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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
by 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 agoit does apply, and Elon chose to waive the right to do that.
- tsimionescu 4y agoMusk 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 agoMy 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.
- tsimionescu 4y agoI think the disagreement is over whether this type of auditing could have been done before signing the contract to acquire Twitter - and in general, my understanding is that yes, Musk (or any other buyer) could have asked for such an audit before agreeing to buy the company for billions of dollars; and that often, that does happen, even if it is not always publicly discussed.