D&D General Elon Musk Wants To Know 'How Much Is Hasbro?'

Following the richest man in the world's attack on Wizards of the Coast for two paragraphs in the 500-page celebration of D&D, The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977, Elon Musk--who bought Twitter not that long ago--wants to know how much D&D's owner Hasbro would cost.

After the public sharing on Twitter of Jason Tondro's (who wrote the book’s foreword) private Facebook posts, Musk replied "How much is Hasbro?"

Hasbro's estimated capitalization is currently $8.71 billion, with $3.95 billion of debt.

It was on 21st December 2017 when Musk similarly enquired "How much is it?" before proceeding to make a bid for Twitter. He later tried to back out of the deal, but was forced to buy the platform for $44 billion in June 2022. Current estimates by investment firm Fidelity put the platform at a value 80% less than when he bought it, with a worth of only about $9.4 billion.

 

[AnotherGuy]

He's going to need to learn to cast Wish in order to get 1/10th of that into reality?

The fact that they keep delaying manned-missions to the moon while the public is fed news of UFO's tells you all you need to know as to how far the mars project really is...

So I'm in agreement with Mistwell...this Musk buying Hasbro is just more storm in a teacup and all that.
Excitement for the anti-Musk fanboys.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Maybe not, but I suspect the valuation of the company doesn't include those IP's and is more derived from material and financial assets.

On top of that, as one of the world's largest toy companies, Hasbro has a gross earnings of 3 billion during a bad year, and 4 billion or more during a good one. So even with whatever troubles it currently has it's no small-fry that he can walk in and buy out of pocket.

If it wasn't for the government contracts to SpaceX he wouldn't have a single company that wasn't slipping in value right now.

Telsa exploded in value after a certain November event, it's worth more then the other Car companies period.

 

[mamba]

But what if he buys 50% plus a share?"

Well, that would be around 4.46 billion dollars, which he definitely hasn't got liquid and possibly does not have, period. But also, it wouldn't get him the company. Hasbro has issued 139.5 million shares - but that's not all they have.

Hasbro is AUTHORIZED to issue up to 600 million shares, and even adding together stuff that is sitting around not trading, they've only issued around a third of that total per their last quarterly report.

how many shares there are makes little difference…

1) it does not increase the company’s value, so if there are 3 times the shares, each share is worth 1/3 of their current value

2) when new shares get issued they are pro-rated to owners of the current shares, so in this case anyone owning one share would get two more

Notice how even after the split Musk would still own half the company and shares, and his shares would still be worth $4.5B, so nothing at all changed from issuing more shares

 

[Future_Monkey]

Telsa exploded in value after a certain November event, it's worth more then the other Car companies period.

What you're saying is the company is only valuable because he literally bought his way into the inner-circle of the president.

Not because he's actually good at business or anything. And certainly not because they make good trucks.

Dogecoin has also gone up in value for the first time in ages too, for the same reason. That doesn't mean it's a good investment.

 

[GrimCo]

If he want's to buy it, and fork over ridiculous amounts of money, go Elon go. His Tesla shenanigans payed me enoguh for complete house renovation. Since i dropped few grand on Hasbro stock, if i get to sell them at 2x or 3x, i'll make toast to Elon with bottle of Pappy.

As I said numerous time, i don't care about company per se or who owns it. I'll buy their products if they are good. If they suck, won't buy them. But, when it comes to stocks, i welcome any billionaire willing to fork over too much money if that makes me some money.

 

[Future_Monkey]

As for buying Hasbro, whether it's a publicly traded or privately held company (like Paizo) just means how much the buyer is offering and how much the current owner(s) wants to part with their company. What way too many people don't get is that a company's sole purpose is to make it's owner(s) money. And no matter how much the CFO hates Musk, the CFO is not the 100% owner of Hasbro, he's only the Chief Financial Officer, his responsibility is to make the owner (aka. shareholders) money.

Also keep in mind that Musk 'overpaid' between 75% and 175% (depending on how you calculate those things) for acquiring Twitter. If Musk offers $16B for Hasbro, with it's marketcap at $9.1B, many shareholders would be interested. If he was to pay $25B for it, there would be very few complaints. That's the power of money and the reality of companies.

The difference is that noone is going to pool billions of dollars in a coalition of investors to buy Hasbro because Elon had a fit over D&D. Because Twitter lets those people have control over world-wide speech. He's not going to find anyone willing to help him scrape together 16 billion for Hasbro, let alone 25 billion.

Not to mention the CFO has an easy excuse to refuse anything but those kind of ridiculous of offers, because he can point to the Twitter purchase and just say in private that he thinks Musk is dumb enough to pay more.

 

[mamba]

Not to mention the CFO has an easy excuse to refuse anything but those kind of ridiculous of offers, because he can point to the Twitter purchase and just say in private that he thinks Musk is dumb enough to pay more.

the CFO has no say in this. If Musk offered $100 for a Hasbro stock trading around $65, with the offer valid for the next 10 days, chances are he owns the company in 10 days, no matter what the CFO thinks

 

[Remathilis]

Yes. Not a death threat, just a "On the list of people I wouldn't be unhappy if they dropped dead" sort of thing. There's been some really big emotions among these four topics about Elon Musk. All triggered by what truly was a silly Tweet.

Zard has it right. Crack a beer. This is not a serious issue. Worth talking about on a slow news night, sure. But not a serious topic.

To be fair, Musk was on that list before he even said the word Hasbro. To be even fairer, a lot of billionaires are on that list.

 

[Cergorach]

Telsa exploded in value after a certain November event, it's worth more then the other Car companies period.

Now, but it wasn't always and it doesn't have to be so in the future. Remember Worldcom and the dotcom bubble? And in car manufacturing land, remember GM? One of the Big Three car manufacturers in the US (went bankrupt), Chrysler, another one of the Big Three is now a (tiny) label/brand from a Netherlands based car company (Stellantis).

Tesla => Musk have been making a TON of promises and braking almost every one of them. That is eventually going to bite them in the behind. And when something like the Cybertruck just isn't allowed on the European roads, no sales in the much more populated Europe isn't going to do great in sales if you only have five models of cars in your lineup.

At this point the Roadster 2 is vaporware, the Cybercab is very little more then a nicely dressed up drone and won't be allowed on European roads either. The Tesla Semi is in a similar boat...

Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have had a level 5 autopilot Tesla car 10 years ago. But not only does Tesla/Musk make a lot of unrealistic promises, they also don't look/prepare for actual deployment beyond the US. Just look at the Tesla Powerwall, it took 10 years before they introduced that product in the UK/Germany (the rest of Europe is still SOL). And that is after they actually produced/sold the product in the US. Other companies/technologies overtake them in the meantime.

As an example, the Volkswagen Group has only 4% of the market cap of Tesla, has a revenue of almost 3.5 times that of Tesla (that should tell you something about the value of Tesla). It also sells more electric cars in Europe then Tesla (2023), even though the most popular model was the Tesla Model Y by a mile (or a kilometer as we like to say), when you primarily sell two types of cars on the European market and the competitor sells many more then that, together it adds up... Around 17.5% of the electric cars sold in 2023 in Europe were Tesla, the other 82.5% were other brands.

At this point I wouldn't want a Tesla Powerwall (if they even were available in my part of the world), why use LFP or LNMC batteries in your home when you have options for sodium-ion saltwater batteries (no thermal runaway). But ten years ago I was going "I want that!"... I don't drive, but for the longest time, if you asked me what kind of electric car to buy, it was a Tesla, but the last couple of years other manufacturers have caught up and these days I would say "I don't know!". And at this point, I'm only interested in buying an electric car if it can drive itself AND is allowed on the road in the Netherlands. Who's going to be the first company that makes that? I don't know, but I wouldn't place a bet at this point...

I personally prefer companies that under promise and over deliver, instead of what Tesla consistently does (over promise and under deliver).

 

[Umbran]

make D&D gretat again!

Can we speak about RPGs without getting over-political?

Mod Note:
What?

You bring up a campaign slogan from the recent election, and ask others to not be political?

Practice what you preach. But for now, you are done in this discussion.