The purpose of a fine is to get compliance, not to punish. The fine was $50,000, doubling every day. So $350,00 dollars means Musk caved after 3 days. Pretty effective tactic by the court.
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Powers of two don't fuck around.
Doing a data science degree right now. No. No they do not.
This pointless comment brought to you by poorly optimized flashbacks.
The fine would've hit $40 billion within a few weeks.
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That's like fining you or I a penny. It's so ridiculously inconsequential to Musk.
If he'd held out one more day it would have been 700k. 2 more days, 1.4M. 3 more, 2.8M.
i.e. Musk caved before it became consequential.
1.4B if he'd waited 2 weeks more. 23.4T (that's Trillion) if he wanted to shield Trump for a month. I'd say it was a heavy fine that worked as intended.
Someone check my math.
Until fines become wealth based, it will always be a poor people tax.
If cash flow is the issue, then start taking stocks.
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Inconsequential for Musk sure, but not Twitter. Twitter is a company that didn't make money, lost half of its ad revenue, can't afford to pay its rent, can't afford to pay its cloud providers, and was saddled with huge debts that have $1b in interest annually. The clock is ticking for Twitter.
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
At first, Twitter resisted producing Trump's data and argued that the government's nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act.
However, US circuit judge Florence Pan wrote that the court was largely unpersuaded by Twitter's arguments, mostly because the government's interest in Trump's data as part of its ongoing January 6 investigation was "unquestionably compelling."
The government then took the extra step to apply for a nondisclosure order, which was granted because "the district court found that there were 'reasonable grounds to believe' that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump 'would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation' by giving him 'an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.'"
The court checked with Twitter and confirmed that it was capable of meeting a rapid deadline and turning over the data by 5:00 pm that evening.
The court rejected Twitter's "good faith" arguments, mainly because the company blew past the original deadline and repeatedly failed to raise concerns at earlier opportunities.
While Twitter appealed the decision, the company "paid the $350,000 sanction into an escrow account maintained by the district court clerk's office."
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
350k is a slap. Criminal charges should be made agaist leaders who ordered the delays.
Sure would be nice if some rich criminals went to jail instead of a life without repercussions of any kind
It was doubling every day. They were scared of day 15 where it would've been 780mil for the day and over 1.562billion total.
Every day doubling is a really good consequence, the fact that it only took twitter 3 days to comply once the penalty started actually hitting should confirm that
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Can we send Twitter to prison?
Corporations are people my friend
Only for free speech purposes but not for criminal or tax.
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Seems fair. If corporations are legally people, they ought to be able to be incarcerated like people or executed like people.
I fully agree with this, I’m just not sure what form this would take.
For execution, a dissolution of all properties, patents, inventory, and all assets seized and sold, followed by barring at least the C-suite from working in the same field ever again?
In my mind, incarceration would be a freeze on all their assets and business operations for a fixed period of time. Execution would mean full liquidation as though they were bankrupt, all their IPs become public domain, like you mention. Perhaps with such equality, owners of corporations would no longer wish them to be considered people.
I imagine a C-suite that caused either of these outcomes wouldn't be popular with the investment class since it would cost them meaningful amounts of money. A ban might not even be nessicary.
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“Who is this Twitter you speak of? My name is X. I don’t know any Twitter.“ - Musk with a fake moustache and glasses.
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Elon is bleeding millions a day at this point - he won’t even know that this 350k ever existed or what it was for.
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Ugh please leave the pointless predictable pithy platitudes at Reddit
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Meanwhile, Twitter was late in its attempts to oppose the sanctions formula. The court opinion said that Twitter's counsel "belatedly" pointed out that "roughly one month of noncompliance" would have "required Twitter to pay a sanction greater than 'the entire world's gross domestic product.'"
PalpatineDewIt.jpg
"But your honor, if we don't comply with your order it'll cost insane amounts of money!"
"Damn it's almost like I want you to comply"
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The government immediately tried to serve Twitter with the search warrant—which required Trump's data to be shared within 10 days—but the website where Twitter gathers legal requests was "inoperative."
Did they auto-reply to the request with a poop emoji?
I find Twitter contemptible, where's my money?
But with Musk's wealth compared to the average white collar workers wealth, isn't that like 35 bucks?
The average net worth in the US is $121k. Elon Musk’s net worth is $231B, or about 1.9M times the average. A $350K fine for Musk would equate to about 18 cents for the average American.
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That's such an ancient phone on the thumbnail that it couldn't even run Twitter.
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The real question is, what were they doing with the data during that time? Did some it disappear?
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I feel like it should be noted that Twitter didn't have any objections at all to handing over all of Trump's data. Thier only issue was with not telling him about it.
Thier only issue was with not telling him about it.
That was a legal tactic. It doesn't mean that was their actual concern. It means it was the best counterargument they could come up with.
If you read the article that was one of several things they threw out there to excuse their consistently delaying/not complying. The courts told them repeatedly that their opinions on the matter were wrong and they kept delaying over and over again.
I mean come on:
"Twitter contends that it 'substantially complied with the [w]arrant' because 'there was nothing [it] could have done to comply faster' after the court issued the February 7 order," the court document said.
The court rejected Twitter's "good faith" arguments, mainly because the company blew past the original deadline and repeatedly failed to raise concerns at earlier opportunities.
Twitter continued challenging the nondisclosure order and the sanctions, but the court rejected most of its arguments and ultimately affirmed the contempt sanctions, issuing its opinion on July 18.
This nonsense went on for months.
To avoid a fine, all they had to do was tell the court they needed more time before the deadline*
*Because Space Karen fired all the people who knew how to look this up
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