[HN Gopher] Twitter says Musk's spam analysis used tool that cal...
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter says Musk's spam analysis used tool that called his own
account a bot
Author : hassanahmad
Score : 329 points
Date : 2022-08-05 17:13 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| jjeaff wrote:
| I find it rather ridiculous and in bad faith that Musk is harping
| on the bot issue for 2 reasons.
|
| First, it wouldn't matter anyway. He signed away any and all
| rights to due diligence in the agreement.
|
| And secondly, it's completely impossible for any outside analysis
| to determine the number of active users on Twitter because most
| active Twitter users don't tweet or interact in anyway. They just
| read tweets and those users see ads, which makes them monetizable
| users.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > First, it wouldn't matter anyway. He signed away any and all
| rights to due diligence in the agreement.
|
| He waived DD but the claim is that Twitter specifically
| inflated numbers to make itself appealing for an
| acquisition/merger, which would still be grounds for breaking
| the contract without Musk needing to give any money to Twitter
| or complete the purchase.
| pwinnski wrote:
| IANAL, but I've read Twitter's SEC filings, and I don't see
| any potential inflation. The section on bots is extremely
| clear and specifically states that reality may be higher or
| lower than their rough estimate, after explaining exactly how
| they make the rough estimate.
|
| So... "We think it's 5% using these methods, but if those
| methods are wrong, then the actual number could be higher or
| lower." How does that lead to grounds for breaking the
| contract?
| judge2020 wrote:
| The claim is that it's actually much higher, say 25%, but
| they're intentionally misrepresenting it as 5%; Elon only
| purchased it at the $54.20 share price because of the
| market valuing Twitter at a certain price ($45) based on
| those bot numbers. Musk is claiming that, if the bot
| numbers were correctly reported at the higher percentage,
| then the market would've valued twitter at a lower price
| and he would've offered to purchase it for less money.
|
| But yes, this is very unlikely to be proven since it'd also
| be fraud against every investor that has put money into
| TWTR within the past few years, opening the company up to a
| shareholder lawsuit even after it goes private.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I suppose the next time Musk tries to buy something that
| costs $44 billion dollars he should do a little more
| homework. Waiving due diligence, though perfectly in line
| with his trollish vibe, is something he's going to regret
| for years.
|
| The bottom line is the guy gets off on being an
| irreverent, flamboyant dipshit and this time it's biting
| him in the ass. And I for one am here for it. After the
| last few years I have run out of patience with assholes
| with money/power thinking they can do whatever they want
| in broad daylight. Christ, at least have the decency to
| be surreptitious about it.
| preommr wrote:
| > The claim is that it's actually much higher, say 25%
|
| Like the parent comment said, bot count was tied with
| methodology.
|
| So Musk can argue:
|
| 1) twitter is lying about the results of their
| methodology - highly unlikely
|
| 2) their methodlogy is flawed - which he should've
| brought up during discovery and asked to revaluate
| according to his requirements.
|
| Either way, seems like he's screwed.
| pauldenton wrote:
| "He signed away any and all rights to due diligence in the
| agreement." Why do more fraudsters not use contracts If people
| can sign away due diligence, sign up for a Diamond, get a
| Lemon, and have no recourse, surely scammers would be doing
| this instead of structuring their scam in a way that has the
| potential of sending them to jail
| jacquesm wrote:
| The default is that you have the right to perform due
| diligence prior to making a binding offer. If you make a
| binding offer and waive the right to due diligence doing it
| later and using whatever you find to back out of the deal or
| change the price likely will not work. Musk can't claim he's
| a business newbie and besides that was spelled out black-on-
| white.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Scammers _are_ doing this. It 's called cryptocurrency.
| ncallaway wrote:
| I mean, that's how a lot of immature markets without
| regulations work, until laws are added to say "you can't do
| that for this kind of transaction".
|
| That's why many states have lemon laws for used car sales, to
| prevent exactly that kind of behavior in that market.
|
| Sales of corporations often don't have consumer protection
| style regulations, because consumers don't often buy
| corporations.
|
| The assumption is if you're spending enough money to buy a
| corporation, you're a big boy and can pay a lawyer to review
| your contracts.
|
| So, if you're spending $54B to buy a company, you should have
| your lawyers closely review the terms of the contract. Every
| lawyer I've heard that reviewed the contract Musk signed is
| gobsmacked by its terms and would have strongly discouraged
| Musk from signing the contract as written, because it's so
| one sided in Twitter's favor.
| jjeaff wrote:
| We also can't forget that there was time for due diligence
| before the contract was signed.
| Spivak wrote:
| You don't deserve the downvotes here. Agreeing to buy Twitter
| as-is does not absolve them if they're found to have
| misrepresented what they're selling which is what the legal
| angle they're gunning for is. I don't buy it but it at least
| logically follows.
| megablast wrote:
| He was allowed to do due diligence, he chose not too. People
| said it was dumb at the time.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Sure, indemnity doesn't always work, especially in the case
| of scammers going after your average consumer.
|
| But clauses like this are highly binding when dealing with
| high stakes deals between sophisticated parties with highly
| sophisticated teams of attorneys on both sides of the deal.
|
| And you certainly couldn't break a deal like this on a hunch
| that the number of daily active users might be wrong. That
| would be like holding up a national presidential election
| because the losing team believes there was fraud but has no
| evidence yet.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes! And in addition to that, some people have argued that
| _the more bots the better_ , because, since Twitter's
| financials are not in dispute, the value of each actual mDAU
| is proportional to number of bots.
|
| 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.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Disclaimer: Just speculating with your scenario. I know
| nothing on this subject and my understanding of this deal is
| that of mild curiosity at best.
|
| 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.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Actual bot count is irrelevant. The only thing that matters
| for revenue purposes would be the results that advertisers
| are getting by advertising on the platform and what
| advertisers think of the bot count.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| No, it is relevant. When the curtain is pulled back and
| it is revealed that all of the accounts are bots,
| advertisers will stop spending money with Twitter.
| rchaud wrote:
| Few accounts post as much vapid engagement-bait and as frequently
| as @elonmusk does, so I have sympathy for the bot analysis tool.
| onelovetwo wrote:
| Thats not what bot means...
| bhouston wrote:
| I couldn't take it and had to block elonmusk on Twitter. It was
| just dumb bait tweets but everyone was constantly reacting to
| them. Horrid and I have better things to do with me time.
| bell-cot wrote:
| "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one
| of its members." - Groucho Marx
|
| "I don't want to buy any..." - Elan Musk
| hk1337 wrote:
| So, it worked?
| smiddereens wrote:
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| If it turns out that it is a bot though, it'd support Elon Musk's
| argument that we need to be afraid of AI.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Already preparing some popcorn. This will be fun to watch.
| [deleted]
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Musk has a chance if he can show that Twitter knowingly mislead
| the public about the bot %. It sounds like their methodology was
| indeed pretty weak, arguably deliberately so, and they had people
| on staff that should've known this would produce poor estimates
| with a large margin on error.
| kentm wrote:
| Their stated methodology isn't weak though. It's pretty good
| actually,
| siliconc0w wrote:
| Was it? TBH I'm a little confused by the downvotes - going by
| the 100 sample size number @ a 95% confidence level this is a
| 10 point margin of error. This seems like basic statistics
| but maybe I'm missing something. I think it's fair to assume
| that they had people who were taught basic statistics doing
| these calculations. If these people then say they think the
| number of bots is 5% without mentioning the margin of error
| due to their methodology that seems deceptive. I'm not a
| lawyer but if I was on a jury I could see being persuaded by
| that.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Urgh, Botometer. I guessed it would be that as soon as I saw the
| headline.
|
| I used to work on fighting bots. Botometer has a long and storied
| history of making totally false claims about Twitter accounts. In
| the past it identified something like 50% of US Congress as bots.
| It has unfortunate credibility because it's a machine learning
| model produced by academic "research", but no credibility is
| deserved. The academics who created it are, in my view, guilty of
| gross intellectual misconduct.
|
| Botometer has had an absurdly high FP rate for years and Twitter
| are right to call Musk out for using it, though presumably Musk
| was just as conned as everyone else who has used this tool.
| Really the Botometer papers should all be retracted, as should
| any papers that relied on it, and then the researchers who
| created it should be fired. Unfortunately this would require
| retracting huge chunks of academic social bot research -
| Botometer is just _that_ prevalent.
|
| A thorough debunking of the model can be found here by Gallwitz
| and Kreil:
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.11474.pdf
|
| _" In this paper, we point out a fundamental theoretical flaw in
| the widely-used study design for estimating the prevalence of
| social bots. Furthermore, we empirically investigate the validity
| of peer-reviewed Botometer-based studies by closely and
| systematically inspecting hundreds of accounts that had been
| counted as social bots. We were unable to find a single social
| bot. Instead, we found mostly accounts undoubtedly operated by
| human users, the vast majority of them using Twitter in an
| inconspicuous and unremarkable fashion without the slightest
| traces of automation. We conclude that studies claiming to
| investigate the prevalence, properties, or influence of social
| bots based on Botometer have, in reality, just investigated false
| positives and artifacts of this approach."_
|
| It took them years to get this paper published, and when they
| first announced their work the Botometer guys simply called them
| "academic trolls" and ignored the problems they reported (except
| for hard-coding their examples to be correct!).
|
| If a full paper is too much, I've written a couple of essays
| about the problems of social bot research. This one summarizes an
| earlier/longer version of the GK paper above:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...
|
| and that earlier paper cites another essay I wrote back in 2017
| about a non-Botometer based Twitter bot paper:
|
| https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
|
| Given these issues it's not hugely surprising that Musk believes
| incorrect things about Twitter bots. The field of Twitter bot
| research is massive with over 10,000 papers. The original
| Botometer paper has been cited over 800 times. He is far from
| alone - many politicians and journalists have all fallen for
| these claims too. Twitter should probably have pushed back far
| more strongly, far earlier, but the general convention of never
| criticizing academics regardless of how dishonest they become
| defanged them and they never went further than a rather mildly
| worded blog post. Now the chickens have come home to roost.
| Misinformation spread by "misinformation researchers" is creating
| real world legal consequences.
| Eriks wrote:
| Maybe that's because he is acting as a troll sometimes. Troll,
| bot. What's the difference.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It is possible that this means Musk's spam analysis tool is
| defective. But, there is another logical possibility...
| shapefrog wrote:
| If Musk can prove that he is a bot, then he wins this lawsuit.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Imagine the gasps in the courtroom when his lawyer walks in
| and people notice it's actually a prototype of his Optimus
| android, that somehow managed to pass an online law degree.
|
| Presumably it would then announce that it is an expert in
| "bot law" and the judge would have no choice but to let it
| argue Musk's case.
| shapefrog wrote:
| And then people look even closer and notice that its the
| same prototype of the Tesla android revealed to much
| fanfare in 2021, and now that they can see it up close and
| in person - they realise its actually just a person in a
| gimp suit, it always was.
| jqgatsby wrote:
| plot twist: the spam analysis tool is correct, and Elon is
| actually a robot, ala Stephen Byerley in Asimov's "Evidence".
| spansoa wrote:
| His Tweets are all done with an iPhone, as Twitter allows you
| to see what client a tweet was made from. The only way bot
| behavior could be done on a smartphone, is if the phone is an
| iOS virtual machine, and the tweets are programmatically
| generated using some algo.
| egypturnash wrote:
| You're neglecting the simple solution of a hot dog moved
| around by a few actuators. Musk could totally be replaced by
| one of these.
|
| Or some other stylus that you can use on a touchscreen with
| your hands in non-conductive gloves. But a hot dog is
| funnier.
| InfoSecErik wrote:
| In the same vein:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXacA35s6vo
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I'm now seeing Elon Musk in that one universe from
| Everything, Everywhere, all at Once.
| martin8412 wrote:
| Not if the bot has a physical form and is able to interact
| with a physical iPhone.
| notahacker wrote:
| I quite like the plot twist where Elon isn't actually a robot,
| but he becomes fully convinced he is. He's already expressed
| sympathies with arguments we're all living in a simulation,
| right?
| mabbo wrote:
| Just in case anyone isn't seeing through the bullshit of Elon
| Musk, let me lay this out for you:
|
| On April 14th: Twitter stock was worth about $45. Tesla stock was
| worth about $985. Elon's contract said he would sell $13B worth
| of Tesla stock (about 13.1m stocks) as part of the plan to buy
| Twitter for $44B, $54.20 per share. A good deal for the Twitter
| shareholders even at the time. (23% higher than the market said
| it was worth).
|
| On May 13th: Twitter stock is worth $40[0]. Tesla stock was worth
| about $769. So now Elon would have to sell 16.9m shares of Tesla,
| 28% more, to get a company worth 12.5% less. All signs pointed to
| both stocks continuing to decline along with all of tech, so the
| deal was getting worse and worse every day for Elon, and better
| and better every day for Twitter's shareholders.
|
| Elon Musk will say or do anything he has to in order to cut his
| losses. There's that well-talked-about $1B get-out-of-deal fee
| that everyone thinks he'll be able to use. But that's actually
| not a valid thing- that was only if the SEC blocked the deal.
| He's contractually obligated to buy the company.
|
| Elon is screwed. All the noise he is making is not going to get
| him out of it because the Twitter shareholders will hire lawyers
| just as good and expensive as his- and they are in the right.
|
| [0]And even then $40 is only because the stock was pumped up from
| Elon saying he's buying it all. If not for that, it would be even
| lower- meaning this is an even better deal for the shareholders.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Even though you are totally right, I can't fault Elon for
| having a sour grape feeling and trying to renegotiate hard with
| all the tools he's got. Millions of lawyer fees are nothing
| compared to the billions of losses he is going to have from the
| deal.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| jjeaff wrote:
| I have seen no credible evidence that Twitter is wrong about
| their numbers. Nor do I even see any possible way an outsider
| could figure that number out.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Have you seen credible evidence that they are right about
| their numbers?
|
| Without Twitter providing more context and showing their
| work, the number can't be trusted, thus it isn't credible.
|
| If you claim you have such a low number of bots (5%), you
| better prove it, otherwise I'll assume the worst and go with
| 20%.
|
| Anyone that goes on Twitter knows it's above 5%. All 3rd
| party estimations are well above 5%. Prove it Twitter. Prove
| it.
| simiones wrote:
| > If you claim you have such a low number of bots (5%)
|
| Twitter has never made any such claim. It's incredible how
| hard it is for some people to actually read the extremely
| explicit process they lay out in their SEC filing.
|
| Twitter has users. A subset of those users are "monetizable
| daily active users" - that is, users who log in to Twitter
| from platforms which are capable of showing them ads, or
| otherwise making money. A subset of users who would
| normally be counted as mDAUs may be discovered today to be
| spam bots, may be suspended for other reasons, or may
| otherwise turn out not to be monetizable - so they are
| excluded from future mDAUs. A subet of _those_ users have
| been counted as mDAUs in the past: this is the subset that
| is estimated to be 5%.
|
| There are plenty of bots on Twitter that are not mDAUs.
| Some are actually fully legitimate, like the earthquake or
| weather reporting bots: they are valid Twitter accounts who
| are bots and who are not counted as mDAUs.
| pcmoney wrote:
| They literally never claimed this was accurate and even
| said their methodology could be wrong. Nothing in the
| contract says anything about bots. They don't have to prove
| anything at all.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > They literally never claimed this was accurate
|
| > and even said their methodology could be wrong
|
| Yeah that's my point, their supplied number is unusable
| for investors, advertisers, etc.
|
| Combine that with the bot experiences on Twitter, the 3rd
| party estimates of 10-20% if looks way off.
|
| I don't see why NOW anyone would trust 5%. Diligence has
| NOW been done and that " _methodology could be wrong_ "
| looks likely.
|
| -- EDIT (post limit) --
|
| > But that's the whole point - Musk waived his right to
| do due diligence, so he is pointing at this statement
| being wrong (and not unusable) as his way out.
|
| @suresk, that's not a thing, but it is a talking point,
| but I'm not debating that. I'm saying NOW that the
| diligence is done and we know it's probably not accurate.
| See my first post.
| suresk wrote:
| But that's the whole point - Musk waived his right to do
| due diligence, so he is pointing at this statement being
| _wrong_ (and not _unusable_ ) as his way out.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| People keep trying to explain to you why you're wrong and
| you keep on ignoring them and persisting with your
| original false statement.
|
| The 5% number claimed by Twitter is _not the percentage
| of all accounts that are bots_. That has never been the
| claim. Twitter separates its accounts into "mDAU"s and
| "other", and they are claiming 5% of the mDAUs are bots.
| You cannot falsify this claim with "bot experiences on
| Twitter", because all the bots you're seeing could be
| correctly classified as "other". Indeed, nobody outside
| Twitter can falsify this claim because it's a statement
| about Twitter's internal classification. The only thing
| that can falsify Twitter's claim is their own internal
| data, so that's why discovery is being done.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| I'm not talking about all bots. I'm talking about mDAU
| bots. You guys are trying to argue against a point I'm
| not making.
|
| 3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots,
| Twitter's is 5%.
|
| Others were defending it by saying "well the number
| doesn't have to be accurate legally" or "well Musk should
| have known it's not really accurate".
|
| My counter is that weasel legal wording and logic doesn't
| give much confidence in Twitter's number at all for
| FUTURE buyers, advertisers, investors, etc.
|
| They should show their work and prove their number or
| investors / advertisers / buyers should lower their
| valuations to reflect somewhere in the middle.
|
| But Twitter hasn't really ever been about the money so
| the status quo will stay the same.
|
| - edit -
|
| @blitzar: https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-
| followerwonk-joint-twit... you can see their methodology
| here.
|
| Despite two different mDAU classifications, both of the
| datasets from SparkToro and Followerwonk were about 20%
| mDAU bots.
| aw1621107 wrote:
| > 3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots
|
| Could you provide some sources for these estimates? In
| particular, I'm curious about the methodology and data
| sources those third-party sources use.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| https://sparktoro.com/blog/sparktoro-followerwonk-joint-
| twit...
|
| Their methodology is very detailed. Maybe Twitter can
| post theirs to give more confidence in their 5%.
|
| They used multiple datasets and posted the calculated
| mDAU for each.
| blitzar wrote:
| > 3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots,
| Twitter's is 5%.
|
| And ... 3rd partys are differentiating a twitter account
| from a mDAU how? Hint: they are not.
| toast0 wrote:
| It would be hard for them to be wrong about their numbers,
| given how subjective they are.
|
| Their methodology is pick 100 users from the mDAU every
| day, then have a human decide botornot.
|
| If you wanted to show those numbers were wrong, you might
| ask to see those specific users and come up with your own
| botornot score. Or if you thought those weren't inaccurate,
| but maybe not a representative sample, you might ask for
| 10,000 users counted as mDAU on a specific day (or each
| day) and botornot them and see if that matches the 100
| sample. If you didn't trust twitter's sampling, you could
| ask for the full list of users and sample it yourself
| before botornot.
|
| But instead, it seems like they were trying to count
| botornot for the full population without considering if
| they were in mDAU or not, which makes it a flawed
| comparison. The counterclaim says mDAU isn't the
| appropriate measure for some of the alternate revenue plans
| Musk was considering, and that's probably true, but it's
| not relevant to twitter's current business and if their
| numbers were accurate to the degree they were measured.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Can we start a tip jar every time someone says the "he signed
| away his due diligence" talking point?
|
| I would love to see how Delaware Chancery Court treats this
| concept. So going in front of a judge is the best way to find
| out!
|
| I routinely accept contracts and agreements with parts I know
| I'm going to ignore or violate just because I understand the
| jurisdiction. It's more efficient than negotiating and actually
| having lawyers making revisions for months at great cost.
|
| I'm not familiar with this nuance of Delaware but its not
| outside of the realm of possibility that there is an argument
| that can help Elon.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Given the language twitter surrounded that number with, they
| probably could. They called out that it was uncertain,
| described how they estimated it in detail, and stated that
| reality could be higher or lower.
|
| Given all of that, they could have said the number was .01% or
| 90%, and neither would have been misrepresentation.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Exactly, so what's the point of Twitter's number or using it
| for valuation?
|
| Now knowing it's surrounded by loose language because the
| number is so loose, assume the worst prediction, which is
| 15-20% from 3rd parties.
| mro_name wrote:
| sensible guess, isn't it?
| leobg wrote:
| TL;DR:
|
| > Specifically, Musk used "an Internet application called the
| 'Botometer'--which applies different standards than Twitter does
| and which earlier this year designated Musk himself as highly
| likely to be a bot," Twitter said.
|
| Note the "Earlier this year". Article continues:
|
| > This morning, Botometer gave Musk's account a rating of 1.2 out
| of 5, indicating that Musk is more "human-like" than bot-like as
| of today.
|
| The legal brief continues:
|
| > The Botometer thus does not even purport to apply Twitter's
| definition of a false or spam account. In fact, some bots (like
| those that report earthquakes as they happen or updates on the
| weather) are often helpful and permissible under Twitter's
| platform manipulation and spam policy, to which Twitter
| respectfully refers the Court.
|
| The latter, in my estimate, is irrelevant to the question here.
| Because the metric in question is "monetizable daily active ". If
| one person runs, besides their personal profile, 10 bots, it
| doesn't matter if those bots are all "permissible" according to
| Twitter's terms of service. These accounts still constitute, from
| the point of an advertiser as well as from the point of
| investors, just one monetizable daily active user, and not
| eleven.
| AllegedAlec wrote:
| I'm still convinced he's just gonna use it to suggest that a
| judge should meet him in the middle; make him buy the company,
| but use the allegations of large numbers of bots to reduce the
| price.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Both are probably true. There are likely more bots than Twitter
| admits, and Musk will likely agree to buy Twitter for a lower
| price (in fact, I believe he outright said that).
| ncallaway wrote:
| I don't think there's any world where that happens.
|
| I think a judge would either order specific performance (e.g.
| do the thing the contract says, as specified in the contract),
| _or_ we're talking about damages (e.g. pay Twitter $X, but you
| don't get anything in return).
|
| I think a purchase at a lower price would probably only come
| from a settlement between the parties, and... I think that's
| likely. Twitter didn't want to be purchased in the first place,
| and now has Musk over a barrel. I think Twitter is going to use
| the threat of specific performance to try and extract a damages
| settlement greater than the contractual $1B from Musk.
| bambax wrote:
| > _I think Twitter is going to use the threat of specific
| performance to try and extract a damages settlement greater
| than the contractual $1B from Musk._
|
| Yeah that's what makes the most sense. Musk doesn't want to
| buy Twitter anymore, forcing him to buy it is not a very good
| solution. It's possible to do, and certainly enforceable, but
| not a desirable outcome for anyone.
|
| But, having him pay $10 or even $15 billions as a price to
| renege on his word, on the contrary, is an excellent outcome.
| simplicio wrote:
| Presumably if the fine is bigger then the delta between the
| current share price and what Musk offered, he'd be better
| off buying the company and then trying to turn around and
| sell it then paying the fine.
|
| Similarly, if the fine is smaller, Twitter share-holders
| would be better off just forcing him to buy and forgoing
| the fine.
|
| So a settlement number seems kinda hard to agree on, unless
| they have differing opinions on what the company is
| currently worth.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| If I were a Twitter share-holder, I'd be fine with
| getting a slice of a $10B settlement, keeping my stake in
| a successful social media & analytics company, banning
| Musk's account, and watching him squirm. I don't know if
| it'd be a perfect financial move, but it would feel good.
| bambax wrote:
| True. However there is a distinct possibility that Musk
| could run Twitter into the ground out of spite, if he's
| made to buy it. So there's a negative externality to
| force him to buy.
|
| A fine close to the spread, but still a bit lower,
| accounts for that.
| matwood wrote:
| I agree there won't be any meet in the middle. Neither Musk
| nor Twitter want Musk to own Twitter now though. What's
| happening today is negotiating the break up fee which starts
| at the difference between current market cap and 54B (~22B
| today).
|
| The accelerated trial date put Musk on notice. The SEC may
| not take enforcing the rules seriously, but Delaware has made
| it their business to enforce the rules that make it
| attractive for big corps to incorporate under. I don't think
| this makes it to trial where Musk will get destroyed, and bet
| they end up settling in the ~10B range.
| metadat wrote:
| Why settle for only $10B? Musk's shenanigans have resulted
| in significant long-term damage to Twitter in the form
| uncertainty and distracting Twitter from focusing on
| operating and growing the business (because they've changed
| internal policies / direction, and shared a lot of
| information with Musk, as per the acquisition agreement).
|
| It's only fair for mullosk to be on the hook for the full
| purchase or at the very least the full differential.
|
| We'll see what happens in about two months.
| rchaud wrote:
| $10b cash will go a long way to remedying that damage.
| They might even not ban Musk's account as a show of
| goodwill. Let him continue to bloviate impotently about
| the evils of censorious social media.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Musk got himself in between a rock and hard place here.
| Either he has to buy Twitter at a higly inflated price with
| all kinds of efdects on his Tesla shares and, maybe, even
| SpaceX ownership. And he looks like a bad business man.
|
| Or he vets out of the deal, has to pay billions for nothing
| and still looks like a bad business man.
|
| Since all his wealth is based on Tesla, and more
| specifically on Tesla's public perception as tech company
| and not a car maker, all of which in turn is based to
| significant extent on yhe public's perception of Musk as a
| genius, this change in public perception is incredibly
| dangerous for Musk.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| > And he looks like a bad business man.
|
| Musk already looked like a corporate bottomfeeder to
| anyone who was actually paying attention to his behavior.
|
| You're right, though. Obviously, other facets of this
| situation were going to affect Tesla, but I hadn't really
| thought about the effects on Musk's reputation could
| impact his companies' share prices. TSLA is as much a
| cult of personality as it is a stock.
| EdiX wrote:
| The funny thing is that stalling is probably enough to pay
| less. He's partially financing the operation by selling tesla
| stocks, if the market goes back up and takes tesla stock price
| up with it then buying twitter will cost less money.
|
| My opinion is this is just a stalling tactic, he thinks the
| market will recover by next year and this is a pretext to wait
| until then.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| How much of this show and dance is really about covering up
| something else that Musk did? Is it possible this is done to
| overshadow other newsworthy stories that would be even more
| detrimental to his reputation?
| bhouston wrote:
| It will be an incredibly expensive show and dance. Not sure it
| is really worth it.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his
| area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid
| decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional
| without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly.
| Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his
| bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check
| he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations.
|
| Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at
| a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69
| because he is a clown?
|
| Twitter replies to counter claims:
| https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_news/2022/08/Twitt...
| chowells wrote:
| Where was there ever evidence Musk is a smart guy? His only
| skills appear to be self-aggrandizement and being born rich.
| Musk is proof that our economic system rewards being already
| rich, not creating value.
|
| He did not found Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, or anything else that's
| been successful with his name attached. He did not contribute
| any tech to those efforts. At best he's contributed publicity,
| but it's only ever with a flavor of celebrating how great he
| is.
|
| He's an example of an utter failure of capitalism. I suppose it
| shouldn't surprise me that he's celebrated for it. Everyone
| wants to fail like him. But most people skipped the step where
| they're born rich, and it's just too hard to recover from that
| miss.
| pcmoney wrote:
| I think that's a little much. Definitely was estranged from
| his dad and it seems for good reason. No evidence his alleged
| childhood wealth funded his adult businesses.
|
| Founding doesnt matter as much as making them as viable as
| they are today. Seems to have a knack for something, either
| PR, hiring others, repeatedly betting the farm, slamming his
| head into a wall etc. whatever it is its on average working.
|
| His companies create thousands of jobs and pay billions in
| taxes, capitalism seems to be doing its thing very well. (Yay
| global reduction in poverty!)
|
| Friends who have worked with him say he is very sharp and
| extremely relentless and hard working. I don't think he's a
| pure confidence man. I do wonder if he has had a bit of a
| mental break in the past 5yrs or so.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have understood the same. This is Delaware, meaning they
| aren't going to give special treatment if they want to keep
| companies there. Deal is a deal. And Musk will pay, now how
| much might vary, but it will not be 1 billion cheap.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Do you mean he only recently got overconfident? Just a reminder
| that he already got fined $40 million for his "going private at
| 420" joke.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| The private at 420 thing was absolutely worth $40 million. It
| helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more
| than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200
| billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one.
| Bubble_Pop_22 wrote:
| > It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere
| even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned
| a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one
|
| Zoom out! Everybody loved GagnamStyle and Baby Shark too,
| but they are not getting on radio and people would be
| indifferent to the disappearence of the artist who made
| those songs.
|
| MarketCap is a flawed measure for tons of reasons (in my
| opinion FCF is king) but if you want to use such flawed
| measure then time spent in the S&P500 would be a meaningful
| way to go about it.
|
| Tesla has been in the SP500 for how long? 1.5 years?
|
| If JPMorgan went bankrupt tomorrow you'd see people
| literally in the streets crying (for a whole bunch of
| reasons both at the macro and micro level) much like when
| Michael Jackson died. If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow it
| would be like if PSY of GagnamStyle fame died, a bunch of
| hardcore devote followers would mourn but the world would
| move on pretty quickly.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Sounds like twtr is worth $800B then? ;)
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| And that court case is scheduled the week after this one.
| Musk has 3 major trials in October.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Just to put this in perspective: if your net worth is
| $100,000, this is the equivalent of being fined $14.
|
| (Based on Elon's net worth of $278 billion, according to
| Google)
| kergonath wrote:
| Still not a great example of a supposedly superior
| intellect.
| pcmoney wrote:
| By the downvotes it Looks like musk fan boys cant handle their
| lord and savior being called out for making a series of dumb
| decisions.
| matt_s wrote:
| > "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due diligence--giving
| Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-it-or-leave-it offer
| before he would present it directly to Twitter's stockholders,"
| Twitter wrote.
|
| Bot/spam account analysis is just trying to do PR spin. Musk has
| no legal standing to use any of that to back out of the merger.
|
| > The five-day trial is now scheduled to begin on October 17
|
| So we will see about 2 more months of PR campaigns from Musk and
| Twitter about the case.
| convery wrote:
| > Musk has no legal standing to use any of that to back out of
| the merger.
|
| The claim is that Twitters SEC filings had bots at ~5%, and
| Musk made the investment based on that. From the leaked
| recordings of staff, everyone knew that the percentage was much
| higher.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| That is a misreading of twitters filing.
| megablast wrote:
| Completely wrong.
| matt_s wrote:
| I made a bad analogy before about this, if Twitter were a
| house Musk was buying, he waived the right to back out of the
| deal based on home inspections (bots/spam accounts). He still
| can analyze bots/spam as much as he wants (as he should) but
| from the article it has no basis in the legal contract
| signed.
|
| > The merger agreement contained no references to false or
| spam accounts, and Musk didn't ask Twitter for any
| information to verify the number of spam accounts before
| signing the merger deal.
| phailhaus wrote:
| Nope, Twitter has been very clear in their filings:
|
| > Additionally, our calculation of mDAU is not based on any
| standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily
| calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly
| titled measures presented by other companies. Similarly, our
| measures of mDAU growth and engagement may differ from
| estimates published by third parties or from similarly titled
| metrics of our competitors due to differences in methodology.
|
| Musk can't barge in and say "but MY calculations have a
| HIGHER number!" because Twitter already acknowledged this
| could be the case. Musk decided to buy anyways.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809
| 120...
| delecti wrote:
| > Musk can't barge in and say "but MY calculations have a
| HIGHER number!" because Twitter already acknowledged this
| could be the case
|
| Not to mention that some of Musk's publicly stated reasons
| for the purchase are to reduce the bot problem to improve
| Twitter's value.
| jcranmer wrote:
| That's not what the SEC filings say. The SEC filings say that
| up to 5% of the number of monetizable daily active users
| (i.e., the number of users _after eliminating bots_ ) may be
| bots--or, in other words, the techniques that Twitter uses to
| detect bots have up to a 5% false negative rate.
|
| No one is saying that 5% of Twitter's users is bots, except
| for when Musk is trying to put those words into Twitter's
| beak.
| martin8412 wrote:
| They don't just say up to five percent are bots - They say
| that their methodology might be flawed and the actual
| number could be higher or lower.
| hef19898 wrote:
| In addition, one could make the claim that monetizeable
| bots cannot have a material adverse effect since they are
| still generating revenue and profits.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I mean, the point of Twitter's statement is to try to
| bound the risk. They could fix their methodology, or
| their advertisers could sue them for charging them for
| bot views, and the magnitude of the risk is ~5% of their
| mDAU, according to Twitter.
|
| A company with 95% of its revenue coming from bot-clicks
| and a company with 5% of its revenue coming from bot-
| clicks might make the exact same amount of money, but one
| is substantially more screwed in the future.
| hartator wrote:
| > No one is saying that 5% of Twitter's users is bots,
| except for when Musk is trying to put those words into
| Twitter's beak.
|
| "In its disclosures, Twitter claims to have nearly 238
| million monetizable daily active users ("mDAU") who
| participate on the platform, and tells its investors that
| this userbase metric is a bellwether for its ability to
| generate revenue and the "best way to measure [Twitter's]
| success . . . ."
|
| I think they are talking about this number being
| significant less than 238 million.
|
| "They show that in early July fully one-third of visible
| accounts may have been false or spam accounts--resulting in
| a conservative floor of at least twice as many false or
| spam accounts as the 5% that Twitter discloses for the
| entire mDAU population."
|
| They are talking about the same after bot removal 5%.
| usgroup wrote:
| Would their be any benefit to Musk going through this ordeal
| meanwhile fully intending to buy Twitter all along?
| h2odragon wrote:
| I think it may be: "Don't throw me in that briar patch."
|
| The more vocal Twitter users were quite dismayed by the
| prospect of Musk owning their favorite forum. There was talk of
| getting the Government to block a deal somehow because "one
| person can't be allowed to own the public square."
|
| Now they're as likely to be overjoyed if a court "forces" him
| to conclude the deal, even with a slightly smaller price than
| originally advertised. Whatever principles were served by the
| initial objection are less important than Dunking on Elon now
| that he's become pariah.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I suppose he could save some billions.
| usgroup wrote:
| It seems to me that any reduction in price would also cause a
| reduction in value, no? I.e pay less because it's worth less?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yes, but if he is taking it private that doesn't change
| anything.
|
| I have no idea what is his plan to make money with Twitter,
| but that is why I'm not multi-billionaire.
| pinko wrote:
| Yes, he could end up negotiating a lower price. Even a tiny
| discount might make it all worthwhile.
| ncallaway wrote:
| It will be hard to negotiate a lower price while a lawsuit
| about specific performance is still open.
|
| Since Twitter has a real (not guaranteed, but not terribly
| unlikely) of having a court force Musk to buy Twitter at the
| original price, I don't think they'd seriously consider
| selling at a massive discount. I could see a small haircut to
| the price in a settlement, so maybe that's the angle.
|
| But... with the threat of specific performance looming, I
| just don't see Twitter moving the needle on their price much.
| kshacker wrote:
| Real chance does not mean 100% chance. As long as there is
| a threat (and fear) of losing, negotiations can happen.
| [deleted]
| coffeeblack wrote:
| I don't think that I trust Twitter on this.
|
| Let's wait for the courts to look at the topic.
| hartator wrote:
| "Twitter also ties mDAU goals to executive compensation. In 2020
| Twitter based its executives' cash bonus pool on revenue,
| operating income, and adjusted EBITDA. After Twitter missed those
| targets in 2020, and only 32% of the cash bonus pool was funded,
| Twitter determined that mDAU (a highly manipulable number) should
| be considered in determining whether executives received these
| bonuses. Following that change, in 2021, 100% of this executive
| bonus pool was funded. And since Twitter's adoption of mDAU over
| MAU, it has reported ten straight quarters of "growth" despite
| stagnant financial results"
|
| There is also this claim. Not sure why we should Twitter
| executives benefit of the doubt when they literally tweak metrics
| to get more money for themselves.
| nojito wrote:
| None of that matters when he waived due diligence.
|
| Again all of that information is public knowledge through
| twitter's SEC filings.
| hartator wrote:
| > None of that matters when he waived due diligence.
|
| Musk didn't though:
|
| "Despite public speculation on this point, Mr. Musk did not
| waive his right to review Twitter's data and information
| simply because he chose not to seek this data and information
| before entering into the Merger Agreement. In fact, he
| negotiated access and information rights within the Merger
| Agreement precisely so that he could review data and
| information that is important to Twitter's business before
| financing and completing the transaction."
|
| > Again all of that information is public knowledge through
| twitter's SEC filings.
|
| Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due
| diligence?
| brandonagr2 wrote:
| Twitter replied seeming to say the clause was to provide
| information only for the purpose of consummating the deal,
| information that would cause the deal to fall apart by
| outing their fraud wouldn't be covered by the clause as
| something they have to hand over.
| simiones wrote:
| > Can you point to the paragraph where Musk waive due
| diligence?
|
| Here it is mentioned in his own legal filing [0]:
|
| > 60. Believing that due diligence processes can be costly
| and inefficient, the Musk Parties instead focused on
| bargaining for contractual representations that the
| information they relied upon in deciding to acquire Twitter
| is accurate.
|
| Also, by definition, due diligence is something that
| happens _before_ signing a contract.
|
| [0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2022/08/musk-...
| [deleted]
| smeej wrote:
| To be fair, Musk himself stated when he hosted SNL that he "runs
| human on 'emulation mode,'" so calling himself a bot might be
| consistent.
| [deleted]
| jcranmer wrote:
| I think Musk's counterclaims are more interesting than Twitter's
| response. Here's the summary of the five counterclaims:
|
| * Twitter committed fraud by lying to the SEC about the mDAU
| numbers with the intent of inducing Musk to buy Twitter at an
| inflated price. No, really, this is the allegation (see
| paragraphs 202-206).
|
| * Count 2 is that Twitter committed [Texas fraud statute] by
| lying when it offered its shares. It's shotgun-pled, so I don't
| know which specific statements are supposed to be wrong, but I'm
| imagining it's basically the previous count recast under a
| different statute.
|
| * Count 3 says that Twitter broke the contract by failing to
| provide information.
|
| * Count 4 says that Twitter broke the contract by instituting a
| hiring freeze. [not gonna fly, especially when Musk admitted that
| Twitter gave him warning of what it was doing and Musk didn't
| respond. Did I mention that Musk's answer admits far more than I
| would have expected?]
|
| * Count 5 is pretty please declare that Twitter lying about mDAUs
| is a materially adverse event that is cause to break the
| contract.
|
| I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first
| count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years
| specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
| nomel wrote:
| > I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first
| count
|
| As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's
| banana-pants insane about a company inflating their hard-to-
| discover numbers, for profit? I thought that was,
| unfortunately, banana-pants standard? For example, the fiction
| that is Twitter or Reddit's user count.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Whether they inflated their numbers or not, the burden would
| be on Musk to prove that and it would be completely
| impossible to do that with a 3rd party tool. You are a
| monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read
| tweets. Something that no 3rd party tool could possibly
| track.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in
| and read tweets.
|
| Actually, even logged-out users (until they forced everyone
| to log in to read timelines) are monetizable, so Musk is
| really trying to make something to get out.
| eastbound wrote:
| I'm surprised that someone clever enough to run a
| business, takes _that_ excuse to get out of a deal. He
| must have been tired.
|
| Any businessman who gets into such a position, even by
| mistake, would have at least taken this opportunity to
| require Twitter's methodology on counting bots an expose
| its flaws. The claim would be something tangible like
| "This account is a bot and your criteria falsely counts
| it as a user."
|
| Not "Really there are 5% bots? Everybody, look!" He looks
| more like an engineer who can't stand the fact that
| ballpark numbers are a decent way to do business in a lot
| of cases.
| evan_ wrote:
| Another explanation could be, he's not actually that good
| at running a business
| bmitc wrote:
| It doesn't matter because Musk waived any due diligence when
| he signed the contract to buy. He literally said, via
| contract, that he waived due diligence, signed on to buy, and
| then a mere week later said that Twitter isn't providing the
| data he's requesting. Again, he was whining about not
| receiving data that he specifically waived access or rights
| to. Twitter already provided him with much more than they had
| to, which was nothing.
|
| Another point is that many of the bots on Twitter are pro-
| Tesla and pro-Musk. Musk knows this but still whines about
| bots despite knowingly benefiting from them. He is a
| charlatan in every sense of the word.
| benj111 wrote:
| The fact that musk tweeted that he was buying Twitter to fix
| the bot problem.
|
| So the fact that he's using his reason for buying to try and
| get out of buying seems... Insane.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Twitter is a public company (and has been for 9 years), and
| has maintained the 5% mDAU disclaimer in its required annual
| reports for years. I don't know off-hand how long it's been
| doing so, but probably at least 4 or 5 years.
|
| The allegation is saying not only that Twitter has been lying
| about that number--for years, on documents that land it in
| legal hot water if it's been lying--but that it was doing so
| specifically so that Musk would buy Twitter at an inflated
| price. The insane part is really that specific intent, not
| the lying about the numbers.
| loceng wrote:
| ... "but that it was doing so specifically so that Musk
| would buy Twitter at an inflated price."
|
| The insanity is people being perfectionistic in that it was
| specific intent to target him to buy it - even if it says
| "him" - it's absurd that people are taking that literally,
| and not simply to "make it seem valuable for someone to
| buy."
| flerchin wrote:
| Well twitter would have been obscuring bots to obtain an
| inflated purchase price _by anyone_.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| FWIW, academic research has questioned the 5% number for
| years. USC and IU put out a report 5 years ago that
| believed the upper bound for fake accounts was 15%[0]. This
| isn't a new allegation.
|
| 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-
| twitter-ac...
| kergonath wrote:
| From your source:
|
| > our estimates suggest that between 9% and 15% of active
| Twitter accounts are bots
|
| From Twitter: "roughly 5% of our monetizable daily users
| are bots".
|
| Both can be true at the same time, and it does not mean
| that Twitter lied.
| dahdum wrote:
| Twitter's lawsuit mentions this, stating only they know
| who is monetizable. IIRC Musk's lawyers deliberately push
| the same false equivalency in their filing.
| [deleted]
| jjoonathan wrote:
| 5% of mDAU is a false negative rate.
|
| 5% of users is not a claim that Twitter made.
| jcranmer wrote:
| As explained many times by many people, the 5% is not the
| number of bots on Twitter. It is the false negative rate
| of Twitter's bot detection algorithms.
| daed wrote:
| One point not mentioned (and I'm just paraphrasing Levine
| from Money Stuff here):
|
| It's crazy because it would probably be BETTER if you had
| more bots. Then you could say that your revenue per user was
| higher and you could argue that you had more room for growth.
| So, if anything, lying and OVERestimating the bot count would
| help your valuation more.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| Not really, because the revenue comes from ads not users.
| Twitter makes profit from ad buyers thinking they are
| reaching many users. The "revenue per user was higher" you
| mention is actually "cost per ad impression" and ad buyers
| want that to be low.
| phailhaus wrote:
| It's insane because Twitter has been very careful to explain
| that the 5% number is not some sort of "promise".
|
| > Additionally, our calculation of mDAU is not based on any
| standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily
| calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly
| titled measures presented by other companies. Similarly, our
| measures of mDAU growth and engagement may differ from
| estimates published by third parties or from similarly titled
| metrics of our competitors due to differences in methodology.
|
| They covered themselves very clearly, and Musk has no
| standing here. He knew this, and decided to waive his due
| diligence and buy anyways.
|
| [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809
| 120...
| bostonsre wrote:
| Twitter added a loop hole saying that their data might be
| incorrect. It seems disingenuous to absolve them of all
| sins if their data is hugely incorrect to the point where
| it's fraudulent just because they added that loop hole.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > It seems disingenuous to absolve them of all sins if
| their data is hugely incorrect to the point where it's
| fraudulent just because they added that loop hole.
|
| If there's an actual industry standard then you could
| argue that Twitter is lying. However as everyone in the
| legal community knows there are two important concepts
| here: wilfulness and negligence. Did Twitter willfully do
| this or is this just because there isn't an actual
| standard methodology but tried to do their best-effort
| anyways? Is Twitter aware of problems in its methodology
| that can be solved but were left as-is? Conversely, did
| an external party intentionally misinterpreted those
| numbers so that that party can paint a different picture
| that what Twitter actually claims?
| bostonsre wrote:
| Yea, makes sense. Seems like it will be hard to prove
| malice over incompetence and vice versa.
| phailhaus wrote:
| There's no standard or foolproof way to find bots,
| otherwise we'd be able to just ban them all. It all
| requires judgement. Twitter's statement is acknowledging
| this fact and legally covering themselves from people
| just like Musk who might go "well I have my own
| calculation metric and it says there's more."
| jacquesm wrote:
| Maybe, but that's just not how it normally works and
| Musks reality distortion field does probably not include
| the courts. You sign a terms sheet conditional on DD and
| only afterwards do you move to put in a binding offer.
| Doing it in a different order is a waste of effort, after
| all, what's the point of doing DD after you've already
| made a binding offer? You can't use it to change the deal
| parameters and you can't use it to break it up.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| He claimed to buy Twitter, specifically, to clean it up; to
| get rid of bots. That was his stated goal.
|
| "If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots
| or die trying!"
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354
| kennxfl wrote:
| Apparently Twitter subpoenaed Musk's friends and
| colleagues who were actively tweeting about the deal with
| what is believed to be an attempt to prove he encouraged
| his posse tweet negatively to force a lower price.
| threeseed wrote:
| David Sachs, prominent VC was one of those subpoenaed and
| he definitely seemed a little sensitive about it:
|
| https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1554258141876932608
| SilverBirch wrote:
| This just reminds us - if you had subpoenaed 5 average
| people they would've responded with honest accounts of
| what happened, under fear of the law. Subpoena 5 of Elon
| Musk's friends and you're answering questions from the 5
| best paid law firms in the country. Throw the fuck in
| jail.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The weird part is that "twitter has lots of spam bots" is
| a completely independent claim from "5% of the users who
| use our website or 1st party apps are bots".
| loceng wrote:
| I imagine the argument is whether the method Twitter used,
| and was seemingly acceptable by SEC, is ethically, morally,
| or logically a reasonable measure.
|
| E.g. Can they 100% say that there are less than 5% bot
| accounts, or is that 5% number being pulled out of their
| ass - and saying "less than 20% of accounts are bots" would
| hold as much water? That is therefore then a
| misrepresentation, fraud IMHO - and stockholders should be
| suing not only Twitter but also the SEC.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| That's not what the original poster implied. He implied
| it's crazy because of the duration and specific purpose of
| the supposed lie.
| pavon wrote:
| Doesn't seem strange to me. If I am suing a company for
| false advertising I'll claim that their behavior was
| aimed at inducing _me_ to purchase the product at an
| inflated price. Not because I think they were
| specifically conspiring to target those lies directly at
| me personally, but because I am the one that is a party
| to the lawsuit. If Twitter was lying to inflate the stock
| price in general, then they were inducing everyone to buy
| at an inflated price and Musk is one of those people.
| fooey wrote:
| There's a whole assumption that bots are a net negative to
| the platforms value besides any arguments over how many of
| them there are.
|
| As a human, it's annoying to get get a reply notification
| only to discover it was bot spam, but from the platform
| perspective that bot just created user activity and content
| for you for free.
|
| I have a theory that the most embarrassing thing to come out
| of this might be that Twitter doesn't really care about bots
| much more than issuing platitudes that they care about bots
| to assuage the user base.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I have like 9 twitter bots and they're all cool and
| interesting. I wonder if Musk's tool differentiates between
| cool and uncool bots.
|
| In the past I tried to write bots that do things like reply
| to people, but that is a violation of the TOS and twitter
| would immediately identify and ban the account.
| fooey wrote:
| The tool he used to identify bots identified his own
| account as a bot, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess
| it's not very intelligent (or is hyper-intelligent)
| blackoil wrote:
| If there are too many bot activities, user may completely
| turn off notifications and reduce the usage.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years
| specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
|
| On one hand, venture-funded hockeystick-startups like Twitter
| definitely aim for a quick exit to make cash, so it's not
| totally out of the blue. On the other hand, Twitter is publicly
| traded and therefore _already had_ its exit.
| mywittyname wrote:
| And the Twitter board was also very much publicly saying,
| "don't buy us."
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Clearly reverse psychology, confirming that this was indeed
| their play all along!
| nerdawson wrote:
| There will be members of staff who's job depends on the value
| of the stock and countless more with total comp tied to it.
| codingdave wrote:
| I don't honestly believe either side cares about the merits of
| the legal case - this is all just a very public and showy
| exercise to negotiate on a new price during a settlement.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > this is all just a very public and showy exercise to
| negotiate on a new price during a settlement.
|
| Why would Twitter want to negotiate on a new price? There's
| already the agreement at a high price - why would they go
| lower?
| koheripbal wrote:
| That's the nature of almost all civil cases - they are
| pretexts for negotiations.
|
| BUT, accusing Twitter of actual _federal and state crimes_ is
| going to raise the awareness of several regulatory bodies, so
| this is going to get hairy.
| _djo_ wrote:
| No it won't, because those are baseless allegations thrown
| out in order to add more noise and confusion.
|
| You might get some red state DA eager for some publicity to
| make a song and dance about it for a bit, but that's it.
|
| If Musk's team could produce actual data and evidence of
| criminal law breaches they'd be reporting them to
| authorities not adding them as minor points in a civil suit
| filing in Delaware.
| dahdum wrote:
| Twitter has the facts and the law on their side, so they most
| certainly care about the merits.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _I don 't honestly believe either side cares about the
| merits of the legal case_
|
| TWTR is only down 1.6% YTD.
|
| * SNAP is down 80%
|
| * PINS is down 40%
|
| * FB is down 50%
|
| A good chunk of TWTR's current valuation is now being propped
| up by Elon's buyout offer. Elon could be looking at paying a
| 100-125% premium on what should be the fair market value for
| Twitter. Twitter's board _should care deeply_ about getting
| as much value here as possible.
| nerdawson wrote:
| Wouldn't the first count apply to anyone interested in buying
| shares in Twitter? Artificially inflating the mDAU figure makes
| the investment appear more attractive and valuable than it
| really is.
| piker wrote:
| Seems like this is the correct answer. Musk is just putting
| himself in that class.
| zinekeller wrote:
| > Twitter committed fraud by lying to the SEC about the mDAU
| numbers with the intent of inducing Musk to buy Twitter at an
| inflated price.
|
| What is that commonly-used aphorism? "One man's trash is
| another man's treasure"? Like, _even if this is true_ , Musk
| didn't do (and subsequently waived) due diligence.
|
| > No, really, this is the allegation
|
| No further comment on it.
|
| > Count 2 is that Twitter committed [Texas fraud statute] by
| lying when it offered its shares. It's shotgun-pled, so I don't
| know which specific statements are supposed to be wrong, but
| I'm imagining it's basically the previous count recast under a
| different statute.
|
| If it's due to Texas laws, is the appropriate jurisdiction is
| the Texas courts or... oh, he's trying to claim that the case
| should be heard in a federal court (for diversity reasons).
| Good luck though Musk.
|
| > Count 3 says that Twitter broke the contract by failing to
| provide information.
|
| What information? The contract is already in the public, but
| okay you want to waste court time.
|
| > Count 4 says that Twitter broke the contract by instituting a
| hiring freeze.
|
| Twitter could just point to its peers like Google, Meta and
| Microsoft.
|
| > Count 5 is pretty please declare that Twitter lying about
| mDAUs is a materially adverse event that is cause to break the
| contract.
|
| Yeah, at this point I'm convinced that Musk wants to just waste
| everyone's time, especially after the chancery court denied his
| petition to schedule the hearing next year.
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| Also I'm pretty sure Musk himself wrote on public Twitter
| that he would trim the fat once he owns the company ..
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > What information? The contract is already in the public,
| but okay you want to waste court time.
|
| The contract stated that Twitter had to provide Musk with
| internal data as required to close the deal. His teams tokens
| were apparently rate-limited at some point and it took a
| while for Twitter to give him access to all data, a.k.a. 'the
| firehose'.
|
| Just for completeness sake, Twitter seemed to still try (the
| token thing was probably a technical error) and whether
| giving him access to the firehose was actually necessary
| could even be contested, as he arguably wanted to use the
| data to _not_ close the deal.
| zinekeller wrote:
| Quite derailing a bit, but Twitter executives are also
| saying that it tries to protect Twitter since that Musk
| indicated that he will launch a rival platform. Honestly
| this particular part sounds like Stac v. Microsoft
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_v._Microsoft)
| bostonsre wrote:
| > Musk didn't do (and subsequently waived) due diligence.
|
| Wasn't him collecting all of this MAU stuff to analyze it
| part of the due diligence needed in order to close the deal?
| theptip wrote:
| No. He signed the merger agreement without doing DD into
| mDAU, and didn't write any contingencies around mDAU onto
| the contract.
|
| You do your diligence BEFORE signing the merger agreement.
| bostonsre wrote:
| O, that seems pretty odd. I can't think of any reason for
| them to do that beyond trying to get out of the deal or
| incredible negligence on the musk side in not doing that
| before hand. Were they able to get that data before hand
| if they wanted it?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Exactly. This whole thing smacks of regret on an impulse
| buy. And as Musk should well know: regret is no cause for
| contract annulment. Twitter is going to be his Waterloo
| if he can't follow through on the deal, they're going to
| force him to perform which means he may have to sell a
| whole bunch more stock to people who know he has to buy.
| That isn't going to help at all.
| mayank wrote:
| > I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first
| count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years
| specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
|
| Not a lawyer, so could you explain why this is banana-pants
| insanity? There's malicious fraud (unlikely) and then there's
| the more likely case of under-investing in bot-detection and
| expunging efforts, e.g. "in favor of other priorities", to keep
| DAUs and subsequently valuations high for a potential sale.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Twitter's methodology for checking bot accounts is clear,
| consistent, and has been detailing in its SEC filings for
| years. Anyone that cared could have easily double checked
| them. Recalling from memory, all they did is take a random
| sampling of accounts and have a human rate the accounts as a
| bot or not--back when Twitter had an API it would have been
| even easier to do this.
| jsnell wrote:
| No. Nobody outside of Twitter can repeat the analysis.
|
| First, only Twitter knows which users are active (the
| population being analyzed are the DAUs). People doing bot
| analysis from publicly available define activity based on
| the account tweeting, which will probably skew heavily
| toward spam bots.
|
| Second, the mDAU metric is the DAUs with known bots having
| been removed. Nobody outside of Twitter knows which active
| accounts were excluded by Twitter from the metric. Even if
| 50% of Twitter DAUs are bots, as long as Twitter detects
| 90% of them as bots and marks them as non-monetized, the 5%
| number stands.
|
| Third, nobody outside of Twitter can actually do a proper
| job of evaluating whether an account is a bot, since they
| have orders of magnitude more signals than a simple tweet
| stream / public profile information.
|
| Twitters methology is far better than any publicly
| available bot detection would be, but the flipside is that
| it's not a replicable methodology.
| runako wrote:
| > No. Nobody outside of Twitter can repeat the analysis.
|
| This is true of most material statements provided by
| companies in every industry:
|
| - Revenue? Trust the company, I cannot independently
| verify from outside the company.
|
| - Retail same-store sales comparable? Have to trust the
| company's numbers.
|
| - Headcount? I have to trust their number again here.
|
| - Expenses? I have no way to verify this unless I work at
| the company, in a very senior position.
|
| Outside verification of data is not a concern relevant to
| corporate disclosures.
| kergonath wrote:
| They must have some internal documentation though, and
| the process can be looked at during the trial, right?
|
| So it cannot be replicated by third parties, and Musk
| does not know what he's talking about (shocker!), but it
| can be verified _a posteriori_. And I assume it will be
| at some point.
| jsnell wrote:
| I don't think it would be verified by somebody being
| given access to Twitter's internal data and redoing their
| process. At most both sides will trot out some expert
| witnesses to talk about whether the process / rating
| guide described in the internal docs are reasonable (what
| Twitter does doesn't need to be perfect, just not
| outright fraudulent). I look forward to finding what kind
| of a kook Musk finds as his expert.
|
| Maybe Musk hopes to find something in discovery to
| discredit the process, e.g. evidence of the process not
| being followed, or of the numbers being tampered with.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I don't think it would be verified by somebody being
| given access to Twitter's internal data and redoing their
| process.
|
| Indeed. But surely they have at least internal audits.
| They seem like they take this stuff seriously.
|
| > I look forward to finding what kind of a kook Musk
| finds as his expert
|
| Indeed! If he picks his experts like his lawyers, this
| could be spectacular.
|
| > e.g. evidence of the process not being followed, or of
| the numbers being tampered with
|
| Yeah, he sounds like he's hoping to find a smoking gun
| where some Twitter higher-up admits fudging the numbers.
| To be fair, if that is true, then Twitter deserves to be
| raked over the coals, even though it would not be
| sufficient to get Musk out of this mess.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This provides a lot of insight into how that man got to the
| top. He clearly has no qualms about lying and bullshitting his
| way into and out of anything and no amount of proof to the
| contrary will ever get him to admit he was wrong.
|
| I guess this is similar to the "reality distortion field"
| people claim Jobs had. Except the examples given there were
| more of him not believing people who said something couldn't be
| done.
| kergonath wrote:
| Jobs' RDF was a manifestation of his charisma: he could make
| people think something really hard was actually easy (when
| dealing with engineers and designers) or the other way around
| (when dealing with customers).
|
| Jobs did bullshit, but AFAIK more on the design and marketing
| side than on the business side (give or take the backdated
| stock option thing and his first stint at Apple, when he
| wasn't in control). Certainly nothing like Musk's
| shenanigans.
| cma wrote:
| > (give or take the backdated stock option thing and his
| first stint at Apple, when he wasn't in control). Certainly
| nothing like Musk's shenanigans.
|
| Don't forget Jobs' prime role in having companies collude
| together to depress wages by not recruiting each other's
| employees:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
|
| "an interconnected web of express agreements, each with the
| active involvement and participation of a company under the
| control of Steve Jobs...and/or a company that shared at
| least one member of Apple's board of directors."
| kergonath wrote:
| > Don't forget Jobs' prime role in having companies
| collude together to depress wages by not recruiting each
| other's employees
|
| Yes, indeed! I forgot to mention that.
| benj111 wrote:
| I reach the opposite conclusion.
|
| He offers to buy twitter on a whim, then changes his mind
| after signing a contract. That doesn't really seem like a
| good way of getting to the top.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| People are missing the obvious story. He locked himself
| into a price, then the price of things crashed. It has
| crashed so much that he's honestly better off just walking
| away and losing the billion dollars... but he doesn't want
| to lose a billion dollars so he's gonna do whatever he can
| do to get out of it.
| dahdum wrote:
| Oh it's definitely not about a billion dollars. He'd pay
| that out in an instant if he could. The contract he
| signed and the law itself is not on his side, he may yet
| slither out of his commitments, but Twitter would never
| settle for a mere $1B when they've lost so much more in
| value due to him.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Twitter hasn't lost anything due to him? Their share
| price would likely be lower if not for his dumb
| shenanigans. The contract is pretty clear that he can
| walk away for $1B, which is a lot of money.
| dahdum wrote:
| That's not what the contract says. The $1B breakup was
| only if bank financing fell through, which it did and has
| not. The banks are still bound by their commitment
| letters to provide the required financing, and it doesn't
| look too plausible they could back out of those
| contracts.
|
| Levine covered it well here:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-07-09/elo
| n-s...
| megablast wrote:
| He could lose a lot more than a billion.
|
| He could lose the entire amount he pledged.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Possibly. But it seem unlikely. The deal explicitly says
| he can back out for a billion dollars.
| swores wrote:
| No it doesn't say that, it says that if his third party
| funding falls through then he's on the hook for a billion
| dollars instead of buying the company.
|
| There's nothing in the contract about a billion dollars
| fee for any other reason of the sale not going through.
|
| Of course, a judge could choose to take that number as
| the amount to punish with, but it's not a price Musk can
| just choose to pay to get out of the deal.
| blackoil wrote:
| That is not a backout clause but protection against the
| deal not getting necessary approval.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Only if the deal fails outside reasons like regulatory
| action. Simply changing your mind, or claiming that you
| should have done due diligence after you explicitly waved
| it, doesn't count.
|
| Personally, I want the court to rule for specific
| performance (ie. Pay the $44 billion) He fucked up.
| linuxftw wrote:
| > I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first
| count... arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years
| specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
|
| This describes the entire business model of WeWork (minus the
| self-dealing), why should Twitter be different?
| kergonath wrote:
| Hmm tough question... Maybe because they are not the same
| company, are not managed by the same people, and do not have
| the same business model? Just a guess...
| Invictus0 wrote:
| What's so interesting about it? It's total nonsense dressed up
| in legalese.
| leobg wrote:
| > arguing that Twitter lied about its numbers for years
| specifically so that someone would buy it at an inflated price?
|
| I don't think that's the argument. Twitter is an ad supported
| business. As such, the incentive is to count the "monthly
| active users" rather higher than lower. Specifically, there us
| no incentive to make an effort to exclude automated accounts
| from that number at all.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The merger agreement contained no references to false or spam
| accounts, and Musk didn 't ask Twitter for any information to
| verify the number of spam accounts before signing the merger
| deal, Twitter said. "To the contrary, Musk forwent all due
| diligence--giving Twitter twenty-four hours to accept his take-
| it-or-leave-it offer before he would present it directly to
| Twitter's stockholders," Twitter wrote._"
|
| If that's true, it kind of makes the question moot.
| koheripbal wrote:
| No, because waiving due diligence does not mean the seller is
| immune to claims if they _knowingly_ provided false data.
| rchaud wrote:
| That will be almost impossible to prove. Especially as he
| provided an all-cash, take-it-or-leave-it offer based on
| publicly available financial data. He has access to lawyers
| and financial advisors to warn him against potential
| misstatemrnts on Twitter's part.
|
| If they signed off on it, he has no case. If they warned him
| against it, and he went ahead anyway, he also has no case.
|
| The judge will rightfully wonder how this isn't anything
| other than a attention-hungry blowhard trying to get out of
| scoring the most comical own goal in business history.
| koheripbal wrote:
| What happens in cases like this is that Musk will request
| the court for discovery of internal Twitter
| documents/emails/reports/etc to backup his claim that
| Twitter was aware that more bots existed in their BAU
| number than they reported.
|
| Twitter will object, but ultimately _some_ degree of
| discovery will be allowed (with a more narrow scope), but
| it will pressure Twitter to settle for a lower purchase
| price because god only knows what kinds of incriminating
| shit lawyers will find in employee emails. Internal emails
| is always a big big random variable which can then spawn
| all sorts of unrelated lawsuits from discrimination, to
| regulatory fines, to executives ' private life drama,
| etc...
|
| Even if Twitter is innocent - it is very easy for lawyers
| to intentionally misconstrue a vague email or threaten so
| with things found in discovery.
| rchaud wrote:
| Yes I also think a settlement is where this is headed.
| But the bill be pretty high.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _Internal emails is always a big big random variable
| which can then spawn all sorts of unrelated lawsuits from
| discrimination, to regulatory fines, to executives '
| private life drama, etc..._
|
| Given the NDAs that would apply to such discovery, were
| such information to exist and to become public, Musk
| would likely be imprisoned for contempt of court.
|
| Not simply fined. Imprisoned. And his lawyers would
| likely be suspended for a few months, if not disbarred.
| You don't mess with the courts, because they have the
| power to mess right back.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Not entirely moot. If Musk could demonstrate that the 5% number
| was actually a fraud (that is, not just wrong, but people were
| lying about it) _and_ show that the true number is so different
| that it would cause a material adverse effect, then he'd have
| an argument to escape the contract even with the DD waiver.
|
| I don't think he has a shot in hell at demonstrating fraud,
| given the various disclaimers around the quoted figure.
|
| And, if he's saying the real number is 10%, he just doesn't
| have close to a shot at reaching the material adverse effect
| bar (which lawyers have told me is a very high bar in Delaware
| courts).
|
| So, on the narrow path that he can navigate after signing away
| his soul and due diligence waivers, he's still totally hosed.
|
| He really shouldn't have signed that contract.
| NotTameAntelope wrote:
| That's kind of like saying he has a shot at getting out of
| the agreement if the sun collapses.
| seydor wrote:
| I wish this whole saga ended, and Musk buys reddit instead.
|
| This current saga is pure entertainment, which will end up in
| some kind of settlement and will leave the lawyers a lot richer.
| Spivak wrote:
| Musk buying Reddit would turn it into corporate 4chan even
| faster than is already happening.
| mherdeg wrote:
| I'm amazed by how reddit has turned itself around from "the
| place where the commenter zeitgeist involves wishing physical
| violence on the CEO" to "the place I append to all my searches
| with a site: prefix to find meaningful Web discussion and
| product reviews".
|
| There was a surprising and unpredictable community turnaround
| from about 2015-2021; don't know if it will last, but it's
| surprising how much better it is now.
| hyperhopper wrote:
| I don't think it ever changed: Reddit was always good for
| things like that, easily for over a decade now.
|
| Its just that the userbase has broadened, and is no longer
| early-internet enthusiasts, and also censorship is far higher
| now
| seydor wrote:
| It's also the place where the same group of moderators
| moderates all politics subreddits for 15 years without
| challenge. And international subreddits can be often worse.
| Moderators run the show now, and they ve become extremely
| vicious
|
| What you 're observing is not some magical reddit
| improvement. It's because forums have become unmonetizable,
| and reddit has consolidated all of them in one place. There
| is nowhere else to go for comment-like discussions (HN, but
| it's limited). Their success and moat lies in their legacy
| userbase. It's not because of their performance
| koheripbal wrote:
| I use it for product reviews, but don't ever use it for
| meaningful discussions. The average age of Reddit users has
| dropped significantly since the mobile app launched.
|
| For tech solutions, Stackexchange is the place to go.
| koheripbal wrote:
| The number of bots on Reddit is likely much higher than on
| Twitter.
| qq66 wrote:
| All of this is just a theatrical farce by business guys. The
| market went down, Elon doesn't want to pay, Twitter has a pretty
| good negotiating position, the parties will settle out of court
| for $3-5 billion.
| jassmith87 wrote:
| Why settle? There is a reasonable shot of forcing musk to pay a
| 200% premium. $3-5 billion is a steep discount. Twitter should
| settle for nothing short of specific performance.
| orlp wrote:
| Why would Twitter settle?
| fullshark wrote:
| To close the sale and end litigation
| saalweachter wrote:
| So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about $12
| billion dollars lower than the standing offer.
|
| I'd naively assume that the price to settle starts at $12
| billion dollars, and maybe goes up rather than down --
| right now that $42 stock price is at least anchored by the
| probability of Musk being forced to buy it at $54, so if
| this ends without a sale, we might expect the stock price
| to go down.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _So right now the Twitter market cap looks to be about
| $12 billion dollars lower than the standing offer._
|
| You also have to factor in almost every other social
| media company is down 50% YTD. If the deal falls through,
| the market will price TWTR like how they did to facebook
| which shaves off another ~$15B off their market cap.
|
| So TWTR actually stands to gain ~$27B in value.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| It is impossible for neutral companies to get mDAU data for
| Twitter. Twitter needs to provide proof. You can't use Twitter
| professionally without using bots btw.
|
| There is a food market at the ground level of Twitter HQ with an
| awesome beer selection. More valuable than most Twitter accounts.
| :)
| tezza wrote:
| This must be the best point for Elon Musk to tear off his human
| face to reveal the impassive robot metal underneath
| make3 wrote:
| read sperm analysis, was very confused. wouldn't have been
| surprising with all the sketchy stories we're hearing about him
| and his family, even if some are false
| [deleted]
| jjeaff wrote:
| Imagine this whole ordeal playing out on a house that was not
| listed for sale.
|
| The buyer starts harassing the homeowner to sell to them, they
| say no, so he buys up the mortgage lender and tries to force a
| sale. His antics are hurting the home's value so you relent to
| selling and give him an as-is sale contract, which he signs and
| gives you 24 hrs to respond or he will try to force a sale.
|
| All the while, this is of course taking your attention away from
| your day job and costing you countless thousands in legal bills.
|
| Then, soon after signing the contract, the housing market crashes
| and the buyer claims he peaked in the window and it doesn't look
| as nice as he imagined (even though he had previously been
| publicly announcing that your house was crappy on the inside and
| that he was going to buy it and fix it up) and so he wants to
| break the deal.
|
| You sue to make the deal go through, he countersues that you
| misrepresented.
|
| Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Except it's kinda funny because the 'homeowner' has spent 10
| years developing the primordial cesspool that the buyer has
| evolved out of and it's kinda funny that some famous rich
| narcissist they've built an entire social network around
| empowering is now fucking them over.
| 762236 wrote:
| markdown wrote:
| What are your thoughts on TruthSocial, which is also "a
| company of bullies, with how they ban people from their
| service that down't conform"?
| 762236 wrote:
| I haven't used TruthSocial, but if they do the same (but
| towards liberals), then TruthSocial has already failed.
| muglug wrote:
| The fact you think that Twitter supports "left orthodoxy"
| just means the conservatives have successfully moved the
| goalposts to make you believe they're the real victims.
|
| Twitter is full of very prominent hard-right voices. Douglas
| Murray! Charles Murray! Tucker Carlson! Dave Rubin! Ben
| Shapiro! Edit: Bannon! Paul Joseph Watson! Jack Posobiec!
| 762236 wrote:
| muglug wrote:
| I know leftists that have been banned from Twitter too.
|
| I'd encourage you to read this thread about moderation on
| social media platforms from the former CEO of Reddit:
| https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440
| root_axis wrote:
| Even if we grant the accusations of enforcing a leftist
| orthodoxy, that's twitter's prerogative, you may not like
| left wing people but they are allowed to have a website that
| caters to a left wing audience.
| jscottmiller wrote:
| >They repeatedly demonstrate that they are a company of
| bullies, with how they ban people from their service that
| don't conform to the left orthodoxy.
|
| So the manner in which they conduct their private business,
| which is well within the rule of law, makes them ineligible
| for protection from those violating securities and contract
| law?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > makes them ineligible for protection from those violating
| securities and contract law
|
| GP said he doesn't feel sorry for them. He said nothing
| about legal protections being inapplicable to Twitter. You
| just brazenly made this up out of whole cloth.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| It's not a violation of contract law to sue the other
| party. That lawsuit may find that the complainant _did_
| violate contract law, but the act of bringing the lawsuit
| is not in itself a violation.
|
| So at this point, pending adjudication, Twitter has not
| been "denied protection." The court is the protection. The
| two parties are suing each other, and the court will decide
| the appropriate remedies for whatever each of the parties
| has been "denied" due to any willful breach of contract by
| the other.
| 762236 wrote:
| I said that I don't feel sorry for Twitter. The law should
| apply without consideration of political ideology.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| What law are you talking about? The first amendment? It
| doesn't apply to private actors. Not only does it not
| apply to nongovernmental entities, it SHOULD NOT apply to
| them. To do so would be government compelled speach.
| 762236 wrote:
| I'm referring to the law in the context of the purchase
| offer from Elon, as the person I'm replying to quite
| clearly stated "securities and contract law".
| anothernewdude wrote:
| So you're an asshole and think others should have to put up
| with you? I doubt they do in real life, why should it be
| different online?
| 762236 wrote:
| I don't understand this comment at all.
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _This gets my curiosity going, so now I 'm paying a lot
| more attention to conservatives than is normal for me (on
| Substack, YouTube, and Instagram)._
|
| This is a phrase right out of this playbook. No thank you.
|
| https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-
| an...
| 762236 wrote:
| It's called the Streisand effect.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Fake streisand effect. Pretending even the tiniest act of
| moderation is a massive campaign to hide information.
| 762236 wrote:
| How is it fake? I'd have never learned about, e.g., some
| of the gender critical viewpoints, if Twitter hadn't
| banned people expressing them. It wouldn't have come on
| my radar. But since Twitter did ban some of those people,
| those viewpoints came on my radar (being relayed by
| others via screenshots), which raised my awareness of it.
| That fits the definition of Streisand effect.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Because twitter wasn't trying to make those viewpoints go
| away or hide them from the world. They just didn't want
| to _themselves_ amplify those views to hundreds or
| thousands or more people.
|
| Twitter's not trying to keep gender critical viewpoints a
| secret, or remove them from anywhere outside of twitter.
| bilsbie wrote:
| A publicly traded company is nothing like a house. I say no to
| this analogy.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?
|
| The buyer is rich and if I side with the buyer maybe one day
| I'll be rich too!
| jawns wrote:
| Imagine it playing out in a romance! "You cad. I never wanted
| to marry you, but I felt compelled to accept your proposal. But
| now that you are trying to back out, I am trying to force you
| to marry me, you idiot."
|
| Although in this case, contrary to what it's arguing, Twitter
| doesn't actually want the marriage to happen. It just wants to
| keep the $1B engagement ring.
| [deleted]
| vehementi wrote:
| You're not caught up with things. Twitter is suing to force
| the deal to go through at the original price, not to get the
| $1B.
| ilikehurdles wrote:
| The investors funding the buyer's antics.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?
|
| Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge
| masses of people on Twitter. The house in question.
|
| Its so ridiculous. Musk's popularity is largely *BECAUSE* of
| his Twitter antics. So this "buyer" is basically someone who
| has come to house-parties / benefited from the house in
| question for the last decade.
|
| And the people arguing against the (current owners) of the
| house are also the party-guests of that very same house.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge
| masses of people on Twitter. The house in question.
|
| What? But he doesn't want to buy ... he wants to pull the
| deal off. He. Does. Not. Want. The. House. Anymore.
| Volundr wrote:
| I don't think anyone is confused on this point.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Your comment implies that there was a time when he was
| actually trying to buy the "house" in good faith. I'm not
| convinced that is true... It gave him a great excuse to
| liquidate Tesla stock without the market responding as
| strongly as it normally would when a CEO unloads billions
| of dollars of shares in a company
| shapefrog wrote:
| I think it is actually worse than that, I think he was
| buying it in good faith.
|
| He believed he had "bought the dip" in stocks. He had
| bought 3bn worth, announced that he had bought some stock
| and made 1bn in a day on it - worlds smartest man
| everyone.
|
| I know, if I buy 44bn worth then at this rate I will make
| many many billions ...
|
| Once he realised he wasnt buying the dip but was actually
| holding the bag, deal cancelled. Best guess is he is down
| 10bn on where he bid so his loss-porn on this one is
| pretty sexy.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > I think he was buying it in good faith.
|
| My personal theory, which more or less matches Matt
| Levine's theory from his Bloomberg opinion column...
|
| Musk wanted special features on his Twitter account. He
| made a stink on Twitter about it, hoping to get more
| features as one of its most popular users. When that
| wasn't working, he tried to join the Board of Directors
| to lean heavily onto the CEO to grant special features on
| his Twitter account.
|
| Upon realizing that the board position doesn't come with
| those kinds of benefits, Musk quit the board, bought 9%
| of Twitter, and tried to push these "special features on
| my account" proposal that way. Board still didn't budge.
|
| Elon Musk, realizing he has to buy the company to
| actually get what he wants, starts to buy the company.
| Then the stock price collapses and its turning out to be
| a horrible loss. So Musk then starts to throw another
| tantrum to get out of this one.
|
| ------------
|
| The benefits of this theory, is that this "story"
| proposed by Matt Levine makes every single decision of
| Elon Musk reasonable (albeit sociopathic, but reasonable
| and self-serving). From his tantrum in early March 2022
| on Twitter, to his 9% buyout, to his flirting as a board
| member (and then quitting), to the eventual buyout.
|
| It also doesn't require "4d chess thinking genius". Each
| decision, while reasonable, isn't really that advanced or
| difficult to follow individually.
|
| Elon Musk just want special treatment on Twitter. I don't
| know what that "special treatment" is (maybe a bigger,
| bluer checkmark. Maybe guarantees on the global Twitter
| Timeline. Etc. etc. Something along those lines...), but
| special nonetheless.
|
| And as a billionaire, Musk has a number of strategies at
| his disposal that you or I wouldn't have. Musk is willing
| to pursue those strategies because he's so rich, and its
| really not a big deal to his finances.
|
| --------
|
| It just fits so neatly to what has happened, that its the
| most reasonable proposal of his behavior for the past 6
| months so far.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I think he was buying it in good faith.
|
| > He believed he had "bought the dip" in stocks. He had
| bought 3bn worth, announced that he had bought some stock
| and made 1bn in a day on it - worlds smartest man
| everyone.
|
| > Once he realised he wasnt buying the dip but was
| actually holding the bag, deal cancelled.
|
| But these concepts don't even apply to taking a company
| private. Once you do that, there is no stock price. You
| can't meaningfully claim that your stock is up or down.
| And what the stock does between when you agree to buy it
| and when you take possession isn't relevant to...
| anything.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Lets say you promise to buy a car in 30 days at a
| dealership (fully fictitious. This obviously can't really
| happen in real life).
|
| You sign a contract saying "I promise to pay $20,000 for
| this car and I'll be back in 30 days".
|
| ---------
|
| What happens if, within those 30 days, the car market
| collapses and the cars are now worth $15,000 ? Well, if
| you were an honest man, you'd still carry through with
| your $20,000 promised payment. If you were a dishonest
| man, you'd try to find a way around it.
|
| Same thing here. Twitter's stock price has no relevance
| after Elon Musk buys it. But we all know that the 60%
| drop in Tech prices means that Twitter is *probably* down
| 60%+ like all other tech stocks.
| joenot443 wrote:
| > Musk's popularity is largely _BECAUSE_ of his Twitter
| antics
|
| I don't really buy this. I knew loads of Musk fanboys who
| were crazy about him before Teslas even become available. The
| 50+ folks that I'm friends with have mostly never used
| Twitter or read a Musk tweet, but they think Teslas are cool
| and are reminded that StarLink brought rural Ontario better
| internet than our own government tried to do for decades.
| Obviously Musk is an ass on Twitter (and probably in person),
| but like a lot of neuroatypicals, their talent seemingly
| makes up for their abrasiveness.
| jollybean wrote:
| The fanboyism is quite considerably amplified by his public
| statements.
|
| Without them, we may not get much press at all from him, he
| may be a bit of an unknown quantity.
|
| His Social Media / PR is a gigantic part of his value. It
| distorts reality to a much, much larger audience.
|
| Do you remember 'Maroon 5' the band? They had 'Really Big
| Hits' back in the day . Banger / Chart toppers. But it
| wasn't until the lead singer was on 'The Voice' did it make
| them a 'Household Global Name'. There were a poppy band
| with a tiny bit of an edge that appealed to a demographic,
| now, they are like 'Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune' -
| multigeneratoinal giants.
|
| Musk has fanboys that are Dentists in Malaysia, street kids
| in Cairo, wannabe ballers in mid level cities in China etc.
| etc..
| wahern wrote:
| > I don't really buy this.
|
| I think you're both correct. My experience is as you
| described, but Musk has _also_ developed a following among
| political conservatives attracted to his abrasive, thumb-
| nosing antics.
| jollybean wrote:
| It's not 'conservatives' as 1/2 of them loath that stuff
| - and 'agitation' is traditionally an artifact of leftist
| populism (with traditional conservatives usually being
| small-c, establishment, older etc.) - it's more a bit of
| a businessy libertarianism, with hints of anti
| establishmentism that's in many ways more popular among
| the youth. Also, it's a hugely populist and international
| appeal, spreading his 'Noisy Tweets' around the globe.
|
| See how much more popular he is now that he makes
| 'controversial' statements [1]
|
| It's as PR trick as old as time.
|
| Edit: but yes, technically he has taken a public shift to
| the 'Current American Right' in the mysterious political
| situation we are in, that's fair to say. Just wanted to
| indicate it's a 'new and kind of specific normal'.
|
| [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo
| =CA&q=%...
| cycomanic wrote:
| I appreciate your analysis, but would like to add that I
| feel that "traditional conservatives" seem to have
| largely disappeared or become voiceless not only in the
| US but also in other places like e.g. the UK. I imagine
| in decades prior traditional conservatives would have
| found people like Trump or Boris Johnson obscene and
| distasteful.
|
| However, I don't see many of that old guard speak out
| against them. It seems with the reducing success
| projections due to changing demographics, many see
| winning as more important than values. Or at least that
| is my only explanation.
| netsharc wrote:
| > many see winning as more important than values.
|
| Interesting thought. For some analogy, if a bunch of
| skinheads joined my local baseball team and started
| playing dirty against the other teams and became the
| champions, would I care that my team has been hijacked,
| or would I not care because now my team is winning?
|
| Obviously in the political example, the skinheads talk
| about "values" and people who want to be deluded just nod
| and repeat "values!", or they demonize the opponents by
| saying they'll bring in "dirty migrants", etc...
| iasay wrote:
| If his popularity is due to what he posts on twitter it would
| appear that a large proportion of the human race are deranged
| morons.
| dragontamer wrote:
| A hundred years ago, you just traveled from city-to-city
| with your posse of 20-guys. Those 20 guys would pretend to
| be an interested crowd (which draws in / astroturfs fake
| interest) Real people then start to join the crowd. You
| then show off your snake oil product working ("guest#1 from
| the crowd", who is of course your buddy), and then the real
| people will get excited, and buy your snake oil.
|
| Today, you just buy a bunch of likes / retweets to perform
| the same astroturfing on a larger scale. Bonus points if
| you "meme" it and "go viral". You want all those people out
| there to be spreading your message at no cost to you.
|
| A little bit of astroturfing goes a long way. People want
| to feel as part of a community. So a bit of fake-generated
| content and fake-interest helps at seeding the crowd and
| popularity.
|
| ---------
|
| Stage magicians still do this today for entertainment
| purposes, rather than illegitimately hawking fake snake
| oil. Its a very good bit of entertainment. It does take
| some practice but once you get the technique, its quite
| repeatable.
|
| Turns out that human psychology / group dynamics are in
| fact, predictable and consistent.
| vkou wrote:
| It would definitely appear that our monkey brains aren't
| very good at reasoning through social interactions that
| happen through mass media.
|
| Whether or not this makes most of us deranged morons or not
| is in the eye of the beholder.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Welcome to earth?
| jollybean wrote:
| Most people don't pay that much attention.
|
| They like the 'vibe' and that's that.
|
| They may not specifically clue into the mapping of 'vaccine
| hesitation / conspiracy' to 'health outcomes', they might
| just view it as 'opinion' - which it is of course, but most
| responsible people understand the 'dots have to be
| connected'.
|
| I think it's a bit part of the reason why a place like HN
| won't grasp populism: we are almost by definition 'anti
| populist' by our very outlook.
|
| Even smart young people are usually busy with school,
| partying, social things, they don't all have time to parse
| all of the shifting nonsense, and those that do are more
| often than not trapped down rabbit holes, I think searching
| for 'an identity' more than they realize it.
|
| This is populism. We (the crowd) make decisions on rough
| statements, headlines, a few words here and there,
| prejudices, assumptions etc.. Some of use a bit smarter
| than others, almost none of us see our blindspots.
| [deleted]
| whack wrote:
| Yes
| ctvo wrote:
| He can be popular due to Twitter and people can also not be
| deranged morons.
|
| Twitter is very popular with a few niche groups:
| Journalists and people in tech for example. The former is
| influenced by Elon's antics on Twitter and end up writing
| news stories or making documentaries [1] about him. People
| learn about Musk through these respectable publications.
| The latter group spreads the gospel of Elon's TED talks and
| press conferences to their friends and family. Being
| subject matter experts, they're more likely to be believed.
|
| Previously the coverage was mostly positive, but Musk's
| antics on Twitter have caused both the former and some of
| the latter to turn slightly negative from what I can tell.
| For example, it's now a common joke that Elon's wealth is
| partially due to being born wealthy. His family owned
| emerald mines. I didn't notice that in the popular
| consciousness until very recently. Phoney Starks is also
| making it's way into popular usage.
|
| 1 - https://www.nytimes.com/video/NYT-
| Presents/100000008464087/t...
| kaczordon wrote:
| Except that Musk has talked about how he had to work his
| way through college and basically didn't benefit in any
| way from his dad.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211054942192119808?s
| =21...
| ctvo wrote:
| I don't mean to represent that I think it's a fact, only
| that people are increasingly repeating it, which
| represents more negativity than I think Elon has received
| in the past.
|
| Interestingly though, it was Elon who said his family
| owned an emerald mine:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140802011449/http://www.for
| bes...
|
| That was a Forbes interview in 2014.
|
| The relevant section:
|
| > JC: How do you handle fear?
|
| > EM: Company death - not succeeding with the company -
| causes me a lot more stress than physical danger. But
| I've been in physical danger before. The funny thing is
| I've not actually been that nervous. In South Africa, my
| father had a private plane we'd fly in incredibly
| dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going
| to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share
| in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted
| to go with him but didn't realize how dangerous it was. I
| couldn't find my passport so I ended up grabbing my
| brother's - which turned out to be six months overdue! So
| we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue
| passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over
| the place and I'm thinking, "Man, this could really go
| bad."
|
| Who knows what happened between when he was 15 and 17 to
| his family wealth that made him essentially penniless in
| a foreign country.
|
| Edit:
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1375212880790913025
|
| This is where Elon says he arrived in Canada with only
| ~2500 CAD.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Elon _says_ he arrived in Canada with only ~2500 CAD.
|
| He went to Canada and could rely on his family network.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| The emerald mine stuff is super overblown and only
| matters to people who don't like Musk for other reasons.
|
| If owning some natural resource like a mine or two was
| all it took to become a trailblazing entrepreneur who
| played a key role in Paypal/Tesla/SpaceX then Musk
| wouldn't be as popular as he is with many because there
| would be so many more like him around.
|
| Musk is clearly an extraordinary individual even if he
| sometimes acts like a dickhead and had a small boost from
| owning emerald mines. But like I mentioned above if
| owning a profitable mine of some type was all it took to
| be an entrepreneur at Musk's level we would be drowning
| in them and he wouldn't be such a big deal in the first
| place.
|
| But in the case of Twitter, Musk clearly seems to be in
| the wrong here legally.
| staticassertion wrote:
| This assumes that everyone who has lots of money and
| advantages chooses to try to run companies. That's not
| the case at all. I grew up around ultra-wealthy people
| and many of them wanted to focus on the arts.
|
| So you have a small sample size - extremely wealthy
| people. Then you cut that down massively again - those
| people who also want to run businesses. Then a bunch of
| other things to narrow the pool lol. But then, finally,
| you cut it down to "and then the ones who succeed".
|
| I don't think, at that point, the numbers are going to be
| behind you.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Wow, even being critical of Musk can't prevent the
| downvotes if you dare mention some of his
| accomplishments.
| ctvo wrote:
| > But like I mentioned above if owning a profitable mine
| of some type was all it took to be an entrepreneur at
| Musk's level we would be drowning in them and he wouldn't
| be such a big deal in the first place.
|
| I don't have an opinion on how big being born wealthy
| plays in his success. Just curious though -- how many
| profitable mines do you think are in operation and how
| many people do you think own them as a percentage of
| total global population?
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| What level of profit did the mine bring in? That's the
| real question that I've never seen an answer to.
|
| You can own a gold mine in the California mountains and
| come out of it with nothing but debt. It would sound like
| you're rich in the newspaper stories, though.
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| Mines specifically? No idea. But come from backgrounds if
| wealth and privilege comparable to what Musk had from his
| families Emerald mines? A huge number.
|
| Think farms, family businesses, real estate empires, even
| just well known doctors or other professionals.
|
| Elon Musks family were comfortably upper middle class but
| really nothing special in terms of wealth. There would be
| hundreds of thousands of American families as rich alone.
| [deleted]
| 2c2c2c wrote:
| anti musk sentiment mostly stems from the post-2016
| leftist surge. most of the mainstream internet was
| technocratic before
| HeXetic wrote:
| With everything that's happened in the past decade, don't
| we know that already by know?
| percentcer wrote:
| got bad news for you
| viraptor wrote:
| > Except you can just buy up supporters by gaslighting huge
| masses of people on Twitter. The house in question.
|
| What's the path from the masses on twitter and courts which
| will hear the case? Public opinion doesn't matter here. The
| case over the contract doesn't even have a jury if I
| understand correctly.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Public opinion doesn't matter here.
|
| Public opinion doesn't matter with regards to
| winners/losers of the case. But public opinion matters from
| the perspective of Elon Musk continuing to build his brand
| and grow his fanbase.
|
| Even if Elon Musk loses the court case, he still want to
| turn this whole charade into a positive for himself. IE:
| Fail upwards, etc. etc.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Well this analogy leaves out Twitter censorship, which makes
| Twitter unlikeable.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Adding to the analogy: The current owners of the home
| regularly remove swastikas spraypainted on their house by
| vandals, and some people call this a violation of free
| speech.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| FTFY:
|
| Adding to the analogy: The current owners of the home
| regularly remove swastikas spraypainted on their house by
| vandals, while leaving the hammer and sickle spraypainted
| by other vandals and some people call this a violation of
| free speech.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Removing swastikas graffitied all over the place, political
| correctness gone mad.
| bhouston wrote:
| I think Twitter is in a tough spot when it comes to deciding
| how to handle hate speech and harassment.
|
| In many ways they are like Amnesty International in that no
| matter which human rights issue they report on, there will be
| a contingent that says, well everything else you says is
| true, but the stuff you said about me is completely wrong and
| you've loss all credibility.
|
| It is a hard spot to be in trying to be neutral in a world of
| actors who only want the other side criticized or censored
| and never themselves.
|
| I am glade I do not have such a role. I wouldn't be able to
| take the constant flak from all directions for actions or
| inaction.
| santiagobasulto wrote:
| Except this is not a house. It's a public company. And a lot of
| people own a piece of that company. And a lot of them were
| unhappy about how Twitter's leadership was running things.
|
| I honestly don't care, I'm not on either side. But this was not
| a house sale, and Musk wasn't a crazy dude approaching a home
| owner. He had a lot of support from shareholders since day 1.
| powerhour wrote:
| Analogies are like cars, they're never perfect but that's OK.
| pavlov wrote:
| Yes. And he promised those shareholders $54.20 per share,
| signed the contract, and now the same shareholders are suing
| to get the money. They don't care what happens to Twitter if
| Musk takes over since they'll have cash instead of shares at
| that point and can reinvest in something more promising.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WShMzwT-nM
|
| For best experience, read it with the Benny Hill theme in a
| background tab.
| tomcam wrote:
| It appears to me that the seller was, in your analogy,
| misrepresenting the condition of the house. This is my totally
| unscientific analysis based on my private random sample of
| accounts I interact with, so, not particularly robust as a
| decision making tool for a big sale.
| lazide wrote:
| In the analogy, the contract was done with no intentional
| representations by the seller _at all_ , and the buyer waived
| contingencies/bought as-is.
|
| It's almost impossible for a seller to misrepresent anything
| material in that situation.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >Who could possibly be on the side of the buyer?
|
| Legally ? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and law can
| frequently have surprising implications in the twists and turns
| of the its logical structure, which - as a bonus - differ by
| time and exact place.
|
| Morally though ? I have less than zero empathy towards the
| homeowner, who hosts terrible and unimaginably dumb discussion
| salons in the house and allows some opinions while banning
| others arbitarily and unfairly. Let the childish potential
| buyer drive the value of this house to the toilet and make the
| life of the seller worse than the 7th hell, I'm all A-okay with
| that.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| > allows some opinions while banning others
|
| _Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?_
|
| Con: LOL no...no not those views
|
| _Me: So....deregulation?_
|
| Con: Haha no not those views either
|
| _Me: Which views, exactly?_
|
| Con: Oh, you know the ones
|
| https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174.
| ..
| Banana699 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure what you think you're achieving by
| parroting an imaginery self-conversation from an
| intellectually-challenged unknown person, but thanks for
| proving all of my points anyway.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| They're challenging you to be specific about the
| opinions.
|
| And you _really_ need to explain how that proves your
| point about twitter. In general, if someone makes a
| really dumb response to you, that doesn 't prove you
| right about anything. And if your argument is "twitter
| has bad comments" then a bad comment on HN doesn't prove
| that right.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Legally ? I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, and law can
| frequently have surprising implications in the twists and
| turns of the its logical structure, which - as a bonus -
| differ by time and exact place.
|
| The contract states the place of the law. Specifically: in
| the Delaware Chancery Court. The contract also states the
| time and conditions of the contract.
|
| Have you read the contract? Its public. Furthermore, the date
| of the court case has been set for October. It seems unlikely
| that Delaware law is going to change dramatically between
| then and now.
| Banana699 wrote:
| How does any of this change or contradict what I said?
|
| And doesn't the US legal system allow for escalation to the
| Supreme Court, which can override lower courts? So
| technically whatever the Delware Court is not the final say
| on whatever happens.
|
| >Trial date set to October
|
| This is so so awesome, I will get to see Twatter defenders
| rage and fume for 2 more months? ^__^
| dragontamer wrote:
| > and law can frequently have surprising implications in
| the twists and turns of the its logical structure, which
| - as a bonus - differ by time and exact place.
|
| There's no twist or turn of the law I can possibly
| imagine between today, and October, in the Delaware Court
| of Chicanery.
|
| There is a reason why contract laws are written to be
| argued in this court. Its considered one of the most
| straightforward courts in the entire country, with legal
| expertise / judges who specialize in corporate contract
| law.
|
| --------
|
| But sure, I'm all ears. What kind of "surprise legal
| twist" do you think will happen over the next 2 months? I
| really don't think its too complicated of a court case.
| Its just fun / fascinating to watch from the perspective
| of internet celebrities.
|
| In any case: the time has been set. October 2022. The
| location has been set, Delaware Court of Chicanery. The
| arguments have been set: we know what Elon is seeking to
| argue, and we know what Twitter is seeking to argue. Not
| much else to hypothesize here, really.
| demarq wrote:
| I go to a mercedes shop to buy a car I can show off with,
| arrange a loan then get demoted and paid less. I'm
| "effectively" too broke to buy the mercedes. So I return the
| next day and claim "the lights are to curved!" Is the way I
| look at it.
|
| TLDR: The worlds richest man, insecure about his wealth decided
| to show off and failed due to a lack of wealth. To somehow save
| face he claims that his change of heart is not financially
| motivated.
|
| Lesson, no one in this world is above being insecure about
| their wealth or status. It just happened to the worlds richest
| dude.
| throwawayacc2 wrote:
| I am, not because I think "the buyer is right" but because I
| hate the seller with a passion.
|
| Twitter has done terrible harm to society and whatever and
| whoever does it harm, it's doing a good job in my book.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| Quite funny than the person doing twitter 'harm' is exactly
| the kind of famous, pompous narcissistic asshole their entire
| platform has been built around enabling.
| Kye wrote:
| This would make a perfect episode if Knight Rider ever got
| another reboot.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I really can't see any other outcome besides Musk getting his ass
| handed to him by the Delaware Court of Chancery.
|
| It's always important to look at incentives and motivations when
| trying to read the tea leaves, and if you look at _Delaware 's_
| incentives, it's very clear. The whole reason everyone
| incorporates in Delaware is because they have centuries of
| handling business cases and have built out a clear set of rules
| and procedures. That is, businesses go to them more for
| _stability_ and _predictability_ than anything else.
|
| Musk signed a contract. The BS reasons he is trying to use to
| back out of it are borderline laughable, and even he knows this,
| so if anything is just really trying to negotiate better terms.
| The Delaware Court has every incentive to hold up the established
| rules of contracts, _especially_ business acquisition contracts,
| and I 'd be pretty shocked if they ruled in favor of Musk on any
| of his claims.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| Actually I have to take you up on this, people who run large
| corporations _say_ that it 's the strong legal regime they
| have. In reality, it's a tax shelter. The only question is "How
| much does Delaware care about their status as a real legal
| regime vs their actual purpose: a tax haven". They know it's
| difficult to defend "We're a tax shelter sucking revenue out of
| the rest of the union", so they argue "We have strong legal
| structures" but we all know that Coca Cola wouldn't be
| incorporated in Delaware if they could save a cent by being
| incorporated in Georgia.
| qwertox wrote:
| I have 30 Twitter accounts, but only one is used. It's only used
| to be able to occasionally search for news on Twitter.
|
| I wonder if those other 29 accounts are actually removed from the
| active accounts count when trying to sell their numbers.
| vel0city wrote:
| I mean your answer is pretty self evident. If you don't use it,
| it's not active daily, and so it's not a monetizeable _daily
| active_ user, now is it?
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Twitter makes what seems like a good "gotcha" point here, but
| knowing a little bit about how social media bots work, I'd like
| to try and give my 2 cents about why Musk's profile is probably
| not a great one for this type of analysis.
|
| 1) Many people who create a brand new Twitter account just end up
| following a few celebrities and then either not tweeting much or
| forgetting about the account after a short time after deciding
| that Twitter is not for them. It's likely that somebody well-
| known like Musk has a ton of actual human followers who would
| likely be labelled as bots because they're users with basically
| blank profiles that would be seen as bot-like.
|
| 2) When programming any reasonably sophisticated bot that doesn't
| just blurt out spam as fast as possible until its banned, the
| programmer would design it to blend in, to avoid detection by any
| defense mechanisms that Twitter would have. It would likely be
| seeded with an array of well-known Twitter profiles to follow at
| random to appear like a normal person with normal interests. Any
| particularly well-known Twitter account would be loaded with bots
| just through bot authors starting out by seeding it with a list
| of accounts they're familiar with.
|
| 3) Due to his life and wealth, Musk probably also exhibits
| characteristics that makes him seem more bot-like: such as
| probably tweeting in random bursts at odd hours in many different
| geographical locations.
|
| 4) Given his status as an international figure that also has a
| role in geopolitics and even military action, it's not impossible
| that there are state actors with big resources who create bots
| that follow Musks account for anything from trying to influence
| him with responses and through polls, or to try and make him look
| bad by "exposing" his bot activity at a later date when they need
| to influence public sentiment against him.
| evan_ wrote:
| The people who sign up for Twitter, dork around for a little
| while, and then leave and never return are not counted among
| the monetizable daily active users.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| Botometer's test claims to use over 1000 individual features
| in its analysis and it is unknown (to me, please clarify if
| you know) if they use Twitter's exact definition of
| monetizable daily active users in their system.
| evan_ wrote:
| What botometer does or does not do is completely irrelevant
| to twitter's mDAU calculation.
|
| No matter how many thousands of individual features
| botometer has, it cannot (and will never be able to) tell
| whether Twitter has served ads to that user today.
| simiones wrote:
| All good points, and all proving that the methods used by Musk
| are unreliable for saying who is or isn't a bot - thus proving
| Twitter's point.
| logicalmonster wrote:
| If I brought up good points, you should note that they apply
| more heavily to Musk than most other humans, which means that
| Twitter's response doesn't necessarily prove anything.
|
| It's not the testing tool that's necessarily bad. Botometer
| claims to look at over 1,000 features, which is pretty
| impressive. The problem might be applying that tool on Musk's
| profile for the specific reasons that I brought up. Musk is
| an outlier in many ways and isn't necessarily a good sample
| for an individual test as he'd tend to draw more bots than an
| average users' profile.
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