February 2 2024
- Friedberg out
- JCal bought Apple googles for all besties
- Never know when you will get lucky in life
- Senate hearing on social media
- This is misguided - how can you end all harm - zeroism is dangerous
- Moral panic
- Powerful moment where Zuckerberg faced the families and apologized in court
- In the past too people blamed other factors - Judas Priest was brought to court for their lyrics
- Rap music was targeted in the past too
- There is a massive law of large numbers at play here too - 1/10 of 1 percent of all users is still > 3M people
- How does Section 230 apply here?
- Are platforms publishers or distributors?
- Are they editorializing or are they a newstand?
- Section 230 says if you make a good samaritan effort to combat bad things, you should be protected
- Parents also have to play an active role if we want social media at scale
- Lawyers are salivating at how they were able to extract money against tobacco, etc and now at this - they are a big donor for democrats
- In the process of being good samaritans, the social media companies started engaging in political censorship against the right - so republicans are mad and want to end Section 230 - it will hit them back
- The companies’ liberals will become even more radical and end more right-wing content
- Tobacco settlement in today’s dollars = $370B
- Lawyers are seeing $$$$ signs - they will get away with it because the issues are emotional and that will dominate the thought process
- People will not target mainstream content (movies, music, games) that are also harmful but sue the social media companies
- Social media might start at late teens then
- Society isn’t helping - one parent households are more vulnerable
- CA already has a bill in progress about age restrictions on social media
- Anger is bipartisan, the objectives are not (dems want more censorship, republicans don’t)
- Elon’s pay package nullified
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Elon drove one of the biggest runs in capitalism
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Judge had to find 3 things
- Excessive pay package
- Negotiation not fair process
- Shareholder vote was invalid
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No one thought Elon would hit these numbers
- Andrew Ross Sorkin clip where they’re laughing that these numbers would be hit
- All stories at the time were laughing at Model 3 projections, etc
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They came up with a plan where he would get rewarded for only outsized performance - not just decent or merely good performance
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All wall street analysts thought it was crazy - the company had the largest short position basically ever
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This sets a very poor standard for why someone should build a company incorporated in Delaware
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How can you go back and retroactively nullify agreements?
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Every other investor made $500B
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This will cause companies to be risk averse - best enterpreneurs will stay private
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Lawsuit brought by someone with 9 shares
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Average compensation plan for most public company CEOs are not as good for shareholders
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No CEO will want an incentive laden plan like this - it will be cancelled 10 years later
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Person had choice - they were not the victim - they could have bought other stuff on the open market
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Its more about the judge’s interpretation of Delaware law and what companies are allowed to do
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Mary Barra would no way have done this deal
- GM stock price has been the same
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Compare with Tesla
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Milestones were not just stock increases but also revenue and profit targets being meant - it wasn’t something gameable
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Delaware is Joe Biden’s state
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CEOs are being incentivized to increase debt and buy back shares
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GM CEO swept almost $200M with flat stock price
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- Capitalism can be perverted by a small group of actors
- Buffett and Munger were right about compensation consultants
- Reddit potential IPO
- Had raised at a $10B valuation during peak ZIRP in 2021 or so
- Secondary trading was ~$15B
- Drone attack issues
- Republican senators are trying to goad Biden into attacking Iran immediately
- Sacks predicted this harm 10 months ago
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