Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy' Elon Musk has decided that it's impossible to verify the number of bot accounts on Twitter even though the social media network has told him their estimates, how they arrived at such estimates, and provided his team with a "firehose" of user data that is usually sold to corporate customers. In case you were wondering whether …
I have been seriously wondering what Musk would actually be buying.
Twitter isn’t a meaningful information sharing platform. It does not promote communication. It requires users to favor banter. I haven’t seen much use of Twitter as anything other than sharing links and making quirky comments. It is commonly used for taking swipes at other people on a platform which greatly limits follow up discussion.
I see absolutely no features or Twitter which provide real value. As an example, look at Facebook. As a platform; it is generally also a cesspool, but everyone tends to have a Facebook account and often have messenger because it is the modern equivalent of a personal phone book. Twitter doesn’t have a real networking feature. You just follow people, you don’t connect with them.
I wouldn’t consider Twitter a worthy investment. The only value I can see for Musk to buy Twitter is to hurt Donald Trump. And frankly, he is rich enough to do something petty like that.
I think it's the opposite; if he bought Twitter and choose very selectively not to apply its various moderation policies, he could continue his ingratiation with the Republican Party and thereby gain such favours as he desires next time the pendulum of government swings back to them.
See also: the drama of the Texas AG vs Twitter, with Texas 'inexplicably' using government clout to further Musk's objectives.
$50Bn is the cost of a presidency, or a presidency in your pocket?
If you try to do so by buying Twatter. I'd expect there to be some other costs still.
Putin won't have paid that much getting Cheeto Benito into the White House, and the additional cost of the remote control option was just a pair of hookers and a couple of video cams (standard KGB equipment anyway).
The ROI is ingratiating himself (again; more) with tRump, allowing the Orange-utan back on the megaphone so that he can FUD himself back into power. The Muskrat can then expect serial favors from he who would be our last president.
At least, that would be the plan...assuming of course that tRump is not serving time in Leavenworth by then.
"There will be some bonus for him or his companies."
Sure, he could allow everybody to write whatever they like about any topic but Elon or one of the companies he holds lots of stock in. So much "news reporting" is just lazy journalists copying and pasting tweets these days. The tactic would cut out a load of bad press.
What never ceases to amaze me is the sheer level of projection slung by rightwingers.
The overwhelming majority of crap on not just twitter but all social media, come from distinctly right-wing sources. Russian botnets. Anti-vaxxers. Trump Supporters. "Libertarians". ALL of this is massively right-wing.
While there are plenty of malcontents on the left, it's the equivalent of a leftist brandishing a knife at someone, vs the right nuking a major metropolitan city.
veryone tends to have a Facebook account and often have messenger because it is the modern equivalent of a personal phone book
.. which is the exact reason I do not have a Facebook account, and any use of it by companies to communicate with customers should be cause for a GDPR fine. We even have an evaluation of social media use as one of the rules in the assessment protocol for vendors now.
Not worth the price tag but it does have its amusements. I follow very very accounts. One notible is whs_carpet originally about the state of the carpets in WHSmith but now about all shops and the their funny sides. Like the discount price tags where only 1p is saved or nothing is saved. WHSmith discounted books from years ago that are now worthless (driving test ones come to mind) and then the historic side where people find old photos of beloved stores. Someone found a WHSmith that still had the cube logo round the back and so on. It's quite interesting.
And can help with research. I watch an Isle of Wight channel about old iow videos. One was put up for Queen Jubilee from 70s I think, unknown location. Decided it was a challenge to find it from shops in background. Asked on that tweeter account & the Sainsbury's archive account as I just couldn't find the place. Not long after asking someone said looked similar to their local shopping area & then the Sainsbury's archive account said they'd found it in their archive. Said what store it was and location :) turned out I couldn't find it as several of the buildings had been knocked down to building a shopping centre.
What you say makes perfect sense. That being said, every single thing you said is _entirely irrelevant_.
It also completely ignores the subtext of all this. He did all this because twitter pisses him off and he's using the stock market to punish them by illegally manipulating it.
But in his arrogance he overplayed his hand. Musk committed to buying twitter, and he chose to skip due dilligence. He is obligated to complete the deal, at the price stated. PERIOD.
He is obligated to complete the deal, at the price stated.
That would be nice (just because it would punish Musk for being an ass as usual), but it's not so simple.
The agreement lets him bow out under various pretexts. One is the "you didn't give us all the information we requested". Consequently, for the past 30 days, his team has been more and more ridiculous requests for information, to build their case for escaping the contract.
This will almost certainly end up in court, and nothing is certain until that process, including the inevitable appeals if no settlement is reached, is done. The result that looks most likely now is that Musk pays a fair bit to walk away – probably more than the $1B abandonment penalty, presumably much less than the $44B purchase price.
There's a good writeup on Techdirt.
Twittter was, when it started, a small quirky little messaging platform. It grew and was used to help so many organise rallies and attempts to bring about political change and it worked well, until our betters noticed.
Our betters, those pulling the strings of presidents and the most powerful corps in the world, don't like the masses having tools they didn't issue and don't like, so they slowly took control of Twitter and now it's nothing more than a platform for driving the fat, lazy, feckless docile masses in whatever direction Twitter is being paid to push this week.
Think I sound like a conspiracy nut. Do you homework, read up on the history of the company, the founders constant power struggles, the way Twitter promotes and removes postings at will, how they don't even allow postings on events that should be know to everyone and how Twitter only cares for the agenda of their political paymasters.
Twitter is in the ranks of the insidiious platforms like Facebook/Meta, YouTube and TikTok as one of the most vile things currently affecting humanity and I hope this damages both Musk ( an infantile man who needs to grow up ) and Twitter, however I don't think we'd be that lucky.
"Our betters, those pulling the strings of presidents and the most powerful corps in the world, don't like the masses having tools they didn't issue and don't like, so they slowly took control of Twitter "
I have a different take. The overlords could never keep track of all of the whispers so they love things like Twitter. All social media makes the bulk of their money selling data about their users. Twitter knows who is following who. Retweets to broaden a tweets coverage and how those people interact. I doubt they'd put up a fight if a three letter agency "requested" a bunch of that back end information. Since nearly everybody is horrible at infosec, it wouldn't be that hard for some organization that's good at it to put proper names on those pseudonyms. If you shut down every communication channel of your adversaries, they might just come up with some that you fail to notice or can't snoop on as easily.
Frankly, human nature and the particular features of Twitter as a medium (brevity, immediacy, indiscriminate publication, etc.) are more than adequate to explain the unfortunate result. Occam's Razor says any hypothesis that requires organized meretriciousness is less probable.
Musk is going to burn for this. He's gone too far this time, making wild statements and making illogical decisions. I qualify paying $45 billion for a worthless POS like Twitter as nothing short of insanity or financial belligerence with the intent to self-inflict injury.
When he announced the deal I knew Tesla and SpaceX would be pulled down with him. And I've been proven right.
Elon does what billionaires do to avoid paying taxes. Instead of selling stock which generates a taxable income, he uses that stock as collateral for loans. The only reason he sold stock last year was to cover the taxes on stock options that were about to expire. With his shenanigans causing the stock price of Tesla to fall, he's at risk of the banks demanding more collateral. If he's suddenly forced to sell a bunch of stock to cover the twitter deal he could be facing another billion dollar tax bill. And dumping more Tesla stock could further drive down Tesla's stock.
> he can find the $1bn breakup fee if he has to
The problem is he may have to come up with the $44b. Musk cannot terminate the takeover deal at will by just paying $1b. There is a contract between Musk and Twitter for the takeover of Twitter. Unless Musk can find a sufficiently valid legal reason to break the contract, or Twitter agrees to Musk backing out with just the $1b break-fee, Twitter could force Musk to go through with the full $44b takeover. Don't forget in that takoever contract, Musk specifically waived standard due diligence conditions. Therefore it would have to be something really huge, something beyond normal due diligence - since that has been waived - problems cropping up, and Musk's complaints about the bot-rate isn't it. That spam-bot estimate - 5% - has been public knowledge, it's been listed in previous Twitter SEC filings, since before the takeover proposal. Therefore that is something that Musk should already know, at least if he performed normal due diligence, but of course he waived that right.
"Yes, but who is the information useful to and which direction is the flow?"
Way back when I had a Twitter account there was a bot that would send me a tweet to let me know if there was an ISS pass within the next so many hours. Twitter shut that one down for too many tweets as it was really popular.
I don't believe this is actually true: there is a summary of the merger agreement posted on the SEC's website (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522120474/d310843ddefa14a.htm), which asserts that if he doesn't provide the funding, then the deal's off and he owes $1B. There are no restrictions on _why_ the funding isn't provided, just that if the it isn't funded, or the clock runs out (Oct 24, 2022), he pays $1B and get's nothing.
"Musk cannot terminate the takeover deal at will by just paying $1b."
From what I understand of what's been going on, yes, he CAN walk away by paying out the $1B termination fee. The shenanigans over the bot count is Musk trying to walk away WITHOUT paying the termination fee because the agreement can be cancelled if the are "significant changes" since the deal was agreed.
Unless Musk can find a sufficiently valid legal reason to break the contract
Potentially the easiest way of doing that is to show that they lied about there being less that 5% fake Twitter users and in reality what they are trying to sell him is a platform with many less users than claimed.
From his perspective the ideal disclosure evidence (should it exist) would be internal communications showing Twitter management were aware that the 5% was an underestimate. That then allows his lawyers to claim that Twitter provided fraudulent information to secure the contract.
While taking SpaceX Public is an option, the IPO price may not be what he would want though. He has shown poor judgement at Tesla. He has shown poor judgement with having an affair with a top executive one of his other companies. He has shown bad judgement in the Twitter deal.
On an IPO, most of the shares are not bought by your average stock investor; but banks, mutual funds, etc.
Also, if he used IPO money to buy Twitter, he pays a lot of money for Twitter but it is worth far south of that.
Where he is going to get some of the funding for the Twitter deal is probably off the table now. Why would they now be interested in Twitter now. The original price of $54.20 a share was already a premium and compared to where the share price is now, $54.20 will mean it could be beyond getting your money back for the foreseeable future.
The shareholders of Twitter as well as the board want the deal to close as they profit from it. The people or entities that help fund that are on the losing side. They would be on the losing side because of Elon Musk.
"While taking SpaceX Public is an option, the IPO price may not be what he would want though."
Without a solid plan that included some ROI for a Mars program, he would have to cancel those dreams even if he was able to maintain a majority stake. He'd also have to prove likely returns on the Starlink system to a wider array of people that can do math and aren't interested in anything more than making money.
"The reason for the drop in value of Tesla is the expectation that a large quantity of shares are about to be dumped on the market."
There was also a huge push back on Elon dividing more of his time when Tesla needs to get promised models into production and factories up to speed.
I disagree. If twitter takes this to court then they are epically stupid. This will end in regulation for social media if that happens. This is not an IT or tech issue, but a financial regulation issue. The meat and potatoes of this is that twitter did not have a satisfactory answer as to what their user engagement really is. They have data that they sell to corporations, but the main allegation that Musk has made, that the journalists are NOT addressing, is that this data is doctored and not scientifically valid.
They would have to explain to the courts, why they use such a small sample size for determining bots, they will have to explain to the courts how they differentiate between Russian bots and legitimate bots. They will have to explain to the court how their methods followed ethical business guidelines and how they came to their methodology.
I really want to see the outcome of this. I do not believe twitter has ever been forthcoming with honest data. There was this laissez faire mentality that the public had with them that to me was too reminiscent of the dot.com bubble and enron. when you have the cable news screeching about Russian bots on twitter yet nothing comes out of it, something is clearly wrong. No other industry seems to have these issues, so why do we accept it on social media?
"This is not an IT or tech issue, but a financial regulation issue."
But most of the points you then make are technical.
The point others have made that you ignore is that he waived due diligence so why is he making a fuss now other than to wriggle out of a bargain that he didn't just enter freely but insisted upon?
This isn't going to be like HP/Autonomy waived due diligence. In that case it was a US coumapny in US courts vs non-US and even then HP had to swallow their losses. This is one US company in US courts vs another.
I was thinking along similar lines. It's all well and good Twitter stating they know how many bots there are based on a statistical analysis of 100 account and then giving Musks team access to the "firehose" of raw data and saying "look, here it is, work it out for yourself" when Twitter themselves are really the only ones in a position to actually analyse that data themselves. It make you wonder WHY they aren't analysing that data themselves. Data collection is a major part of their business. Why don't they know? There's many other reasons why Musk is a dick and screwing around over this deal, but asking for this bot data and then Twitter being so obtuse over it is not one of them.
"The meat and potatoes of this is that twitter did not have a satisfactory answer as to what their user engagement really is."
Beyond the waiving of due diligence, this is a hostile takeover, not a negotiated sale. Twitter wasn't looking to sell out. If I take a fancy to your car and make a high offer that you will accept, it doesn't mean I can then demand to see all of the service records before handing over the cash. If we have a contract for the sale and it contains a clause that if you back out, you owe me money, you still can't demand to see the records I hold before paying unless that's specifically in the contract and you can terminate the deal if you see anything you don't like. I am not on the hook to make any assurances as I was not the one that initiated the sale.
Elon publicly made it known that he would pay $54.20/share as his best, last and final offer as-is.
"you still can't demand to see the records I hold before paying unless that's specifically in the contract and you can terminate the deal if you see anything you don't like."
The moment Twitter said that less than 5% of accounts were bots they became legally required to prove it, they should have just said that they didn't know. You can't lie about details of the company during a buyout.
The fun part is that even if he wants to, he can't take the $1BN breakup fee option. He's signed the agreement to buy already, waiving due diligence as he did so, and he now has to attempt to buy Twitter at the agreed price. The breakup fee only comes into play if he's unable to secure funding, and "but the bots" or "I don't want to" doesn't count as being unable. If he can't wrangle any investors any more, he has to go back to the original offer of paying by selling of his own shares.
Kick and scream as much as he wants, he's made his bed and now has to sleep in it. The question is just if he'll give in (which being that it's Musk, just lol at that happening), or if Twitter has to drag him to court first.
> If he can prove fraud, which it could be argued that the dodgy bot numbers are
What are you basing that on?
Twitter says that 5% of it's average monthly monetizable users are spam-bots, not that 5% of its entire account base are spam-bots.
The 'monetizable users' are the user accounts that remain after they have filtered out spam and other accounts that they don't generate money from. They could have already eliminated over 50% of their total accounts to come up with this 'monetizable users' number. What they are saying is that their filtering process is not perfect, that after they have filtered out what they think are junk accounts, that remaining set could still have a few - 5% - bot accounts.
"that remaining set could still have a few - 5% - bot accounts."
Twitter say they have 330 million active users. If we halve that and say 5% are bots, that's still 8,250,000 bots. eight and a quarter million bots. Sounds like a lot to me. In PR terms, it seems like a much bigger and scarier number than 5%. Especially when there's still another 150 million "non-monitisable" accounts, many, many more of which could be bots than the baseline 5%. But apparently even Twitter don't know how many there are. It sounds more and more like they are wilfully turning a blind eye to make their numbers look better.
Try to understand that in this instance, Musk is being really really stupid.
If he wants to buy twitter he needs to talk up its value to just below the purchase price so he can get good interest rates on the required loans.
If he wants to back out of the deal he needs to talk up the share price until it is well over his offer so Twitter shareholders decide they would be better off voting against the sale.
Trash talking Twitter again is just going to repeat the financial battering he took last time he did it.
Skimmed it. It is large with plentiful legal jargon and IANAL.
Section 9.9 covers specific performance. So far Twitter appear to have jumped through the required hoops to apply for it. Musk's drivel about 5% bots does not come close to a way out and if he had anything better he would be shouting it from the roof tops. It will go before a judge and there will likely be a settlement before the judge reaches a decision. It will take years but Musk will not wriggle out of this for a paltry $1B.
" It will take years but Musk will not wriggle out of this for a paltry $1B."
That's hard to say. He didn't get his peepee slapped for calling somebody (repeatedly) a pedophile. He didn't get in trouble for lying on SEC filings about Solar City. He didn't get spanked for not recusing himself as he said during the Solar City bailout. The guy is proving himself to be coated in PTFE.
The TL;DR of this pantomime has been to expose the fact that any "value" in social media platforms is derived from what the owners of said social media platforms claim.
I've known car salesmen like that.
All Musk has done is put them to the sword. And - surprise, surprise - mysteriously they can't find the goods.
If anyone pays to advertise on Twatter after this (or "Meta" or whatever the current trend is) without negotiating a serious discount is a little dim.
And that is why Musk has drawn the haters.
Social media platforms are a little like ponzi cryptoscams. You seem to need a new one every so often to ensure people still part with cash.
No he has done considerably more than that by signing legally binding agreements which he will undoubtedly vigourously contest in court for several years up and down to various appellate levels. The lawyers are licking their lips and they are about the only people to benefit from this shambles.
Oddly enough, the Delaware Chancery Court is not like most courts, and moves really, really quickly... and can only be appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court.
It's hard to see how Musk could get a Federal jurisdiction, as the deal is structured as one Delaware corporation (Musk's vehicle, called X Holdings I) buying another (Twitter) with the assistance of two other ones (X Holdings II and III, also Musk's vehicles).
That's a good point, but while the SEC might go after Musk for being a basic dinkwahd, shareholders only have limited recourse against the existing board. And of course only if they don't get their $54.20 a share... if they do, or are "made whole" by (hypothetically speaking) Musk paying Twitter enough cash to increase the value of the company to the point where each share is worth $54.20, they won't have a leg to stand on.
The consensus amongst those who know seems to be that this is going to cost Musk ten figures, but opinion varies as to whether it's low (the $1b breakup fee), middle or high...
It is not just a matter of inciting violence. Republicans hate the idea of other people having free speech.
I suspect it may involve stamping his feet whilst screaming loudly that it's not fair, when he gets sued for the $1 billion that he agreed to pay in a contract he voluntarily signed. And probably some horseshit about "biased judges" when they confirm that contract law and legal precedent apply to him too, no matter how rich he is.
"Would a near EoL battery pack make a reasonable warhead?"
I don't think you can count on a Tesla battery pack exploding on impact. They sometimes do of course, but until the kinks are ironed out, I think a more conventional explosive might be a better choice.
It would just keep going round with you.
Only if you have the correct orbital speed for your altitude AND you just stick your hand out the window letting go of the marble without altering its speed in any way. Even then, given atmospheric drag (which is still present several 100km up), the marble will gradually lose speed which will cause it to undergo orbital decay, ultimately falling to earth and at least partly burn up.
"Can you actually drop a marble from orbit?"
Yes, use a nice sized steely and fasten a long piece of copper wire to it. The problem is it would be impossible to aim. From LEO, the long wire interacts with the Earth's magnetic field and it induces drag. I couldn't say if the marble would melt and make pretty lights or if it would slow down enough to survive passing through the atmosphere.
Even a marble dropped from orbit can have one heck of an impact if it hits the ground...
But by and large it wouldn't.
Space rocks have to be a fair bit bigger than a marble if they would have to have a marble-sized remnant hitting the earth; most of it will burn up. If you start with a marble there may be several dust specs arriving at altitude zero, but I guess you' agree that their impact wouldn't be particularly impressive.
I guess that if you threw a marble out of the ISS its entry speed may be low enough that less of it will burn up compared to an honest marble-sized meteoroid before the remnant(s) hits the earth, but it will still be partly vapourised.
pace rocks have to be a fair bit bigger than a marble if they would have to have a marble-sized remnant hitting the earth
This is true. Even an anvil wouldn't do much damage on impact since there would be little left.
A nicely-shaped penetrator made out of tungsten, that's a different matter..
"I think a more conventional explosive might be a better choice."
Something like 2,400t (US) of LoX and CH4 from a Starship that doesn't light its engines after the first stage cuts off? If they manage to mix well before impact, the detonation would be measured in Kt.
His intention was never to buy Twitter.
It was to have a reason to cash in on his ridiculously over-valued Tesla stock.
He's a conman and a liar.
And Musk is not worth $200 billion.
Tesla stock will collapse at some point, as all of these over-inflated, over-valued stocks do eventually.
"It was to have a reason to cash in on his ridiculously over-valued Tesla stock."
He needed cash to exercise Tesla options he had that would have expired and the price per share was way up past stupid. I'm not sure if the option price was as low as some people posted but I'm sure it was quite a spread. Given how much the stock price increased, he needed to pay a bunch in taxes and paying taxes at that level is good for even more PR spin, so why not? I don't think that the options have expired yet, so he might be holding off on buying more Tesla stock until the price drops more or he's up against the deadline.
How many users are on Twitter? Lots. Including many world leaders. Most of them tweet like bots, so it is impossible to get an accurate figure. There are lots of cats too, posting cute videos of themselves, which is popular Web 2.0 content.
Essentially Twitter is a news and announcements site and functions better than Facebook and Reuters at it. There is plenty you can add on. Chinese netizens proved to be adept at monetising their own social media sites until Xi decided to take them down in the name of communist purity. You could do that with Twitter and skim a % off everything. Words of warning: It is unwise to buy any tech entity when it is mature - there are reasons for the popular appeal of young trophy apps. Twitter users are used to getting everything for free. Requesting they open their wallets and purses may be a step too far on the possibility scale, even for Musk. And he would be buying a star topology service with high bandwidth costs, high storage costs and oversight issues. You could spend a lot less money on a start up operating as a distributed service - tiny bandwidth and storage costs and no oversight issues - and cash in big time as it growed and growed, possibly to replace Twitter.
Musk is rich enough to lose a billion and pay it in 1c coins on a sponsored livestream for good measure. This has cost Twitter a whole lot more. Next time you are approached by a rich person promising sacks of lovely cash, hide in your safe space and call Deputy Dawg.
As for the 'drastic action' - perhaps he is going to break into song.
"Next time you are approached by a rich person promising sacks of lovely cash, hide in your safe space and call Deputy Dawg."
The board originally rebuffed Elon but he kept pushing and stating that the shareholders should be deciding. So the board just gave Elon what he wanted....to let the shareholders decide. If you look at the stock price, it is a payday for the shareholders as Twitter would probably never see $54.20 to begin with.
There are lots of cats too, posting cute videos of themselves
My cats don't use twitter - it's *far* too much effort. And there are not many Koi there for them to eat..
(My wife managed to prevent our youngest cat carrying off and eating one of the koi from the pond yesterday.. The cat is still giving her evil looks.)
"Functions better at it?"
Not if you tried Twitter early on and found the web UI to be such a bloated and inefficient pig that your browser would freeze every 5 minutes and abandoned the "platform" as a piece of CRAP before it even was "big."
It still doesn't function efficiently. It's lousy software compared to other web platforms out there.
"We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders. "
Notice - Shareholders - not Stakeholders. The only people who will benefit from this deal going through are the current shareholders who will get way more cash from selling their Shares to Musky then they ever could have hoped to get in normal operation. Since probably most of the management hold Shares, it's not really a wonder that they are so keen.
Everyone else - workers at Twitter, Users, corporations that use Twitter for marketing, etc., oh they're screwed if the deal goes through, but at least the Shareholders got rich(er), so you know that's all that matters...
A batch of workers left when this deal was signed. A batch more will go if Musk takes charge. Twitter have reduced the number of staff they employ for hiring new staff. Musk has already worked out that even if his original plans for Twitter had made any sense he would have difficulty getting them implemented.
Actually, GeoCities is old enough now that a revival might work for a while, out of a combination of nostalgia and hipster retro vogue.
MySpace would be tougher, I think, because the cultural moment when hideous DIY graphic design was a sign of outsider-art credibility is probably gone. And a new MySpace that didn't permit, even cultivate, that aesthetic would be dismissed as a cheap remake.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62102821
"The billionaire businessman had asked for evidence to back the company's assertion that spam bot accounts make up less than 5% of its total users."
"In a letter, Mr Musk's lawyer said Twitter had failed or refused to provide this information."
Go get the popcorn. This will enrich some lawyers for a few years. A good few years bearing in mind the apparent disfunctionality of US civil law.
That is shitty reporting from the BBC. I thought you had been cherry picking the quotes so I read the article. They are only quoting Musk. That specific 5% is Musk deliberately misquoting Twitter. The actual quote from Twitter's filings is "less than 5% of its first-quarter monetizable daily active users were made of bots."
Twitter sells adverts based on the number of monetizable daily active users. It arrives at this number by filtering out a large number of bots some of which provide interesting tweets, but none of which use the user interface or see adverts. Twitter says that the number of users that it claims see adverts is includes less than 5% bots.
Any journalist capable of minimal fact checking would have spotted Musk's malicious misquote. The judge in Delaware is going to find out really fast too. I used to expect better from the BBC.
The actual quote from Twitter's filings is "less than 5% of its first-quarter monetizable daily active users were made of bots."
You are correct in that that is what Twitters answer was. Musks argument appears to be that it doesn't answer the question asked of them.
"How many Twitter accounts are bots?"
"Well, if we take the total number of accounts, discard a load of them for $reasons, then take a tiny sample of 100, we reckon there might be less than 5% bots" I don't know about you, but if working with a sample of only 100, shouldn't the answer be an integer of 1,2,3 or 4 if it's "less than 5%", even when multiplying up by 100's of millions accounts to project the actual numbers? If the sample is 100, then you can't have one account being partially a bot. Yeah, I don't do stats :-)
I used to expect better from the BBC.
The BBCs technical coverage (IT, medical etc etc) has always been really poor (although good when compared to some of their competitors). Which is what happens when even their 'specialist' reporters (RC-J - I'm looking at you) don't seem to have a clue what they are talking about and seem to mostly just regurgitate press briefings..
And when they have stand-in generalist reporters doing technical segments it gets worse.
The Twitter Board was very quick to agree to the sale, without considering if Muskrat was approaching it in good faith or not. With the shareholders not only losing out on a nice payout, but also seeing this fiasco tank the value of their shares, they could be motivated to replace most of the current board members.
Actually the board tried to poison the shareholding to block him, but the larger shareholders threatened to sue the board for not selling Twitter at high price. It's an interesting story - I recommend the corporate lawyer HoegLaw's YouTube playlist on it.
The board and share holders were clearly aware they were selling a pig in a poke. The board exploited Musk's haste to get a specific performance clause to up the payout beyond $1B and a due diligence waiver to hog tie Musk's defence in the inevitable litigation. If I were a share holder I would be impressed by how well the board had maximised the value of my shares. As a cherry on top, the board got Musk to sign a clause about not trash talking Twitter on Twitter. It was obvious that once Musk spotted he was penned in his immediate response would be to squeal. Twitter's lawyers will argue that any reduction in share value is a result of Musk's tweets.
Somehow Musk's lawyers were able to get him to stay off Twitter for 9 days. He has come back with a photo of him meeting with Pope Francis. The only way this could get stranger would be to announce a coal rolling option for Teslas.
"The board exploited Musk's haste"
What? Elon made his first, best and final offer. He backed out of taking a seat on the board. He could have demanded more due diligence but didn't which is far below a rookie mistake. Elon is known for his bravado so what the hell. Get his signature on a contract with a notary present and feed him all the rope he whinges for. See what happens.
"The Twitter Board was very quick to agree to the sale, without considering if Muskrat was approaching it in good faith or not."
They got a signature on a contract. There isn't any worrying about the fate of Twitter, only how well the stockholders do.
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands: But he that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him and makes me poor indeed.
If he has 200 quatloos, and it costs him one quatloo to be free of the deal, he'll walk away. I've tried not to follow his trails and tribulations, but I get the feeling he's a binary decision maker, all or nothing 1 or 0.
Making the popcorn now. Show starts at 11! Or perhaps 10!
Twitter only cares about promoting whatever political agenda they're being paid to promote this week. Poeple think Twitter is just a free message service, well all that influcence and infrastructure they use needs to be paid for, that comes from a lot of dirty money pouring in from our betters, those pulling the strings of the great and the good.
A curse on Musk ( a rather pathetic and immature man ) and curse on Twitter and their polically paid and affilated ilk, the quicker humanity frees itself of social media platforms, the better it will be.
A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.
Those billionaires believe they can do everything. They believe they are above laws (and most of the times are) and can fuck anyone without having to pay the price for it. But from time to time, it doesn't happen so well, and they are bring back down to Earth.
I will really enjoy my popcorn this time.
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