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Comment by notadev | Hacker News Reader

Please stop spreading the falsehood that Eli Lilly lost billions because of a fake verified tweet. https://medium.com/@westwise/did-twitter-just-take-8-billion...

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Is it false? At most I think we can say it's unclear, but Eli Lilly seem to take it seriously since they pulled all their ad spend from twitter in response.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3907399-fake-free-insulin-twee...

You are correct, I should have said it was unclear. I am aware of their pause in ad spend but I assumed it was to cover up for their judgement.

A discussion about viral tweets and stock price collapse that doesn't address the topic of high frequency trading bots? And written by a PhD in bioinformatics, who gives zero evidence of his claims. Why should we pay attention to his argument?

is that all your evidence?

Even if it is, he's right. Although this is anecdotal, I have a friend who works in finance that said the drop in stock was coincidental to the stock price dropping. Apparently pharmaceuticals are a defensive sector in a bear market, and the market popping up last week meant the price of Eli Lilly dropped, as I understand it. In his words that tweet causing the stock to drop was "fake news"

There is never going to be a way to conclusively ascribe the drop in stock price to any one event. However, the act of pointing out the high cost of insulin to a large audience not causing a drop in stock price would be highly suspect. I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

But in a bear market, this bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

Or it could have also been a coincidence... there's no way to know.

> bad publicity about the high price of a mandatory medication for a large population is likely going to have an effect.

I know this is orthogonal to the stock price drop, but this kind of bad publicity (gouging sick people in need of your product) actually turned out to be a good thing for the public and for overall justice.

> I personally doubt it was the Tweet itself that caused the drop. No one should/would have believed it was an actual statement by Eli Lilly.

Your second sentence is probably true, but the first one is questionable.

It's well-known that there are high-frequency stock trading bots which watch Twitter, news headlines, etc.

High frequency trader bots watch random accounts? That seems like a bad strategy. Maybe they're watching news headlines - but that seems like a media problem where a storm of articles about nothing drive the very story they are talking about.

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