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Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot

589 points by hassanahmad 4y ago

rmbyrro 4y ago
Already preparing some popcorn. This will be fun to watch.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
givemeethekeys 4y ago
If it turns out that it is a bot though, it'd support Elon Musk's argument that we need to be afraid of AI.
jqgatsby 4y ago
plot twist: the spam analysis tool is correct, and Elon is actually a robot, ala Stephen Byerley in Asimov's "Evidence".
- spansoa 4y ago
  His Tweets are all done with an iPhone, as Twitter allows you to see what client a tweet was made from. The only way bot behavior could be done on a smartphone, is if the phone is an iOS virtual machine, and the tweets are programmatically generated using some algo.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    You're neglecting the simple solution of a hot dog moved around by a few actuators. Musk could totally be replaced by one of these. Or some other stylus that you can use on a touchscreen with your hands in non-conductive gloves. But a hot dog is funnier.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I'm now seeing Elon Musk in that one universe from Everything, Everywhere, all at Once.
    - InfoSecErik 4y ago
      In the same vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXacA35s6vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXacA35s6vo
  - martin8412 4y ago
    Not if the bot has a physical form and is able to interact with a physical iPhone.
- notahacker 4y ago
  I quite like the plot twist where Elon isn't actually a robot, but he becomes fully convinced he is. He's already expressed sympathies with arguments we're all living in a simulation, right?
pcmoney 4y ago
Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly. Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations. Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69 because he is a clown? Twitter replies to counter claims: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitters-Reply-to-Verified-Counterclaims.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitt...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I have understood the same. This is Delaware, meaning they aren't going to give special treatment if they want to keep companies there. Deal is a deal. And Musk will pay, now how much might vary, but it will not be 1 billion cheap.
- nathanvanfleet 4y ago
  Do you mean he only recently got overconfident? Just a reminder that he already got fined $40 million for his "going private at 420" joke.
  - jakelazaroff 4y ago
    Just to put this in perspective: if your net worth is $100,000, this is the equivalent of being fined $14. (Based on Elon's net worth of $278 billion, according to Google)
    - kergonath 4y ago
      Still not a great example of a supposedly superior intellect.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    The private at 420 thing was absolutely worth $40 million. It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one.
mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
> "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due diligence—giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to Twitter's stockholders," Twitter wrote. Bot/spam account analysis is just trying to do PR spin. Musk has no legal standing to use any of that to back out of the merger. > The five-day trial is now scheduled to begin on October 17 So we will see about 2 more months of PR campaigns from Musk and Twitter about the case.
- convery 4y ago
  > Musk has no legal standing to use any of that to back out of the merger. The claim is that Twitters SEC filings had bots at ~5%, and Musk made the investment based on that. From the leaked recordings of staff, everyone knew that the percentage was much higher.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    That is a misreading of twitters filing.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    That's not what the SEC filings say. The SEC filings say that up to 5% of the number of monetizable daily active users (i.e., the number of users after eliminating bots) may be bots--or, in other words, the techniques that Twitter uses to detect bots have up to a 5% false negative rate. No one is saying that 5% of Twitter's users is bots, except for when Musk is trying to put those words into Twitter's beak.
    - martin8412 4y ago
      They don't just say up to five percent are bots - They say that their methodology might be flawed and the actual number could be higher or lower.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      In addition, one could make the claim that monetizeable bots cannot have a material adverse effect since they are still generating revenue and profits.
jcranmer 4y ago
I think Musk's counterclaims are more interesting than Twitter's response. Here's the summary of the five counterclaims: * Twitter committed fraud by lying to the SEC about the mDAU numbers with the intent of inducing Musk to buy Twitter at an inflated price. No, really, this is the allegation (see paragraphs 202-206). * Count 2 is that Twitter committed [Texas fraud statute] by lying when it offered its shares. It's shotgun-pled, so I don't know which specific statements are supposed to be wrong, but I'm imagining it's basically the previous count recast under a different statute. * Count 3 says that Twitter broke the contract by failing to provide information. * Count 4 says that Twitter broke the contract by instituting a hiring freeze. [not gonna fly, especially when Musk admitted that Twitter gave him warning of what it was doing and Musk didn't respond. Did I mention that Musk's answer admits far more than I would have expected?] * Count 5 is pretty please declare that Twitter lying about mDAUs is a materially adverse event that is cause to break the contract. I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
- nomel 4y ago
  > I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's banana-pants insane about a company inflating their hard-to-discover numbers, for profit? I thought that was, unfortunately, banana-pants standard? For example, the fiction that is Twitter or Reddit's user count.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    Whether they inflated their numbers or not, the burden would be on Musk to prove that and it would be completely impossible to do that with a 3rd party tool. You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Something that no 3rd party tool could possibly track.
    - zinekeller 4y ago
      > You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Actually, even logged-out users (until they forced everyone to log in to read timelines) are monetizable, so Musk is really trying to make something to get out.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
jjeaff 4y ago
I find it rather ridiculous and in bad faith that Musk is harping on the bot issue for 2 reasons. First, it wouldn't matter anyway. He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement. And secondly, it's completely impossible for any outside analysis to determine the number of active users on Twitter because most active Twitter users don't tweet or interact in anyway. They just read tweets and those users see ads, which makes them monetizable users.
- pauldenton 4y ago
  "He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement." Why do more fraudsters not use contracts If people can sign away due diligence, sign up for a Diamond, get a Lemon, and have no recourse, surely scammers would be doing this instead of structuring their scam in a way that has the potential of sending them to jail
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Scammers are doing this. It's called cryptocurrency.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    I mean, that’s how a lot of immature markets without regulations work, until laws are added to say “you can’t do that for this kind of transaction”. That’s why many states have lemon laws for used car sales, to prevent exactly that kind of behavior in that market. Sales of corporations often don’t have consumer protection style regulations, because consumers don’t often buy corporations. The assumption is if you’re spending enough money to buy a corporation, you’re a big boy and can pay a lawyer to review your contracts. So, if you’re spending $54B to buy a company, you should have your lawyers closely review the terms of the contract. Every lawyer I’ve heard that reviewed the contract Musk signed is gobsmacked by its terms and would have strongly discouraged Musk from signing the contract as written, because it’s so one sided in Twitter’s favor.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      We also can't forget that there was time for due diligence before the contract was signed.
hunterb123 4y ago
- pwinnski 4y ago
  Given the language twitter surrounded that number with, they probably could. They called out that it was uncertain, described how they estimated it in detail, and stated that reality could be higher or lower. Given all of that, they could have said the number was .01% or 90%, and neither would have been misrepresentation.
  - hunterb123 4y ago
    Exactly, so what's the point of Twitter's number or using it for valuation? Now knowing it's surrounded by loose language because the number is so loose, assume the worst prediction, which is 15-20% from 3rd parties.
    - pwinnski 4y ago
      There isn't, and it wasn't used for valuation. The number appears nowhere in the purchase document which assigned the valuation; nor does any reference to it. It could be 20%, or 50%, and it wouldn't have any bearing whatsoever on the purchase agreement. Musk agreed that the number of bots not currently being caught was probably higher than 5%, which was a big part of his stated reasons for buying Twitter. Then the market took a turn, and now up is down, Musk is pretending this number matters. It doesn't.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  > Can we start a tip jar every time someone says the "he signed away his due diligence" talking point? I would love to see how Delaware Chancery Court treats this concept. So going in front of a judge is the best way to find out! I routinely accept contracts and agreements with parts I know I'm going to ignore or violate just because I understand the jurisdiction. It's more efficient than negotiating and actually having lawyers making revisions for months at great cost. I'm not familiar with this nuance of Delaware but its not outside of the realm of possibility that there is an argument that can help Elon.
usgroup 4y ago
Would their be any benefit to Musk going through this ordeal meanwhile fully intending to buy Twitter all along?
- Ekaros 4y ago
  I suppose he could save some billions.
  - usgroup 4y ago
    It seems to me that any reduction in price would also cause a reduction in value, no? I.e pay less because it’s worth less?
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Yes, but if he is taking it private that doesn't change anything. I have no idea what is his plan to make money with Twitter, but that is why I'm not multi-billionaire.
- pinko 4y ago
  Yes, he could end up negotiating a lower price. Even a tiny discount might make it all worthwhile.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    It will be hard to negotiate a lower price while a lawsuit about specific performance is still open. Since Twitter has a real (not guaranteed, but not terribly unlikely) of having a court force Musk to buy Twitter at the original price, I don’t think they’d seriously consider selling at a massive discount. I could see a small haircut to the price in a settlement, so maybe that’s the angle. But… with the threat of specific performance looming, I just don’t see Twitter moving the needle on their price much.
AllegedAlec 4y ago
I'm still convinced he's just gonna use it to suggest that a judge should meet him in the middle; make him buy the company, but use the allegations of large numbers of bots to reduce the price.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  I don’t think there’s any world where that happens. I think a judge would either order specific performance (e.g. do the thing the contract says, as specified in the contract), or we’re talking about damages (e.g. pay Twitter $X, but you don’t get anything in return). I think a purchase at a lower price would probably only come from a settlement between the parties, and… I think that’s likely. Twitter didn’t want to be purchased in the first place, and now has Musk over a barrel. I think Twitter is going to use the threat of specific performance to try and extract a damages settlement greater than the contractual $1B from Musk.
  - matwood 4y ago
    I agree there won't be any meet in the middle. Neither Musk nor Twitter want Musk to own Twitter now though. What's happening today is negotiating the break up fee which starts at the difference between current market cap and 54B (~22B today). The accelerated trial date put Musk on notice. The SEC may not take enforcing the rules seriously, but Delaware has made it their business to enforce the rules that make it attractive for big corps to incorporate under. I don't think this makes it to trial where Musk will get destroyed, and bet they end up settling in the ~10B range.
    - metadat 4y ago
      Why settle for only $10B? Musk's shenanigans have resulted in significant long-term damage to Twitter in the form uncertainty and distracting Twitter from focusing on operating and growing the business (because they've changed internal policies / direction, and shared a lot of information with Musk, as per the acquisition agreement). It's only fair for mullosk to be on the hook for the full purchase or at the very least the full differential. We'll see what happens in about two months.
mcguire 4y ago
"The merger agreement contained no references to false or spam accounts, and Musk didn't ask Twitter for any information to verify the number of spam accounts before signing the merger deal, Twitter said. "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due diligence—giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to Twitter's stockholders," Twitter wrote." If that's true, it kind of makes the question moot.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  Not entirely moot. If Musk could demonstrate that the 5% number was actually a fraud (that is, not just wrong, but people were lying about it) and show that the true number is so different that it would cause a material adverse effect, then he’d have an argument to escape the contract even with the DD waiver. I don’t think he has a shot in hell at demonstrating fraud, given the various disclaimers around the quoted figure. And, if he’s saying the real number is 10%, he just doesn’t have close to a shot at reaching the material adverse effect bar (which lawyers have told me is a very high bar in Delaware courts). So, on the narrow path that he can navigate after signing away his soul and due diligence waivers, he’s still totally hosed. He really shouldn’t have signed that contract.
  - NotTameAntelope 4y ago
    That’s kind of like saying he has a shot at getting out of the agreement if the sun collapses.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      I’m just saying the issue isn’t legally moot, because there’s a legal path even after due diligence is waived. But, I think the facts of this case almost certainly foreclose that path.
    - ergocoder 4y ago
      Meanwhile other people argue that, even if twitter reports a wildly wrong number, twitter still isn't at fault. It seems like people like to exaggerate both ways.
seydor 4y ago
I wish this whole saga ended, and Musk buys reddit instead. This current saga is pure entertainment, which will end up in some kind of settlement and will leave the lawyers a lot richer.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Musk buying Reddit would turn it into corporate 4chan even faster than is already happening.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  I'm amazed by how reddit has turned itself around from "the place where the commenter zeitgeist involves wishing physical violence on the CEO" to "the place I append to all my searches with a site: prefix to find meaningful Web discussion and product reviews". There was a surprising and unpredictable community turnaround from about 2015-2021; don't know if it will last, but it's surprising how much better it is now.
  - hyperhopper 4y ago
    I don't think it ever changed: Reddit was always good for things like that, easily for over a decade now. Its just that the userbase has broadened, and is no longer early-internet enthusiasts, and also censorship is far higher now
  - seydor 4y ago
    It's also the place where the same group of moderators moderates all politics subreddits for 15 years without challenge. And international subreddits can be often worse. Moderators run the show now, and they ve become extremely vicious What you 're observing is not some magical reddit improvement. It's because forums have become unmonetizable, and reddit has consolidated all of them in one place. There is nowhere else to go for comment-like discussions (HN, but it's limited). Their success and moat lies in their legacy userbase. It's not because of their performance
  - koheripbal 4y ago
    I use it for product reviews, but don't ever use it for meaningful discussions. The average age of Reddit users has dropped significantly since the mobile app launched. For tech solutions, Stackexchange is the place to go.
logicalmonster 4y ago
Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably not a great one for this type of analysis. 1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or forgetting about the account after a short time after deciding that Twitter is not for them. It's likely that somebody well-known like Musk has a ton of actual human followers who would likely be labelled as bots because they're users with basically blank profiles that would be seen as bot-like. 2) When programming any reasonably sophisticated bot that doesn't just blurt out spam as fast as possible until its banned, the programmer would design it to blend in, to avoid detection by any defense mechanisms that Twitter would have. It would likely be seeded with an array of well-known Twitter profiles to follow at random to appear like a normal person with normal interests. Any particularly well-known Twitter account would be loaded with bots just through bot authors starting out by seeding it with a list of accounts they're familiar with. 3) Due to his life and wealth, Musk probably also exhibits characteristics that makes him seem more bot-like: such as probably tweeting in random bursts at odd hours in many different geographical locations. 4) Given his status as an international figure that also has a role in geopolitics and even military action, it's not impossible that there are state actors with big resources who create bots that follow Musks account for anything from trying to influence him with responses and through polls, or to try and make him look bad by "exposing" his bot activity at a later date when they need to influence public sentiment against him.
- simiones 4y ago
  All good points, and all proving that the methods used by Musk are unreliable for saying who is or isn't a bot - thus proving Twitter's point.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    If I brought up good points, you should note that they apply more heavily to Musk than most other humans, which means that Twitter's response doesn't necessarily prove anything. It's not the testing tool that's necessarily bad. Botometer claims to look at over 1,000 features, which is pretty impressive. The problem might be applying that tool on Musk's profile for the specific reasons that I brought up. Musk is an outlier in many ways and isn't necessarily a good sample for an individual test as he'd tend to draw more bots than an average users' profile.
Eriks 4y ago
Maybe that's because he is acting as a troll sometimes. Troll, bot. What's the difference.
hartator 4y ago
"Twitter also ties mDAU goals to executive compensation. In 2020 Twitter based its executives’ cash bonus pool on revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA. After Twitter missed those targets in 2020, and only 32% of the cash bonus pool was funded, Twitter determined that mDAU (a highly manipulable number) should be considered in determining whether executives received these bonuses. Following that change, in 2021, 100% of this executive bonus pool was funded. And since Twitter’s adoption of mDAU over MAU, it has reported ten straight quarters of “growth” despite stagnant financial results" There is also this claim. Not sure why we should Twitter executives benefit of the doubt when they literally tweak metrics to get more money for themselves.
- nojito 4y ago
  None of that matters when he waived due diligence. Again all of that information is public knowledge through twitter's SEC filings.
  - hartator 4y ago
    > None of that matters when he waived due diligence. Musk didn't though: “Despite public speculation on this point, Mr. Musk did not waive his right to review Twitter’s data and information simply because he chose not to seek this data and information before entering into the Merger Agreement. In fact, he negotiated access and information rights within the Merger Agreement precisely so that he could review data and information that is important to Twitter’s business before financing and completing the transaction.” > Again all of that information is public knowledge through twitter's SEC filings. Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due diligence?
    - simiones 4y ago
      > Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due diligence? Here it is mentioned in his own legal filing [0]: > 60. Believing that due diligence processes can be costly and inefficient, the Musk Parties instead focused on bargaining for contractual representations that the information they relied upon in deciding to acquire Twitter is accurate. Also, by definition, due diligence is something that happens before signing a contract. [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/musk-counterclaim.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/musk-...
smiddereens 4y ago
siliconc0w 4y ago
Musk has a chance if he can show that Twitter knowingly mislead the public about the bot %. It sounds like their methodology was indeed pretty weak, arguably deliberately so, and they had people on staff that should've known this would produce poor estimates with a large margin on error.
- kentm 4y ago
  Their stated methodology isn't weak though. It's pretty good actually,
  - siliconc0w 4y ago
    Was it? TBH I'm a little confused by the downvotes - going by the 100 sample size number @ a 95% confidence level this is a 10 point margin of error. This seems like basic statistics but maybe I'm missing something. I think it's fair to assume that they had people who were taught basic statistics doing these calculations. If these people then say they think the number of bots is 5% without mentioning the margin of error due to their methodology that seems deceptive. I'm not a lawyer but if I was on a jury I could see being persuaded by that.
    - kentm 4y ago
      > This seems like basic statistics but maybe I'm missing something. Yep, the thing you're missing is that it was 100 samples per week, over a quarter, so 900 samples per calculation. I don't remember the margin of error cited but I think it was about .5%. Its not your fault though, because this is a misunderstanding that Musk actively encouraged in his tweets. Musk has actually shown quite a few times that he either doesn't know what he's talking about here or is trying to mislead the public. For example, he also confuses total bot count and the number of bots in mDAU, which are different things.
make3 4y ago
read sperm analysis, was very confused. wouldn't have been surprising with all the sketchy stories we're hearing about him and his family, even if some are false
jjeaff 4y ago
Imagine this whole ordeal playing out on a house that was not listed for sale. The buyer starts harassing the homeowner to sell to them, they say no, so he buys up the mortgage lender and tries to force a sale. His antics are hurting the home's value so you relent to selling and give him an as-is sale contract, which he signs and gives you 24 hrs to respond or he will try to force a sale. All the while, this is of course taking your attention away from your day job and costing you countless thousands in legal bills. Then, soon after signing the contract, the housing market crashes and the buyer claims he peaked in the window and it doesn't look as nice as he imagined (even though he had previously been publicly announcing that your house was crappy on the inside and that he was going to buy it and fix it up) and so he wants to break the deal. You sue to make the deal go through, he countersues that you misrepresented. Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?
- bilsbie 4y ago
  A publicly traded company is nothing like a house. I say no to this analogy.
- ilikehurdles 4y ago
  The investors funding the buyer’s antics.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  > Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer? Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge masses of people on Twitter. The house in question. Its so ridiculous. Musk's popularity is largely *BECAUSE* of his Twitter antics. So this "buyer" is basically someone who has come to house-parties / benefited from the house in question for the last decade. And the people arguing against the (current owners) of the house are also the party-guests of that very same house.
  - iasay 4y ago
    If his popularity is due to what he posts on twitter it would appear that a large proportion of the human race are deranged morons.
rossdavidh 4y ago
It is possible that this means Musk's spam analysis tool is defective. But, there is another logical possibility...
- shapefrog 4y ago
  If Musk can prove that he is a bot, then he wins this lawsuit.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Imagine the gasps in the courtroom when his lawyer walks in and people notice it's actually a prototype of his Optimus android, that somehow managed to pass an online law degree. Presumably it would then announce that it is an expert in "bot law" and the judge would have no choice but to let it argue Musk's case.
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      And then people look even closer and notice that its the same prototype of the Tesla android revealed to much fanfare in 2021, and now that they can see it up close and in person - they realise its actually just a person in a gimp suit, it always was.
mabbo 4y ago
Just in case anyone isn't seeing through the bullshit of Elon Musk, let me lay this out for you: On April 14th: Twitter stock was worth about $45. Tesla stock was worth about $985. Elon's contract said he would sell $13B worth of Tesla stock (about 13.1m stocks) as part of the plan to buy Twitter for $44B, $54.20 per share. A good deal for the Twitter shareholders even at the time. (23% higher than the market said it was worth). On May 13th: Twitter stock is worth $40[0]. Tesla stock was worth about $769. So now Elon would have to sell 16.9m shares of Tesla, 28% more, to get a company worth 12.5% less. All signs pointed to both stocks continuing to decline along with all of tech, so the deal was getting worse and worse every day for Elon, and better and better every day for Twitter's shareholders. Elon Musk will say or do anything he has to in order to cut his losses. There's that well-talked-about $1B get-out-of-deal fee that everyone thinks he'll be able to use. But that's actually not a valid thing- that was only if the SEC blocked the deal. He's contractually obligated to buy the company. Elon is screwed. All the noise he is making is not going to get him out of it because the Twitter shareholders will hire lawyers just as good and expensive as his- and they are in the right. [0]And even then $40 is only because the stock was pumped up from Elon saying he's buying it all. If not for that, it would be even lower- meaning this is an even better deal for the shareholders.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Even though you are totally right, I can’t fault Elon for having a sour grape feeling and trying to renegotiate hard with all the tools he’s got. Millions of lawyer fees are nothing compared to the billions of losses he is going to have from the deal.
  - DoesntMatter22 4y ago
    Realistically he may not take a loss in the end. If Elon does buy it and is able to get into payments and charge Businesses for their account, they could quite possibly quadruple or better their income.
rchaud 4y ago
Few accounts post as much vapid engagement-bait and as frequently as @elonmusk does, so I have sympathy for the bot analysis tool.
- onelovetwo 4y ago
  Thats not what bot means...
- bhouston 4y ago
  I couldn’t take it and had to block elonmusk on Twitter. It was just dumb bait tweets but everyone was constantly reacting to them. Horrid and I have better things to do with me time.
mro_name 4y ago
sensible guess, isn't it?
leobg 4y ago
TL;DR: > Specifically, Musk used "an Internet application called the 'Botometer'—which applies different standards than Twitter does and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot," Twitter said. Note the “Earlier this year”. Article continues: > This morning, Botometer gave Musk's account a rating of 1.2 out of 5, indicating that Musk is more "human-like" than bot-like as of today. The legal brief continues: > The Botometer thus does not even purport to apply Twitter's definition of a false or spam account. In fact, some bots (like those that report earthquakes as they happen or updates on the weather) are often helpful and permissible under Twitter’s platform manipulation and spam policy, to which Twitter respectfully refers the Court. The latter, in my estimate, is irrelevant to the question here. Because the metric in question is “monetizable daily active “. If one person runs, besides their personal profile, 10 bots, it doesn’t matter if those bots are all “permissible“ according to Twitter‘s terms of service. These accounts still constitute, from the point of an advertiser as well as from the point of investors, just one monetizable daily active user, and not eleven.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Urgh, Botometer. I guessed it would be that as soon as I saw the headline. I used to work on fighting bots. Botometer has a long and storied history of making totally false claims about Twitter accounts. In the past it identified something like 50% of US Congress as bots. It has unfortunate credibility because it's a machine learning model produced by academic "research", but no credibility is deserved. The academics who created it are, in my view, guilty of gross intellectual misconduct. Botometer has had an absurdly high FP rate for years and Twitter are right to call Musk out for using it, though presumably Musk was just as conned as everyone else who has used this tool. Really the Botometer papers should all be retracted, as should any papers that relied on it, and then the researchers who created it should be fired. Unfortunately this would require retracting huge chunks of academic social bot research - Botometer is just that prevalent. A thorough debunking of the model can be found here by Gallwitz and Kreil: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11474.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11474.pdf "In this paper, we point out a fundamental theoretical flaw in the widely-used study design for estimating the prevalence of social bots. Furthermore, we empirically investigate the validity of peer-reviewed Botometer-based studies by closely and systematically inspecting hundreds of accounts that had been counted as social bots. We were unable to find a single social bot. Instead, we found mostly accounts undoubtedly operated by human users, the vast majority of them using Twitter in an inconspicuous and unremarkable fashion without the slightest traces of automation. We conclude that studies claiming to investigate the prevalence, properties, or influence of social bots based on Botometer have, in reality, just investigated false positives and artifacts of this approach." It took them years to get this paper published, and when they first announced their work the Botometer guys simply called them "academic trolls" and ignored the problems they reported (except for hard-coding their examples to be correct!). If a full paper is too much, I've written a couple of essays about the problems of social bot research. This one summarizes an earlier/longer version of the GK paper above: https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... and that earlier paper cites another essay I wrote back in 2017 about a non-Botometer based Twitter bot paper: https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... Given these issues it's not hugely surprising that Musk believes incorrect things about Twitter bots. The field of Twitter bot research is massive with over 10,000 papers. The original Botometer paper has been cited over 800 times. He is far from alone - many politicians and journalists have all fallen for these claims too. Twitter should probably have pushed back far more strongly, far earlier, but the general convention of never criticizing academics regardless of how dishonest they become defanged them and they never went further than a rather mildly worded blog post. Now the chickens have come home to roost. Misinformation spread by "misinformation researchers" is creating real world legal consequences.
smeej 4y ago
To be fair, Musk himself stated when he hosted SNL that he "runs human on 'emulation mode,'" so calling himself a bot might be consistent.
- metadat 4y ago
  Musk actually has a tiny man inside his "body", acting as the operator. https://i.postimg.cc/BQprkpLv/Screenshot-20220805-171518-Instagram.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/BQprkpLv/Screenshot-20220805-171518-Ins...
deleted 4y ago
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AtNightWeCode 4y ago
It is impossible for neutral companies to get mDAU data for Twitter. Twitter needs to provide proof. You can’t use Twitter professionally without using bots btw. There is a food market at the ground level of Twitter HQ with an awesome beer selection. More valuable than most Twitter accounts. :)
qq66 4y ago
All of this is just a theatrical farce by business guys. The market went down, Elon doesn't want to pay, Twitter has a pretty good negotiating position, the parties will settle out of court for $3-5 billion.
- jassmith87 4y ago
  Why settle? There is a reasonable shot of forcing musk to pay a 200% premium. $3-5 billion is a steep discount. Twitter should settle for nothing short of specific performance.
- orlp 4y ago
  Why would Twitter settle?
  - fullshark 4y ago
    To close the sale and end litigation
    - saalweachter 4y ago
      So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about $12 billion dollars lower than the standing offer. I'd naively assume that the price to settle starts at $12 billion dollars, and maybe goes up rather than down -- right now that $42 stock price is at least anchored by the probability of Musk being forced to buy it at $54, so if this ends without a sale, we might expect the stock price to go down.
      - nemothekid 4y ago
        >So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about $12 billion dollars lower than the standing offer. You also have to factor in almost every other social media company is down 50% YTD. If the deal falls through, the market will price TWTR like how they did to facebook which shaves off another ~$15B off their market cap. So TWTR actually stands to gain ~$27B in value.
      - 4y ago
qwertox 4y ago
I have 30 Twitter accounts, but only one is used. It's only used to be able to occasionally search for news on Twitter. I wonder if those other 29 accounts are actually removed from the active accounts count when trying to sell their numbers.
- vel0city 4y ago
  I mean your answer is pretty self evident. If you don't use it, it's not active daily, and so it's not a monetizeable daily active user, now is it?
bell-cot 4y ago
"I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members." - Groucho Marx "I don't want to buy any..." - Elan Musk
tezza 4y ago
This must be the best point for Elon Musk to tear off his human face to reveal the impassive robot metal underneath
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I really can't see any other outcome besides Musk getting his ass handed to him by the Delaware Court of Chancery. It's always important to look at incentives and motivations when trying to read the tea leaves, and if you look at Delaware's incentives, it's very clear. The whole reason everyone incorporates in Delaware is because they have centuries of handling business cases and have built out a clear set of rules and procedures. That is, businesses go to them more for stability and predictability than anything else. Musk signed a contract. The BS reasons he is trying to use to back out of it are borderline laughable, and even he knows this, so if anything is just really trying to negotiate better terms. The Delaware Court has every incentive to hold up the established rules of contracts, especially business acquisition contracts, and I'd be pretty shocked if they ruled in favor of Musk on any of his claims.
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Actually I have to take you up on this, people who run large corporations say that it's the strong legal regime they have. In reality, it's a tax shelter. The only question is "How much does Delaware care about their status as a real legal regime vs their actual purpose: a tax haven". They know it's difficult to defend "We're a tax shelter sucking revenue out of the rest of the union", so they argue "We have strong legal structures" but we all know that Coca Cola wouldn't be incorporated in Delaware if they could save a cent by being incorporated in Georgia.
  - FrobeniusTwist 4y ago
    What tax, specifically, is Delaware a haven from? Incorporating in Delaware doesn't get you out of Federal income taxes, or state income taxes (to the extent your operations, which are probably not based in Delaware, subject you to income taxes from various states), or sales taxes, or property taxes, etc., etc. There are some taxes that are avoided by incorporating in Delaware, as opposed to some other jurisdiction, but they round to zero when compared with taxes imposed without regard to where you happen to be incorporated.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    I think it's both. Many states could compete with Delaware by also becoming tax havens. They can't anymore, because there is now more to it that simply being cheap.
coffeeblack 4y ago
I don’t think that I trust Twitter on this. Let’s wait for the courts to look at the topic.
polishdude20 4y ago
How much of this show and dance is really about covering up something else that Musk did? Is it possible this is done to overshadow other newsworthy stories that would be even more detrimental to his reputation?
- bhouston 4y ago
  It will be an incredibly expensive show and dance. Not sure it is really worth it.
- hackerlight 4y ago
  Simplest explanation is that he wanted to buy it and then got cold feet after the market crashed.
- lostdog 4y ago
  There must be a million cheaper ways of drawing attention away. Here, let's come up with a couple: Musk announces that in order to help repopulate the world he's looking for 10 female "paid volunteers" to come stay in a compound during 2023. Musk begins a run for Senate in Wyoming. Or even more simply: Keep talking about purchasing Twitter, but don't actually write up an offer!
hk1337 4y ago
So, it worked?
amelius 4y ago
Where does he find the time to run Tesla and SpaceX? I'm starting to conclude that he's fake and the man was created by investors to serve their purpose.
stainablesteel 4y ago
a lot of people have said a lot of things about this if I was going to buy something for billions of dollars, you'd better believe multi-year long negotiations, court cases, and backing off as a tactic would be an obvious strategy i'll buy into either side's spam once something actually happens, premature judgement -> sensationalism in this case
_justinfunk 4y ago
Twitter is making two claims that seem to contradict each other: 1) The 5% number is right 2) Musk's number is wrong because bot counting tools are flawed because bot counting is very difficult. So... if it's very difficult... perhaps your 5% number is wrong?
yalogin 4y ago
Musk has done irreparable damage to his name and brand. The decline from genius and eccentric to straight up fraudster and borderline unstable is just amazing actually. I now don’t know what to think of him as he still has amazing businesses and they haven’t even peaked yet. I may still buy stock in them but won’t work for him ever.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  People knew Elon was crazy for a long time and it hasn't hurt their demand. If a few people don't want to work for them it's not gonna hurt them much as they are the #1 or #2 company that engineers want to work for.
  - nharada 4y ago
    > they are the #1 or #2 company that engineers want to work for for real?
yalogin 4y ago
To be fair Musk’s Twitter does read like a bot full of illogical, nonsensical tweets. So yeah any well written algorithm could classify it as a bot :)
dhdsznbszd 4y ago
story: critics didnt want elon to buy twitter; elon says he no longer wants to buy twitter; now critics want him to buy twitter plot twist: elon probably still wants to buy twitter now everyone wants him too as well
bobobob420 4y ago
Twitter is dying this battle and their ceo is truly pathetic. From spending his day trying to reply to Elons tweets to prove himself to now spending time trying to force a billionaire to play out a contract to spend 45 billion when he does not want to. Imagine all the employees who have to watch their CEO cuck himself publicly while they work hard. They should focus on their own internal problems like banning the President of Anerica while allowing religious terrorists (iran leaders and taliban) to tweet on their platform. They show a consistency in not making smart moves. They have one of the most visited websites in the world that is imo one of the most engaging and popular social platforms ever and struggle to capitalize on it. People have to write their stories in series of tweets that have to be read upside down still.
aaron695 4y ago
jsharf 4y ago
To be fair, that's a realistic mistake that twitter users might make too. Musk has one of the most faked accounts on the site, with lots of bots running Musk impersonation crypto scams. IMO this says more about the problems with twitter than about an inaccuracy in Musk's script.
hackerlight 4y ago
If he isn't forced to buy it, then he was given a free multi billion dollar call option, paid for by Twitter shareholders. That's effectively theft.
patrickdavey 4y ago
If I bought Twitter shares today ($42) would Musk be forced to also buy my shares at $52 if the sale was forced through?
- sethaurus 4y ago
  Yes — and this possibility has been factored by the market into that $42 price. It's among the reasons why the stock isn't trading significantly lower.
k8si 4y ago
Incredibly irritating how much of everyone's time Musk has wasted on this
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I just find it a little hilarious that Twitter is even attempting to counter the bots claim. You have to spend 5 minutes reading the replies to tweets by prominent politicians to know that its filled with bots
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  Yeah, but that just shows there are a lot of bots. There are a lot of twitter users too. 5% of a lot (of Twitter users) as bots equals a lot of bots. So, that's consistent. What about all the tweets that aren't famous politicians? What about the orders of magnitude more people who just read, and maybe like, tweets? I don't think "I see a lot of bots" is an argument that the 5% number is wrong.
- arlcode 4y ago
  None of my tweets ever got a bot reply. Now that is most likely because they are all about very local topics or things related to my specific field of work. They are also not very popular (a handful of retweets) and mostly cater to people I know in real life. I know at least 10 people who regularly use Twitter through the app (aka being shown ads) but never ever tweeted a single thing. They would be counted as real users by Twitter but 1000 bots who never viewed an ad wouldn't. That is all that Twitter claims in their SEC fillings. That there are roughly 200 million active daily users who are being shown ads and that of those 200 million (very roughly) 5% are bots but "who knows it's a guess", says Twitter. If there were an additional 50 Billion bots who never saw an ad, Twitters statement would still be true.
cambaceres 4y ago
What happens if Musk loses? Will he be forced to buy the company, or just to pay a huge fine?
- arlcode 4y ago
  Twitter is sueing for specific performance (aka pay up the full price) and argues that Elon's funding by banks is still comitted and must be used to buy Twitter at 54.40 a share. IANAL but this court already did enforce similar contracts in the past. Of course the parties can also settle out of court at any time under any terms.
walrus01 4y ago
In the end, the real winners here are the lawyers and their billable hours.
motbus3 4y ago
plot twist. it was always a bot.
kabes 4y ago
As someone unfamiliar with the US juridical system: when can we expect an outcome in court? Or put otherwise: if we assume Musk is stalling in the hope that tesla shares go back up. How long can he keep this going?
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jliptzin 4y ago
Why is twitter so desperate to sell to Musk? Are they really out of ideas? If they just want to squeeze out an extra $11.50 / share I can think of tons of ways to do it, they don't have to just copy Facebook's monetization model. They could let people buy followers; they could add an onlyfans clone to the service; charge a monthly fee for premium features; charge a premium to be the first to know about trending topics - could be useful for news orgs, hedge funds, governments, etc; do what cameo does, let users pay popular accounts to make customized videos and take a cut of revenue. This is just off the top of my head, if you're just trying to squeeze money out of the rock and don't really care about long term brand impact I feel like they can get a lot more than $11.50 / share.
- jackvalentine 4y ago
  What makes you think the features you suggested are worth $11.50 a share? Some of them I think would tank the share price like buying followers so they’d have to be worth even more. There are 765 million twitter shares.
  - jliptzin 4y ago
    I don’t know for sure what will work, but they don’t seem to be trying anything other than forcing Elon to buy them out as hard as they can
tikiman163 4y ago
I hope this seriously bites Musk in the ass. I hope he's forced to buy it, and then it's such a pain in the ass for him that he immediately tries to turn around and sell only to discover no single entity or investment group wants to privately own Twitter. I hope he makes another dumbass tweet that results in another legal action removing him as the president/ceo/whatever and then decides to just take Twitter public again so he can divest himself. I hope Twitter users don't have to deal with too much chaos as a result, but if it half bankrupts an idiot who openly accused a rescue diver of being a pedophile, despite knowing nothing about the man, and merely because he told Musk not to interfere with rescue operations, then let Twitter deal with a little chaos.
suggala 4y ago
My guess is Elon is just trying to slow down the takeover until he figure out the money source.

589 points by hassanahmad 4y ago

rmbyrro 4y ago

Already preparing some popcorn. This will be fun to watch.

deleted 4y ago
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givemeethekeys 4y ago

If it turns out that it is a bot though, it'd support Elon Musk's argument that we need to be afraid of AI.

jqgatsby 4y ago

plot twist: the spam analysis tool is correct, and Elon is actually a robot, ala Stephen Byerley in Asimov's "Evidence".

spansoa 4y ago
His Tweets are all done with an iPhone, as Twitter allows you to see what client a tweet was made from. The only way bot behavior could be done on a smartphone, is if the phone is an iOS virtual machine, and the tweets are programmatically generated using some algo.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  You're neglecting the simple solution of a hot dog moved around by a few actuators. Musk could totally be replaced by one of these. Or some other stylus that you can use on a touchscreen with your hands in non-conductive gloves. But a hot dog is funnier.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I'm now seeing Elon Musk in that one universe from Everything, Everywhere, all at Once.
  - InfoSecErik 4y ago
    In the same vein: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXacA35s6vo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXacA35s6vo
- martin8412 4y ago
  Not if the bot has a physical form and is able to interact with a physical iPhone.
notahacker 4y ago
I quite like the plot twist where Elon isn't actually a robot, but he becomes fully convinced he is. He's already expressed sympathies with arguments we're all living in a simulation, right?

pcmoney 4y ago

Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly. Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations. Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69 because he is a clown? Twitter replies to counter claims: https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitters-Reply-to-Verified-Counterclaims.pdf https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitt...

Ekaros 4y ago
I have understood the same. This is Delaware, meaning they aren't going to give special treatment if they want to keep companies there. Deal is a deal. And Musk will pay, now how much might vary, but it will not be 1 billion cheap.
nathanvanfleet 4y ago
Do you mean he only recently got overconfident? Just a reminder that he already got fined $40 million for his "going private at 420" joke.
- jakelazaroff 4y ago
  Just to put this in perspective: if your net worth is $100,000, this is the equivalent of being fined $14. (Based on Elon's net worth of $278 billion, according to Google)
  - kergonath 4y ago
    Still not a great example of a supposedly superior intellect.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  The private at 420 thing was absolutely worth $40 million. It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one.

mattbrewsbytes 4y ago

> "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due diligence—giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to Twitter's stockholders," Twitter wrote. Bot/spam account analysis is just trying to do PR spin. Musk has no legal standing to use any of that to back out of the merger. > The five-day trial is now scheduled to begin on October 17 So we will see about 2 more months of PR campaigns from Musk and Twitter about the case.

convery 4y ago
> Musk has no legal standing to use any of that to back out of the merger. The claim is that Twitters SEC filings had bots at ~5%, and Musk made the investment based on that. From the leaked recordings of staff, everyone knew that the percentage was much higher.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  That is a misreading of twitters filing.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  That's not what the SEC filings say. The SEC filings say that up to 5% of the number of monetizable daily active users (i.e., the number of users after eliminating bots) may be bots--or, in other words, the techniques that Twitter uses to detect bots have up to a 5% false negative rate. No one is saying that 5% of Twitter's users is bots, except for when Musk is trying to put those words into Twitter's beak.
  - martin8412 4y ago
    They don't just say up to five percent are bots - They say that their methodology might be flawed and the actual number could be higher or lower.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    In addition, one could make the claim that monetizeable bots cannot have a material adverse effect since they are still generating revenue and profits.

jcranmer 4y ago

I think Musk's counterclaims are more interesting than Twitter's response. Here's the summary of the five counterclaims: * Twitter committed fraud by lying to the SEC about the mDAU numbers with the intent of inducing Musk to buy Twitter at an inflated price. No, really, this is the allegation (see paragraphs 202-206). * Count 2 is that Twitter committed [Texas fraud statute] by lying when it offered its shares. It's shotgun-pled, so I don't know which specific statements are supposed to be wrong, but I'm imagining it's basically the previous count recast under a different statute. * Count 3 says that Twitter broke the contract by failing to provide information. * Count 4 says that Twitter broke the contract by instituting a hiring freeze. [not gonna fly, especially when Musk admitted that Twitter gave him warning of what it was doing and Musk didn't respond. Did I mention that Musk's answer admits far more than I would have expected?] * Count 5 is pretty please declare that Twitter lying about mDAUs is a materially adverse event that is cause to break the contract. I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?

nomel 4y ago
> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's banana-pants insane about a company inflating their hard-to-discover numbers, for profit? I thought that was, unfortunately, banana-pants standard? For example, the fiction that is Twitter or Reddit's user count.
- jjeaff 4y ago
  Whether they inflated their numbers or not, the burden would be on Musk to prove that and it would be completely impossible to do that with a 3rd party tool. You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Something that no 3rd party tool could possibly track.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    > You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Actually, even logged-out users (until they forced everyone to log in to read timelines) are monetizable, so Musk is really trying to make something to get out.

deleted 4y ago

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jjeaff 4y ago

I find it rather ridiculous and in bad faith that Musk is harping on the bot issue for 2 reasons. First, it wouldn't matter anyway. He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement. And secondly, it's completely impossible for any outside analysis to determine the number of active users on Twitter because most active Twitter users don't tweet or interact in anyway. They just read tweets and those users see ads, which makes them monetizable users.

pauldenton 4y ago
"He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the agreement." Why do more fraudsters not use contracts If people can sign away due diligence, sign up for a Diamond, get a Lemon, and have no recourse, surely scammers would be doing this instead of structuring their scam in a way that has the potential of sending them to jail
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Scammers are doing this. It's called cryptocurrency.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  I mean, that’s how a lot of immature markets without regulations work, until laws are added to say “you can’t do that for this kind of transaction”. That’s why many states have lemon laws for used car sales, to prevent exactly that kind of behavior in that market. Sales of corporations often don’t have consumer protection style regulations, because consumers don’t often buy corporations. The assumption is if you’re spending enough money to buy a corporation, you’re a big boy and can pay a lawyer to review your contracts. So, if you’re spending $54B to buy a company, you should have your lawyers closely review the terms of the contract. Every lawyer I’ve heard that reviewed the contract Musk signed is gobsmacked by its terms and would have strongly discouraged Musk from signing the contract as written, because it’s so one sided in Twitter’s favor.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    We also can't forget that there was time for due diligence before the contract was signed.

hunterb123 4y ago

pwinnski 4y ago
Given the language twitter surrounded that number with, they probably could. They called out that it was uncertain, described how they estimated it in detail, and stated that reality could be higher or lower. Given all of that, they could have said the number was .01% or 90%, and neither would have been misrepresentation.
- hunterb123 4y ago
  Exactly, so what's the point of Twitter's number or using it for valuation? Now knowing it's surrounded by loose language because the number is so loose, assume the worst prediction, which is 15-20% from 3rd parties.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    There isn't, and it wasn't used for valuation. The number appears nowhere in the purchase document which assigned the valuation; nor does any reference to it. It could be 20%, or 50%, and it wouldn't have any bearing whatsoever on the purchase agreement. Musk agreed that the number of bots not currently being caught was probably higher than 5%, which was a big part of his stated reasons for buying Twitter. Then the market took a turn, and now up is down, Musk is pretending this number matters. It doesn't.
yieldcrv 4y ago
> Can we start a tip jar every time someone says the "he signed away his due diligence" talking point? I would love to see how Delaware Chancery Court treats this concept. So going in front of a judge is the best way to find out! I routinely accept contracts and agreements with parts I know I'm going to ignore or violate just because I understand the jurisdiction. It's more efficient than negotiating and actually having lawyers making revisions for months at great cost. I'm not familiar with this nuance of Delaware but its not outside of the realm of possibility that there is an argument that can help Elon.

usgroup 4y ago

Would their be any benefit to Musk going through this ordeal meanwhile fully intending to buy Twitter all along?

Ekaros 4y ago
I suppose he could save some billions.
- usgroup 4y ago
  It seems to me that any reduction in price would also cause a reduction in value, no? I.e pay less because it’s worth less?
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Yes, but if he is taking it private that doesn't change anything. I have no idea what is his plan to make money with Twitter, but that is why I'm not multi-billionaire.
pinko 4y ago
Yes, he could end up negotiating a lower price. Even a tiny discount might make it all worthwhile.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ncallaway 4y ago
  It will be hard to negotiate a lower price while a lawsuit about specific performance is still open. Since Twitter has a real (not guaranteed, but not terribly unlikely) of having a court force Musk to buy Twitter at the original price, I don’t think they’d seriously consider selling at a massive discount. I could see a small haircut to the price in a settlement, so maybe that’s the angle. But… with the threat of specific performance looming, I just don’t see Twitter moving the needle on their price much.

AllegedAlec 4y ago

I'm still convinced he's just gonna use it to suggest that a judge should meet him in the middle; make him buy the company, but use the allegations of large numbers of bots to reduce the price.

ncallaway 4y ago
I don’t think there’s any world where that happens. I think a judge would either order specific performance (e.g. do the thing the contract says, as specified in the contract), or we’re talking about damages (e.g. pay Twitter $X, but you don’t get anything in return). I think a purchase at a lower price would probably only come from a settlement between the parties, and… I think that’s likely. Twitter didn’t want to be purchased in the first place, and now has Musk over a barrel. I think Twitter is going to use the threat of specific performance to try and extract a damages settlement greater than the contractual $1B from Musk.
- matwood 4y ago
  I agree there won't be any meet in the middle. Neither Musk nor Twitter want Musk to own Twitter now though. What's happening today is negotiating the break up fee which starts at the difference between current market cap and 54B (~22B today). The accelerated trial date put Musk on notice. The SEC may not take enforcing the rules seriously, but Delaware has made it their business to enforce the rules that make it attractive for big corps to incorporate under. I don't think this makes it to trial where Musk will get destroyed, and bet they end up settling in the ~10B range.
  - metadat 4y ago
    Why settle for only $10B? Musk's shenanigans have resulted in significant long-term damage to Twitter in the form uncertainty and distracting Twitter from focusing on operating and growing the business (because they've changed internal policies / direction, and shared a lot of information with Musk, as per the acquisition agreement). It's only fair for mullosk to be on the hook for the full purchase or at the very least the full differential. We'll see what happens in about two months.

mcguire 4y ago

"The merger agreement contained no references to false or spam accounts, and Musk didn't ask Twitter for any information to verify the number of spam accounts before signing the merger deal, Twitter said. "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due diligence—giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to Twitter's stockholders," Twitter wrote." If that's true, it kind of makes the question moot.

ncallaway 4y ago
Not entirely moot. If Musk could demonstrate that the 5% number was actually a fraud (that is, not just wrong, but people were lying about it) and show that the true number is so different that it would cause a material adverse effect, then he’d have an argument to escape the contract even with the DD waiver. I don’t think he has a shot in hell at demonstrating fraud, given the various disclaimers around the quoted figure. And, if he’s saying the real number is 10%, he just doesn’t have close to a shot at reaching the material adverse effect bar (which lawyers have told me is a very high bar in Delaware courts). So, on the narrow path that he can navigate after signing away his soul and due diligence waivers, he’s still totally hosed. He really shouldn’t have signed that contract.
- NotTameAntelope 4y ago
  That’s kind of like saying he has a shot at getting out of the agreement if the sun collapses.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    I’m just saying the issue isn’t legally moot, because there’s a legal path even after due diligence is waived. But, I think the facts of this case almost certainly foreclose that path.
  - ergocoder 4y ago
    Meanwhile other people argue that, even if twitter reports a wildly wrong number, twitter still isn't at fault. It seems like people like to exaggerate both ways.

seydor 4y ago

I wish this whole saga ended, and Musk buys reddit instead. This current saga is pure entertainment, which will end up in some kind of settlement and will leave the lawyers a lot richer.

Spivak 4y ago
Musk buying Reddit would turn it into corporate 4chan even faster than is already happening.
mherdeg 4y ago
I'm amazed by how reddit has turned itself around from "the place where the commenter zeitgeist involves wishing physical violence on the CEO" to "the place I append to all my searches with a site: prefix to find meaningful Web discussion and product reviews". There was a surprising and unpredictable community turnaround from about 2015-2021; don't know if it will last, but it's surprising how much better it is now.
- hyperhopper 4y ago
  I don't think it ever changed: Reddit was always good for things like that, easily for over a decade now. Its just that the userbase has broadened, and is no longer early-internet enthusiasts, and also censorship is far higher now
- seydor 4y ago
  It's also the place where the same group of moderators moderates all politics subreddits for 15 years without challenge. And international subreddits can be often worse. Moderators run the show now, and they ve become extremely vicious What you 're observing is not some magical reddit improvement. It's because forums have become unmonetizable, and reddit has consolidated all of them in one place. There is nowhere else to go for comment-like discussions (HN, but it's limited). Their success and moat lies in their legacy userbase. It's not because of their performance
- koheripbal 4y ago
  I use it for product reviews, but don't ever use it for meaningful discussions. The average age of Reddit users has dropped significantly since the mobile app launched. For tech solutions, Stackexchange is the place to go.

logicalmonster 4y ago

Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably not a great one for this type of analysis. 1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or forgetting about the account after a short time after deciding that Twitter is not for them. It's likely that somebody well-known like Musk has a ton of actual human followers who would likely be labelled as bots because they're users with basically blank profiles that would be seen as bot-like. 2) When programming any reasonably sophisticated bot that doesn't just blurt out spam as fast as possible until its banned, the programmer would design it to blend in, to avoid detection by any defense mechanisms that Twitter would have. It would likely be seeded with an array of well-known Twitter profiles to follow at random to appear like a normal person with normal interests. Any particularly well-known Twitter account would be loaded with bots just through bot authors starting out by seeding it with a list of accounts they're familiar with. 3) Due to his life and wealth, Musk probably also exhibits characteristics that makes him seem more bot-like: such as probably tweeting in random bursts at odd hours in many different geographical locations. 4) Given his status as an international figure that also has a role in geopolitics and even military action, it's not impossible that there are state actors with big resources who create bots that follow Musks account for anything from trying to influence him with responses and through polls, or to try and make him look bad by "exposing" his bot activity at a later date when they need to influence public sentiment against him.

simiones 4y ago
All good points, and all proving that the methods used by Musk are unreliable for saying who is or isn't a bot - thus proving Twitter's point.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  If I brought up good points, you should note that they apply more heavily to Musk than most other humans, which means that Twitter's response doesn't necessarily prove anything. It's not the testing tool that's necessarily bad. Botometer claims to look at over 1,000 features, which is pretty impressive. The problem might be applying that tool on Musk's profile for the specific reasons that I brought up. Musk is an outlier in many ways and isn't necessarily a good sample for an individual test as he'd tend to draw more bots than an average users' profile.

Eriks 4y ago

Maybe that's because he is acting as a troll sometimes. Troll, bot. What's the difference.

hartator 4y ago

"Twitter also ties mDAU goals to executive compensation. In 2020 Twitter based its executives’ cash bonus pool on revenue, operating income, and adjusted EBITDA. After Twitter missed those targets in 2020, and only 32% of the cash bonus pool was funded, Twitter determined that mDAU (a highly manipulable number) should be considered in determining whether executives received these bonuses. Following that change, in 2021, 100% of this executive bonus pool was funded. And since Twitter’s adoption of mDAU over MAU, it has reported ten straight quarters of “growth” despite stagnant financial results" There is also this claim. Not sure why we should Twitter executives benefit of the doubt when they literally tweak metrics to get more money for themselves.

nojito 4y ago
None of that matters when he waived due diligence. Again all of that information is public knowledge through twitter's SEC filings.
- hartator 4y ago
  > None of that matters when he waived due diligence. Musk didn't though: “Despite public speculation on this point, Mr. Musk did not waive his right to review Twitter’s data and information simply because he chose not to seek this data and information before entering into the Merger Agreement. In fact, he negotiated access and information rights within the Merger Agreement precisely so that he could review data and information that is important to Twitter’s business before financing and completing the transaction.” > Again all of that information is public knowledge through twitter's SEC filings. Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due diligence?
  - simiones 4y ago
    > Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due diligence? Here it is mentioned in his own legal filing [0]: > 60. Believing that due diligence processes can be costly and inefficient, the Musk Parties instead focused on bargaining for contractual representations that the information they relied upon in deciding to acquire Twitter is accurate. Also, by definition, due diligence is something that happens before signing a contract. [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/musk-counterclaim.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/musk-...

smiddereens 4y ago

siliconc0w 4y ago

Musk has a chance if he can show that Twitter knowingly mislead the public about the bot %. It sounds like their methodology was indeed pretty weak, arguably deliberately so, and they had people on staff that should've known this would produce poor estimates with a large margin on error.

kentm 4y ago
Their stated methodology isn't weak though. It's pretty good actually,
- siliconc0w 4y ago
  Was it? TBH I'm a little confused by the downvotes - going by the 100 sample size number @ a 95% confidence level this is a 10 point margin of error. This seems like basic statistics but maybe I'm missing something. I think it's fair to assume that they had people who were taught basic statistics doing these calculations. If these people then say they think the number of bots is 5% without mentioning the margin of error due to their methodology that seems deceptive. I'm not a lawyer but if I was on a jury I could see being persuaded by that.
  - kentm 4y ago
    > This seems like basic statistics but maybe I'm missing something. Yep, the thing you're missing is that it was 100 samples per week, over a quarter, so 900 samples per calculation. I don't remember the margin of error cited but I think it was about .5%. Its not your fault though, because this is a misunderstanding that Musk actively encouraged in his tweets. Musk has actually shown quite a few times that he either doesn't know what he's talking about here or is trying to mislead the public. For example, he also confuses total bot count and the number of bots in mDAU, which are different things.

make3 4y ago

read sperm analysis, was very confused. wouldn't have been surprising with all the sketchy stories we're hearing about him and his family, even if some are false

jjeaff 4y ago

Imagine this whole ordeal playing out on a house that was not listed for sale. The buyer starts harassing the homeowner to sell to them, they say no, so he buys up the mortgage lender and tries to force a sale. His antics are hurting the home's value so you relent to selling and give him an as-is sale contract, which he signs and gives you 24 hrs to respond or he will try to force a sale. All the while, this is of course taking your attention away from your day job and costing you countless thousands in legal bills. Then, soon after signing the contract, the housing market crashes and the buyer claims he peaked in the window and it doesn't look as nice as he imagined (even though he had previously been publicly announcing that your house was crappy on the inside and that he was going to buy it and fix it up) and so he wants to break the deal. You sue to make the deal go through, he countersues that you misrepresented. Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?

bilsbie 4y ago
A publicly traded company is nothing like a house. I say no to this analogy.
ilikehurdles 4y ago
The investors funding the buyer’s antics.
dragontamer 4y ago
> Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer? Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge masses of people on Twitter. The house in question. Its so ridiculous. Musk's popularity is largely *BECAUSE* of his Twitter antics. So this "buyer" is basically someone who has come to house-parties / benefited from the house in question for the last decade. And the people arguing against the (current owners) of the house are also the party-guests of that very same house.
- iasay 4y ago
  If his popularity is due to what he posts on twitter it would appear that a large proportion of the human race are deranged morons.

rossdavidh 4y ago

It is possible that this means Musk's spam analysis tool is defective. But, there is another logical possibility...

shapefrog 4y ago
If Musk can prove that he is a bot, then he wins this lawsuit.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Imagine the gasps in the courtroom when his lawyer walks in and people notice it's actually a prototype of his Optimus android, that somehow managed to pass an online law degree. Presumably it would then announce that it is an expert in "bot law" and the judge would have no choice but to let it argue Musk's case.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    And then people look even closer and notice that its the same prototype of the Tesla android revealed to much fanfare in 2021, and now that they can see it up close and in person - they realise its actually just a person in a gimp suit, it always was.

mabbo 4y ago

Just in case anyone isn't seeing through the bullshit of Elon Musk, let me lay this out for you: On April 14th: Twitter stock was worth about $45. Tesla stock was worth about $985. Elon's contract said he would sell $13B worth of Tesla stock (about 13.1m stocks) as part of the plan to buy Twitter for $44B, $54.20 per share. A good deal for the Twitter shareholders even at the time. (23% higher than the market said it was worth). On May 13th: Twitter stock is worth $40[0]. Tesla stock was worth about $769. So now Elon would have to sell 16.9m shares of Tesla, 28% more, to get a company worth 12.5% less. All signs pointed to both stocks continuing to decline along with all of tech, so the deal was getting worse and worse every day for Elon, and better and better every day for Twitter's shareholders. Elon Musk will say or do anything he has to in order to cut his losses. There's that well-talked-about $1B get-out-of-deal fee that everyone thinks he'll be able to use. But that's actually not a valid thing- that was only if the SEC blocked the deal. He's contractually obligated to buy the company. Elon is screwed. All the noise he is making is not going to get him out of it because the Twitter shareholders will hire lawyers just as good and expensive as his- and they are in the right. [0]And even then $40 is only because the stock was pumped up from Elon saying he's buying it all. If not for that, it would be even lower- meaning this is an even better deal for the shareholders.

xiphias2 4y ago
Even though you are totally right, I can’t fault Elon for having a sour grape feeling and trying to renegotiate hard with all the tools he’s got. Millions of lawyer fees are nothing compared to the billions of losses he is going to have from the deal.
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  Realistically he may not take a loss in the end. If Elon does buy it and is able to get into payments and charge Businesses for their account, they could quite possibly quadruple or better their income.

rchaud 4y ago

Few accounts post as much vapid engagement-bait and as frequently as @elonmusk does, so I have sympathy for the bot analysis tool.

onelovetwo 4y ago
Thats not what bot means...
bhouston 4y ago
I couldn’t take it and had to block elonmusk on Twitter. It was just dumb bait tweets but everyone was constantly reacting to them. Horrid and I have better things to do with me time.

mro_name 4y ago

sensible guess, isn't it?

leobg 4y ago

TL;DR: > Specifically, Musk used "an Internet application called the 'Botometer'—which applies different standards than Twitter does and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly likely to be a bot," Twitter said. Note the “Earlier this year”. Article continues: > This morning, Botometer gave Musk's account a rating of 1.2 out of 5, indicating that Musk is more "human-like" than bot-like as of today. The legal brief continues: > The Botometer thus does not even purport to apply Twitter's definition of a false or spam account. In fact, some bots (like those that report earthquakes as they happen or updates on the weather) are often helpful and permissible under Twitter’s platform manipulation and spam policy, to which Twitter respectfully refers the Court. The latter, in my estimate, is irrelevant to the question here. Because the metric in question is “monetizable daily active “. If one person runs, besides their personal profile, 10 bots, it doesn’t matter if those bots are all “permissible“ according to Twitter‘s terms of service. These accounts still constitute, from the point of an advertiser as well as from the point of investors, just one monetizable daily active user, and not eleven.

mike_hearn 4y ago

Urgh, Botometer. I guessed it would be that as soon as I saw the headline. I used to work on fighting bots. Botometer has a long and storied history of making totally false claims about Twitter accounts. In the past it identified something like 50% of US Congress as bots. It has unfortunate credibility because it's a machine learning model produced by academic "research", but no credibility is deserved. The academics who created it are, in my view, guilty of gross intellectual misconduct. Botometer has had an absurdly high FP rate for years and Twitter are right to call Musk out for using it, though presumably Musk was just as conned as everyone else who has used this tool. Really the Botometer papers should all be retracted, as should any papers that relied on it, and then the researchers who created it should be fired. Unfortunately this would require retracting huge chunks of academic social bot research - Botometer is just that prevalent. A thorough debunking of the model can be found here by Gallwitz and Kreil: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11474.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11474.pdf "In this paper, we point out a fundamental theoretical flaw in the widely-used study design for estimating the prevalence of social bots. Furthermore, we empirically investigate the validity of peer-reviewed Botometer-based studies by closely and systematically inspecting hundreds of accounts that had been counted as social bots. We were unable to find a single social bot. Instead, we found mostly accounts undoubtedly operated by human users, the vast majority of them using Twitter in an inconspicuous and unremarkable fashion without the slightest traces of automation. We conclude that studies claiming to investigate the prevalence, properties, or influence of social bots based on Botometer have, in reality, just investigated false positives and artifacts of this approach." It took them years to get this paper published, and when they first announced their work the Botometer guys simply called them "academic trolls" and ignored the problems they reported (except for hard-coding their examples to be correct!). If a full paper is too much, I've written a couple of essays about the problems of social bot research. This one summarizes an earlier/longer version of the GK paper above: https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... and that earlier paper cites another essay I wrote back in 2017 about a non-Botometer based Twitter bot paper: https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f08c014a https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f... Given these issues it's not hugely surprising that Musk believes incorrect things about Twitter bots. The field of Twitter bot research is massive with over 10,000 papers. The original Botometer paper has been cited over 800 times. He is far from alone - many politicians and journalists have all fallen for these claims too. Twitter should probably have pushed back far more strongly, far earlier, but the general convention of never criticizing academics regardless of how dishonest they become defanged them and they never went further than a rather mildly worded blog post. Now the chickens have come home to roost. Misinformation spread by "misinformation researchers" is creating real world legal consequences.

smeej 4y ago

To be fair, Musk himself stated when he hosted SNL that he "runs human on 'emulation mode,'" so calling himself a bot might be consistent.

metadat 4y ago
Musk actually has a tiny man inside his "body", acting as the operator. https://i.postimg.cc/BQprkpLv/Screenshot-20220805-171518-Instagram.jpg https://i.postimg.cc/BQprkpLv/Screenshot-20220805-171518-Ins...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

AtNightWeCode 4y ago

It is impossible for neutral companies to get mDAU data for Twitter. Twitter needs to provide proof. You can’t use Twitter professionally without using bots btw. There is a food market at the ground level of Twitter HQ with an awesome beer selection. More valuable than most Twitter accounts. :)

qq66 4y ago

All of this is just a theatrical farce by business guys. The market went down, Elon doesn't want to pay, Twitter has a pretty good negotiating position, the parties will settle out of court for $3-5 billion.

jassmith87 4y ago
Why settle? There is a reasonable shot of forcing musk to pay a 200% premium. $3-5 billion is a steep discount. Twitter should settle for nothing short of specific performance.
orlp 4y ago
Why would Twitter settle?
- fullshark 4y ago
  To close the sale and end litigation
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about $12 billion dollars lower than the standing offer. I'd naively assume that the price to settle starts at $12 billion dollars, and maybe goes up rather than down -- right now that $42 stock price is at least anchored by the probability of Musk being forced to buy it at $54, so if this ends without a sale, we might expect the stock price to go down.
    - nemothekid 4y ago
      >So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about $12 billion dollars lower than the standing offer. You also have to factor in almost every other social media company is down 50% YTD. If the deal falls through, the market will price TWTR like how they did to facebook which shaves off another ~$15B off their market cap. So TWTR actually stands to gain ~$27B in value.
    - 4y ago

qwertox 4y ago

I have 30 Twitter accounts, but only one is used. It's only used to be able to occasionally search for news on Twitter. I wonder if those other 29 accounts are actually removed from the active accounts count when trying to sell their numbers.

vel0city 4y ago
I mean your answer is pretty self evident. If you don't use it, it's not active daily, and so it's not a monetizeable daily active user, now is it?

bell-cot 4y ago

"I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members." - Groucho Marx "I don't want to buy any..." - Elan Musk

tezza 4y ago

This must be the best point for Elon Musk to tear off his human face to reveal the impassive robot metal underneath

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I really can't see any other outcome besides Musk getting his ass handed to him by the Delaware Court of Chancery. It's always important to look at incentives and motivations when trying to read the tea leaves, and if you look at Delaware's incentives, it's very clear. The whole reason everyone incorporates in Delaware is because they have centuries of handling business cases and have built out a clear set of rules and procedures. That is, businesses go to them more for stability and predictability than anything else. Musk signed a contract. The BS reasons he is trying to use to back out of it are borderline laughable, and even he knows this, so if anything is just really trying to negotiate better terms. The Delaware Court has every incentive to hold up the established rules of contracts, especially business acquisition contracts, and I'd be pretty shocked if they ruled in favor of Musk on any of his claims.

SilverBirch 4y ago
Actually I have to take you up on this, people who run large corporations say that it's the strong legal regime they have. In reality, it's a tax shelter. The only question is "How much does Delaware care about their status as a real legal regime vs their actual purpose: a tax haven". They know it's difficult to defend "We're a tax shelter sucking revenue out of the rest of the union", so they argue "We have strong legal structures" but we all know that Coca Cola wouldn't be incorporated in Delaware if they could save a cent by being incorporated in Georgia.
- FrobeniusTwist 4y ago
  What tax, specifically, is Delaware a haven from? Incorporating in Delaware doesn't get you out of Federal income taxes, or state income taxes (to the extent your operations, which are probably not based in Delaware, subject you to income taxes from various states), or sales taxes, or property taxes, etc., etc. There are some taxes that are avoided by incorporating in Delaware, as opposed to some other jurisdiction, but they round to zero when compared with taxes imposed without regard to where you happen to be incorporated.
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  I think it's both. Many states could compete with Delaware by also becoming tax havens. They can't anymore, because there is now more to it that simply being cheap.

coffeeblack 4y ago

I don’t think that I trust Twitter on this. Let’s wait for the courts to look at the topic.

polishdude20 4y ago

How much of this show and dance is really about covering up something else that Musk did? Is it possible this is done to overshadow other newsworthy stories that would be even more detrimental to his reputation?

bhouston 4y ago
It will be an incredibly expensive show and dance. Not sure it is really worth it.
hackerlight 4y ago
Simplest explanation is that he wanted to buy it and then got cold feet after the market crashed.
lostdog 4y ago
There must be a million cheaper ways of drawing attention away. Here, let's come up with a couple: Musk announces that in order to help repopulate the world he's looking for 10 female "paid volunteers" to come stay in a compound during 2023. Musk begins a run for Senate in Wyoming. Or even more simply: Keep talking about purchasing Twitter, but don't actually write up an offer!

hk1337 4y ago

So, it worked?

amelius 4y ago

Where does he find the time to run Tesla and SpaceX? I'm starting to conclude that he's fake and the man was created by investors to serve their purpose.

stainablesteel 4y ago

a lot of people have said a lot of things about this if I was going to buy something for billions of dollars, you'd better believe multi-year long negotiations, court cases, and backing off as a tactic would be an obvious strategy i'll buy into either side's spam once something actually happens, premature judgement -> sensationalism in this case

_justinfunk 4y ago

Twitter is making two claims that seem to contradict each other: 1) The 5% number is right 2) Musk's number is wrong because bot counting tools are flawed because bot counting is very difficult. So... if it's very difficult... perhaps your 5% number is wrong?

yalogin 4y ago

Musk has done irreparable damage to his name and brand. The decline from genius and eccentric to straight up fraudster and borderline unstable is just amazing actually. I now don’t know what to think of him as he still has amazing businesses and they haven’t even peaked yet. I may still buy stock in them but won’t work for him ever.

DoesntMatter22 4y ago
People knew Elon was crazy for a long time and it hasn't hurt their demand. If a few people don't want to work for them it's not gonna hurt them much as they are the #1 or #2 company that engineers want to work for.
- nharada 4y ago
  > they are the #1 or #2 company that engineers want to work for for real?

yalogin 4y ago

To be fair Musk’s Twitter does read like a bot full of illogical, nonsensical tweets. So yeah any well written algorithm could classify it as a bot :)

dhdsznbszd 4y ago

story: critics didnt want elon to buy twitter; elon says he no longer wants to buy twitter; now critics want him to buy twitter plot twist: elon probably still wants to buy twitter now everyone wants him too as well

bobobob420 4y ago

Twitter is dying this battle and their ceo is truly pathetic. From spending his day trying to reply to Elons tweets to prove himself to now spending time trying to force a billionaire to play out a contract to spend 45 billion when he does not want to. Imagine all the employees who have to watch their CEO cuck himself publicly while they work hard. They should focus on their own internal problems like banning the President of Anerica while allowing religious terrorists (iran leaders and taliban) to tweet on their platform. They show a consistency in not making smart moves. They have one of the most visited websites in the world that is imo one of the most engaging and popular social platforms ever and struggle to capitalize on it. People have to write their stories in series of tweets that have to be read upside down still.

aaron695 4y ago

jsharf 4y ago

To be fair, that's a realistic mistake that twitter users might make too. Musk has one of the most faked accounts on the site, with lots of bots running Musk impersonation crypto scams. IMO this says more about the problems with twitter than about an inaccuracy in Musk's script.

hackerlight 4y ago

If he isn't forced to buy it, then he was given a free multi billion dollar call option, paid for by Twitter shareholders. That's effectively theft.

patrickdavey 4y ago

If I bought Twitter shares today ($42) would Musk be forced to also buy my shares at $52 if the sale was forced through?

sethaurus 4y ago
Yes — and this possibility has been factored by the market into that $42 price. It's among the reasons why the stock isn't trading significantly lower.

k8si 4y ago

Incredibly irritating how much of everyone's time Musk has wasted on this

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I just find it a little hilarious that Twitter is even attempting to counter the bots claim. You have to spend 5 minutes reading the replies to tweets by prominent politicians to know that its filled with bots

ALittleLight 4y ago
Yeah, but that just shows there are a lot of bots. There are a lot of twitter users too. 5% of a lot (of Twitter users) as bots equals a lot of bots. So, that's consistent. What about all the tweets that aren't famous politicians? What about the orders of magnitude more people who just read, and maybe like, tweets? I don't think "I see a lot of bots" is an argument that the 5% number is wrong.
arlcode 4y ago
None of my tweets ever got a bot reply. Now that is most likely because they are all about very local topics or things related to my specific field of work. They are also not very popular (a handful of retweets) and mostly cater to people I know in real life. I know at least 10 people who regularly use Twitter through the app (aka being shown ads) but never ever tweeted a single thing. They would be counted as real users by Twitter but 1000 bots who never viewed an ad wouldn't. That is all that Twitter claims in their SEC fillings. That there are roughly 200 million active daily users who are being shown ads and that of those 200 million (very roughly) 5% are bots but "who knows it's a guess", says Twitter. If there were an additional 50 Billion bots who never saw an ad, Twitters statement would still be true.

cambaceres 4y ago

What happens if Musk loses? Will he be forced to buy the company, or just to pay a huge fine?

arlcode 4y ago
Twitter is sueing for specific performance (aka pay up the full price) and argues that Elon's funding by banks is still comitted and must be used to buy Twitter at 54.40 a share. IANAL but this court already did enforce similar contracts in the past. Of course the parties can also settle out of court at any time under any terms.

walrus01 4y ago

In the end, the real winners here are the lawyers and their billable hours.

motbus3 4y ago

plot twist. it was always a bot.

kabes 4y ago

As someone unfamiliar with the US juridical system: when can we expect an outcome in court? Or put otherwise: if we assume Musk is stalling in the hope that tesla shares go back up. How long can he keep this going?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jliptzin 4y ago

Why is twitter so desperate to sell to Musk? Are they really out of ideas? If they just want to squeeze out an extra $11.50 / share I can think of tons of ways to do it, they don't have to just copy Facebook's monetization model. They could let people buy followers; they could add an onlyfans clone to the service; charge a monthly fee for premium features; charge a premium to be the first to know about trending topics - could be useful for news orgs, hedge funds, governments, etc; do what cameo does, let users pay popular accounts to make customized videos and take a cut of revenue. This is just off the top of my head, if you're just trying to squeeze money out of the rock and don't really care about long term brand impact I feel like they can get a lot more than $11.50 / share.

jackvalentine 4y ago
What makes you think the features you suggested are worth $11.50 a share? Some of them I think would tank the share price like buying followers so they’d have to be worth even more. There are 765 million twitter shares.
- jliptzin 4y ago
  I don’t know for sure what will work, but they don’t seem to be trying anything other than forcing Elon to buy them out as hard as they can

tikiman163 4y ago

I hope this seriously bites Musk in the ass. I hope he's forced to buy it, and then it's such a pain in the ass for him that he immediately tries to turn around and sell only to discover no single entity or investment group wants to privately own Twitter. I hope he makes another dumbass tweet that results in another legal action removing him as the president/ceo/whatever and then decides to just take Twitter public again so he can divest himself. I hope Twitter users don't have to deal with too much chaos as a result, but if it half bankrupts an idiot who openly accused a rescue diver of being a pedophile, despite knowing nothing about the man, and merely because he told Musk not to interfere with rescue operations, then let Twitter deal with a little chaos.

suggala 4y ago

My guess is Elon is just trying to slow down the takeover until he figure out the money source.