I think there are at least 7! ways to add up those 7 digits, so there are 5040 different ways to add up those numbers (possibly more). So the fact that ONE of them is 69 is not at all surprising.
7! would be the count if and only if the sequence of addition were important, but it's not (Transitive property of addition). If we were simply adding each digit there would be only a single unique sum, not 5040 unique sums.
All we did here was add up the digits but count the 0 as part of a two digit number, which also seems to have also happened in the 12092021/934091 machinations when 8 & 0 were counted as 80 and Elon had recently tweeted that zero is cool and important. Even if we generalize to adding all the digits but arbitrarily picking two adjacent digits to count as one two-digit number, that gives only 7-1 = 6 possible options.
The number of shares sold needed to be around 1 million for each tranche for this hypothesized scheme to work within Elon's budget of 10% total equity sale. The number of total digits in the prime factorization of such a number would be 6-10 in most cases and at the extreme would be 20 because 2^20 is about 1 million.
If we want to generalize and let the sum be 51, 69, 42, or 129 (the only relevant possibilities given the number of digits in the prime factorization) then we have 4 possible interesting sums, yielding 6*4 = 24 possible combos.
Now, there are multiple ways to add 6-10 digits to get each of these magic numbers, so a true count of maybe around 100-1000 is more accurate, but that's insignificant compared to the number of potential sequences of 7 digits which is 10^7 or 10 million.
A full proof would be much more complicated but I am convinced this is definitely surprising.
Additionally, with all the machinations around his 934,091 shares traded, and it's only two prime factors being 229 and 4079, that someone just made up one of the thousands of ways to add up those numbers is 69? That Elon PLANNED THAT? Come on, you really have to admit that that's a HUGE improbability. That he STARTED with "69", found a way to find seven (six actually) numbers that added up to 69, that when those six numbers are split into two prime integers are the only two prime factors in the number of shares he sold? Not happening.
I was initially more impressed until I saw a comment on Rob Graves' twitter feed that it would be easy to write a software script to do all of this with brute force search algorithms and I think that's true.
It would basically iterate through every single number between perhaps 500k and 5 million and look for the ones with the greatest number of simple ways for the meme numbers to appear. It could include direct digit sequences and simple arithmetic operations ( + - / * ) and prime factorization. The computer would comb through all the possibilities and find some number, apparently 934091, that has the most interesting patterns.
Also, consider the apparent tweet timing clues. Let me try to enumerate all the possible simple ways for a time to point to the magic numbers.
For 12/9 we have:
12:09, 12:18, 12:27, 12:36, 12:45, 12:54, 7:59, 8:49, 9:39, 10:29, 11:19, 3:49, 4:39, 6:29
For 420 & 42
4:20, 2:22, X:42 (12 of these), 1:32, 3:12
For 5:1
1:05, 1:14, 1:23, 1:32, 1:41, 1:50, 5:01, 5:10, 2:31, 3:21, 7:21, X:51 (12 of these)
For 69
6:33, 6:18, 6:27, 6:36, 6:45, 6:54, 2:39, 1:59, 10:59, 11:49, 12:39
That's 52 options, most of which are a bit of a stretch, out of 720 possible timestamps in a 12 hour format.
Now add in:
- 5/1/2020 8:11 tweet "Stock price too high IMO" followed by 5-1 split on 8/11/2020
- Elon is a geeky troll who despises the SEC
- All the other 934091 stuff
- 1209 Viking raid coupled with anagram for "Im team split I swear" or maybe "Split I swear, wait EM"
- Dinosaurs wearing $129 airpods
- 1:29 risk ratio of motorcycle vs car
- 12 million lbs thrust from Falcon 9
- 129th orbital flight "milestone"
- 9th item on 12-pt bullet list of FSD 10.5 release notes is missing its bullet and talks about "short-deadline" situations
- "Choked with news and starved of history" from book published 12/9 and tweeted at 12:09
- 12 + 9 + 21 = 42
- 12/9 is International Anti-Corruption Day
- 12/9 is approximately expected opening day of Giga Austin and possibly Berlin, one of the most momentous days in Tesla's history thus far
- String of 934091 sales pointing on calendar towards finishing on 12/9 with cumulative total of 12900512 shares sold (12/9 & 512 Austin area phone code)
- 12/9 coincides with many significant financial dates as
@Artful Dodger has described
As a quality engineer I professionally spend much of my time trying to get people to consider alternative explanations and not to draw strong conclusions from insufficient data. By default I assume most unexpected patterns are random coincidences, but that's just a heuristic. Simply assuming that this heuristic is ALWAYS giving the right answer is wrong because it would lead to guaranteed Type II error (failure to reject the null hypothesis) any time something really is going on.
Also I experimented with a control group where I actively tried to produce similar results with different randomly selected numbers and failed time and time again.
I simply do not see how coincidence and confirmation bias is the strongest hypothesis to explain these facts.
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