A lot has been said about this, but little about the lack of coherence in Musk's argument. TL;DR; The more of the existing users that are fake, the better the d

A lot has been said about this, but little about the lack of coherence in Musk's argument. TL;DR; The more of the existing users that are fake, the better the deal is for Musk. Musk was ready to buy (say) 100 million users with 5% fake at a market value of $44B, so call it something like $463 per user that he thinks is fair. He said he has a plan to eliminate all the fake users and push the number of users up to a billion or something. Let's say that works and therefore he's able to drive the company's value to to $463 * 1 billion = $463 billion. Tidy return. But as an exercise, consider what would be the case if all but 10 million current accounts are fake/spam/bots? Now each user would be worth $4,000. So if Musk could grow the site to 1 billion users at the same economics, it would be worth $4 trillion. This is nearly a 10x better return than under the scenario where there are fewer fake users. If you think his strategy will work, he's getting a better deal if most of the users on the site now are fake, because it means a better economic profile of the existing users.