I rather think Musk's brain has finally caught up with his mouth, and is looking for something to squeeze out of the deal over or looking to lower the initial cost of the take over.

Musk wrecked the Tesla share price trying to showboat this deal (420 is a US cannabis reference) and now he has torpedoed the Twitter share price. He might not be stupid but he is a charlatan.

My, are you a generous soul.

He's got money, and that's all he's got.

He's got no class, he's got no refinement, he's barely cultured and he's got no reserve. He's a mouthpiece on steroids and he's got all the money for all the steroids he wants.

There is absolutely nothing interesting in him, if not for the fact that he is almost single-handedly bringing Humanity back into space.

That is his only redeeming feature, and I will give him that.

the fact that he is almost single-handedly bringing Humanity back into space.

what do you mean by that ? Russian never stopped going into space, and lately Chinese have been doing it repeatedly so. Do you implicitly try to say that Humanity = USA ? And you even try to sell this as " fact " ????

This is, of course, without even mentioning existence of Virgin Galactic, whatever Bezos effort is called, as well as the European Space Agency. But we could be here all day if we start down that road.

And Russia never developed their Soyuz technology beyond the 1960's. And China simply copied Soyuz. Neither of these come within an asses roar of SpaceX technology.

Pascal Monett: And what has Elon Musk ever done for us?!

XERXES: PayPal?

Pascal Monett: What?

XERXES: PayPal.

Pascal Monett: Oh. Yeah, yeah. He did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

COMMANDO #3: And Tesla.

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, Tesla, Pascal. Remember what electric cars used to be like?

Pascal Monett: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you PayPal and Tesla are two things that Elon Musk has done.

MATTHIAS: And SpaceX.

Pascal Monett: Well, yeah. Obviously SpaceX. I mean, SpaceX goes without saying, don't they? But apart from PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX--

COMMANDO: OpenAI?.

XERXES: SolarCity.

COMMANDO #2: StarLink!

Pascal Monett: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

COMMANDO #1: And he proved you can call someone a peado and get away with it.

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Pascal, if Elon Musk left.

Pascal Monett: All right, but apart from PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, SolarCity, StarLink and the ability to call someone a peado and get away with it, what has Elon Musk ever done for us?

XERXES: He does have a buttload of cash, Pascal.

Pascal Monett: Shut up!

That's a whole list of "features" of US presidential candidates so if he owns Twitter and gets elected then there's no risk of losing his account.

A snake oil salesman and a flim-flam artist all rolled into one.

I have to wonder how much due diligence he did before making the purchase announcement? If the chickens are coming home to roost and he ends up bailing out could he be liable for a whole raft of lawsuits? Or even another SEC investigation?

He should learn to shut his gob and just get on with running Tesla and Space-X

With the fall in the stock price of Tesla, the cost of Musk's funding for the acquisition of Twitter has risen -- Musk will need to stake more of his Tesla shares to purchase Twitter. One way to address that situation is to require less funding in the first place. Raising doubt about Twitter's number of users and the level of misuse of the platform are both ways to do that.

No, this is all part of the scam. He has apparently already sold billions in shares for the purchase of twitter. The purchase was just an excuse to minimize the impact on Tesla stock when he sold it.

If he just sold it, or even worse told the truth that he's selling while the shares are grossly overpriced by 100x (or is it 80x now, I don't follow Telsa stock) then the stock would have really tanked

I saw reports that Musk had suckered more investors into his bid, so may not need to take a margin loan against his Tesla stock. Which I guess makes things slightly safer for other Tesla speculators.

LOL 5%

More like 30%

People who singed up but have not posted even 1 time 25%

Saw the headline and thought was he complaining about that there was not enough bots?

My first thought was that he underestimated the amount of real people who are dumber than bots.

Banning dumber-than-bots people would probably be a benefit to the platform, but obviously not in line with free speech.

> the amount of real people who are dumber than bots

No matter how intelligent, real people have more money to spend than any bot.

Don't forget he's not buying a heap of servers and some software, he's buying a load of humans, and he has to make sure they are all still alive and indeed people, not cardboard cutouts.

I originally signed up because I needed to write a twitter client. I only follow a handful of companies but I have quite a few attractive young "women" who follow me. Who knows, some of them might even exist, some might actually be female, but all of them are scams of some sort.

Accounts in general in these social networks and cloud services in general that are fake or dead most probably up north of 50%. But monetizable accounts that means active and browsing content to consume adds may be less and 5% may be reasonable. Hey almost all my FB friends have locked several times their accounts and open a new one. People die and their accounts survive so the question is why these companies never clean up those dead accounts and if they are used both to boost their valuation and also to charge advertisers with their own internal bots. To me more should be looked at dead accounts than bots that render content. Most of the boys just post content and they do not bother parsing and rendering content and even if they do they are well done to actually consume any advertising content.

The real number is 0% of the monetizable accounts are fake. Oh wait, the advertisers are paying even if the accounts being served are fake.... The real number is 100% of the fake accounts are monetizable. (Aside: We can't put *that* on an earnings report.) I'm confused. What does twitter do differently for a non-monetizable account?

Thats me, signed up years ago without a single twit or retwit.

Just to follow some people / organisations on twitter.

And I have a colony on Mars to sell you…

Shut up and take my money, Do you have any spots near Deuteronilus Mensae available still I hear that's the best spot to live

I'm undecided between having a really good view of Olympus Mons caldera or being above the high cliffs on its southern flank.

Actually, I'll take both, they're only 150 or so miles apart.

No no, longterm thinking needed it's all cheap at the moment i've got my option in for all 40km of the Dorsa Brevia structure.

Thats ecoeconomics for you ;-)

I vaguely remember a figure of $1b which he has to pay if he pulls out.

Source? No contract has been signed yet, meaning no punitive terms can be applied.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-may-have-pay-1-billion-if-he-terminates-twitter-deal-filing-2022-04-26/

Is it just me or does that sound like they excluded users who aren't monetizable daily active users... as in bots?

I read a handful of people's posts on a reasonably regular basis, but I don't have an account (though the nagging has become much more noticeable of late) and I've never seen any advertising apart from the promoted content in the "What's Happening?" box in the sidebar.

It's a mystery to me how any of their users are "monetizable".

"users who aren't monetizable daily active users"

Not just bots. Add "people who were forced to sign up because that's the only way you can contact some shit businesses - the even less palatable alternative being Faecebook"

There's definitely weasel words in use here.

I would suggest that most bots do not post daily - they do a flurry of activity around a certain activity and then go silent until the next campaign. As such, they would not be included in the mDAU figures.

So they've basically chosen a group that is unrepresentative of bots, and declared that amongst that group they dont have many bots! Success!

If Elon want's to eliminate spam bots from Twitter, why is he critizing the ban of the Orange One?

I want to upvote you, but that errant apostrophe is preventing me from doing so. ;)

Bad excuse. Bots don't use apostrophes.

Wants vs. want's

Ah go on. Don't be a grammar Nazi.

Well, obviously I did anyway.

"I'm shocked to discover this previously unknown fact! "

Tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode of "Elon's Excuse".

Yeah like "I was really high on weed when I decided to make the offer"?

Looking at Bot Sentinel's numbers here ( https://botsentinel.com/stats/platform-stats ) they classify around 24% of users as 'Disruptive' or 'Problematic' - obviously this is very finger-in-the-air, I've seen some plausible accounts in the 'Disruptive' category (but also many probable bots in 'Satisfactory') - but if we imagine that there's some bias towards Bot behaviour in the accounts it is asked to analyse and it still seems plausible that we're looking at something closer to ~20% of users being bots.

A 2017 study -more rigorous than my guesswork but less current - suggested it was in the region of 15% at that point. ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf )

Whatever the source, it seems everyone outside Twitter is estimating significantly more bot users than Twitter are, which may explain a lot about why the hellsite is so full of goddamn bots.

You can take Twitter in whatever direction you want, buddy. I'll never be interested.

I'm sure there's a lot of people who'd happily tell Elon where he can take twitter.

is the bot that tracks his helicopter still on there?

I think the whole thing is just a vehicle (pun intended) for liquidating some of his Tesla shares, while trying to keep the panic factor in the markets minimised. If he just sold off stock, that could make people lose confidence, but if he portrays a need to liquidate, well, people might fall for that, and not panic. He knows his stock in Tesla is over valued, and it's a good time to cash in. He lost something like $17Bn when the Tesla stock price dropped, to cash out, $8.4Bn was it? So a 50% exchange rate from vapour to hard cash seems like a reasonable exchange rate. But the idea he sells shares in a profitable company to buy a loss making one doesn't make sense to me.

sells shares in a profitable company

if you mean Tesla by that, I remember reading that they are actually loosing money on every car they make, and the company is only " profitable " because other car manufacturers pay penalties – to Tesla – for not making their CO2 targets. The infamous "carbon tax" or "carbon stock exchange" or something like that.

They have a gross profit margin of ~29% per vehicle.

[1]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-reveals-how-much-a-Model-Y-or-Model-3-cost-to-make-reports-envious-profit-margins.596747.0.html

[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-reveals-how-much-a-Model-Y-or-Model-3-cost-to-make-reports-envious-profit-margins.596747.0.html

Well what's the point of buying a profitable company that does well at everything it does? There's nothing to fix in that.

I've been saying this since his first twitter poll about selling telsa shares. He wants to take profit before the Tesla bubble bursts.

No sane person would think that a company about the size of Subaru is worth more than the 10 biggest auto makes combined.

All this focussing on Tesla's losses in the auto market loses sight of the issue that Tesla isn't an automaker

And by that, I mean that Tesla is a battery maker that happens to sell cars wrapped around (some of) the battery packs. Carmaking wasn't intended to be a long term core business activity, but a means to an end - "creating a market for the GIgafactories". Eventually what those will be turning out is components for automakers to integrate into their own vehicles

...frustratingly opaque in how it had come up with the spam bot figure.

Translation:

They won't tell anyone just whose arse they pulled this out of.