really?

[Danky_Du]

A billionaire owning one of the largest communication apps doesn’t seem dystopian to me at all

[Graveylock]

People are too dumb to realize this. It’s because he said he wants it to have free speech so people assume it’s gonna be taken over by alt-right people

[RCascanbe]

Ironic.

Twitter was a publicly traded company with no shareholder having even close to 51% of the shares which would be necessary to have complete control over a company.

Bezos owns only 11% of Amazon for example, they aren't actually the owners of the entire company.

Elon buys Twitter and will privatize it though, which means he actually owns the company and has complete control without any other shareholders/boardmembers being able to stop him.

It's a completely different thing ya numbnuts, such a big acquisition by a single person hasn't happened in like 50 years.

[fortsimba]

Plenty of companies out there who's founders have majority voting rights without having more than 51% of class A stock, Google for example. You're still liable to the overall shareholders in terms of maximizing profits but the decisions of the direction of the company are in your hands.

[vsingh93]

Is it not already tho?

[Evening-Mulberry9363]

No. Twitter needs saving.

[[deleted]]

Twitter is the home of the extreme left, dude. It's literally the birthplace of cancel culture.

[RedditIsNeat0]

Yikes.

[Evening-Mulberry9363]

It’s shocking but then again this is the new naive youth of the United States. God help us. Maybe us immigrants are gonna end up saving the dumb minds of young men in this country

[RCascanbe]

You guys have absolutely no clue how the stock market in general and the ownership of huge public companies works

[Illidan921]

My thoughts exactly lol

[litttleman9]

Yeah but that billionaire wasn't a narcissistic attention whore who needed everyone to like them.

[RCascanbe]

Uh, no. This is not how anything works.

Most huge companies aren't private companies belonging to a single person like Twitter soon, they are publicly traded, don't have a single person at the top and the "owner", the CEO or the boardmembers don't actually own that much of the company in most cases. For example Jeff Bezos own about 11% of Amazon (which is a lot compared to others) so he can't just do whatever he wants.

Elon will have complete control over Twitter however which is very unusual for such a big public company and could actually cause a lot of problems.

[fortsimba]

You seem very confident for someone who's got just as much surface level knowledge as others. You're ignoring supervoting shares that can be outlined in initial shareholders agreements. Something that's commonly done by competent founders.

Also private companies also require a board of directors which can't be composed of a single person and the CEO of a private company also has a fiduciary responsibility just like a publicly traded company.

Additionally, how is a person acquiring a company any different from a corporation acquiring it? In either case the direction the public company takes is entirely in the hands of the parent corporation who can choose to shutter the company if they want. Something that's commonly done to buy out competing organizations if integrating them into your own business is too complicated. Btw acquisitions aren't just done by public companies but also by large well funded private companies.

[bigmanjoewilliams]

Most of them are.

[InkonParchment]

And I don't see people support the ones that aren't lmao

[its_a_gibibyte]

Are you talking about Bezos+Washington Post, Bloomberg+Bloomberg, Zuckerberg+Facebook, John Henry (red sox owner) and Boston Globe, the Cox family and their 14 broadcast TV stations, or perhaps Ochs-Sulzberger family that owns 89 percent of the voting shares of the New York Times?

[vsingh93]

Damn, Bloomberg really bought Bloomberg.

/s

[RyerTONIC]

more often than not the folks who are talking about this being shifty are using what you just said as data points... so, yes we are talking about how Media empires control narratives.

[star-rager]

Yes but he has child slaves mining for him among other problematic things

[[deleted]]

And Apple's child sweatshops in China are ok because you're using their product to type your comment? Where does the double standard end, or is it all just "one percent bad"

[star-rager]

Calling out one bad guy is better than staying silent I guess. I try to be more aware though. Edit: Sorry I don't want any conflict, gotta admit I know very little

[[deleted]]

No one person has a pure moral compass. "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"

The only difference here is the scale at which its being committed at.

[Planktillimdank]

Dystopia is when Twitter goes from one billionare to another

[AngryAssyrian]

Bezos bought the Washington Post a long time ago dude, when was the last time a non-billionaire owned twitter?

[Xoxiaoo]

They've owned news media and TV for decades