What we’re reading (4/25)
“Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Offer To Buy Company In $44 Billion Deal” (Wall Street Journal). “The [$44 billion] takeover, if it goes through, would mark one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history and will likely have global repercussions for years to come, including possibly reshaping how billions of people use social media. Mr. Musk will bring his commitment to a more hands-off approach on speech to a company that has struggled to reconcile freewheeling conversation with content that appeals to advertisers.”
“Elon Closes In” (Matt Levine, Bloomberg). “Incidentally, the legal standard here is a bit odd. Roughly speaking, the way Delaware law works is that a board can reject a cash acquisition for stakeholder-y reasons, but it can’t really accept one for those reasons. ‘We will not sell to Elon Musk because it would be bad for the world for him to own Twitter, even though the price is right,’ is a controversial but possible thing for the board to say. ‘We will sell to Elon Musk because it would be good for the world for him to own Twitter, even though the price is wrong,’ would not be okay.”
“It’s Not Just High Oil Prices. It’s A Full-Blown Energy Crisis.” (Helen Thompson, New York Times). “Americans are worrying about their gas prices. Germans are turning down their heating. Peru has seen violent protests — and a violent crackdown on them — over rising fuel costs. Nigeria’s national energy grid recently collapsed. And that’s just this spring. Focused on the future, the United Nations Intergovernmental Planet on Climate Change warned in a report on April 4 that too much investment is going into fossil fuels and too little into the energy transition that could prevent a devastating increase in global temperatures.”
“The Gathering Stagflationary Storm Will Rattle Markets, Economies And Societies” (Nouriel Roubini, Project Syndicate). “The new reality with which many advanced economies and emerging markets must reckon is higher inflation and slowing economic growth. And a big reason for the current bout of stagflation is a series of negative aggregate supply shocks that have curtailed production and increased costs. This should come as no surprise.”
“Prosecutors Spoof Spoofer Into Guilty Plea For Spoofing” (Dealbreaker). “Federal prosecutors and authorities more generally have spent the better part of the last few years trying to demonstrate that spoofing—goosing the market you actually intend to trade in with a raft of rather large orders you have no intention of actually executing—is, in fact, illegal. And, like, properly, prison-worthy illegal, whatever those bleeding hearts at the U.S. Probation Office say.”
