chaseideas

yeah, seriously

Wow.... nice one...

Definitely seems like there was some creative liberty in the submission title.

I suppose a "refusal" could be inferred by the lack of their acceptance on the initial buyout offer and their (apparent) rebuttal of a $2.5bil valuation.

For instance, if I offered you a million dollars cash for your house and you came back to me with an appraisal saying it was valued at $20mil... I think it would be clear (or at least strongly insinuated) that you refused my offer of a million dollars.

Thinking that's kinda what happened here? Seems like Elon didn't take to their method of countering and called the whole thing off.

Just my $0.02 and I'm not privy to all the inside-details. Could've gone down entirely different than any of us know.

Plus, it seems like there's a LOT of infighting among the co-founders and previous team. Will be curious to see if more information emerges.

Like they say... hindsight is 20/20...

Finding this piece really interesting though for other reasons. Had a similar idea for a project based in that area a couple years back. Imperial Valley (in general) strikes me as a HUGELY under-capitalized opportunity at the moment.

As a San Diego native, grew up familiar with it as the cesspool and stink-puddle that it is... but, if you look into the history of Imperial Valley and Salton Sea (and the abundance of mineral-rich 'dust' and other waste) it's actually an extremely fascinating tale.

Anyone want to put a few million into helping establish a similar project? Seems like there's way more than just Lithium to be monetized out there.

I'm pretty sure his wife had it, last I spoke with her shortly after his death. Nowadays, it's likely his daughter might have it.

Have a lot of great memories thoroughly enjoying that book as a kid. Used to flip through it and test him through-out our sessions. Loved every minute of it.

Please email me traffic details and more info. Would be very interested in taking over, or working with you, on this project to grow it to that next level.

Hey Ron, interested in the site details and seeing if we can work out a deal. Please email me traffic stats and revenue info

Interested in talking about how we can get this one back online, or perhaps I can take over the project? Email me.

Very interested as well, can you email me details?

Lol… never thought I'd see a WickedFire link on HN. My life is now complete. -__-

"Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple."

What did anyone really expect? Sounds like a typical government contract.

I can only imagine how these conversations go...

"We need more QA! STAT! It's going to take at least $50 million to test this system... it's awfully broken!" chuckle

face/palm

That said, I think there should be a lot more concern about the security of this site if there's been such a mishandling of the basic functions and operational flow.

Seems only reasonable to suspect this will be leading to a horrible leak of many people's private records at some near point in the future.

As someone who's spent several years researching and working within the online advertising industry, I can attest to this being quite common on a lot of the larger Alexa-ranked sites and traffic sources.

There are many highly ranked sources that will simply burn through your ad spends as quickly as you can deposit funds to the account. People often times spend thousands throwing away money on "testing" these sources, only to usually find they don't pan out.

That's why one of the most important things in online advertising is constant optimization and watching the conversion rates from different sources and adjusting bids as necessary. Drop the sources that don't pan out.

It's similar to stock trading, mitigate your losses quickly and don't bleed your ROI or throw away excess money on "testing" what works. Prune the sources that aren't doing anything for you, and watch your ad spends become much more productive.

The only thing the traffic described in this article is good for is vanity metrics and pumping up numbers like it sounds several of these large brand sites are doing.

If you're looking to inflate your numbers, sure... waste a bunch of money on a ton of bot hits, it's still 1999 right? Just don't expect any sales or conversions from that type of traffic... ever. It just simply won't happen.