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Twitter plans to comply with Musk’s demands for data

284 points by Balgair 4y ago

formerkrogemp 4y ago
This whole spectacle is becoming a bit of a circus of late. I feel it's a nice distraction, but it's detracting from coverage of other serious topics. Ah well.
floatinglotus 4y ago
Right now Elon is searching stackoverflow: “how do I get out of buying twitter?”
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  I'm sure there is Quora thread ...
  - Nition 4y ago
    Hi there, thanks for your question. I'm an expert on social media, and an expert on social media. Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter hasn't been bought before so there isn't much info on this. I hope that answers your question! If you learned something new, please upvote and share.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      That is so accurate I can't tell if you went to Quora and found a quote or made it up.
      - Nition 4y ago
        I pasted the main facts directly from Wikipedia because I figured that's what a Quora response would do anyway. I did go to Quora for my last line ("If you learned something new..."). I was looking for a generic "like and subscribe" kind of response and that was literally on the first answer I saw on the first random question I typed in. My "I'm an expert on social media, and an expert on social media" joke (they're an expert in the field of social media, and also an expert who's posting on social media) was inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4.
    - srvmshr 4y ago
      Made me chuckle. There is a telltale template to how Quora answers are typically. One point of time, it used to be a great discussion platform. But the low quality answers & hi-quality gossip, overtly aggressive "Be nice" policy (to the point every sob story has a happy ending, with cupcakes & unicorns, without taking any names or identifiable information) & login wall to view answers has made the site so so poor. Pinterest & Quora are piles of flaming junk at present.
      - Ensorceled 4y ago
        > Pinterest & Quora are piles of flaming junk at present. Both were really great at some point, Quora was kind of a stack overflow for business and life for a brief moment in time.
ceejayoz 4y ago
"If the average length of a tweet (minus headers) is ~100 bytes of text, that’s only 50GB. You could fit it on a USB stick." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 Having worked with the Twitter API, I think he's rather underestimating how much volume this is gonna wind up being, the amount of processing it'll entail, and the difficulties of determining "this is a bot" from just the Tweet data.
- d23 4y ago
  It's imbecilic and baffling to think this is all one would need. Edit: to be clear, I'm saying this about what Elon said, not you.
  - rvense 4y ago
    "Tech world in shock after self-absorbed middle aged man speaks before thinking"
- mcintyre1994 4y ago
  I'm curious how he thinks you can detect bots by analysing just the tweet text. How would you even tell the difference between a retweet and a bunch of bots copy-pasting stuff without headers?
- micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Probably a couple hundred metadata fields for each tweet, right? he's at least one order of magnitude off right out of the gate
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    Also, Isn’t the metadata the important part for determine not vs non bot? I don’t think bots start there tweet, “bot here: “
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
aronhegedus 4y ago
Behind a paywall so I can't see
- dang 4y ago
  Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885
coding123 4y ago
Was it like $1B for him to back out - I can't recall. But in any case, that's a way better deal to walk away than sink $40B into something worth $20B. Maybe this whole thing was a way to show everyone it was worthless and now he's going to spend $1B on getting out of the deal and another $1B in starting a Twitter clone.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  He can't just back out of the deal (according to analysts like Levine).
- room500 4y ago
  No. The $1B breakup fee is only applicable if the deal falls apart for very specific reasons (trouble getting financing, regulatory concerns, etc). Musk cannot just wake up one morning, decide to not buy Twitter, and pay the breakup fee. He has already agreed to buy Twitter and cannot back out. That is why the bot issue is so important. If Musk can prove that Twitter made false claims to the SEC, he is allowed to get out of the deal. But if not, he must buy Twitter
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
  - cmeacham98 4y ago
    NAL - what happens if Musk just refuses to do it and never sends the money? Can Twitter get a court order to garnish Musk's bank account and/or assets for $40B?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      They'd sue for the $1B cancellation fee, I'd imagine.
      - ahahahahah 4y ago
        FFS, this exact thread points out that there is no $1B cancellation fee.
Not_Elon 4y ago
kreeben 4y ago
Unpenetrably paywalled?
- dang 4y ago
  Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885
sigmonsays 4y ago
can someone paste a link or copy of the article for us poor plebs who wont pay for it?
- a2800276 4y ago
  everything important is in the teaser: Twitter agreed to give Musk access to the firehose. Everything else is speculative wank.
- dang 4y ago
  Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885
notacoward 4y ago
roamerz 4y ago
Since when is providing pertinent information to someone performing pre purchase due diligence calling their bluff?
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusing-to-share-data-on-spam-accounts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusin... > Musk waived due diligence when he agreed to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share in April.
  - roamerz 4y ago
    If there was false information provided by Twitter (a little irony there) I believe that agreement’s validity would be in question by common sense or in any court of law.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Unlikely; they're quite careful in their wording. From their latest annual report: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FiscalYR2021_Twitter_Annual_-Report.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar... > We estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the fourth quarter of 2021 continued to represent fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. However, this estimate is based on an internal review of a sample of accounts and we apply significant judgment in making this determination. As such, our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have currently estimated.
      - nhkcode 4y ago
        >the average of false or spam accounts during the fourth quarter of 2021 continued to represent fewer than 5% of our mDAU Not a native English speaker so maybe I'm just not understanding it correctly. Since mDAU are a subset of DAU, probably a tiny subset of it, wouldn't that statement mean that way way less than 5% of DAU would be bots?
cynusx 4y ago
Twitter has been calling Elon's bluffs since the start of this entire episode. There is not enough financing in place to buy twitter and they both know that but Elon can't just say he's not rich enough. Instead twitter accepted his bid knowing full well that the deal will fall through (and pocket 1B in the process).
- aidaman 4y ago
  nah he has enough financing and $1 billion would never be enough of a pay off for the disruption he has caused.
- querulous 4y ago
  elon is on the hook for 33 bil as long as twitter can secure the debt financing for the rest. elon's options here are bankruptcy or buying twitter if he can't find some other way out
  - BbzzbB 4y ago
    Bankruptcy? I understand people dislike Elon's antics and that they got worse lately, but I feel like the sentiment online overshot. He's liquidated nearly $10B for this deal already, has a remaining ~125B in Tesla stock and ~55B in SpaceX, plus a long list of billionaire partners for this M&A. I bet he has a few more options than going "bankwupt". The thought may be titillating some, but it's wishful thinking.
    - gamblor956 4y ago
      The issue isn't bankruptcy, it's that Elon has funded his billionaire lifestyle by mortgaging his Tesla stock, and may face one or more margin calls depending on (a) whether Tesla stock falls below $625/share and (b) how much Tesla stock he is required to pledge as collateral or liquidate to finance his personal portion of the purchase price. Additionally, as CEO of Tesla there are limitations on his ability to pledge his shares of Tesla stock. It's unlikely that he's anywhere close to that threshold, but that is something he needs to watch for. Also, Musk cannot pledge or sell his SpaceX shares without prior government approval, as doing so would violate a number of requirements related to SpaceX's government contracts.
codefreeordie 4y ago
This is silly. Musk will produce evidence that a material fraction of tweets are fake. Everybody knows it's actually true, and even if his evidence isn't as compelling as advertised, it will still probably achieve what he wants -- which is the ability to force Twitter to negotiate a lower price.
- Clent 4y ago
  Public opinion will not force Twitter to re-negotiate.
  - rurp 4y ago
    I'm not so sure about that given how quickly they rolled over for his initial offer, with hardly any attempt to negotiate. It's hard to say why they did, but popular opinion is a reasonable explanation. Now I think Elon has been acting in extremely bad faith throughout this process and I hope Twitter sticks to their guns, but I don't have a lot of faith.
    - jquery 4y ago
      It was a fairly large premium and it waived due diligence and had a $1B termination fee. I don't think the board expected Elon to sign the offer, it was very biased in Twitter's favor. But I think Elon was feeling much too impressed with himself and took the bait.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - jquery 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't understand why people think this is still in the "dealmaking" phase. Twitter got Musk to agree to a certain price. The deal is done. Either Musk buys Twitter at the agreed price, or he's forced to admit he's not rich to buy Twitter and hands Twitter $1B in penalties. unless I'm missing something it seems pretty cut and dry.
    - 4y ago
dang 4y ago
We've changed the URL from https://mikeelgan.substack.com/p/twitter-calls-elons-bluff https://mikeelgan.substack.com/p/twitter-calls-elons-bluff, which is hard paywalled (re that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989), to one that Google seemed to approve of. If there's a better (i.e. more substantive and neutral) article, we can change it again.
- zionic 4y ago
  How about you stop changing links vs what users submit. Crazy idea, I know. If the link is bad we’ll fix it with votes, not admin actionz
  - dang 4y ago
    This site can't work based on upvotes alone (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). It's a complex system involving community input (not just upvotes, but also flags, emails, etc.), software, and manual moderation. The purpose of moderation isn't to go about tweaking things willy-nilly or imposing personal views. It's mostly to prevent the system from getting stuck in one of its failure modes. If we tried to go by upvotes alone, we'd end up with the same small number of hot topics and sensational controversies dominating the front page. This is the weakness of the upvoting system. There wouldn't be any room for the unpredictable sorts of stories that best fulfill the site mandate of intellectual curiosity. I know it's irritating when moderators do something you don't like, but in case it helps at all, I think the irritation is pretty evenly distributed across the different subgroups who populate this place. As for the OP, you're not going to get much support from the community here if you think that we should have left a hard-paywalled link on the front page. That's no doubt why users heavily flagged your comment (mods didn't touch it, btw, and I've unkilled it now).
imgabe 4y ago
> In truth, Musk probably only needs the “decahose” API Twitter makes available to some researchers, which is 10% of all tweets. If you have the firehose, couldn't you just only sample every 10th tweet and make a "decahose"[1] of your own to work with? [1] Shouldn't this be "decihose" since it's 1/10 not 10x?
- kareemsabri 4y ago
  Yeah. A bit annoying to make a system to handle 5,000 events/sec (probably much more at peak) to throw away 90% of them though. Obviously you don't have an SLA on consumption time, but I imagine you can't lag too far behind assuming it's kafka or something.
  - webo 4y ago
    >If the average length of a tweet (minus headers) is ~100 bytes of text, that’s only 50GB. You could fit it on a USB stick. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      You can't do bot detection with just the tweet text. Tweets come with a lot more data than that. Tweet object model: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/object-model/tweet https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti... Example payloads: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/example-payloads https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti...
      - webo 4y ago
        Yeah, I was just highlighting how ignorant Musk is (sarcastically). This must’ve been what he meant by “hardcore software engineering.”
necubi 4y ago
This whole thing is extremely dumb for at least three reasons: 1. Musk is talking about percent of daily active users that are bots, but Twitter's SEC filings refer to the percent of monetizable users that are bots, i.e., users that actually get shown ads. There is no way for Elon to produce a comparable figure from the firehose data 2. Even if he could, the firehose doesn't contain the sort of PII you would need to determine whether a user be a bot. 3. But even if it did, none of this matters. He can get out of the deal only if he proves the error would cause a material adverse effect on the company, which is an extremely high bar that is basically never met and would certainly not be met due to an erroneous estimate in a SEC filing.
- duxup 4y ago
  Could this be a fishing expedition for some other reason to back out?
  - dekhn 4y ago
    With Musk it's hard to know exactly what his plan is, but I think it's an attempt to either find a way to back out, reduce the overall price, or otherwise cause chaos as an intentional strategy.
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      - felixfurtak 4y ago
        More likely global stock markets took a dive which devalued Twitter (and Tesla) substantially making the offer over-priced.
        behnamoh 4y ago
        well maybe he should not have offered a price based on meme numbers then.
nybsop 4y ago
Are we pretending it wasn't Musk calling Twitter's 5% bluff to begin with?
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  Twitter didn't bluff. They qualified the 5% by saying it may be wrong because it's difficult to quantify, and offered Musk to run his own metrics before signing the deal, which he refused.
Galanwe 4y ago
I do not agree with the arguments that a Twitter provided sample of the data would be enough. You would have to be sure that the sample is statistically representative of the overall population, which would require prior analysis with access to the whole data. Example of biases that you would need to adjust the sample for: - Maybe the part of active users receiving ads change shape with time, or is biased toward a certain type of user. - As more users are active on the site, a random sampling would overrepresent recent messages over previous ones. Or maybe the reverse if Twitter lost users. - Maybe %users being bots is not that interesting, versus %messages posted by bots. 5% of users being bots can represent 30% of messages being sent by bots. - If you're willing to train some ML model to detect bots, you're most likely going to need as much out of sample as you could have. - Etc
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  You can just ask "tweets for which the Unix timestamp mod 97 = 21", which is easy to verify and will smooth out any conceivable selection bias.
  - Galanwe 4y ago
    Right, but in that case the choice is between a pre-made extract with unknown sampling, or a full population. Asking for a custom-made sample is really the same as requesting the whole population and sampling yourself.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      Well no, it's not the same, because you don't need to handle the whole population. And as far as sampling this is trivially simple.
AYBABTME 4y ago
It seems like people want to see Musk suffer and so exaggerate the real "burden" put on him with this. 500e6/(24 * 60 * 60)~= 6k tweets per seconds. It's not nothing, but not that hard to handle either. > it will take Musk considerable time to do an analysis of bots on Twitter, a task requiring a team of researchers who will need to laboriously construct software to review the tweets. ...is just not true. A few engineers can bring up infra to first filter & sample the firehose, and then store only what they need. EDIT: I'd candidly love to know how what I'm saying is completely off base, if downvoters wouldn't mind educating me.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  6,000 tweets per second is a lot of tweets for a team of humans to analyze. Twitter employs dozens of people to analyze flagged tweets, and they can only handle (relatively) small samples of each day's data. It's not something Musk can do algorithmically or through brute force data analysis, because that sort of superficial analysis would be very inferior to Twitter's very involved process, and Musk would have to demonstrate that the algorithm that he or his team came up with on short notice is more accurate than the process Twitter has been using for several years. Which isn't going to happen. See: pretty much every Musk "first principles" claim ever. Musk will need to hire a lot of people to do this job, but he can't just drag in SpaceX and Tesla employees to do this for him, since he would be (rightfully) sued by the other shareholders of these companies for abusing/misuing company resources. Also, Musk is pretty well known as a horrible boss that likes to badmouth his employees. It's going to be very difficult for him to assemble a team of qualified people to handle this task for him, especially in the time frame he has. You got downvoted for doing the programmer thing of thinking that a very difficult problem can be trivially solved with some light programming, and completely ignoring that people who actually deal with this sort of thing for a living think that this is a very large and difficult task that will take a great deal of effort by a great many people.
stumpedonalog 4y ago
I think he just wanted to liquidate sim Tesla stock
stumpedonalog 4y ago
I think he just wanted to liquidate some Tesla stock
- cainxinth 4y ago
  Same. It was just a few months ago that he had to sell stock to pay his taxes and he played it off like he was doing it because of some ridiculous online poll. I think this Twitter play is just more cover to sell more stock.
- tommiegannert 4y ago
  I was wondering if he made a bet with someone that Twitter had more than 5% bots. Sure, it's a relevant metric for valuation, but if you're serious about buying, do you really want to drag your target through the mud? Seems like due diligence you'd do behind closed doors.
- joering2 4y ago
  Bingo. This stunt especially after he tweeted long time ago that he will be the last one to cash out on Tesla. Then himself said anything above $1000 for the stock its overpriced. It will be very easy to see if that's what it was. If they deal won't go thru (I anticipated both parties will be stuck in court to fight over $1B for close to 5 years, then Musk will settle for some $200MM), Musk can simply buy Tesla stock back! Why he needs to all this cash sitting in a bank right???
gorgoiler 4y ago
Five percent isn’t a needle in a haystack. If you gave me 20 tweets from 20 accounts, would I be able to spot the one that’s a bot? Maybe? If you gave me 100, could I spot the 5 that are bots? If you gave a team of paralegals a pile of 10k random accounts that are actively writing content, could they find the 500 that are supposedly bots? Perhaps I’ve answered my own question: the bot accounts that get people hot under the collar are the ones that simply like and retweet, without ever posting any unique content?
- WoahNoun 4y ago
  Most twitter users don't tweet so using tweets to identify % of bots isn't helpful.
johndhi 4y ago
If I were trying to very simply estimate pct of tweets attributable to bots[0] based only on tweet content I'd do these things: -find (near) duplicate tweets reposted many times -look at responses to famous people -look for certain verticals experts know to be bot heavy [0] btw I bet Elon and Twitter disagree on the definition of "bot." Is a low paid human worker who tweets spam and scams all day a "bot*?
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I am 100% sure that it is definitely probably maybe a bot.
  - foderking 4y ago
    "definitely probably maybe"
la64710 4y ago
Well all said and done things just did not go the way Musk had predicted and though it is too early to say if twitter current CEO Parag Agarwal have outsmarted Musk or not , there is no doubt Musk has proved he is not as smart as he projects himself to be.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > Musk has proved he is not as smart as he projects himself to be Do we need proof? You can safely assume that nobody who behaves like that is as smart as they advertise. Don't wait for the hard evidence.
playbooks 4y ago
1. Monetisable daily active users likely excludes users twitter excludes as bots - possibly users visiting from automated browsers, minor browsers, cloud IPs etc. To protect against ad fraud you have to do that. 2. Musk likely cares about all users that keep spamming his feed and others. The platform currently feels like armies of bots from political and ad/marketing agencies and some active users who think someone is reading their content. If one correlates the number of followers they have (especially if you’ve had twitter for a long time) vs number of reads on each of your recent tweets, the % is very low. 3. A firehouse of all tweets coming out may show a lot of bot activity (accounts with more numbers than letters in the username commenting in reply to popular accounts with a lot of followers) but they are not near the number active users who are just reading and that is where Musk’s claim and Twitter’s defensively worded SEC statements pass each-other like ships in the night.
sn0w_crash 4y ago
If you’ve ever advertised on Twitter, you know that an overwhelming majority of the clicks are fake. Not like, 5% fake. Not 15% fake. No it’s more in the range of “most clicks are fake but we just live with it anyway.” If you run PPC campaigns you also know how easy it is to spot this crap. I for one am interested in learning what’s going on there. I don’t buy the “it’s soooo complicated oh it’s just impossible to know for sure!” Narrative that Twitter is peddling.
- zeepzeep 4y ago
  that's doesn't mean it's because that amount of twitter users are fake tho I'd argue real people rarely click ads for facebook I read that most of the advertising money is spent on clickfarms, which just click anything to seem real e.g. follow 100 real brands and sell 50 fake follows on that acc.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
Twitter could probably force a sale just by closing Musk's Twitter account. That's a direct contributor to much of his wealth. They can say you'll get your account back when you honor the original deal.
- gkoberger 4y ago
  The board doesn't want the deal to close. Nor does Musk. They both just don't want to be responsible financially.
  - vecter 4y ago
    At this point with the market in a drawdown, you don't think that the board wants to close the deal? It would seem to me that it's their fiduciary duty to try to close a deal at well above the current market price, and probably any price they'll have in the far foreseeable future also.
    - gkoberger 4y ago
      I guess there’s two questions in there… do they want to avoiding closing, and do they want to be accused of violating their fiduciary duty. For the first, they all know they’re getting fired the minute Elon can find a way. Maybe they care about money, but I bet they also would prefer to keep their positions. I bet a lot of them believe in and like Twitter, and it’s not about money. As for the second question… they can’t be seen as the reason it doesn’t close. I firmly believe they’ve been banking on Elon doing exactly what he’s doing. They likely can’t be successfully sued if they say “hey, we accepted the deal and did everything Elon asked…”
      - vecter 4y ago
        Good points. If Elon took over, would he actually be able to fire the board though? I thought that the point of the board is to keep the CEO accountable, but maybe there are other tricks he can play.
jijji 4y ago
I remember doing some consulting with a medium sized porn site in the early 90's and they were selling to another company. One of my tasks was to generate fake traffic logs to make it appear that the company had alot more traffic than in reality, so as to get a higher sale price. So, knowing this is how the industry works in general, I would be highly suspect about any claims made by some web site about their traffic, and as a matter of fact I would want a right to inspect, prior to the sale, for myself, to make my own determination about real traffic numbers from the inside. When buying a house, the buyer has a right to inspect period, and its ironic that this same right to inspect does not generally apply to sale of businesses, when the sale price (and risk) is many orders of magnitude higher.
- throwmeaway1212 4y ago
  it does apply, and Elon chose to waive the right to do that.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Musk has been very explicit, both in public statements before the sale and in the final contract he signed, that he doesn't care about this. It's only after the price of both Tesla and Twitter fell significantly that he suddenly became very concerned about the number of bots (a matter which he had been claiming is false in Twitter's filings for years before signing the contract to buy Twitter without further investigations).
  - jijji 4y ago
    My comment was not talking about Musk specifically, it was talking generally about the idea of trusting the seller, whether it be of a house or a company, that their numbers are indeed truth. It's one thing to buy a house for $100K and let the seller tell you that there is no problems, its another thing to buy a company for billions of dollars and let the seller tell you there are no problems. And as my comment explains, its fairly simple for the seller of a company to make up a bunch of fake traffic to bump up the sales price. It's nice to be able to do the research yourself, although a lot of companies don't like/want you doing this kind of investigation. The kind of investigation I am talking about is a deep dive via shell access to servers/routers in a thorough, true manner and can be performed by an independent auditing company like one of the big five accounting firms.
wolverine876 4y ago
Consider it from this perspective: Musk is in this case - not always - a troll (he even said, early on, he was going into 'goblin mode' or something like that). The primary aim of trolls is to disrupt and gain attention as much as possible, not to accomplish anything. Accomplishments undermine trolling; they complete something; they are constructive or anti-disruptive; they end the trolling. From that perspective, if the deal went smoothly and quickly, it would be a failure; if it concludes, its value is lost. The troll would want to drag this out as long as possible, with as many disruptive and attention-getting events as possible. The deal is a vehicle for trolling. Would Musk risk $40 billion on it? Would you be surprised if he thought he was smart enough to play this highest-stakes poker game and get away with it? If he relished it?
awsrocks 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
apeace 4y ago
I want Twitter to embrace its true identity as a platform for rich people / companies to broadcast their brand to the masses. If you have > 2,000 followers, you pay $0.01 per 10,000 followers per tweet. At current follower counts, Elon Musk pays $97/tweet. CNN pays $58. McDonalds pays $4.50. Pay the same amount to reply to a tweet/thread of an account with that many followers. Bot problem solved. No need for an ad platform, ad targeting, etc. The whole thing is just paid ads.
- vermilingua 4y ago
  ...right, so remove the ability for anyone but people with fuck-you money to voice an opinion; much less criticise someone else's opinion? Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a garbage fire, but this idea is just... bad.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The point is that this is how Twitter already works: it's 99% a platform for rich people, companies, and big journalists to broadcast their opinions. Sure, there is some minor amount of "the masses" voicing their opinion, but it's marginal. And more importantly, the vast, vast majority of Twitter's users never tweet, and only look at tweets from the initial group. The poster is saying - why keep up this charade of being a social media platform at all, worrying about bots harassing your ad-viewers and so on? Why not embrace how the platform is already going, and get more direct monetization from those looking to broadcast? If you want to see platforms for voicing opinions of the masses, Facebook and Reddit are doing much better at that, witch much more organic conversation and interaction.
hitovst 4y ago
Musk made them an offer with contingencies. If they're not providing data to meet the contingencies, they're defaulting for whatever reason, including possibly that they misrepresented their product. If they do provide data, and the contingencies aren't met, there is no deal, as they misrepresented their product. If they provide data, and the contingencies are met, Musk would be in default to not close. There is chance Musk was bluffing, but it seems likely the other way around. I don't know how it could be that Twitter would think Musk wouldn't check to verify what he was purchasing. Seems a huge waste of time. I suspect that Musk was willing to purchase Twitter if legitimate, and knew if Twitter was fraudulent, this process would shed light on it. If the deal is void due to Twitter misrepresenting itself, Musk can invest in a legitimate venture instead. I don't see a whole lot of reason for speculation. The deal will close, or it will not. Chances are, Musk wasn't kidding when he made the offer, which means if it doesn't close, Twitter misrepresented itself.
- throwaway2048 4y ago
  Musk pretty much waived all contingencies, the contract is public and easily viewed, that's why twitter was willing to agree so quickly in the first place.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  You pretty much have everything backwards. Musk has requested for almost no contingencies, even opting out of due diligence. The only contingency is Twitter not committing fraud in their filings with the SEC. Their filing on active users are extremely narrow in their claims - the only way they could realistically be shown to be fraudulent is by discovering in internal emails that they were crafted to deceive; otherwise, they are very specifically saying that the 5% number they give is only an estimate and that it involves a judgment call in how it was decided. So if you find some way of calculating bots and come up with 20%, that still doesn't mean they misrepresented the numbers: they never claimed 5% is a precise number, just their judgment based on some sampling they did. Futhermore, even if the number is found to be a lie, that still wouldn't mean they materially lied to the SEC - you still have to then prove that this impacted their revenue projections significantly (apparently the standard is "at least by 40%"), which comes with even bigger burdens of proof. You would have to show that Twitter's clients (advertisers, mostly) were relying on the reported numbers to decide if they were getting a good deal, and that they would significantly change the price/number of ads on Twitter based on this difference. This in itself is unlikely, as these companies have their own metrics for judging whether an ad was effective, and in the many years Twitter's official bot estimates have stayed the same, they would have had time to notice if their revenue from advertising on Twitter was worth it. Even worse, Musk has been claiming that Twitter's reported bot numbers are much lower than reality for many years before he made the offer to buy Twitter, so his belief can't have materially impacted his willingness to buy. He even publically talked about cleaning up Twitter of it's bot problems as a specific target after the acquisition. These public statements will again significantly affect any claim that Musk makes that any new information he finds on the number of Twitter bots would have impacted his decision to sign the contract if it had been disclosed before hand. Finally, note that the information he asked Twitter to provide (access to tweets) has almost nothing to do with the discussion about revenue, as Twitter's revenue comes from users reading tweets, not writing them. The 5% number is about users who request the Twitter feed and receive ads, but are in fact bots and thus can't buy products. This is completely uncorrelated to the number of bots and other fake accounts who might be posting tweets, as there are no ads in the tweet posting pages. In short, if Musk analyzes the data he received now from Twitter and discovers that 100% of all tweets are actually made by bots, it will not make one iota of a difference to his obligation of paying the $44B he singed on. Twitter makes no claims to the SEC about the number of real VS fake users posting tweets, and this number has no direct impact on revenue. The only claims by Twitter are that by their own internal process and judgment, up to 5% of monetizable daily users are bots, and this can only refer to users reading tweets, not posting them, based on how Twitter works.
DeathArrow 4y ago
It will take a long time for Musk to read all those tweets and count the bots. I hope he doesn't make mistakes at counting so he doesn't need to start all over. :)
DeathArrow 4y ago
I wonder how Musk did that big of a mistake, to not sense Twitter is not worth $44 billion and that the market wasn't going up for ever. Or, somehow, becoming the richest person in the world has more to do with other features like luck, than the ability to asses the market?
- invig 4y ago
  I guess you got rich shorting the whole market? If the market were predictable everyone would just use it to print money.
- TheCowboy 4y ago
  His intellectual or competitive advantage is not market movement timing. Plenty of brilliant people exist who would be considered bad at making predictions over a broad field of categories, especially market timing. More to disagree with the argument than to defend Musk. He's certainly been doing a lot of things to really undermine the brilliant-at-all-trades image. And luck is always underrated.
- deviation 4y ago
  It weirds me out that he's even worried about this now. In the beginning Musk stated in interviews that he wasn't concerned about the monetary amount. I can't pull it up on my VPN, but I recall him taking the stance of it being a social-impact-y investment and not one that is designed to make a profit.
  - kramerger 4y ago
    And you believed him??
invig 4y ago
1. Given Jack's level of support for Elon, does anyone think he doesn't already know _exactly_ where the skeletons are buried? 2. It seems entirely unreasonable to assume that Elon doesn't want to own Twitter, or that he tried to buy it on a lark and changed his mind. If your premise is that Elon did want to own Twitter a few weeks ago and doesn't want to own Twitter now you should rethink your opinion.
- ncann 4y ago
  There is nothing unreasonable here, it's perfectly understandable. Stock market crashed, which means the proposed buying price for Twitter is now too high, PLUS Tesla stock is less valuable which means he has to use a lot more to get funding. It up debatable whether he wants out of the deal completely or just want to negotiate for a lower price though.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 4y ago
My first thought on reading this was the scene from the movie UHF: "WHO WANTS TO DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE?!?!?!"
nikolqy 4y ago
Now it's starting to look like they actually want to sell Twitter to Musk now. Not gonna lie, I'm torn on the whole deal, bit I still think it'll be a good thing as long as there's actual free speech, but with realistic limits and not just one-sided moderation. He better not mess with Twitter design though. It's really good and honestly appears to influence most of the other apps in some way, shape or form, but I'd also be excited to see some design changes that are new in the industry. I also want the app to be faster.
- rrradical 4y ago
  Genuinely curious what "realistic limits and not just one-sided moderation" means.
coffeeblack 4y ago
listenallyall 4y ago
It's a negotiating tactic, part of which is just stalling the deal. Musk will likely still buy Twitter, but for less. Happens all the time in sports when a player still has multiple years on his contract but threatens to hold out if the team won't negotiate a new, higher contract. Musk agreed to pay $54/share. But after the tech selloff, Twitter might be worth $25-30. Maybe less. Musk can, in fact, get out of the deal for $1 billion or so in fees. But that would be awful for Twitter too, it's stock would tank overnight without a bidder (it already dropped from $50+ to under $40 quite rapidly). So perhaps Musk can get the board to agree to a deal at around $32-35/share, it would be a win/win for both parties.
- dmurray 4y ago
  I've only been following this through Matt Levine, but he thinks Musk absolutely does not have the right to bail on the deal for $1 billion. This clause is only triggered if he can no longer find financing, which he can.
- RayVR 4y ago
  Your understanding of the deal is incorrect. The $1b is only an out in a few very restricted scenarios. Wanting out is not one of them.
  - listenallyall 4y ago
    You're right, haven't been following closely. But let's say Musk just walks and it is in fact a contract violation. What is Twitter's recourse? Sure it can sue... and what? Spend years in court, more dirty laundry aired, stock price continues dropping, employees leaving, unlikely new buyers emerge. Twitter board could face lawsuits from public stockholders if they feel material information was hidden from them or misrepresented. What exactly were the damages Musk caused? Pumped up its stock price? It's not exactly like a labor or employment contract. How sure are you that Twitter would actually win in court? All I'm saying is that renegotiating the deal with Musk at a lower price is still likely Twitter's best option, regardless of the specific contract terms.
coffeeblack 4y ago
SilverBirch 4y ago
People seem to be looking at this as if there are two active actors in this situation. There really isn't. There's Musk, doing what Musk wants, and Twitter reacting. Twitter didn't want to sell to Musk, but there in this situation that they have to deal with it. If Musk truly wanted to walk away, I think Twitter would find a way to let him. But the fear is that he's just going to renege on the price and then say "34.20 a share" because that's probably a decent price for twitter now. So now they just have to play full defense. Musk says he'll walk because they won't provide data? They'll provide data. Musk says the numbers are false? Let him prove it. At the end of the day it's a signed contract. The question is how quickly does this come down to "Okay let's cut a deal" - and my feeling is that since this entire thing has been an ego trip for Musk there is no deal that's acceptable for him to walk away without some sort of: Musk pays $XB and Twitter admits the bot problem is bigger than stated in some sort of way that doesn't cause legal troubles for Twitter. It has to be a "I didn't want Twitter anyway" narrative, rather than "Musk just stuck his dick into a meat grinder" type narrative.
- matwood 4y ago
  > If Musk truly wanted to walk away, I think Twitter would find a way to let him. They will let him walk away, but the starting number is $44B. Now they are just negotiating.
  - SilverBirch 4y ago
    I'm sure they'd extract some price, but if the conversation were "this deal won't happen" they'd be a lot more flexible than what's actually going on which is "This douchebag will be back in 3 months at half the price"
    - matwood 4y ago
      Except Twitter doesn't need to be flexible in either case. Experts seem to agree the contract and law is on Twitters side. Musk signed and now owes the shareholders ~$44B. The stuff about bots and whatever else is a distraction.
hrgiger 4y ago
Probably very small part of twitter but fintwits (twits using Dolar signed stock symbols/crypto i.e. $tsla) has the highest bots.
Terry_Roll 4y ago
So when he gets the data, he becomes a data controller, so we need to submit a GDPR request so that we can have him delete our data and also find out if Twitter has been deleting Twitter accounts in accordance with GDPR laws or not. Will that help him find the bots though or will he just find a Bacofoil Tent Roasted Turkey masquerading as a Tesla Cyber Truck? Anyway, anyone know what address we need to use to submit a GDPR request as this is him personally, not Tesla or any other entity, ie personal wealth so does anyone know his home address so I can submit a GDPR request in person?
kornhole 4y ago
What if he gets the whole data dump and then backs out of the deal? Does he now have kompromat on all the politicians who had the app on the phone tracking their location and more?
thedrbrian 4y ago
Wonder if the twitter false/spam accounts include all those who get banned for not providing a phone number.

284 points by Balgair 4y ago

This whole spectacle is becoming a bit of a circus of late. I feel it's a nice distraction, but it's detracting from coverage of other serious topics. Ah well.

floatinglotus 4y ago

Right now Elon is searching stackoverflow: “how do I get out of buying twitter?”

Ensorceled 4y ago
I'm sure there is Quora thread ...
- Nition 4y ago
  Hi there, thanks for your question. I'm an expert on social media, and an expert on social media. Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter hasn't been bought before so there isn't much info on this. I hope that answers your question! If you learned something new, please upvote and share.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    That is so accurate I can't tell if you went to Quora and found a quote or made it up.
    - Nition 4y ago
      I pasted the main facts directly from Wikipedia because I figured that's what a Quora response would do anyway. I did go to Quora for my last line ("If you learned something new..."). I was looking for a generic "like and subscribe" kind of response and that was literally on the first answer I saw on the first random question I typed in. My "I'm an expert on social media, and an expert on social media" joke (they're an expert in the field of social media, and also an expert who's posting on social media) was inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4.
  - srvmshr 4y ago
    Made me chuckle. There is a telltale template to how Quora answers are typically. One point of time, it used to be a great discussion platform. But the low quality answers & hi-quality gossip, overtly aggressive "Be nice" policy (to the point every sob story has a happy ending, with cupcakes & unicorns, without taking any names or identifiable information) & login wall to view answers has made the site so so poor. Pinterest & Quora are piles of flaming junk at present.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      > Pinterest & Quora are piles of flaming junk at present. Both were really great at some point, Quora was kind of a stack overflow for business and life for a brief moment in time.

ceejayoz 4y ago

"If the average length of a tweet (minus headers) is ~100 bytes of text, that’s only 50GB. You could fit it on a USB stick." https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 Having worked with the Twitter API, I think he's rather underestimating how much volume this is gonna wind up being, the amount of processing it'll entail, and the difficulties of determining "this is a bot" from just the Tweet data.

d23 4y ago
It's imbecilic and baffling to think this is all one would need. Edit: to be clear, I'm saying this about what Elon said, not you.
- rvense 4y ago
  "Tech world in shock after self-absorbed middle aged man speaks before thinking"
mcintyre1994 4y ago
I'm curious how he thinks you can detect bots by analysing just the tweet text. How would you even tell the difference between a retweet and a bunch of bots copy-pasting stuff without headers?
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Probably a couple hundred metadata fields for each tweet, right? he's at least one order of magnitude off right out of the gate
- mikkergp 4y ago
  Also, Isn’t the metadata the important part for determine not vs non bot? I don’t think bots start there tweet, “bot here: “
  - ceejayoz 4y ago

aronhegedus 4y ago

Behind a paywall so I can't see

dang 4y ago
Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885

coding123 4y ago

Was it like $1B for him to back out - I can't recall. But in any case, that's a way better deal to walk away than sink $40B into something worth $20B. Maybe this whole thing was a way to show everyone it was worthless and now he's going to spend $1B on getting out of the deal and another $1B in starting a Twitter clone.

moralestapia 4y ago
He can't just back out of the deal (according to analysts like Levine).
room500 4y ago
No. The $1B breakup fee is only applicable if the deal falls apart for very specific reasons (trouble getting financing, regulatory concerns, etc). Musk cannot just wake up one morning, decide to not buy Twitter, and pay the breakup fee. He has already agreed to buy Twitter and cannot back out. That is why the bot issue is so important. If Musk can prove that Twitter made false claims to the SEC, he is allowed to get out of the deal. But if not, he must buy Twitter
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  NAL - what happens if Musk just refuses to do it and never sends the money? Can Twitter get a court order to garnish Musk's bank account and/or assets for $40B?
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    They'd sue for the $1B cancellation fee, I'd imagine.
    - ahahahahah 4y ago
      FFS, this exact thread points out that there is no $1B cancellation fee.

Not_Elon 4y ago

kreeben 4y ago

Unpenetrably paywalled?

dang 4y ago
Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885

sigmonsays 4y ago

can someone paste a link or copy of the article for us poor plebs who wont pay for it?

a2800276 4y ago
everything important is in the teaser: Twitter agreed to give Musk access to the firehose. Everything else is speculative wank.
dang 4y ago
Changed now. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31688885

notacoward 4y ago

roamerz 4y ago

Since when is providing pertinent information to someone performing pre purchase due diligence calling their bluff?

ceejayoz 4y ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusing-to-share-data-on-spam-accounts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/06/musk-says-twitter-is-refusin... > Musk waived due diligence when he agreed to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share in April.
- roamerz 4y ago
  If there was false information provided by Twitter (a little irony there) I believe that agreement’s validity would be in question by common sense or in any court of law.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Unlikely; they're quite careful in their wording. From their latest annual report: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar/FiscalYR2021_Twitter_Annual_-Report.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2021/ar... > We estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the fourth quarter of 2021 continued to represent fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. However, this estimate is based on an internal review of a sample of accounts and we apply significant judgment in making this determination. As such, our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have currently estimated.
    - nhkcode 4y ago
      >the average of false or spam accounts during the fourth quarter of 2021 continued to represent fewer than 5% of our mDAU Not a native English speaker so maybe I'm just not understanding it correctly. Since mDAU are a subset of DAU, probably a tiny subset of it, wouldn't that statement mean that way way less than 5% of DAU would be bots?

cynusx 4y ago

Twitter has been calling Elon's bluffs since the start of this entire episode. There is not enough financing in place to buy twitter and they both know that but Elon can't just say he's not rich enough. Instead twitter accepted his bid knowing full well that the deal will fall through (and pocket 1B in the process).

aidaman 4y ago
nah he has enough financing and $1 billion would never be enough of a pay off for the disruption he has caused.
querulous 4y ago
elon is on the hook for 33 bil as long as twitter can secure the debt financing for the rest. elon's options here are bankruptcy or buying twitter if he can't find some other way out
- BbzzbB 4y ago
  Bankruptcy? I understand people dislike Elon's antics and that they got worse lately, but I feel like the sentiment online overshot. He's liquidated nearly $10B for this deal already, has a remaining ~125B in Tesla stock and ~55B in SpaceX, plus a long list of billionaire partners for this M&A. I bet he has a few more options than going "bankwupt". The thought may be titillating some, but it's wishful thinking.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    The issue isn't bankruptcy, it's that Elon has funded his billionaire lifestyle by mortgaging his Tesla stock, and may face one or more margin calls depending on (a) whether Tesla stock falls below $625/share and (b) how much Tesla stock he is required to pledge as collateral or liquidate to finance his personal portion of the purchase price. Additionally, as CEO of Tesla there are limitations on his ability to pledge his shares of Tesla stock. It's unlikely that he's anywhere close to that threshold, but that is something he needs to watch for. Also, Musk cannot pledge or sell his SpaceX shares without prior government approval, as doing so would violate a number of requirements related to SpaceX's government contracts.

codefreeordie 4y ago

This is silly. Musk will produce evidence that a material fraction of tweets are fake. Everybody knows it's actually true, and even if his evidence isn't as compelling as advertised, it will still probably achieve what he wants -- which is the ability to force Twitter to negotiate a lower price.

Clent 4y ago
Public opinion will not force Twitter to re-negotiate.
- rurp 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about that given how quickly they rolled over for his initial offer, with hardly any attempt to negotiate. It's hard to say why they did, but popular opinion is a reasonable explanation. Now I think Elon has been acting in extremely bad faith throughout this process and I hope Twitter sticks to their guns, but I don't have a lot of faith.
  - jquery 4y ago
    It was a fairly large premium and it waived due diligence and had a $1B termination fee. I don't think the board expected Elon to sign the offer, it was very biased in Twitter's favor. But I think Elon was feeling much too impressed with himself and took the bait.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jquery 4y ago
  Yeah, I don't understand why people think this is still in the "dealmaking" phase. Twitter got Musk to agree to a certain price. The deal is done. Either Musk buys Twitter at the agreed price, or he's forced to admit he's not rich to buy Twitter and hands Twitter $1B in penalties. unless I'm missing something it seems pretty cut and dry.
  - 4y ago

dang 4y ago

We've changed the URL from https://mikeelgan.substack.com/p/twitter-calls-elons-bluff https://mikeelgan.substack.com/p/twitter-calls-elons-bluff, which is hard paywalled (re that, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989), to one that Google seemed to approve of. If there's a better (i.e. more substantive and neutral) article, we can change it again.

zionic 4y ago
How about you stop changing links vs what users submit. Crazy idea, I know. If the link is bad we’ll fix it with votes, not admin actionz
- dang 4y ago
  This site can't work based on upvotes alone (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22upvotes%20alone%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). It's a complex system involving community input (not just upvotes, but also flags, emails, etc.), software, and manual moderation. The purpose of moderation isn't to go about tweaking things willy-nilly or imposing personal views. It's mostly to prevent the system from getting stuck in one of its failure modes. If we tried to go by upvotes alone, we'd end up with the same small number of hot topics and sensational controversies dominating the front page. This is the weakness of the upvoting system. There wouldn't be any room for the unpredictable sorts of stories that best fulfill the site mandate of intellectual curiosity. I know it's irritating when moderators do something you don't like, but in case it helps at all, I think the irritation is pretty evenly distributed across the different subgroups who populate this place. As for the OP, you're not going to get much support from the community here if you think that we should have left a hard-paywalled link on the front page. That's no doubt why users heavily flagged your comment (mods didn't touch it, btw, and I've unkilled it now).

imgabe 4y ago

> In truth, Musk probably only needs the “decahose” API Twitter makes available to some researchers, which is 10% of all tweets. If you have the firehose, couldn't you just only sample every 10th tweet and make a "decahose"[1] of your own to work with? [1] Shouldn't this be "decihose" since it's 1/10 not 10x?

kareemsabri 4y ago
Yeah. A bit annoying to make a system to handle 5,000 events/sec (probably much more at peak) to throw away 90% of them though. Obviously you don't have an SLA on consumption time, but I imagine you can't lag too far behind assuming it's kafka or something.
- webo 4y ago
  >If the average length of a tweet (minus headers) is ~100 bytes of text, that’s only 50GB. You could fit it on a USB stick. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1534939289653592065
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    You can't do bot detection with just the tweet text. Tweets come with a lot more data than that. Tweet object model: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/object-model/tweet https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti... Example payloads: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dictionary/example-payloads https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti...
    - webo 4y ago
      Yeah, I was just highlighting how ignorant Musk is (sarcastically). This must’ve been what he meant by “hardcore software engineering.”

necubi 4y ago

This whole thing is extremely dumb for at least three reasons: 1. Musk is talking about percent of daily active users that are bots, but Twitter's SEC filings refer to the percent of monetizable users that are bots, i.e., users that actually get shown ads. There is no way for Elon to produce a comparable figure from the firehose data 2. Even if he could, the firehose doesn't contain the sort of PII you would need to determine whether a user be a bot. 3. But even if it did, none of this matters. He can get out of the deal only if he proves the error would cause a material adverse effect on the company, which is an extremely high bar that is basically never met and would certainly not be met due to an erroneous estimate in a SEC filing.

duxup 4y ago
Could this be a fishing expedition for some other reason to back out?
- dekhn 4y ago
  With Musk it's hard to know exactly what his plan is, but I think it's an attempt to either find a way to back out, reduce the overall price, or otherwise cause chaos as an intentional strategy.
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    - felixfurtak 4y ago
      More likely global stock markets took a dive which devalued Twitter (and Tesla) substantially making the offer over-priced.
      - behnamoh 4y ago
        well maybe he should not have offered a price based on meme numbers then.

nybsop 4y ago

Are we pretending it wasn't Musk calling Twitter's 5% bluff to begin with?

sudosysgen 4y ago
Twitter didn't bluff. They qualified the 5% by saying it may be wrong because it's difficult to quantify, and offered Musk to run his own metrics before signing the deal, which he refused.

Galanwe 4y ago

I do not agree with the arguments that a Twitter provided sample of the data would be enough. You would have to be sure that the sample is statistically representative of the overall population, which would require prior analysis with access to the whole data. Example of biases that you would need to adjust the sample for: - Maybe the part of active users receiving ads change shape with time, or is biased toward a certain type of user. - As more users are active on the site, a random sampling would overrepresent recent messages over previous ones. Or maybe the reverse if Twitter lost users. - Maybe %users being bots is not that interesting, versus %messages posted by bots. 5% of users being bots can represent 30% of messages being sent by bots. - If you're willing to train some ML model to detect bots, you're most likely going to need as much out of sample as you could have. - Etc

sudosysgen 4y ago
You can just ask "tweets for which the Unix timestamp mod 97 = 21", which is easy to verify and will smooth out any conceivable selection bias.
- Galanwe 4y ago
  Right, but in that case the choice is between a pre-made extract with unknown sampling, or a full population. Asking for a custom-made sample is really the same as requesting the whole population and sampling yourself.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Well no, it's not the same, because you don't need to handle the whole population. And as far as sampling this is trivially simple.

AYBABTME 4y ago

It seems like people want to see Musk suffer and so exaggerate the real "burden" put on him with this. 500e6/(24 * 60 * 60)~= 6k tweets per seconds. It's not nothing, but not that hard to handle either. > it will take Musk considerable time to do an analysis of bots on Twitter, a task requiring a team of researchers who will need to laboriously construct software to review the tweets. ...is just not true. A few engineers can bring up infra to first filter & sample the firehose, and then store only what they need. EDIT: I'd candidly love to know how what I'm saying is completely off base, if downvoters wouldn't mind educating me.

gamblor956 4y ago
6,000 tweets per second is a lot of tweets for a team of humans to analyze. Twitter employs dozens of people to analyze flagged tweets, and they can only handle (relatively) small samples of each day's data. It's not something Musk can do algorithmically or through brute force data analysis, because that sort of superficial analysis would be very inferior to Twitter's very involved process, and Musk would have to demonstrate that the algorithm that he or his team came up with on short notice is more accurate than the process Twitter has been using for several years. Which isn't going to happen. See: pretty much every Musk "first principles" claim ever. Musk will need to hire a lot of people to do this job, but he can't just drag in SpaceX and Tesla employees to do this for him, since he would be (rightfully) sued by the other shareholders of these companies for abusing/misuing company resources. Also, Musk is pretty well known as a horrible boss that likes to badmouth his employees. It's going to be very difficult for him to assemble a team of qualified people to handle this task for him, especially in the time frame he has. You got downvoted for doing the programmer thing of thinking that a very difficult problem can be trivially solved with some light programming, and completely ignoring that people who actually deal with this sort of thing for a living think that this is a very large and difficult task that will take a great deal of effort by a great many people.

stumpedonalog 4y ago

I think he just wanted to liquidate sim Tesla stock

stumpedonalog 4y ago

I think he just wanted to liquidate some Tesla stock

cainxinth 4y ago
Same. It was just a few months ago that he had to sell stock to pay his taxes and he played it off like he was doing it because of some ridiculous online poll. I think this Twitter play is just more cover to sell more stock.
tommiegannert 4y ago
I was wondering if he made a bet with someone that Twitter had more than 5% bots. Sure, it's a relevant metric for valuation, but if you're serious about buying, do you really want to drag your target through the mud? Seems like due diligence you'd do behind closed doors.
joering2 4y ago
Bingo. This stunt especially after he tweeted long time ago that he will be the last one to cash out on Tesla. Then himself said anything above $1000 for the stock its overpriced. It will be very easy to see if that's what it was. If they deal won't go thru (I anticipated both parties will be stuck in court to fight over $1B for close to 5 years, then Musk will settle for some $200MM), Musk can simply buy Tesla stock back! Why he needs to all this cash sitting in a bank right???

gorgoiler 4y ago

Five percent isn’t a needle in a haystack. If you gave me 20 tweets from 20 accounts, would I be able to spot the one that’s a bot? Maybe? If you gave me 100, could I spot the 5 that are bots? If you gave a team of paralegals a pile of 10k random accounts that are actively writing content, could they find the 500 that are supposedly bots? Perhaps I’ve answered my own question: the bot accounts that get people hot under the collar are the ones that simply like and retweet, without ever posting any unique content?

WoahNoun 4y ago
Most twitter users don't tweet so using tweets to identify % of bots isn't helpful.

johndhi 4y ago

If I were trying to very simply estimate pct of tweets attributable to bots[0] based only on tweet content I'd do these things: -find (near) duplicate tweets reposted many times -look at responses to famous people -look for certain verticals experts know to be bot heavy [0] btw I bet Elon and Twitter disagree on the definition of "bot." Is a low paid human worker who tweets spam and scams all day a "bot*?

mikkergp 4y ago
I am 100% sure that it is definitely probably maybe a bot.
- foderking 4y ago
  "definitely probably maybe"

la64710 4y ago

Well all said and done things just did not go the way Musk had predicted and though it is too early to say if twitter current CEO Parag Agarwal have outsmarted Musk or not , there is no doubt Musk has proved he is not as smart as he projects himself to be.

wolverine876 4y ago
> Musk has proved he is not as smart as he projects himself to be Do we need proof? You can safely assume that nobody who behaves like that is as smart as they advertise. Don't wait for the hard evidence.

playbooks 4y ago

1. Monetisable daily active users likely excludes users twitter excludes as bots - possibly users visiting from automated browsers, minor browsers, cloud IPs etc. To protect against ad fraud you have to do that. 2. Musk likely cares about all users that keep spamming his feed and others. The platform currently feels like armies of bots from political and ad/marketing agencies and some active users who think someone is reading their content. If one correlates the number of followers they have (especially if you’ve had twitter for a long time) vs number of reads on each of your recent tweets, the % is very low. 3. A firehouse of all tweets coming out may show a lot of bot activity (accounts with more numbers than letters in the username commenting in reply to popular accounts with a lot of followers) but they are not near the number active users who are just reading and that is where Musk’s claim and Twitter’s defensively worded SEC statements pass each-other like ships in the night.

sn0w_crash 4y ago

If you’ve ever advertised on Twitter, you know that an overwhelming majority of the clicks are fake. Not like, 5% fake. Not 15% fake. No it’s more in the range of “most clicks are fake but we just live with it anyway.” If you run PPC campaigns you also know how easy it is to spot this crap. I for one am interested in learning what’s going on there. I don’t buy the “it’s soooo complicated oh it’s just impossible to know for sure!” Narrative that Twitter is peddling.

zeepzeep 4y ago
that's doesn't mean it's because that amount of twitter users are fake tho I'd argue real people rarely click ads for facebook I read that most of the advertising money is spent on clickfarms, which just click anything to seem real e.g. follow 100 real brands and sell 50 fake follows on that acc.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

Twitter could probably force a sale just by closing Musk's Twitter account. That's a direct contributor to much of his wealth. They can say you'll get your account back when you honor the original deal.

gkoberger 4y ago
The board doesn't want the deal to close. Nor does Musk. They both just don't want to be responsible financially.
- vecter 4y ago
  At this point with the market in a drawdown, you don't think that the board wants to close the deal? It would seem to me that it's their fiduciary duty to try to close a deal at well above the current market price, and probably any price they'll have in the far foreseeable future also.
  - gkoberger 4y ago
    I guess there’s two questions in there… do they want to avoiding closing, and do they want to be accused of violating their fiduciary duty. For the first, they all know they’re getting fired the minute Elon can find a way. Maybe they care about money, but I bet they also would prefer to keep their positions. I bet a lot of them believe in and like Twitter, and it’s not about money. As for the second question… they can’t be seen as the reason it doesn’t close. I firmly believe they’ve been banking on Elon doing exactly what he’s doing. They likely can’t be successfully sued if they say “hey, we accepted the deal and did everything Elon asked…”
    - vecter 4y ago
      Good points. If Elon took over, would he actually be able to fire the board though? I thought that the point of the board is to keep the CEO accountable, but maybe there are other tricks he can play.

jijji 4y ago

I remember doing some consulting with a medium sized porn site in the early 90's and they were selling to another company. One of my tasks was to generate fake traffic logs to make it appear that the company had alot more traffic than in reality, so as to get a higher sale price. So, knowing this is how the industry works in general, I would be highly suspect about any claims made by some web site about their traffic, and as a matter of fact I would want a right to inspect, prior to the sale, for myself, to make my own determination about real traffic numbers from the inside. When buying a house, the buyer has a right to inspect period, and its ironic that this same right to inspect does not generally apply to sale of businesses, when the sale price (and risk) is many orders of magnitude higher.

throwmeaway1212 4y ago
it does apply, and Elon chose to waive the right to do that.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Musk has been very explicit, both in public statements before the sale and in the final contract he signed, that he doesn't care about this. It's only after the price of both Tesla and Twitter fell significantly that he suddenly became very concerned about the number of bots (a matter which he had been claiming is false in Twitter's filings for years before signing the contract to buy Twitter without further investigations).
- jijji 4y ago
  My comment was not talking about Musk specifically, it was talking generally about the idea of trusting the seller, whether it be of a house or a company, that their numbers are indeed truth. It's one thing to buy a house for $100K and let the seller tell you that there is no problems, its another thing to buy a company for billions of dollars and let the seller tell you there are no problems. And as my comment explains, its fairly simple for the seller of a company to make up a bunch of fake traffic to bump up the sales price. It's nice to be able to do the research yourself, although a lot of companies don't like/want you doing this kind of investigation. The kind of investigation I am talking about is a deep dive via shell access to servers/routers in a thorough, true manner and can be performed by an independent auditing company like one of the big five accounting firms.

wolverine876 4y ago

Consider it from this perspective: Musk is in this case - not always - a troll (he even said, early on, he was going into 'goblin mode' or something like that). The primary aim of trolls is to disrupt and gain attention as much as possible, not to accomplish anything. Accomplishments undermine trolling; they complete something; they are constructive or anti-disruptive; they end the trolling. From that perspective, if the deal went smoothly and quickly, it would be a failure; if it concludes, its value is lost. The troll would want to drag this out as long as possible, with as many disruptive and attention-getting events as possible. The deal is a vehicle for trolling. Would Musk risk $40 billion on it? Would you be surprised if he thought he was smart enough to play this highest-stakes poker game and get away with it? If he relished it?

awsrocks 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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apeace 4y ago

I want Twitter to embrace its true identity as a platform for rich people / companies to broadcast their brand to the masses. If you have > 2,000 followers, you pay $0.01 per 10,000 followers per tweet. At current follower counts, Elon Musk pays $97/tweet. CNN pays $58. McDonalds pays $4.50. Pay the same amount to reply to a tweet/thread of an account with that many followers. Bot problem solved. No need for an ad platform, ad targeting, etc. The whole thing is just paid ads.

vermilingua 4y ago
...right, so remove the ability for anyone but people with fuck-you money to voice an opinion; much less criticise someone else's opinion? Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a garbage fire, but this idea is just... bad.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  The point is that this is how Twitter already works: it's 99% a platform for rich people, companies, and big journalists to broadcast their opinions. Sure, there is some minor amount of "the masses" voicing their opinion, but it's marginal. And more importantly, the vast, vast majority of Twitter's users never tweet, and only look at tweets from the initial group. The poster is saying - why keep up this charade of being a social media platform at all, worrying about bots harassing your ad-viewers and so on? Why not embrace how the platform is already going, and get more direct monetization from those looking to broadcast? If you want to see platforms for voicing opinions of the masses, Facebook and Reddit are doing much better at that, witch much more organic conversation and interaction.

hitovst 4y ago

Musk made them an offer with contingencies. If they're not providing data to meet the contingencies, they're defaulting for whatever reason, including possibly that they misrepresented their product. If they do provide data, and the contingencies aren't met, there is no deal, as they misrepresented their product. If they provide data, and the contingencies are met, Musk would be in default to not close. There is chance Musk was bluffing, but it seems likely the other way around. I don't know how it could be that Twitter would think Musk wouldn't check to verify what he was purchasing. Seems a huge waste of time. I suspect that Musk was willing to purchase Twitter if legitimate, and knew if Twitter was fraudulent, this process would shed light on it. If the deal is void due to Twitter misrepresenting itself, Musk can invest in a legitimate venture instead. I don't see a whole lot of reason for speculation. The deal will close, or it will not. Chances are, Musk wasn't kidding when he made the offer, which means if it doesn't close, Twitter misrepresented itself.

throwaway2048 4y ago
Musk pretty much waived all contingencies, the contract is public and easily viewed, that's why twitter was willing to agree so quickly in the first place.
tsimionescu 4y ago
You pretty much have everything backwards. Musk has requested for almost no contingencies, even opting out of due diligence. The only contingency is Twitter not committing fraud in their filings with the SEC. Their filing on active users are extremely narrow in their claims - the only way they could realistically be shown to be fraudulent is by discovering in internal emails that they were crafted to deceive; otherwise, they are very specifically saying that the 5% number they give is only an estimate and that it involves a judgment call in how it was decided. So if you find some way of calculating bots and come up with 20%, that still doesn't mean they misrepresented the numbers: they never claimed 5% is a precise number, just their judgment based on some sampling they did. Futhermore, even if the number is found to be a lie, that still wouldn't mean they materially lied to the SEC - you still have to then prove that this impacted their revenue projections significantly (apparently the standard is "at least by 40%"), which comes with even bigger burdens of proof. You would have to show that Twitter's clients (advertisers, mostly) were relying on the reported numbers to decide if they were getting a good deal, and that they would significantly change the price/number of ads on Twitter based on this difference. This in itself is unlikely, as these companies have their own metrics for judging whether an ad was effective, and in the many years Twitter's official bot estimates have stayed the same, they would have had time to notice if their revenue from advertising on Twitter was worth it. Even worse, Musk has been claiming that Twitter's reported bot numbers are much lower than reality for many years before he made the offer to buy Twitter, so his belief can't have materially impacted his willingness to buy. He even publically talked about cleaning up Twitter of it's bot problems as a specific target after the acquisition. These public statements will again significantly affect any claim that Musk makes that any new information he finds on the number of Twitter bots would have impacted his decision to sign the contract if it had been disclosed before hand. Finally, note that the information he asked Twitter to provide (access to tweets) has almost nothing to do with the discussion about revenue, as Twitter's revenue comes from users reading tweets, not writing them. The 5% number is about users who request the Twitter feed and receive ads, but are in fact bots and thus can't buy products. This is completely uncorrelated to the number of bots and other fake accounts who might be posting tweets, as there are no ads in the tweet posting pages. In short, if Musk analyzes the data he received now from Twitter and discovers that 100% of all tweets are actually made by bots, it will not make one iota of a difference to his obligation of paying the $44B he singed on. Twitter makes no claims to the SEC about the number of real VS fake users posting tweets, and this number has no direct impact on revenue. The only claims by Twitter are that by their own internal process and judgment, up to 5% of monetizable daily users are bots, and this can only refer to users reading tweets, not posting them, based on how Twitter works.

DeathArrow 4y ago

It will take a long time for Musk to read all those tweets and count the bots. I hope he doesn't make mistakes at counting so he doesn't need to start all over. :)

DeathArrow 4y ago

I wonder how Musk did that big of a mistake, to not sense Twitter is not worth $44 billion and that the market wasn't going up for ever. Or, somehow, becoming the richest person in the world has more to do with other features like luck, than the ability to asses the market?

invig 4y ago
I guess you got rich shorting the whole market? If the market were predictable everyone would just use it to print money.
TheCowboy 4y ago
His intellectual or competitive advantage is not market movement timing. Plenty of brilliant people exist who would be considered bad at making predictions over a broad field of categories, especially market timing. More to disagree with the argument than to defend Musk. He's certainly been doing a lot of things to really undermine the brilliant-at-all-trades image. And luck is always underrated.
deviation 4y ago
It weirds me out that he's even worried about this now. In the beginning Musk stated in interviews that he wasn't concerned about the monetary amount. I can't pull it up on my VPN, but I recall him taking the stance of it being a social-impact-y investment and not one that is designed to make a profit.
- kramerger 4y ago
  And you believed him??

invig 4y ago

1. Given Jack's level of support for Elon, does anyone think he doesn't already know _exactly_ where the skeletons are buried? 2. It seems entirely unreasonable to assume that Elon doesn't want to own Twitter, or that he tried to buy it on a lark and changed his mind. If your premise is that Elon did want to own Twitter a few weeks ago and doesn't want to own Twitter now you should rethink your opinion.

ncann 4y ago
There is nothing unreasonable here, it's perfectly understandable. Stock market crashed, which means the proposed buying price for Twitter is now too high, PLUS Tesla stock is less valuable which means he has to use a lot more to get funding. It up debatable whether he wants out of the deal completely or just want to negotiate for a lower price though.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

walrus01 4y ago

My first thought on reading this was the scene from the movie UHF: "WHO WANTS TO DRINK FROM THE FIREHOSE?!?!?!"

nikolqy 4y ago

Now it's starting to look like they actually want to sell Twitter to Musk now. Not gonna lie, I'm torn on the whole deal, bit I still think it'll be a good thing as long as there's actual free speech, but with realistic limits and not just one-sided moderation. He better not mess with Twitter design though. It's really good and honestly appears to influence most of the other apps in some way, shape or form, but I'd also be excited to see some design changes that are new in the industry. I also want the app to be faster.

rrradical 4y ago
Genuinely curious what "realistic limits and not just one-sided moderation" means.

coffeeblack 4y ago

listenallyall 4y ago

It's a negotiating tactic, part of which is just stalling the deal. Musk will likely still buy Twitter, but for less. Happens all the time in sports when a player still has multiple years on his contract but threatens to hold out if the team won't negotiate a new, higher contract. Musk agreed to pay $54/share. But after the tech selloff, Twitter might be worth $25-30. Maybe less. Musk can, in fact, get out of the deal for $1 billion or so in fees. But that would be awful for Twitter too, it's stock would tank overnight without a bidder (it already dropped from $50+ to under $40 quite rapidly). So perhaps Musk can get the board to agree to a deal at around $32-35/share, it would be a win/win for both parties.

dmurray 4y ago
I've only been following this through Matt Levine, but he thinks Musk absolutely does not have the right to bail on the deal for $1 billion. This clause is only triggered if he can no longer find financing, which he can.
RayVR 4y ago
Your understanding of the deal is incorrect. The $1b is only an out in a few very restricted scenarios. Wanting out is not one of them.
- listenallyall 4y ago
  You're right, haven't been following closely. But let's say Musk just walks and it is in fact a contract violation. What is Twitter's recourse? Sure it can sue... and what? Spend years in court, more dirty laundry aired, stock price continues dropping, employees leaving, unlikely new buyers emerge. Twitter board could face lawsuits from public stockholders if they feel material information was hidden from them or misrepresented. What exactly were the damages Musk caused? Pumped up its stock price? It's not exactly like a labor or employment contract. How sure are you that Twitter would actually win in court? All I'm saying is that renegotiating the deal with Musk at a lower price is still likely Twitter's best option, regardless of the specific contract terms.

coffeeblack 4y ago

SilverBirch 4y ago

People seem to be looking at this as if there are two active actors in this situation. There really isn't. There's Musk, doing what Musk wants, and Twitter reacting. Twitter didn't want to sell to Musk, but there in this situation that they have to deal with it. If Musk truly wanted to walk away, I think Twitter would find a way to let him. But the fear is that he's just going to renege on the price and then say "34.20 a share" because that's probably a decent price for twitter now. So now they just have to play full defense. Musk says he'll walk because they won't provide data? They'll provide data. Musk says the numbers are false? Let him prove it. At the end of the day it's a signed contract. The question is how quickly does this come down to "Okay let's cut a deal" - and my feeling is that since this entire thing has been an ego trip for Musk there is no deal that's acceptable for him to walk away without some sort of: Musk pays $XB and Twitter admits the bot problem is bigger than stated in some sort of way that doesn't cause legal troubles for Twitter. It has to be a "I didn't want Twitter anyway" narrative, rather than "Musk just stuck his dick into a meat grinder" type narrative.

matwood 4y ago
> If Musk truly wanted to walk away, I think Twitter would find a way to let him. They will let him walk away, but the starting number is $44B. Now they are just negotiating.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  I'm sure they'd extract some price, but if the conversation were "this deal won't happen" they'd be a lot more flexible than what's actually going on which is "This douchebag will be back in 3 months at half the price"
  - matwood 4y ago
    Except Twitter doesn't need to be flexible in either case. Experts seem to agree the contract and law is on Twitters side. Musk signed and now owes the shareholders ~$44B. The stuff about bots and whatever else is a distraction.

hrgiger 4y ago

Probably very small part of twitter but fintwits (twits using Dolar signed stock symbols/crypto i.e. $tsla) has the highest bots.

Terry_Roll 4y ago

So when he gets the data, he becomes a data controller, so we need to submit a GDPR request so that we can have him delete our data and also find out if Twitter has been deleting Twitter accounts in accordance with GDPR laws or not. Will that help him find the bots though or will he just find a Bacofoil Tent Roasted Turkey masquerading as a Tesla Cyber Truck? Anyway, anyone know what address we need to use to submit a GDPR request as this is him personally, not Tesla or any other entity, ie personal wealth so does anyone know his home address so I can submit a GDPR request in person?

kornhole 4y ago

What if he gets the whole data dump and then backs out of the deal? Does he now have kompromat on all the politicians who had the app on the phone tracking their location and more?

thedrbrian 4y ago

Wonder if the twitter false/spam accounts include all those who get banned for not providing a phone number.