Liberty

Would be interested to see what this does to the convertible debt too..

I don't know how this works? Musk, Abu Dhabi, and the Saudis (no filing yet?) look like 22%, 4%, and 4% of shares...likely they don't sell so we know that's the 30% not selling... say 70% of base sells, if the deal values TSLA at $70B, Musk needs $49B before debt "secured"? He seems confident that a large fraction won't sell. Tencent owns a chunk too, and maybe he's confident that Fidelity and FMR and such won't sell. Probably can know that a lot of retail investors won't sell because it's such a cult stock. It might blow up in his face, but his risk appetite isn't exactly normal (you don't start car companies and space rocket companies if it is)...

Legacy Charter bought Time Warner Cable and the cable systems of Advance/Newhouse at the same time, and A/N retained some ownership in the New Charter (basically, they took a bunch of stock in NewCo as payment). They've been maintaining their % by selling back into the company's buybacks.

His idea basically seems to be that most shareholders will remain in, so the capital needed to buy out the others won't be more than what he can raise from a few deep pockets...

Why do you think it is a massive vote of confidence? It seems that A/N is just taking a margin loan by pledging a portion of their Charter common units. Charter is at the early stages of what Liberty Global has nearly entirely accomplished. Malone et al likely have an idea of what the next few quarters will look like. There are certainly a lot of bad investors out there, but someone like Malone doesn't margin a sinking ship. A/N isn't John Malone, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications

Official blog post: https://www.tesla.com/blog/taking-tesla-private?redirect=no

If you read Musk's twitter feed, sounds like he's got a consortium to fund it. Can't be that many people with deep pockets... Tencent already owns a bunch, Softbank, Google, Saudi Arabia, etc.. What a crazy day. Legendary

https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2018/08/06/new-details-about-wilbur-rosss-businesses-point-to-pattern-of-grifting/

You're welcome, LC!

Fiscal Q3: https://www.transdigm.com/investor-relations/news-releases/news-article/?myartid=2362418

https://blog.openai.com/openai-five-benchmark-results/ "Yesterday, OpenAI Five won a best-of-three against a team of 99.95th percentile Dota players: Blitz, Cap, Fogged, Merlini, and MoonMeander — four of whom have played Dota professionally — in front of a live audience and 100,000 concurrent livestream viewers." https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/elon-musks-dota-2-bots-spank-top-tier-humans-and-they-know-how-to-trash-talk/ "OpenAI is using 128,000 cores on Google's Cloud Platform. The bots learn the game from scratch: initial versions will just wander aimlessly and at random as the game plays itself out. As thousands upon thousands of games are played, it figures out which actions will improve its chance of winning."

Glad you found it interesting, John. I agree that it's not quite the same mold as some of the other Dirty Money episodes, but I think that this was more than counter-balanced by the fact that this is the president of the US. Some other guys in other episodes might have stolen maple syrup or committed fraud on small loans and that's sleazy, or cheated on diesel emission tests that hurt the health of millions, and that's really bad, but this man not being what most of his voters think he is is on another scale when it comes to world impact.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Bad Blood, and it's pretty amazing just how much of a fraud Theranos was from the start and how much of a con woman Holmes was. Really sleazy stuff, especially considering it touched healthcare. Also less in the spotlight, but just as guilty seems to be exec Sunny Balwami, who seems to have enabled and encouraged the whole thing from the start.

New free writeup about CPRT (and KAR) at Scuttleblurb. No sub required for that one. Good stuff: https://www.scuttleblurb.com/cprt_kar/

The company has released a new Q&A from shareholders: http://www.csisoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/QA-August-2018-Final.pdf On recently lower margins:

I'd be interested in having a look. I've been testing various alternatives and have looked at a few that are in development.

Yeah. I think Putin is probably putting a lot of pressure behind the scenes...

New acquisition at Volaris: https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/08/02/1546461/0/en/Volaris-Group-Expands-Position-in-Communications-Media-Vertical-with-Acquisition-of-Aleyant.html h/t @behrak on Twitter

Yep https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/20/instagram-1-billion-users/

Q2 letter is out: http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/7235e525-db16-470c-8dce-9ecac0ad7712

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-oracle-software-by-early-2020.html

Don't forget friendster..the poor man's myspace. How is Orkut doing these days?

Yeah, I also don't understand the organic numbers, and wish I did. Have you reached out to investor relations? Curious if they have anything to say about it.

Writeup on CHTR after Q2: http://www.yetanothervalueblog.com/2018/08/some-updated-thoughts-on-charter-post_1.html

I've been looking at this one for maybe 2-3 years, I think it might have been Ian Cassel that wrote something about it that made me look. Looks like good management and good strategy and at times a fairly cheap price, but I never felt comfortable enough with the industry and with how potentially cyclical it is to know for sure...