuse for why he no longer wanted to do it?[1]

William Cohan is referring, of course, to Elon Musk’s claim about “bots,” which he is deploying as an excuse to back out of his deal to purchase Twitter,[2] and which is unlikely to carry much weight in the courts.[3] It might be an understatement to suggest that Cohan holds Musk’s attempt to back out of the deal in extreme disdain but he forecasts it’ll be in the courts for many years to come.[4] This, of course, excludes entirely the possibility that Musk is just trying for a better deal.[5]

One way or another, these are all very rich people battling over vast sums of money. Time will tell whether this is just Musk holding out for a lower price or this really ends up as a lengthy court battle[6] or, somehow, a combination of both. As I’ve previously noted, Musk has some growing up to do,[7] so it’s impossible, really, to rule out any of Danny Fortson’s three possibilities[8] (two of which reduce to Cohan’s lengthy court battle[9]); the simplest thing would indeed still be for Musk to settle for a lower price,[10] but at least from afar, it looks to me like Musk often thinks he’s the only person with any brains in whatever room he happens to be in, and there most definitely is that adolescent sense that the world’s problems would all be solved if everyone just did everything Musk’s way. You know, like nuking Mars.[11]

William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/

  1. [1]William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/↩
  2. [2]William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/↩
  3. [3]Danny Fortson, “Erratic Elon Musk leaves Twitter with three unbearable choices,” Times, July 9, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/erratic-elon-musk-leaves-twitter-with-three-unbearable-choices-g3tg5zlbt; Faiz Siddiqui and Gerrit De Vynck, “Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril,” Washington Post, July 7, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/07/07/elon-musk-twitter-jeopardy/↩
  4. [4]William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/↩
  5. [5]Danny Fortson, “Erratic Elon Musk leaves Twitter with three unbearable choices,” Times, July 9, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/erratic-elon-musk-leaves-twitter-with-three-unbearable-choices-g3tg5zlbt↩
  6. [6]William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/; Danny Fortson, “Erratic Elon Musk leaves Twitter with three unbearable choices,” Times, July 9, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/erratic-elon-musk-leaves-twitter-with-three-unbearable-choices-g3tg5zlbt↩
  7. [7]David Benfell, “Elon Musk, groan, again,” Not Housebroken, February 28, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/03/22/elon-musk-groan-again/↩
  8. [8]Danny Fortson, “Erratic Elon Musk leaves Twitter with three unbearable choices,” Times, July 9, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/erratic-elon-musk-leaves-twitter-with-three-unbearable-choices-g3tg5zlbt↩
  9. [9]William D. Cohan, “The Musk Reckoning,” Puck News, July 10, 2022, https://puck.news/the-musk-reckoning/↩
  10. [10]Danny Fortson, “Erratic Elon Musk leaves Twitter with three unbearable choices,” Times, July 9, 2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/erratic-elon-musk-leaves-twitter-with-three-unbearable-choices-g3tg5zlbt↩
  11. [11]Tristan Greene, “Here’s the stupid reason Elon Musk wants to nuke Mars,” Next Web, August 16, 2019, https://thenextweb.com/distract/2019/08/16/heres-the-stupid-reason-elon-musk-wants-to-nuke-mars/↩

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