Elon Musk is in “Bonkersland”?

[uck fay] you, no it's not.

 

The flawed math behind Elon Musk’s Twitter deal (msn.com). Lot of snark in the article but I've pulled out the interesting section. Elon may not be able to do the deal solo, he has more outstanding Tesla leverage than I thought.

 

I was never under the impression he was doing this solo. He is a figurehead. It will end up being the same difference.

 

Well played sir.

 

I think any "problems" talk is speculation and cope. At this point, anyway.

 

I assumed he'd own like 90% but it may look a lot closer to 60% if it goes through.

 

Now musk is trying to back out or argue down from the agreed upon price. He wants proof that only 5% of twitter users are bots, as stated in SEC filings.

But I am not sure that will matter since there is already an agreement?

He has to pay 1 billion to twitter if he backs out.

 

Fraud is a big deal if he can prove that Twitter knowingly lied to the SEC and to the public about their bot numbers.

It will bring down the price for sure if he can prove it, but that risk bringing in other buyers at a lower price.

 

I really doubt only 5% of users are bots, unless they define user by some specific activity metric.

 

Then twitter committed security fraud

 

Much like with musk's problems with the sec, a fine is a price and whatever the case the consequences will be mostly inconvenient whereas you or I would go to jail for anything similar.

 

I don't think they're going to get the hammer, especially since I think they do the bidding for a lot of the establishment in politics

 

It's looking increasingly likely he never really wanted Twitter just wanted to shit on it.

 

If their method for measuring whether something is a bot or not is as simple as exact duplicate posts in a day, I could see their claim as accurate.

There is no reliable method for determining exact count of bots. I imagine they did a few different things, and took the smallest (meaning most simple) method.

 

I'm still wondering what his play is/was here. Definitely nothing to do with free speech. The only real way to increase profitability is user data. Anything else is going to be tiny in comparison.

 

Musk is saying "prove it" but they can share their metric and he disagree with it, and that doesn't make it false necessarily. Musk would need to substantiate that the metric is deliberately (high bar) inaccurate. Which means knowingly wrong by an order of magnitude, I would think. And if that is the case, shouldn't he have at least been skeptical or aware of this possibility when he deliberately bid OVER the evaluation of the stock. Why do that if you think it is already overvalued?

The whole thing is bizarre. Did he leap without looking? Get ahead of himself? Or did he expect more joint investors who did not fully materialize and doesn't want his fortunes tied to the rise or fall of twitter?

 

He waived due diligence at the outset. I'm definitely reevaluating my take on his intelligence.

 

I could see maybe bots accounting for no more than 5% if you look at total accounts, although that number seems comically low. But if you look at active accounts that number has to be approaching 25-30% at least.

 

Yes, that is exactly what I am thinking. They are counting abandoned and maybe even banned real accounts in their total but only estimated active bots. So their statement may be accurate in one sense, but is arguably an apples and oranges comparison if they count all users ever vs only active and not banned bots.