I don’t think that I trust Twitter on this.
Let’s wait for the courts to look at the topic.
Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
301–310 of 585 posts
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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 o…
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)…
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.
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 so…
> 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…
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Musk can prove that he is a bot, then he wins this lawsuit.
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.
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#307I 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 a…
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
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...
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.forbes...
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.
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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
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".
Re: Twitter says Musk’s spam analysis used tool that called his own account a bot
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
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…
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.