Twitter plans to comply with Musk’s demands for data
forbes.com
forbes.com
1. Musk is talking about percent of daily active users that are bots, but Twitter's SEC filings refer to the percent of monetizable users that are bots, i.e., users that actually get shown ads. There is no way for Elon to produce a comparable figure from the firehose data
2. Even if he could, the firehose doesn't contain the sort of PII you would need to determine whether a user be a bot.
3. But even if it did, none of this matters. He can get out of the deal only if he proves the error would cause a material adverse effect on the company, which is an extremely high bar that is basically never met and would certainly not be met due to an erroneous estimate in a SEC filing.
Doesn’t make sense to buy the company to do things and… not just do that.
wtf knows if that’s what’s going on.
It’s not like flipping a switch, how matters, as does following up on effectiveness and so on. I would think someone planning to run the company would want to do it right…
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-09/elon-w...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-06/elon-h...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-17/elon-m...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-m...
Pew analysis (based on surveying humans) says "97% of tweet volume comes from the top 25% most active tweeters"[1]
So Musk is arguing about a statistic that twitter claims, which is that spambots make up less than 5% of users.
Now, if those bots are part of the most active 25%, then they make up 1/5 of the 'most active' user population. So it seems plausible that they could well be responsible for 1/5 of tweets.
Which matches exactly what Musk is claiming - that 20% of tweets are from spam bots.
Which still makes no difference to Twitter's ability to sell Advertising targeting the 95% of users who are humans, 75/95 (=79%) of which are only responsible for 3% of tweets, but... presumably... 79% of ad revenue. Because they only serve you ads when you're looking at a feed. And that's what those users are using Twitter to do.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90697826/the-top-25-most-active-...
Am I understanding this right? I would assume no matter how many ads you show a bot, they wouldn't end up buying anything. Or is the point that that those ad sales are not a reliable source of income since the people buying them would likely decide they weren't getting a good enough return?
Ghosn: Carlos Ghosn, former CEO of Nissan-Renault, held on Japan for some white collar crime and illegally smuggled out of Japan, with the help of a former Green Beret and his son, to Libanon, Ghosn home country. Since then he is no longer CEO and wanted internationally by Japan.
His ego is at stake, he’s called many things but not often a fool.
I mean, yeah, sure on the surface it's economically rational and all, but really--you're already nominally in charge of at least 3 different large companies, yet this is how you choose to spend your time and energy? Nickel-and-diming Twitter for lulz?
edit: and before someone points out what a big difference a few dollars in the share price would make towards the acquisition price: if he really believes that Twitter has so much untapped potential (economic or otherwise), then a few dollars either way shouldn't matter much. But by going to such lengths to slightly reduce the cost and jeopardize the deal, he shows that he doesn't think it has much potential and/or he's just screwing around.
SpaceX's success is easy to explain: they could do the same task as competitors for a substantially lower price.
As for Tesla's market success, I think that's predominantly driven by the product itself. They won countless car of the year awards. Customer satisfaction levels at near-unprecedented levels. Record-breaking 0-60 times provide an angle for gushing media coverage. And a decade of having no competitors in the market subset of desirable EVs. I've personally never heard anyone mention Elon when describing why they're interested in—or purchased—a Tesla vehcile.
They also intuited/gambled/stumbled upon (pick your verb depending on what you think of it) that “electric and fast” was enough to compete against non-EV cars with much better finish.
Both options are very unlikely, but this will drag on.
Unless and until such a thing happens, he owes them ~$44B.
Now that he can't simply walk away and pay $1B. The contract he signed has a few extremely limited circumstances where the deal may fall through, and in those few cases, he would pay the $1B. In any other case, he has to pay the full amount.
If this becomes the case, Musk can use that as leverage to threaten to litigate if twitter doesn't accept a lower offer price.
That might be the plan, but what prevents Twitter from continuing to reasonably cooperate? You take it granted that there will be a point where twitter says no, but why?
The fact that Twitter seem to have tried to stonewall him will just "prove" to him that he is right and he can afford to be stubborn enough to drag this out.
That may be, but it's not part of the contract, and it's very unlikely to materially impact the future revenue of Twitter to a high enough degree that it would be a breach of the signed contract, so all he would be doing is assisting the dirty laundry of his new company in public.
The $1B breakup was for a narrow set of cases, outside of those he's on the hook for the whole amount. Every move now is just part of the negotiation for how much he's going to pay get out of the deal.
There's also a moral hazard here. If Musk is allowed to walk away with zero consequence, he was able to hold Twitter hostage for however many months where they could have potentially had other suitors. It writes the playbook for other large companies to do the same.
2) Then they should provide data he can use to verify their figure. It is dumb they won’t provide it and are providing noise instead.
3) He’s not trying to get out of the deal, he’s calling them out on their figure. It’s dumb they aren’t giving him the data he can use to verify their figure and he wants to expose them prior to the deal to show how effective he will be when(if) he “cleans” it up.
Not just different but materially and verifiably different.
So the onus would be Musk to produce numbers that are significantly higher and just as accurate if not more than Twitter.
So nothing has changed between Musk making the binding offer and today with regards to bots. He has not suddenly been surprised about some discovery. This is not something that materially changes what he thought Twitter was worth. It’s just another game to distract people.
This is going to end horribly for Twitter and some sort of slapp on the wrist for Elon.
And you've interpreted: "Producing that evidence is not a contingency in the deal". Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
He never said he didn't want to buy it under the negotiated terms, he said he wants to be able to _verify_ that what the company says is accurate.
Not only have people heard of bots and user validation in advance, but Musk waived his rights to diligence after announcing on Twitter that fixing the bot problem was why he was buying Twitter. He might not just lose this case if it got to court; the Delaware courts might make an example out of him for this.
Matt Levine is to "it's not Materially Adverse" as Ken White is to "it's not RICO".
They didn't want to be the target of a pump and dump. And they didn't want a bunch of distracting rumors from a takeover bid with no financing. As soon as Elon put financing together they said "yes" pretty quickly.
Shareholders can only sue Twitter if those facts are materially false. This is an incredibly high bar that is almost never met.
;)
But I mean who knows, your guess is as good as mine. I think it was an impulse buy and now he has regrets.
By providing all the data requested, twitter just squashed that out.
He had no out on the bot claim itself, but his legal team was comfortable that the covenant breach was a colorable claim and wrote a letter. Now they need to think of a new legally plausible claim.
It’s just the posts. Probably the most useless part of the data if your goal is bot detection.
But people seem to fall for it.
But there is also a “public opinion” part, and that’s about politics. I have the impression that Tw is trying to at least remain in control until the upcoming elections.
And this has nothing to do with elections whatsoever, just with a but hurt trying to buy Twitter out of spite.
The legal battle will not be about whether it is all the data. Musk isn’t owed that. It’s about whether twitter is sufficiently responding to requests.
Even without this the claim was very likely to fail. Hard to see it surviving this.
If Musk has a way of running analysis on the data to do the following: 1. Level of duplicates. 2. Source of duplicates (who posts it first) 3. How often do they do that? 4. What is the political slant of these tweets 5. Which part of the world are the people tweeting from
All of this alone will reveal very interesting information.. my guess is that it will prove that a lot of tweets are orchestrated.
What data would that be though ?
1) Email addresses would be valid since they are used during the verification process.
2) Location data is only available on mobile which bots obviously won't be using.
3) IP address data would be filtered through compromised hosts.
4) Interaction data is probably the key one. But this is trivially forged.
The type of bots that are most common on Twitter are those from well funded interests e.g. governments, companies or technical ones e.g. hackers.
People who know what they are doing and would be building something largely imperceptible from ordinary users.
Twitter spam bots that offer to sell me bitcoin or start following me with a beautiful profile picture who just opened their twitter account and I don't know are pretty obviously bots to me. The former could be found using the firehose, but the latter wouldn't be detected until they tweeted something in the firehose.
If the firehose included DMs, new accounts (with all available signup and verification data), etc. then the firehose would be useful. Detecting bots using the firehose would only detect bots based on suspicious tweet content and nothing else.
Also, the firehose is a 7Mbps (compressed) stream. It takes substantial compute power to run just sentiment analysis and substantial storage to keep heuristics on that volume of data. Musk would need to spend some time and money and hire some people to just make sense of the full firehose.
Source: I worked for GNIP in 2012. GNIP used to re-sell the twitter firehose and was a twitter partner before they were acquired by twitter in 2014.
I've seen this mentioned elsewhere also, but I really need help here. From my understanding, Twitter's entire business model, and existing revenue stream, is people paying them to show content/ads to other humans. If some unknown percent of users are not human, doesn't that have a pretty extreme, direct, influence on the possible revenue?
If someone wants to buy Twitter, I assume their first question would not be, what percent of users that you're currently showing ads to are bots. Rather, it would be what percent of users are real, so I can show ads to all of them. Which bring up the question, why isn't Twitter showing ads to some users?
Keep in mind that the onus is on Elon to prove to a court that the higher bot count has a large, material impact (on the order of 50% of Twitter's revenue). It's not something that is a matter of opinion, but rather based on his ability to argue his position to the court, for which he needs strong evidence.
https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2018/10/delaware-chance...
This is about Delaware finding that an MAE occurred, for the first time ever, like literally ever, in 2018.
What we have here is a case where Twitter's performance isn't even faltering (it's stock price is, but its 2022 revenues are actually up). There's not a chance in hell for the MAE argument.
That's the biggest part of twitters business, but they do have additional revenue streams. However, the other revenue streams are also highly dependent on their status as "a place where people say things and people look at things"
Advertising buyers determine how much ad views are worth to them in their own way. This demand essentially sets the price since there is no marginal cost of providing advertising views.
For example, suppose that you show 1,000 ads and get 2 people buying something from your store. It doesn't really matter whether 1,000 people saw your ad, or 500 humans and 500 bots saw it. The important statistic is what revenue you got from it.
I do think Twitter in its current form is essentially unusable due to the amount of scams. I see thousands on a weekly basis. Every feature, from tweets, replies, lists, etc. is a cesspool of scamming. I block 100s of users per week and yet I still get added to “Free ETH drop” lists daily.
The mDAU exclusion includes such accounts already. I think people (and Elon) use the term bot rather colloquially, so I don't think it's an important distinction anyway.
Even after the drops in tech stocks, he has enough money to fund the takeover if he really wants it. Did he not even consider that possibility? Twitter having bots is not surprising to anyone even a tiny bit informed. Their public records and filings have this data. Did he not even read those?
The whole thing is just bizarre and stupid, yes.
And as much as he trash talks Warren Buffet, I think he was basically following his advice of “buy what you know.” He just got burned by amazingly bad market timing.
Due to the market drop the dollar figure is now more expensive relatively speaking. I would not be surprised if some lawsuits fly back and forth and the deal winds up going through at a valuation that is similar in relative terms to the offer when it was made but different numerically.
I have no idea what that means. You think they negotiate to 53.69/share so Musk can save some face?
So they could agree to a new lower price and Twitter shareholders would still make the same money relative to the recent value of the stock and Musk would take a similar ding relative to his net worth.
It's like if you agree with someone's heirs to buy something after the current owners croaks but the current owner takes long enough to croak that the market for that thing changes. The typical path forward is to re-adjust so the deal is just as fair for both parties as it used to be and get on with it. But because of the dollar figures involved here the parties will sue each other instead of exchanging emails/texts like normal people looking to buy and sell stuff do.
What? So let's imagine I bought 10000 shares of TWTR in 2018 for $25. And now Musk wants to revise the offer down from 54.20 down to 34.20. Why should I accept a $200k smaller return, just to be more "fair to Elon" in terms of the effect on his net worth?
Or worse, what if I bought 10000 shares close to the peak? Why should I accept a $200k larger loss on the stock?
He made a contract to pay a certain price - it's in no way a wash to shareholders if he wants to pay less. He just made a bad deal. Nobody forced him to sign a contract to acquire Twitter at that price.
If Twitter had gone through the current tech market drop, without Musk hanging over it, it could easily be down 60-70%, maybe even 80%.
Twitter is a terrible business on paper with the current board. It wouldn't have done well in this tech crash.
Musk must be pretty annoyed that if he had waiting about 30 days he could have gotten twitter for 60% less money.
Consumer law gives you certain protection varying from place to place because it is impossible to verify what you buy online, but a bid on the stock of a public company is not an Amazon purchase and hence does not have the same kind of protections.
And in a way that is Elon's play: to claim that he put that bid in with important information being withheld by the company that would have had a material effect on the bid price. A reasonable person might take the position that Elon should have done his due diligence before making that bid.
WeWork failed at that, and even the slightest increase in intrest rates might doom thosr businesses. We will see so.
Good that you survived so, facing of against 30 million in funding isn't easy, regardless of how stupid that money is.
It's an execution of the contractual terms, not an annulment of the contract.
The whole tech field, including Tesla and Twitter has seen stock prices drop.
Yes Musk can leverage less money, but he also has to spend less to buy Twitter.
Best not even to look at the amounts until your close to retirement and need to adjust your investments.
It doesn't make Elon look great, but some of the other theories…
- he wants to feed his ego because he doesn't already have enough to feed his ego
- he wants to make money because he doesn't have enough money
- he wants to grief twitter because it's such a good tool for him and he uses it every day
- he wants to get more people to preorder cars since the waiting line is only a year right now
...are just bonkers.
Generally, this is far too complicated and involved to be any kind of effective scheme. He has professional managers and lawyers who could have easily come up with dozens of ways to sell tsla stock without this public legal morass.
The situation most likely is as it seems: He wanted to buy twitter for personal reasons and is in the process of doing so.
*** He wanted to buy twitter for personal readons [reasons] and is in the process of doing so. ***
I suppose that he wanted to buy Twitter. Perhaps it was for personal and business reasons. I simply don't know.
Also, at this point it seems like he might have decided not to purchase Twitter.
Nonetheless, the following comment which you successfully refuted...
*** Am I the only one who thinks it's obvious he was pretending to buy Twitter to try cover his cashing out of massive amounts of tesla? ***
was ridiculous.
He could have justified the stock sale in plenty of other ways, including reallocating funds to his other companies, without forcing himself into a $44B deal.
Whether or not that was the purpose is speculation but being held up as a champion of free speech (as if) I’m sure did great things for his ego too.
…maybe they’ll change the law one day and he can run against Schwarzenegger.
Meanwhile, Elon could not run against Arnold for governor of California: Elon is not a citizen of California and Arnold has been disqualified from running again since 2011 due to term limits.
It can get tricky and people (or states) can argue/sue about it because it can make a big difference in taxes. Elon became a citizen of Texas before he made all the money that resulted in his 11 billion dollar federal tax bill last year and in doing so probably saved himself 5 to 7 billion dollars that otherwise would have gone to California.
Musk is not fully trusted by either side. He says a lot of things that traditional conservatives (especially those who don’t buy into climate change) oppose.
The left ideology is the dominant force in pop culture, and those views are in vogue. He’s speaking out against some of those things and that’s getting him a lot of attention.
It will be interesting to see if conservative car types decide to give electric cars a go. Keeping a close eye on a famous YouTube mechanic.
You'd have to live very far away from any so-called "conservative car types" to believe this.
Currently, the conservative base is much more prone to thinking that electric cars are going to be _forced_ on them by a cabal who want to erase fossil fuels use from the earth.
Not saying they're correct, but your theory is just as baseless as theirs is.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/musk-is-of...
Not seriously, HOWEVER, I would now worry about him a lot more as a competitor or enemy as he's shown he's happy to blow what is -- to me -- an unthinkable amount of cash on whimsy and for the lulz.
This is all a side show and negotiation tactics. Really not bizarre at all. The original offer is at least 10 billion or so too much now.
To me it seems like griefer [0] behavior. The goal is to just duck with Twitter and derive joy from others pain.
Musk is a gamer and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s pretty common to see people who are bored or max level or whatever who just mess with other players like a cat does with a mouse. They expel more of their own energy to cause discomfort to their target. An example may be spending 10 gold pieces to make the target lose 1 gold piece.
It “doesn’t make sense” rationally until you take into account the value of the confusion, pain, negative experiences for the target as a sort of currency.
So it seems perfectly common for me to see Musk spend a few billion in fines or whatever to make life worse for Twitter.
One theory I’ve seen to explain why Musk wants to buy Twitter is to shut it down. If that’s the goal then it’s actually much cheaper not to pay $40B to acquire it and shut it down, but to do this sort of thing that seeds uncertainty so when he pulls out the stock price plummets and Twitter dies from an acceleration from it’s likely path.
Musk has lots of followers and was marketing snakeoil perfectly well before Twitter and will be fine after Twitter. I think Musk’s Twitter count is based on his activity, not the other way around. He’s not rich because of Twitter.
But it’s just a theory and there could be other reasons.
Could be that Twitter just had bad management and by cutting lots of staff and establishing a clear ToS they can plaster ads everywhere and let trump back on to drum up activity.
Who knows? It’s kind of boring to me and I try not to follow it, but it leaks into my feeds. I just noticed the behavior and it reminds me of encountering griefers in games I’ve played.
I think this Griefer theory explains a lot of the antisocial behavior we see out of executives and politicians who have beaten the game of life. We structure the game to make "Sociopath" the character class most likely to reach level 99 and win the game, and then we wonder why there are so many sociopaths using game-winning wealth to grief everyone else.
Anyway, I figure we should all suspect that the actual goal of this charade is not simply "to acquire Twitter" and motivation is not "to protect free speech" or "solve Twitter's bot problem" or whatever.
Eventually your answer to the "why" becomes simply: because you can.
I heard this idea from a colleague in the space industry. Going to Mars is one of Musks main goals, and as crazy as it sounds I could see him doing all this Twitter craziness just to move that ball forward.
https://www.faa.gov/space/stakeholder_engagement/spacex_star...
The results of the review were pushed back by 2 weeks from the original date and it now appears to be on track for the June 13 release. It doesn't mean it's going to be positive, but your version of it is pretty damn far-fetched. Like really super contrived.
This is just the most recent of a series of delays. The report was originally due by the end of 2021.
I'm 100% on Elon's side here. He should be allowed to kick the tires. I've been in an organization which went through something similar twice, in both cases, based on material misrepresentations.
In the first case, two organizations who should have known better invested tens of millions of dollars, with one effectively defrauding the other. In another case, a $3.5B organization bought an $800M organization, and the combined entity was worth less than $800M within a year.
Serious, when spending tens or hundreds of millions, do your due diligence. People and organizations lie all the time.
I'd be against Elon if he backed out of the transaction based on a material change. Failure to provide data? He's being perfectly reasonable.
Waiving due diligence is a crazy dumb decision. The one lesson in my career is always do due diligence, whether you're making a $40B transaction, or negotiating stock options with a startup. People cheat. A lot.
But people keep telling me this guy is a genius. I guess I’m not smart to understand his level of thinking.
That's just hero worship, like with Jobs; there's zero evidence to believe he's Einstein or Feynman or Knuth (which I would say are legit "geniuses").
He's a smart guy with a South African emerald fortune.
That's three unicorn-grade successes. Within those, he had similar streams of successes, like OS-X and the iPhone.
That's genius.
Two footnotes:
- I'm not sure genius is a good reason to worship someone or treat them as a hero; it's to me, it's more about what you do with that genius. For example, Hitler was a genius speaker, and Stalin was a genius administrator. Many geniuses I've met are not-nice people.
- Jobs had one major failure: NeXT. NeXT was still pretty brilliant, even if it didn't do well in the market.
But! There's another way out for Musk.
Merger agreements include covenants, promises that the parties make to one another about what they will do to close the deal. If one of the parties can prove that the other didn't fulfill a covenant obligation and therefore broke its promise to work towards closing in good faith, then that's a valid justification to walk away.
The merger agreement includes covenants that force Twitter to provide any and all information "reasonably" requested by Musk, in a timely manner.
So the game becomes: how to trick Twitter into not respecting its obligations? One way is to ask for information that is impossible to provide: "Give me all the tweets since the beginning of time, each tweet on a single piece of paper!"
But Twitter might object, and a judge might find, that this is done in bad faith...
The other, more subtle way is to ask for information that Twitter should be very anxious and reluctant to provide, such as, for example, personal information regarding users. Twitter may run afoul of many regulations if it does, and has reasons to believe Musk won't honor any NDA he might sign (as he has a history of disrespecting his own word). Yet on the other hand, Musk can argue that he's entitled to ask for such information.
That's the nature of the current game. I don't think there's any way this isn't settled in court.
Note: for more on this, cf. Matt Levine's newsletter from June 6th.
The more key metric for the integrity of the platform, it's ability to be a trustworthy indicator of real people's sentiments, vs firehoses of disinformation into a cesspool of lies and fake interactions, is not the percentage of bots (monetizable or not), but the percentage of bot vs real person posts.
Having worked with the Twitter API, I think he's rather underestimating how much volume this is gonna wind up being, the amount of processing it'll entail, and the difficulties of determining "this is a bot" from just the Tweet data.
Edit: to be clear, I'm saying this about what Elon said, not you.
What a terrible cultural icon Musk has become.
We should all aspire to be fentanyl dropping, pregnant women torturing street trash.
We should all aspire to accomplish great things like AOC when she ...uh she did ...um ...drop Adderall and start a podcast about putting on makeup! Yeah! That podcast alone employs 50,000 engineers and has saved or created 100,000,000 jobs a month, at least.
Source: Former employee of one of the few companies who got the "push" firehose and not just the API.
"1 terabyte per day of data [...] - that is how much is produced by the firehose of 250 million tweets a day" [0]
i.e., ~4kb per tweet. So, 2ish Tb/day of text + metadata at current rates?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2011/12/07/datasift-historical-tweets...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/17/twitter-seeing-6-billion-a...
Some accounts are a mix of human and "bot" updates--and you can get a very different impression of their nature depending on your sample.
https://twitter.com/JeffLindner1, for example, posts automatic alerts from the Harris County flood warning system (such as https://twitter.com/JeffLindner1/status/1529386618938920960). If you look at his account when it isn't pouring outside, you'll see human updates and retweets. If you look during a three-day downpour, you may see dozens of automatic tweets per human post.
NOTE: For the ones operating legitimately I mean.
Although I will say that UI hint is extremely subtle.
While I do understand your point about the difference, neither type should be measured for things like (e.g.) advertising revenue. Weatherbots don't buy goods or services.
If people aren't viewing those tweets or deriving value, they're consuming resources without adding much to the ecosystem. If people are viewing those tweets and deriving value from them, the bot is increasing ad revenue.
I don't see how he thinks tweet content alone will be enough to verify the 5% of monthly monetizable users
The other poor indicator was his tweet about sampling _100_ of his own replies to detect bots. That's a horribly small sample and horrible selection bias
The firehose is terabytes a day, add storage + indexes and it's pretty far from "fitting on an USB stick" in order to analyze.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E
Here is Elon answering questions of National Academy of Science members about Starship. He explains in detail why he pushed the team towards steel and away from carbon fibers:
https://youtu.be/da3iF2Np51A?t=951
Here you have another direct conversation with Elon:
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=172
Here is Elon discussing with Sundy Munro mass manufacturing and engineering.
Sandy Munro is a veteran engineer from General Motors supplier and directly at Ford. Sandy Munro is now running a consultancy company that tear downs cars and suggests improvements to wide range of clients from the car industry.
Also, Musk was doing a physics PhD in battery tech at Stanford when he dropped out to found Zip2.
There is some long running pattern here with getting cold feet on bad decisions ^^ .
It’s funny how quickly the left changed from loving him for turning the car industry on its head to hating him for taking away the left’s hate machine. Oh well.
Being accepted is not the important part of PhD work, no.
His modus operandi is taking quick decisions and backtracking if he is wrong.
Actually it's not only his modus operandi, SpaceX according to NASA evaluation is also working that way.
It's basically depth first search vs. breath first search.
Dr. Daniel Rasky, a NASA Senior scientist
https://youtu.be/MxIiiwD9C0E?t=1464 :
> I think there are some things and kind of going back to in some ways back to the Apollo days if you take a look at kind of the environment that NASA had in Apollo it was kind of what Elon has with his young engineers. you had you know people trying things and in what works and what doesn't work I think over the years we've gotten into a very risk-averse profile and we're I call it full matrix engineering that okay that all concerns that anyone can raise have to be chased down a hundred percent before you can make any decision. Okay, so yeah like a full matrix of all the things that may be pertinent to a certain decision and you have to fill that entire array before you can make a decision to go forward and there's times when that makes sense but it doesn't make sense for everything we do. SpaceX uses a sparse matrix okay 51% okay when do when we get to 51% okay enough we're gonna make a decision and then we're going to try it and move on.
That is the modus operandi with products/services, it's not anything new anyways. It has been named in a bunch of different ways ranging from "agile" , "move fast break things" etc. also less charmingly "Microsoft vaporware products" or "Google graveyard", "Steve Jobs' bluffs"
They all indicate the same strategy: ship something and get feedback, if feedback is ultra-negative then you can always kill it.
However when legal stuff is signed, and especially legal stuff of this magnitude then the only way in which you leave yourself room to backtrack is if there is a clause which lets you do so in the legal document. When legal stuff is signed is not in your hands anymore, you have to treat it as being in the courts hands. Because that is what happens if you backtrack.
From what I understand he can legally backtrack from the deal, but he would have to pay some billion dollars penalty. Not cheap by any means, but he can afford that. And having billion dollars at stake you can try to look for a lot of legal reasons to not pay that billion.
But my guess is that he genuinely thinks that 5% number is not accurate based on his twitter feed comments. His feed comments is mostly crypto scammers. Some independent people also claim that 50% of his followers are fake.
Twitter claim of 5% is very specific and probably accurate in a legal sense. But if you have tens of billions at stake and a deal that looks like a mistake it's entirely reasonable to dig deeper.
Isn't a bit premature to declare it a successful revolution? Cases against Tesla autopilot are mounting, there is a reason why "move fast and break things" isn't used in fields where the people's lives are at stake. It's the reason why Theranos imploded. Who could have possibly predicted what could have happened if US Govt let Theranos run, maybe they'd have really developed the product in the following iteration of the company?
> From what I understand he can legally backtrack from the deal, but he would have to pay some billion dollars penalty
That is only the case if the FTC or the US. Govt. blocks the deal because of any reason.
With SpaceX it is certainly a successful revolution. There is whole bunch of new startups that would not exists without SpaceX. Most of them will die, but some will not.
It is also quite clear that Tesla already achieved it's goal of accelerating transition to sustainable energy. Volkswagen shift is certainly linked to Tesla. And Volkswagen actually committed fraud on emissions that probably led to death of many people.
Situation with Theranos and Tesla is completely not comparable. Autopilot works fine. You are safer with autopilot activated on a highway than you are driving in a city per kilometer driven. Whether you are safer on a highway with or without autopilot is debatable and we don't have good enough data to settle it. So, Autopilot is not prefect by any means, arguably not market leading solution in the category of drive assist, but it works fine.
The bigger issue is with Full Self Driving. Tesla can drive you around in a city - so the way they spin what FSD means is almost satisfied. The issue is that it is extremely stressful experience and I'm 100% convinced that you are more likely to get in an accident when babysitting it vs. if you would drive by yourself and pay the same amount of attention.
But I think in 5 - 10 years they may be able to actually deliver proper working solution. They are making progress.
Apples and oranges. Volkswagen committed fraud on behalf of the consumer. In the endless war for quality of life as a consumer who has to spend 45k for a car I know that Volkswagen is conspiring on my behalf to sidestep environmental regulations and thus providing a vehicle which is more affordable, more durable with the tradeoff of being less green.
Same goes for oil companies, they are just in the business of extracting oil, they are the ones who take the blame for global warming whereas it's me burning it for quality of life purposes when refilling my Escalade or flying to Cabo for the weekend. I owe them one otherwise the nuts over at Extinction Rebellion or GreenPeace would attack my Escalade and cause trouble to airlines.
Tesla is the opposite of that, it's conspiring against the consumer by making a poorly refined car with a terrible design and lots of problems ranging from faulty Autopilot to sudden braking and unintended acceleration. They want to wash away all such disadvantages with a supposedly green car. But in the end if you understand anything about the industrial economy and power generation you get how Teslas are hardly green cars.
But toxic exhausts within a city can not be tolerated.
I don't want externalties being offloaded on me and the democratic rule of law is there to make sure that we balance it.
Either way though, I expect Musk, the richest man alive, can afford to pay a handful of senior engineers a couple weeks pay to store and run some analysis on the firehose. It's a lot of data, but at "fuck-you" level money it's certainly manageable.
Maybe from now on we should use statistics as the epitome of difficult intellectual activity instead of “rocket science”.
He’ll likely have to sample the data anyway before he can do any meaningful analysis, so the whole exercise is pointless.
The hypothesis is that sampling those buffers at scale should be enough to detect significant bot activity on the platform, without needing any additional metadata.
That may very well be the case, so why the snide?
If the link is bad we’ll fix it with votes, not admin actionz
If we tried to go by upvotes alone, we'd end up with the same small number of hot topics and sensational controversies dominating the front page. This is the weakness of the upvoting system. There wouldn't be any room for the unpredictable sorts of stories that best fulfill the site mandate of intellectual curiosity.
I know it's irritating when moderators do something you don't like, but in case it helps at all, I think the irritation is pretty evenly distributed across the different subgroups who populate this place.
As for the OP, you're not going to get much support from the community here if you think that we should have left a hard-paywalled link on the front page. That's no doubt why users heavily flagged your comment (mods didn't touch it, btw, and I've unkilled it now).
If you have the firehose, couldn't you just only sample every 10th tweet and make a "decahose"[1] of your own to work with?
[1] Shouldn't this be "decihose" since it's 1/10 not 10x?
Tweets come with a lot more data than that.
Tweet object model: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti...
Example payloads: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/data-dicti...
I’m boggled by the extent to which people mind-read Musk through his tweets. To me it’s obvious that his Twitter is an outlet for stress busting and banter, like smoke breaks.
500 million times 1KB is... still one USB stick, not even $50 https://amazon.com/SanDisk-512GB-Ultra-Flash-Drive/dp/B083ZL...
Or going by the retweeted quote tweet that's 40% bigger zipped, it's still well within 1TB which is a normal size for a flash drive.
I'm not very fond of Musk but this is a weak criticism.
That's like saying it's easy to check if a picture shows a bird because it's only 100kB.
What kind of system architecture would be good to load & search through such dataset. We tried to explore Mongo Atlas but it is coming out very expensive. Other alternative is to throw away most metadata & just keep ID & Tweet.
By the way, you have to pay for this access or there are some other options available? It is interesting to ingest all this data by ourselves
Concerning ingestion costs, I think it took me ~10 hours of 4vCPU vm last time, when I loaded 1.5 TB data to ClickHouse from this dataset: http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta... 1.1 billion rides became 3.5 billion already.
So now they just have to play full defense. Musk says he'll walk because they won't provide data? They'll provide data. Musk says the numbers are false? Let him prove it. At the end of the day it's a signed contract.
The question is how quickly does this come down to "Okay let's cut a deal" - and my feeling is that since this entire thing has been an ego trip for Musk there is no deal that's acceptable for him to walk away without some sort of: Musk pays $XB and Twitter admits the bot problem is bigger than stated in some sort of way that doesn't cause legal troubles for Twitter. It has to be a "I didn't want Twitter anyway" narrative, rather than "Musk just stuck his dick into a meat grinder" type narrative.
They will let him walk away, but the starting number is $44B. Now they are just negotiating.
The stuff about bots and whatever else is a distraction.
Or, somehow, becoming the richest person in the world has more to do with other features like luck, than the ability to asses the market?
More to disagree with the argument than to defend Musk. He's certainly been doing a lot of things to really undermine the brilliant-at-all-trades image.
And luck is always underrated.
In the beginning Musk stated in interviews that he wasn't concerned about the monetary amount. I can't pull it up on my VPN, but I recall him taking the stance of it being a social-impact-y investment and not one that is designed to make a profit.
> Musk waived due diligence when he agreed to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share in April.
> We estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the fourth quarter of 2021 continued to represent fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. However, this estimate is based on an internal review of a sample of accounts and we apply significant judgment in making this determination. As such, our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have currently estimated.
Not a native English speaker so maybe I'm just not understanding it correctly. Since mDAU are a subset of DAU, probably a tiny subset of it, wouldn't that statement mean that way way less than 5% of DAU would be bots?
In a situation like this there is a very strong implication that you're talking about the intersection of the sets 'bots' and 'mDAU'. To talk about the raw number of bots vs. the raw number of mDAU would require very explicit wording to override that implication.
> Musk waived due diligence when he moved to buy the company, seemingly to hasten the acceptance of his bid.
> He wrote in a letter to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor on April 24, "As we discussed, $54.20 has been and will remain my best and final offer, period. This is binary – my offer will either be accepted or I will exit my position."
> Twitter announced the company had accepted his offer the next day.
> But in the weeks that followed, Musk vocally criticized Twitter during media interviews and on Twitter, where he has tens of millions of followers.
Then pretty sure advertisers who are savvy about these things would've done something about it.
By waiving due diligence, Musk has put himself into situation where it is entirely his responsibility to establish the existence of material false information, and no one else's opportunity to help, short of required discovery should he file a lawsuit establishing a legally cognizable claim.
It seems like the people who are supporting this move assume Elon has some secret plan we're not privy too, but if so why would his actions be so erratic?
In a corporate acquisition, the contract is law. And if a party, with billions of dollars, chooses to waive a standard provision, then the choice to waive that provision is held against them when interpreting the parties' understandings of the terms and representations that were included in the contract.
In this case, Musk deliberately waived due diligence to get Twitter to accept his offer. This means, that all representations must be interpreted in the light in which they were not material to the contract and thus not grounds for withdrawing from his obligation to proceed with the purchase.
Because clearly everybody is having hard time understanding this ...
When you buy a home, even if you waive all contingencies, including a home inspection, if the seller fails to disclose material problems with the house, the sellers will be liable. This liability extends for years past the close of sale.
So you accidentally gave a perfect counter example as to why you are wrong.
In some places, you can also sell a house as "condemned" and then you have no recourse what-so-ever.
Surprise, the basement isn't leaking. You just claimed it was.
This is the problem, you believe Elon is right without proof.
You have proven your own ignorance with your example!
The sellers are liable for some things, in some states, because there are laws that say they are liable for some things.
No such laws generally apply to corporate acquisition agreements.
And yes, nothing protects a company from not disclosing material information regardless of “due diligence”, including fraud. So give it up.
There are no requirements to disclose anything at all on a hostile take over, that’s why smart people don’t waive due diligence.
I'm not sure you understood my comment. The point of my comment was that with respect to housing sales, sellers have responsibilities with regards to things not covered by the sales contract because the law says they do. It's so not the point as to whether they are state or federal laws (but on that note, the "federal disclosure laws" specifically only apply to the use of lead-based paint in housing built before 1978, or in other words, to less than 25% of the US housing market).
There are no similar laws that govern corporate acquisitions. If an acquisition agreement does not explicitly (or by incorporation) require a disclosure about "X" , then the lack of disclosure about "X" has absolutely no impact on the resolution of the parties' respective contractual obligations.
Musk has zero way of proving Twitter is lying about its bot problems. In fact, their bot case is fairly ironclad because as others have mentioned, they've been reporting on it for years and it's been implicitly assumed to be true, incl. by Musk who mentioned it as part of the reason why he was buying Twitter.
In order to prove Twitter is lying, he would need to prove that the past few years of data is falsified, provide his own data and prove his data is more accurate than Twitter.
He has to prove that they are lying AND the real number is a material change to the contract worthy of dismissing the contract.
By publicly stating that he thinks the bot problem is worse than they are saying AND that he is buying the company in part to fix the bot problem AND by waiving due diligence, Musk will have difficulty establishing that whatever new "bot number" he finds is actually a material change to the situation.
You're moving the goal posts on my analogy which is ironic ...
The weirder part is technically Twitter can sue to force the deal to close anyway.
Remember that he has already secured the funding, he has filed information about that with the SEC, and he has already signed the contract for paying Twitter's shareholders $44B in exchange for sole ownership of the company. Neither of the parties can pull out now: the deal is done. Only extraordinary circumstances can undo it anymore.
Analyzing the raw feed isn't all that hard for someone with Musk's resources. A fat pipe and a ClickHouse cluster could boil this down pretty efficiently. At least the metadata.
Analyzing tweet content would involve more effort, obviously. But bot operators aren't all that bright and much of their activity will be obvious.
The real question is would any conclusions of such analysis be actionable? Could Musk produce an analysis credible enough in the time available to lead to renegotiation? That is highly dubious.
It was just a few months ago that he had to sell stock to pay his taxes and he played it off like he was doing it because of some ridiculous online poll. I think this Twitter play is just more cover to sell more stock.
It will be very easy to see if that's what it was. If they deal won't go thru (I anticipated both parties will be stuck in court to fight over $1B for close to 5 years, then Musk will settle for some $200MM), Musk can simply buy Tesla stock back! Why he needs to all this cash sitting in a bank right???
2. Musk likely cares about all users that keep spamming his feed and others. The platform currently feels like armies of bots from political and ad/marketing agencies and some active users who think someone is reading their content. If one correlates the number of followers they have (especially if you’ve had twitter for a long time) vs number of reads on each of your recent tweets, the % is very low.
3. A firehouse of all tweets coming out may show a lot of bot activity (accounts with more numbers than letters in the username commenting in reply to popular accounts with a lot of followers) but they are not near the number active users who are just reading and that is where Musk’s claim and Twitter’s defensively worded SEC statements pass each-other like ships in the night.
“how do I get out of buying twitter?”
I did go to Quora for my last line ("If you learned something new..."). I was looking for a generic "like and subscribe" kind of response and that was literally on the first answer I saw on the first random question I typed in.
My "I'm an expert on social media, and an expert on social media" joke (they're an expert in the field of social media, and also an expert who's posting on social media) was inspired by https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFhpctuUwb4.
One point of time, it used to be a great discussion platform. But the low quality answers & hi-quality gossip, overtly aggressive "Be nice" policy (to the point every sob story has a happy ending, with cupcakes & unicorns, without taking any names or identifiable information) & login wall to view answers has made the site so so poor.
Pinterest & Quora are piles of flaming junk at present.
Both were really great at some point, Quora was kind of a stack overflow for business and life for a brief moment in time.
You would have to be sure that the sample is statistically representative of the overall population, which would require prior analysis with access to the whole data.
Example of biases that you would need to adjust the sample for:
- Maybe the part of active users receiving ads change shape with time, or is biased toward a certain type of user.
- As more users are active on the site, a random sampling would overrepresent recent messages over previous ones. Or maybe the reverse if Twitter lost users.
- Maybe %users being bots is not that interesting, versus %messages posted by bots. 5% of users being bots can represent 30% of messages being sent by bots.
- If you're willing to train some ML model to detect bots, you're most likely going to need as much out of sample as you could have.
- Etc
Asking for a custom-made sample is really the same as requesting the whole population and sampling yourself.
Musk agreed to pay $54/share. But after the tech selloff, Twitter might be worth $25-30. Maybe less. Musk can, in fact, get out of the deal for $1 billion or so in fees. But that would be awful for Twitter too, it's stock would tank overnight without a bidder (it already dropped from $50+ to under $40 quite rapidly). So perhaps Musk can get the board to agree to a deal at around $32-35/share, it would be a win/win for both parties.
For the first, they all know they’re getting fired the minute Elon can find a way. Maybe they care about money, but I bet they also would prefer to keep their positions. I bet a lot of them believe in and like Twitter, and it’s not about money.
As for the second question… they can’t be seen as the reason it doesn’t close. I firmly believe they’ve been banking on Elon doing exactly what he’s doing. They likely can’t be successfully sued if they say “hey, we accepted the deal and did everything Elon asked…”
Not gonna lie, I'm torn on the whole deal, bit I still think it'll be a good thing as long as there's actual free speech, but with realistic limits and not just one-sided moderation. He better not mess with Twitter design though. It's really good and honestly appears to influence most of the other apps in some way, shape or form, but I'd also be excited to see some design changes that are new in the industry. I also want the app to be faster.
[0] btw I bet Elon and Twitter disagree on the definition of "bot." Is a low paid human worker who tweets spam and scams all day a "bot*?
Not like, 5% fake. Not 15% fake.
No it’s more in the range of “most clicks are fake but we just live with it anyway.”
If you run PPC campaigns you also know how easy it is to spot this crap.
I for one am interested in learning what’s going on there. I don’t buy the “it’s soooo complicated oh it’s just impossible to know for sure!” Narrative that Twitter is peddling.
I'd argue real people rarely click ads
for facebook I read that most of the advertising money is spent on clickfarms, which just click anything to seem real e.g. follow 100 real brands and sell 50 fake follows on that acc.
He's liquidated nearly $10B for this deal already, has a remaining ~125B in Tesla stock and ~55B in SpaceX, plus a long list of billionaire partners for this M&A. I bet he has a few more options than going "bankwupt".
The thought may be titillating some, but it's wishful thinking.
Additionally, as CEO of Tesla there are limitations on his ability to pledge his shares of Tesla stock. It's unlikely that he's anywhere close to that threshold, but that is something he needs to watch for.
Also, Musk cannot pledge or sell his SpaceX shares without prior government approval, as doing so would violate a number of requirements related to SpaceX's government contracts.
1: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/zuckerberg-twitter_n_4256014
$625/share as the margin call level? As I understand it there are some documents saying how many shares he has on margin, but nothing about the triggers.
As CEO of Tesla there are limitations on his ability to pledge his shares of Tesla stock? What limitations? I thought his limit was "number of shares he held"
Musk cannot pledge or sell his SpaceX shares without prior government approval, as doing so would violate a number of requirements related to SpaceX's government contracts? What clauses in what contracts? There may be clauses that prevent him from transacting shares to non-US citizens, but in general?
Yes, as CEO of a publicly traded company there are limitations on his ability to pledge his shares of that company's stock, and that limit is far less than "number of shares held." This is not a legal requirement; it is a de facto requirement relating to eligibility for the S&P 500 and of corporate governance requirements by many public pension funds and other large investors to buy a company's stock.
It's only after the price of both Tesla and Twitter fell significantly that he suddenly became very concerned about the number of bots (a matter which he had been claiming is false in Twitter's filings for years before signing the contract to buy Twitter without further investigations).
Will that help him find the bots though or will he just find a Bacofoil Tent Roasted Turkey masquerading as a Tesla Cyber Truck?
Anyway, anyone know what address we need to use to submit a GDPR request as this is him personally, not Tesla or any other entity, ie personal wealth so does anyone know his home address so I can submit a GDPR request in person?
If you gave me 100, could I spot the 5 that are bots? If you gave a team of paralegals a pile of 10k random accounts that are actively writing content, could they find the 500 that are supposedly bots?
Perhaps I’ve answered my own question: the bot accounts that get people hot under the collar are the ones that simply like and retweet, without ever posting any unique content?
Do we need proof? You can safely assume that nobody who behaves like that is as smart as they advertise. Don't wait for the hard evidence.
If you have > 2,000 followers, you pay $0.01 per 10,000 followers per tweet. At current follower counts, Elon Musk pays $97/tweet. CNN pays $58. McDonalds pays $4.50.
Pay the same amount to reply to a tweet/thread of an account with that many followers.
Bot problem solved. No need for an ad platform, ad targeting, etc. The whole thing is just paid ads.
Don't get me wrong, Twitter is a garbage fire, but this idea is just... bad.
The poster is saying - why keep up this charade of being a social media platform at all, worrying about bots harassing your ad-viewers and so on? Why not embrace how the platform is already going, and get more direct monetization from those looking to broadcast?
If you want to see platforms for voicing opinions of the masses, Facebook and Reddit are doing much better at that, witch much more organic conversation and interaction.
Musk is in this case - not always - a troll (he even said, early on, he was going into 'goblin mode' or something like that). The primary aim of trolls is to disrupt and gain attention as much as possible, not to accomplish anything. Accomplishments undermine trolling; they complete something; they are constructive or anti-disruptive; they end the trolling. From that perspective, if the deal went smoothly and quickly, it would be a failure; if it concludes, its value is lost. The troll would want to drag this out as long as possible, with as many disruptive and attention-getting events as possible. The deal is a vehicle for trolling.
Would Musk risk $40 billion on it? Would you be surprised if he thought he was smart enough to play this highest-stakes poker game and get away with it? If he relished it?
Maybe this whole thing was a way to show everyone it was worthless and now he's going to spend $1B on getting out of the deal and another $1B in starting a Twitter clone.
Musk cannot just wake up one morning, decide to not buy Twitter, and pay the breakup fee. He has already agreed to buy Twitter and cannot back out.
That is why the bot issue is so important. If Musk can prove that Twitter made false claims to the SEC, he is allowed to get out of the deal. But if not, he must buy Twitter
Do a search for "Parent Termination Fee".
TL;DR: There is indeed a $1B termination fee.
For example, in the case of this acquisition, it seems almost impossible for the government to step in - so, the expected value (in the probability theory sense) of the downside is close to 0.
> The Merger Agreement also provides that Twitter, on one hand, or Parent and Acquisition Sub, on the other hand, may specifically enforce the obligations under the Merger Agreement, except that Twitter may only cause Mr. Musk’s equity financing commitment to be funded in circumstances where the conditions to Parent’s and Acquisition Sub’s obligations to consummate the Merger are satisfied and the debt and margin loan financing is funded or available. As described above, if the conditions to Parent’s and Acquisition Sub’s obligations to complete the Merger are satisfied and Parent fails to consummate the Merger as required pursuant to the Merger Agreement, including because the equity, debt and/or margin loan financing is not funded, Parent will be required to pay Twitter a termination fee of $1.0 billion.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
I am not a lawyer so I am quite curious as to how that plays out.
Assuming he has it, could the courts force him to sell $40B in assets?
In principal, courts could either order him to complete the buyout (specific performance) or make those injured by his failure to do so whole (money damages). If they chose the former and he continued to fail to do so, he could be punished for contempt of court, either civil contempt (including, e.g., progressive fines and/or imprisonment until and unless he complied) or criminal contempt (fines or imprisonment of a set amount of period.)
IIRC, previous acquisitions that were attempted to be weaseled out of were forced to go through by the courts, when the acquisitor's finances weren't the issue.
EDIT: Ooh, the contract is public. Guess that makes sense, as it's a public company. Relevant to this, but section 8.1.d is the stanza relevant to this discussion. And the Act I definitions does define the "parent termination fee" at $1B.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000119312...
Found via:
Saying something confidently does not make it so.
Several of these contracts have even gone to court, so their typical clauses are public knowledge (including the verdicts), even if the specifics are not.
EDIT: The actual contract is public (which makes sense, Twitter is public; a deal to buy would also be public). I have posted it in a sibling contract.
Then why does (or did) everyone believe Musk? Why do they believe everything else said confidently on the Internet?
It is also Musk. People know he's insane so that is an additional hit to the price. They know he'll do anything to get out of the deal. Doesn't mean he will.
And indeed, Musk's own letter to the SEC confirms that his sole reason for seeking the data is that it relates to his ability to acquire financing for the deal.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000110465922...
They are billionaires. They will come out on top because at the end of it they will still be a billionaire.
Name one billionaire that isn't on top.
Donald Trump.
If you want to pretend the end of his term and everything afterwards never happened, sure. But as of now, he's the ultimate example of spectacular failure despite his resources. He is still a billionaire, though. I suppose it depends on where you decide the top is.
That's exactly the "coming out on top" the original comment was referring to.
Are you referring to the fact he lost the most recent election? He did pretty good in my opinion, especially considering now notably unpopular he was in his first term. And his opponent got the most votes ever in history (and he was number 2!)
That's not really ending on a good note.
They made sure that they covered and did anything they could to stop him getting re-elected in 2020 which after losing lead to Jan 6th. Even after the acquittal, he is yet again still talked about running once again and did not run into another war.
I would have expected the media, and editors to have ignored him by now, but the fact they are finding it difficult to do so tells us that they are taking his possiblity of re-election seriously such that they know he could do it again.
Indeed, its not failure at all.
That's because the population is larger than ever in history.
2. It seems entirely unreasonable to assume that Elon doesn't want to own Twitter, or that he tried to buy it on a lark and changed his mind. If your premise is that Elon did want to own Twitter a few weeks ago and doesn't want to own Twitter now you should rethink your opinion.
500e6/(24 * 60 * 60)~= 6k tweets per seconds. It's not nothing, but not that hard to handle either.
> it will take Musk considerable time to do an analysis of bots on Twitter, a task requiring a team of researchers who will need to laboriously construct software to review the tweets.
...is just not true. A few engineers can bring up infra to first filter & sample the firehose, and then store only what they need.
EDIT: I'd candidly love to know how what I'm saying is completely off base, if downvoters wouldn't mind educating me.
It's not something Musk can do algorithmically or through brute force data analysis, because that sort of superficial analysis would be very inferior to Twitter's very involved process, and Musk would have to demonstrate that the algorithm that he or his team came up with on short notice is more accurate than the process Twitter has been using for several years. Which isn't going to happen. See: pretty much every Musk "first principles" claim ever.
Musk will need to hire a lot of people to do this job, but he can't just drag in SpaceX and Tesla employees to do this for him, since he would be (rightfully) sued by the other shareholders of these companies for abusing/misuing company resources. Also, Musk is pretty well known as a horrible boss that likes to badmouth his employees. It's going to be very difficult for him to assemble a team of qualified people to handle this task for him, especially in the time frame he has.
You got downvoted for doing the programmer thing of thinking that a very difficult problem can be trivially solved with some light programming, and completely ignoring that people who actually deal with this sort of thing for a living think that this is a very large and difficult task that will take a great deal of effort by a great many people.
Now I think Elon has been acting in extremely bad faith throughout this process and I hope Twitter sticks to their guns, but I don't have a lot of faith.
unless I'm missing something it seems pretty cut and dry.
If Musk can demonstrate that this is grotesquely false (which he probably can do, since it is obvious that at least 20% of tweets are fake), then he has a case against Twitter.
We know that. Twitter makes it clear publicly in their annual reports.
It's to prove that there is a material fraction of fake tweets significantly above their number.
Even if 100% of all tweets were generated by bots, as long as real people come to Twitter to read them and occasionally click on ads that Twitter shows them, Twitter's revenue is secured.
I suspect that Musk was willing to purchase Twitter if legitimate, and knew if Twitter was fraudulent, this process would shed light on it. If the deal is void due to Twitter misrepresenting itself, Musk can invest in a legitimate venture instead.
I don't see a whole lot of reason for speculation. The deal will close, or it will not. Chances are, Musk wasn't kidding when he made the offer, which means if it doesn't close, Twitter misrepresented itself.
Their filing on active users are extremely narrow in their claims - the only way they could realistically be shown to be fraudulent is by discovering in internal emails that they were crafted to deceive; otherwise, they are very specifically saying that the 5% number they give is only an estimate and that it involves a judgment call in how it was decided. So if you find some way of calculating bots and come up with 20%, that still doesn't mean they misrepresented the numbers: they never claimed 5% is a precise number, just their judgment based on some sampling they did.
Futhermore, even if the number is found to be a lie, that still wouldn't mean they materially lied to the SEC - you still have to then prove that this impacted their revenue projections significantly (apparently the standard is "at least by 40%"), which comes with even bigger burdens of proof. You would have to show that Twitter's clients (advertisers, mostly) were relying on the reported numbers to decide if they were getting a good deal, and that they would significantly change the price/number of ads on Twitter based on this difference. This in itself is unlikely, as these companies have their own metrics for judging whether an ad was effective, and in the many years Twitter's official bot estimates have stayed the same, they would have had time to notice if their revenue from advertising on Twitter was worth it.
Even worse, Musk has been claiming that Twitter's reported bot numbers are much lower than reality for many years before he made the offer to buy Twitter, so his belief can't have materially impacted his willingness to buy. He even publically talked about cleaning up Twitter of it's bot problems as a specific target after the acquisition. These public statements will again significantly affect any claim that Musk makes that any new information he finds on the number of Twitter bots would have impacted his decision to sign the contract if it had been disclosed before hand.
Finally, note that the information he asked Twitter to provide (access to tweets) has almost nothing to do with the discussion about revenue, as Twitter's revenue comes from users reading tweets, not writing them. The 5% number is about users who request the Twitter feed and receive ads, but are in fact bots and thus can't buy products. This is completely uncorrelated to the number of bots and other fake accounts who might be posting tweets, as there are no ads in the tweet posting pages.
In short, if Musk analyzes the data he received now from Twitter and discovers that 100% of all tweets are actually made by bots, it will not make one iota of a difference to his obligation of paying the $44B he singed on. Twitter makes no claims to the SEC about the number of real VS fake users posting tweets, and this number has no direct impact on revenue. The only claims by Twitter are that by their own internal process and judgment, up to 5% of monetizable daily users are bots, and this can only refer to users reading tweets, not posting them, based on how Twitter works.