Comment by henry_bone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henry_bone | Hacker News Reader

I see the author's scepticism of the bots argument, but I don't think it's one that should be dismissed so easily. I don't know anything, but isn't the value of these big tech properties largely in the number of actual human daily active users?

When Facebook acquired whatsapp, I remember reading that it wasn't the tech per se that facebook really wanted. It was the daily active users. Whatsapp had (still has? dunno) a pretty big userbase. That was the where a lot of the value lay for facebook, or so I understand.

So, if daily active users are important to the value of the property, do we believe twitter's SEC filing estimates of <5% bots? Musk doesn't, or hasn't been convinced by what he has seen.

That really does seem like a legit reason to abort the deal. Twitter is representing <5% bots. Musk thinks that's a wildly optimistic estimate & is prepared to call bullshit. Seems fair to me.

A more cynical view might be that Musk is simply looking to lower the price. Exposure of Twitter's bot problems in a court might not be very good for the share price. Just having Musk pull out (9 kids, he never pulls out) probably dips the share price. So, isn't it all good leverage to bring the price down?

We’re to believe that before buying 11% of the company, before making a bid to buy all of it, Elon or his advisers never considered the possibility of bots but all of a sudden in the due diligence it occurred to them?

The timing makes no sense for bots to be a legit explanation. Elon is just a troll.

That’s not how any of this works. E.g. the contract he signed already has the price he agreed to buy Twitter for.

Could it be (& I am asking) that he can invalidate the current contract on the grounds that daily active users aren't what twitter said.

Then could they draft a new contract, complete with a new price and daily active users estimates?

I don't know anything, so I'm asking. If someone out there is a M&A lawyer and can shed light, that would be great.

The first line is what he is trying to do right now. The answer seems to be "maybe", it's going to court because there's a chance that he can but Twitter also thinks there's a chance he cannot.

The second, maybe. I doubt that Twitter would be interested.

-- not an M&A lawyer

He could but

1.) Twitter would need to be egregiously wrong. If Musk found that 7% of mDAU were bots, he would likely still be forced to purchase

2.) I feel like the inverse; that Twitter, it’s board, manager and employees were all in on a massive conspiracy to understate the bot problem for almost a decade. The number they presented wasn’t something they just gave musk, it was a number that they have been reporting to the SEC and investors for several years. It would be a massive fraud for Twitter to have committed.

In my opinion the whole thing is a massive distraction so Elon could pull out. The amount of people who only read (but never post) likely dwarfs the number of bots elon suspects there is (if the 90-9-1 rule is anything to go by). The mDAU number is a different, much larger, number than actual tweeters

You can find the thoughts of an M&A Lawyer here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-09/elon-s...

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