What of those shareholders who fought tooth and nail to stop Elon?
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Elon & Twitter
- Thread starter Buckminster
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Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Bias!
I also want $54.20 a share. Both because I like money and because I want to see what happens if Elon owns Twitter.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Oh, damn, this reminded me I guess indirectly I AM a twitter shareholder since my 401k that I can only invest in a short list of funds is in an S&P500 index fund, and twitter is in the S&P 500....
My apologies for previous failures to disclose conflict of interest
Knightshade
Well-Known Member
Except there continues to not only be 0 evidence of fraud (which requires intent- not just "our measurement method is dumb or wrong"), but Twitter explicitly states that SPECIFIC measurement is based on broad human judgement and might well be wrong.
This isn't them saying "We have X dollars in revenue" and it's off by 50% in real life because someone cooked the books.
This is "we made up a measurement, here's the garbage method we use to guess at it, and we could be way off"
All of which Elons lawyers confirmed is true in their own filings (we covered this a few pages ago)
And if THAT is true, then there's no basis for Elon backing out.
Even if the "real" 5% number is actually 50%.
Because again what Elon imagines they said in the SEC filing is vastly different from what they actually said in it.
This isn't them saying "We have X dollars in revenue" and it's off by 50% in real life because someone cooked the books.
This is "we made up a measurement, here's the garbage method we use to guess at it, and we could be way off"
All of which Elons lawyers confirmed is true in their own filings (we covered this a few pages ago)
And if THAT is true, then there's no basis for Elon backing out.
Even if the "real" 5% number is actually 50%.
Because again what Elon imagines they said in the SEC filing is vastly different from what they actually said in it.
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ZenRockGarden
Active Member
Yeah, I'm a little fascinated at those embracing the "Twitter lied to the SEC about the bots" crowd. We can all agree that the way Twitter estimates bots is incredibly naive and prone to human judgement error, but they disclosed exactly that in their SEC filings and literally said their way of estimating could be off.
I just don't see any legal traction on it, even if the bot count (measured by some other, possibly better standard/means) is low.
If you go deeper on the "bot" topic, you'll quickly find a ton of grey area. How do you define a "bot" account or activity? If you use a fleet of humans in India to manually create real accounts and sell followers... are those "bots"? What about a group of accounts that are handled by a human running a brand, but the human has some automation to auto-publish material (written by the human) to multiple accounts? How about real human accounts that have been compromised by a hacker and he's adding follows and posts in addition to the real owners activity - is that account "bot or not?".
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I certainly don't agree. How do you determine if an account is a bot without human judgement?
Twitter's methodology seems fine and no one has proposed a better one.
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So it's not a material event, or even relevent, if advertisers (Twitter's revenue source) suddenly are told they only have half the previously reported audience? And that Twitter had effectively been overcharging them for years prior?
In other words, you're saying Twitter's is wrong in what they stated in their 10-K?
I agree with most of what you are saying especially about Twitter’s vague language about their methodology and related disclaimers.
BUT…
Playing devil’s advocate here I do think Elon & Co. can take this approach
1. Use data science to show bot percentage is much higher than 5%. I think this is going to be so difficult.
2. Twitter reports earnings on Jul 22. If the recent drama around bots had any impacts we should see some hit to ad revenues. Next earnings report is likely not until the trial is finished. In other words Elon and Co. can use this to correlate bots and revenues.
If Elons wants to argue MAE he better hope Q2 revenues are bad. Of course Twitter can argue that this is macro related but it should be an interesting earnings report nonetheless.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Elon and Co coming up with their own methodology to get better estimates of bot numbers not just some random manual sampling of 100 users per day.
It is laughable how bad their methodology is, it’s too bad for Elon they covered all bases with vague disclaimers.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Or, Elon creates a few million bots, sees if they show up in Twitter's count. Maybe he already did and is just waiting for Q2 numbers. Most entertaining option.
@vikings123 I think you dropped a negation:
Use data science to show bot percentage is much higher than 5%. I don't think this is going to be so difficult.
@vikings123 I think you dropped a negation:
Use data science to show bot percentage is much higher than 5%. I don't think this is going to be so difficult.
If it’s his own methodology he can always make sure it’s working in his favor.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
A few million is only 1.5% so it wouldn't show up. Also Elon would need proof that the bots were counted as mDAU's and not filtered out.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
100% bots through the magic of "data science." haha
No idea what you are getting at. Data science is not magic. The point is Twitter does not even have a semblance of a tool/methodology to track bot numbers. It’s just fluff. Elon has the brains and resources to actually come up with a methodology that works.
Recent count was 217M, I was thinking few like 5M or so. Would be trivial to request their status from Twitter as part of the proceedings. Or delete then to drive numbers down.
Though technically, they might be able to be included under the multiple-account carve out. Which would then bring that loophole to the forefront.
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