And thirdly, his boast was that he would solve the bot problem and that would make twitter better. More bots means there's more room for him to improve the company - should be a good thing.
Twitter revenue for 2021 was $5b, for, say, 200m mDAU (actual number is a little over that); each mDAU is therefore worth $20. But if half of these are bots, then each non-bot is worth twice more!
If all mDAU are actually bots save one, that one user is worth five billion dollars per year.
Musk should be very happy that there are bots. Not only is his defense irrelevant, for the reasons listed above, but it's also incoherent.
Fair point. Though i would think bots still affect price, right? Ie lets say it's 100% fake right now, what would the value be? Lets say $0 for easy math. Buying it at $54.20 means he has to at least clean up the bots enough to make it worth, at least, $54 to regain his investment.
So while i think your point is interesting, if bot count affects price then i feel one could argue there's a bot threshold whereby he would be over valuing it.
In your scenario the sweet spot would be if it was just enough bots to make $54 a fair price, but also lots of bots in total so that he could "fix the problem" and increase value.