Did any of this happen as a matter of policy? Or are you getting upset about rumors and hearsay?
> Grace - courteous goodwill.
I think we are saying the same thing. Goodwill can only be built with actions and that would be similar to what Stripe did in their layoffs. The lack of goodwill would result in what you are saying.
The game dev work environmental is notoriously shitty, that doesn't make it okay to make it shitty elsewhere.
You say that as if the working conditions in the AAA game industry _aren't_ widely regarded as horrible...
Crunch happening in the games industry isn't a defense of it happening elsewhere. It shouldn't be happening in the games industry either.
The real measure of Musk will be seeing how well this all goes. If he's really is smart, this may work. But by all accounts we're seeing what taking 44 billion dollars and setting it on fire looks like.
I'm not saying he's a genius, either, but first mover and disruption aren't exactly without foresight.
Is that your honest opinion?
We'll all wait and see how it shakes out.
The skills to run SpaceX and Tesla transfer to running Twitter a lot more than basketball to cooking. For one thing, they all (leading SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter) have running a large business in common.
Jesus christ the dick riding on HN is insane.
I view the whole thing as Elon getting bored and wanting a new toy to play with. When you have as much wealth as he does, a loss hardly really matters. If he can make it profitable somehow, that's just a bonus.
The mental gymnastics people on HN perform to diminish Musk's real achievements deserves 10s across the board.
I mean if you hate the guy just say so (for extra credit, explain why). Don't lie about his achievements and intelligence. They are so obviously real. Yes, luck is involved too, but it's not the only thing by far. He fucken self-learned rocket science in 6 years.
> When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Robert Zubrin - aerospace engineer
> Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years.
Kevin Watson - Head of Avionics, Launcher
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
That's being generous. He's not a paypal founder. He started a different company, which merged a couple times into becoming part of paypal.
Elon is brash, tough to work with and doesn't behave in upstanding ways, and I don't think I'd want to work for him; he's a jerk. But all this doesn't make wishful denial become true.
Where is the Hyperloop? Since he announced it China has build 3 thousand miles of high speed rail.
How many cars travelled through boring company tonnels?
How many years ago was Full Self Driving meant to be released?
> doesn't behave in upstanding ways
He was sued for sexual harrasment, unfair dismissal, dangerous working conditions, defamation, reneging on signed contract, by SEC for lying to investors, and countless others.
If an average person broke this many laws, their life would be ruined.
We can dislike him all we want for all his flaws, he's going to be in history books. If he wasn't so ruthless about achieving his goals, the moonshots he did achieve would have been failures as well.
We can dislike someone and still recognize their impact, people aren't black or white. Nuanced opinions are possible.
No one is questioning his impact, but the people do question and have the right to question the methods. But we live in a corrupt system, we can point fingers in many directions, and rightly so. He is just one of a breed.
I'm not sure anyone ever considered him the average joe. He was born into privilege for a start.
You are right that he is not an average person.
Incredible. The man isn’t smart. Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink were just luck. And he was lucky with PayPal.
No, Musk is only a genius if he does it with a fourth, fifth, or sixth business. Perhaps then he’ll graduate from lucky to fortunate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33462201
It's just mind boggling to me that otherwise rational and intelligent people can discount reality in this way.
Musk more or less got trapped into a deal with Twitter that was largely based upon numbers that were fabricated by executives.
From his perspective, the way to salvage this mess is layoffs. Some of the previous executives (Parag) have committed fraud imo, and should face consequences. They won't though.
Lot's of twitter employees will suffer. To varying degrees, many of them played a role in the house of cards that is twitter.
This is the only part of this I am speaking to because the rest is exactly what is happening. Musk messed up and now a whole lot of people are put in a terrible situation going right into the holiday season. It's unconscionable for one of the richest people in the world to behave this way.
The Twitter executives have been up to shenanigans for quite some time it seems. That is imo, the actual main reason this deal has been so messy.
Also, it was Musk who waive due diligence. This is ENTIRELY all on him.
EDIT: Since max depth was reach, there are _multiple_ comments about how he waived due diligence.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/in-letter-to-twi...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/musk-did-not-seek-due-diligenc...
The bot thing was an entire hail mary to stop the purchase. It doesn't matter if Twitter lied about the bots.
Regardless, I was referring to twitter whistle blower that confirmed the number of spam accounts is fabricated: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
There is a LOT of fishy stuff in these documents. The twitter executives have committed fraud but it seems like they'll be getting away with it.
In addition, the number of spam bots is more or less a red herring - the only representation regarding bots that Twitter made during the acquisition was the false/spam/etc. rate among its mDAU. There was no representation made as to the total number of bots on Twitter, nor the percentage of all Twitter accounts which are bots.
That Musk focused on a different number is more or less entirely on him, and is a significant reason his lawsuit never really went anywhere.
It's also important to note that data scientists Musk hired failed to find evidence that supported his "wildly higher" claim - one firm found an 11% "fake user number" at an 80% confidence interval, while the other found a 5.3% spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU at a 90% confidence interval. Hardly the kind of evidence one would want to have when accusing Twitter of lying, let alone fraud.
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
The first and biggest problem is that the paragraph is talking about the total number of spam bots on Twitter, while the number that Twitter represented to Musk was the percentage of false/spam accounts as a percentage of mDAU. These are two different metrics and cannot be directly compared. Even if the paragraph directly accused Twitter of falsifying and/or fabricating the total number of spam bots on Twitter, it would have no relevance towards the merger since Twitter made no representations of the total number of spam bots on Twitter to Musk.
The second problem is that nothing in that paragraph implies fabrication - it's basically complaining that Twitter isn't paying attention to a metric Mudge thinks should be measured. "We don't know the answer and aren't interested in finding out" is not the same thing as "We don't know the answer and made something up instead".
The third problem is that Musk's own analysis failed to hint at fabrication as well - even if Mudge directly accused Twitter of fabrication, his claim was contradicted by other evidence.
'In fact, Mudge learned deliberate ignorance was the norm amongst the executive leadership team. In early 2021, as a new executive, Mudge asked the Head of Site Integrity (responsible for addressing platform manipulation including spam and botnets), what the underlying spam bot numbers were. Their response was “we don't really know."'
If they don't know what the spam numbers are, then where is the 5% figure coming from?
I already quoted this part but this is also relevant: "The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform."
They aren't able to provide an upper bound on the total number of spam accounts.
None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
It's 5% of mDAU.
Again, that is 5% of mDAU, not 5% of accounts. Mudge is complaining about the latter, Twitter only represented the former.
In any case, Twitter's methodology to get the 5% figure, based on what was stated in court, appears to be:
1. Every day, have someone(s) randomly sample 100 users from the mDAU pool and use various pieces of data to try to determine which of those sampled accounts are spam/false accounts
2. At the end of the quarter, use the 90 samples to estimate the proportion of spam/false accounts among all mDAU users
This allows one to get a relatively tight estimate of the proportion of spam/false accounts among mDAU users without knowing the precise number of spam accounts among mDAU or the upper bound on the total number of spam accounts among all users on the platform. The former isn't known because of the statistical nature of the method, and the latter isn't known because the pool the samples are drawn from isn't the one needed to determine the total number of bots.
> None of this is to due with the spam accounts that are known, and not counted as part of mDau. Those spam accounts are KNOWN, and not included in counts.
Non-mDAU users consist of more than just spam accounts, though - for example, inactive users and users using non-monetizable clients are excluded. If the precise makeup of the pool of non-mDAU users is not known, then that would easily explain not knowing the upper bound on spam accounts.
Strictly speaking, one can trivially provide an upper bound on the number of spam accounts - just give the total number of accounts - but that's hardly a useful answer. Presumably Mudge wanted something with more precision, and if that information is not tracked than Twitter obviously wouldn't be able to give a useful answer, no deception needed.
> These documents are stating that twitter has no information on the actual total number of spam accounts.
But it doesn't state that Twitter fabricated the total number of spam accounts, does it?
And once again, the total number of spam bots is irrelevant to Musk's purchase. Twitter made no representations regarding such a statistic in its SEC filings or in the merger agreement, so there can be no fraud or falsification regarding that statistic. The only statistic Twitter provided regarding bots was the 5% number, and that was bots as a percentage of mDAU, which is different from the statistic Mudge was complaining about.
The very next paragraphs state that they have no idea just how many total fake accounts there are. That is, there is a number of fake accounts that they don't know about (and don't make any effort to count), and they are concerned that counting them will affect stock price.
Said another way, they are admitting they aren't counting all the fake accounts. That's in paragraphs 17 & 18
Mudge isn't saying that Twitter's statements about mDAU are wrong; he's saying that he thinks it's a bad metric, because mDAU ignores the effect of fake accounts. Even if Mudge is correct in his assessment that mDAU is a bad metric, it does not sustain any allegations of fraud.
He literally did say that. I get the sense you're not reading the whistleblower docs... Or just arguing for the sake of arguing. I've quoted Mudge. Whereas you are inferring things based on what Musk said.
I've already linked the docs so I won't again. I've pointed out where this information can be found. Those documents are in no uncertain terms stating that Twitter does not have a grasp of how many fake accounts there are. Therefore, any number they give is wrong.
P11:
> On May 13, Mr. Musk expressed doubts about the accuracy of Twitter's claim in legal filings that <5% of accounts are “bots,” or automated spam accounts that spread propaganda and hurt the experience of real users:'
He's repeating Musk's claim here. Recall that Twitter says that 5% of mDAU are potentially spam. That's not the same as accounts.
P16:
> However there are many millions of active accounts that are not considered “mDAU,” either because they are spam bots, or because Twitter does not believe it «can monetize them.
So when Twitter is saying "mDAU generally excludes spam bots", he's indirectly saying that it's correct.
P26:
> A more meaningful and honest answer to Mr. Musk’s question would be trivial for Twitter to calculate, given that Twitter is already doing a decent job excluding spam bots and other worthless accounts from its calculation of mDAU. But this number is likely to be meaningfully higher than 5%:
Quite literally saying here that "<5% of mDAU is spam" is correct!
So, yes I have read the whistleblower docs. The disconnect here is that I believe you have not read Twitter's filings, which do not in fact claim that "<5% of accounts are spam" but "<5% of mDAU are spam" (see, e.g., https://sec.report/Document/0001418091-22-000075/).
This is an incorrect conclusion to draw. Twitter states that they estimate that a certain percentage of a subset of users is spam/false accounts. That they don't know the percentage of spam/false accounts outside of that subset of users has no bearing on the accuracy of their statement regarding their chosen subset.
As a greatly reduced example, I can say that neither the @elonmusk nor the @chancery_daily accounts are spam accounts. I have no idea how many accounts Twitter has, let alone how many of those are spam accounts, but that lack of knowledge does not affect the accuracy of my first statement.
He should have just left them alone. If the executives were so incompetent, he’d have gotten a better deal by waiting for them to fail. Or shorting the stock like a normal investor.
The deal was always contingent on the confirmation that bot accounts were accurate. This was a precondition from the beginning.
Twitter did in fact lie about the bot numbers and Musk somehow caught wind of it and tried to back out.
I know it’s popular to hate the guy but facts matter more than your disdain.
Did it? At least based on what was shown in court, that seems hard to believe, especially given data scientists he hired failed to produce mDAU spam numbers significantly off from what Twitter had, let alone off to the point where fabrication becomes a likely explanation.
Yes.
Whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
This is entirely false. Read the whistleblower report:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
“The company could not even provide an accurate upper bound on the total number of spam bots on the platform. The site integrity team gave three reasons for this failure: (1) they did not know how to measure; (2) they were buried under constant firefighting and could not keep up with reacting to bots and other platform abuse; and, most troubling, (3) senior management had no appetite to properly measure the prevalence of bot accounts—because as Mudge later learned from a different sensitive source, they were concerned that if accurate measurements ever became public, it would harm the image and valuation of the company.”
Any citation for that? I thought Elon waived most of the contingencies.
> but facts matter
true, they do. And the fact here is that Elon backed out of the legal fight and purchased the company. Why do you think that happened?
IIRC it's kind of true. Section 7(b)(i) of the merger agreement [0], which is part of the section describing the conditions under which the merger will take place, states:
> each of the representations and warranties of the Company contained in this Agreement (except for the representations and warranties contained in Section 4.2(a) and Section 4.2(b)), without giving effect to any materiality or “Company Material Adverse Effect” qualifications therein, shall be true and correct as of the Closing Date..., except for such failures to be true and correct as would not have a Company Material Adverse Effect
And Section 4.6 of the agreement describes Twitter's representations regarding its SEC documents and financial statements. Among other things, it states:
> As of their respective dates... none of the Company SEC Documents at the time it was filed... contained any untrue statement of a material fact or omitted to state any material fact required to be stated therein or necessary to make the statements therein, in light of the circumstances under which they were made, or are to be made, not misleading.
At least by my reading (and the general sense I got from more knowledgeable commentators), this basically means that Twitter represents that its SEC filings contain no material inaccuracies, and that the merger shall take place unless those filings contain inaccuracies significant enough to cause a Company Material Adverse Effect.
So in one sense, the deal depends on Twitter's numbers being not too inaccurate - if Musk could prove that Twitter's numbers were wrong and that that inaccuracy was enough to cause a MAE, then he would be able to back out of the deal.
What is incorrect, though, is the implication that the deal could not go forward until Musk checked Twitter's numbers. The deal basically assumes Twitter's numbers are correct, with the default action being that the merger will happen. The onus was on Musk to prove Twitter's numbers incorrect to the point that it will cause a MAE; otherwise, he must go through with the deal. Proving a MAE is an incredibly high bar - from what I've seen from other commentators, a MAE has been found once in the entirety of Delaware's corporate legal history, and given how Musk's evidence was turning out during trial it seemed extremely unlikely he would have been able to successfully argue that claim.
[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
Factor in that Twitter did not have processes in place to accurately count the spam accounts themselves. The truth is that there is not currently an accurate count of Twitter’s fake users.
Page 8 of this whistleblower report goes into details: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
Which is why the court ordered discovery that forced Twitter to give him that data.
First he was on the board, then he wasn't. Then he thought it would be funny to agree to buy Twitter for a price that had "420" in it, then the markets declined and he sued to get out of a contract nobody forced him to sign.
Either something changed recently in Musk, he has been hiding the fact that he has had a few screws loose for years, or both.
I guess most people just get depressed when they hit middle age. When you are wealthy, you can knock up one of your employees and buy a company on a whim.
Small correction: he wrote an open "I declare" letter to Twitter 'canceling' the deal: Twitter got to Delaware court first (within days of his letter), and it took Musk's lawyers 2 weeks to file.
In what way?
What numbers were fabricated?
Page 8 of whistleblower report: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22186683-twitter-whi...
Mudge says Parag is lying about not being incentivized to remove spam, and then tries to do a sleight of hand thing by saying Musk is right because Musk is confused by what he sees in his own replies on the site vs what Twitter is actually reporting in their SEC filings. Those are two separate numbers, and Twitter only reported one.