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Should I step down as head of twitter This poll is closed. |
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420 | 4.43% |
| No |
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69 | 0.73% |
| Goku |
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9001 | 94.85% |
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ben shapino posted:Please reach out to justice@tesla.com with this information post haste what information? that we don't know stuff that could come out at trial?
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Aug 15, 2022 03:01
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Bad Purchase posted:what information? that we don't know stuff that could come out at trial? Yes
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Aug 15, 2022 03:02
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ok ben shapino, definitely will do this
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Aug 15, 2022 03:03
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Bad Purchase posted:i didn't miss that point, i even called it out in the part of my post you're quoting. the method that elon tweeted out is their sampling technique. what is still not known is how they decide which accounts are monetizable and active and what their bot criteria are. obviously those are different from public research, which has no access to twitter's internal method and data. why would the judge make them explain it??? it's completely and totally irrelevant to the court case the Delaware Chancery Court isn't gonna engage in a fishing expedition on Musk's behalf. if he doesn't already have hard proof that Twitter is committing fraud, then the judge isn't gonna go help him find some, because he can't back out of a contract solely on the grounds of suspicions and bad vibes
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Aug 15, 2022 03:13
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it's not likely, but you're relying on a judge in an american courtroom to act rationally and that doesn't always happen. musk's strategy seems to be to claim twitter was lying about bots before he ever made the offer and waived diligence. it's not a good strategy, but i fully expect them to present whatever bullshit they can scrape together to "prove" twitter was committing fraud before the buyout deal ever got off the ground, and hope that the judge isn't smart enough to understand what bots are and how math works and will require twitter to counter the claim. that's pretty much all they've got. i really don't get everyone leaping to twitter's defense and pretending they're angels just because they're against elon. it's obvious twitter has a bot problem that they downplay to investors with opaque metrics. do you really think they aren't designed or cherry picked to hide the scale of the problem? i can't prove it, but i bet that if it did become public, we'd see that their method stinks and was intended to hide the problem. the ideal outcome is that both elon and twitter eat poo poo here. if i had to pick one, then yeah, elon deserves it more and is certainly more likely to lose. i just am not willing to concede that there is absolutely no risk to twitter that might make them consider settling for less than the full 44 billion prize.
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Aug 15, 2022 03:24
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Why would or should Twitter care about non-monetizable users vs the ones that can generate daily revenue and why should Twitter waste their time on them beyond the smallest courting efforts?
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Aug 15, 2022 03:31
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500excf type r posted:Why would or should Twitter care about non-monetizable users vs the ones that can generate daily revenue and why should Twitter waste their time on them beyond the smallest courting efforts? they have to spend the same amount of effort counting the monetizable users as non-monetizable users. it's the same exercise.
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Aug 15, 2022 03:34
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Bad Purchase posted:the issue is whether the trial reveals that information, which twitter wants to hide Asspull guess here but I'd bet that delaware corporate court is a pretty good venue for getting evidence sealed as proprietary corporate information. Bad Purchase posted:and also whether their 5% metric has been used in a misleading way to investors, or their methodology is bad to the point of being fraudulent. That's the thing that everyone is saying has pretty much zero chance whatsoever because twitter gets to select all the criteria for bot-vs-human and MDAU-vs-not, the methodology is whatever they want, and their investor report has a rather steep disclaimer on it. Like it could happen. But twitter would have to be giant idiots to lie about a thing where they pretty much have free reign to define the rules for truth, and even then they still get some wiggle room. e: Bad Purchase posted:i really don't get everyone leaping to twitter's defense and pretending they're angels just because they're against elon. Klyith fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 03:38
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Klyith posted:Asspull guess here but I'd bet that delaware corporate court is a pretty good venue for getting evidence sealed as proprietary corporate information. yeah, i'm sure that's true. although elon already broke his NDA once, he could do it again. but the bigger thing i don't know the answer to is if the court discovers evidence of fraud in the proprietary information, then what? are they under any obligation to report it? are they under any obligation to keep it sealed? Klyith posted:That's the thing that everyone is saying has pretty much zero chance whatsoever because twitter gets to select all the criteria for bot-vs-human and MDAU-vs-not, the methodology is whatever they want, and their investor report has a rather steep disclaimer on it. just because something is proprietary and opaque doesn't mean it can't be fraudulent. like, suppose there was an email out there where jack or whoever was in charge at the time wrote to the bot counting department and said "hey we need to make this problem go away, make sure the number stays below 5%". that would be evidence that investors were intentionally misled. i highly doubt any such evidence will be found or even exists, but fishing for that is basically all elon can do. Klyith posted:It's not leaping to twitter's defense to say that elon's bot strategy is a stupid one that has zero chance. (Which is different than saying that he has zero chance altogether to lawsuit his way out. He's making a ton of noise about the bot thing rather than the legally actionable thing because he's trying to be a huge pain in the rear end and get twitter to renegotiate.) i'm not talking about the zero chance stuff, but there have been people itt who vigorously defend twitter's honor about their bot metrics when really we don't and can't know. but twitter certainly has a financial motivation to hide the problem and i don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if they're being dishonest. it really shouldn't affect the elon trial, and i guess it's hard for me to say in this thread that i'm skeptical about twitter's metrics without also sounding like i'm rooting for elon, which i absolutely am not. Bad Purchase fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 03:49
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Bad Purchase posted:what information? that we don't know stuff that could come out at trial? Like uh, ivan, oop, Elon’s involvement in installing backdoors on all Bluetooth devices that pipe your data to the CIA and using an IR spectral blackout that violates antitrust laws by inhibiting the development of other IR devices by sapping the operating distances of anything at that bandwidth? I mean somebody should just pull the rotten tooth out of his skull so that poo poo doesn’t work anymore. 
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Aug 15, 2022 04:05
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Bad Purchase posted:i still think the most likely outcome is twitter will offer a settlement where he pays a few billion to walk away and the trial is just the stick to make him take the deal. although i agree it would be intensely funny, i am not sure a judge would really want to force an unwilling buyer to gain sole control of a company he now has bad blood with unless there were no possible alternative. that would be a pretty terrible situation for the workers, which the court may actually care about because they're white collar. It's also not like keeping them employed under their current leadership is doing them a big favor since those guys would already be the ones that decided to tank the company by selling it to Musk in the first place and they'd be the ones forced to continue running it in that case instead of Musk. I would think a decent number of twitter employees are looking for employment elsewhere regardless of the outcome (and maybe even hoping the judge forces the sale if twitter has an ESPP or other stock based benefit). yook fucked around with this message at 04:32 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 04:28
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I don't think people are rushing to twitters defenseman. it's a Sancho panda issue where whether the stone hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the stone its bound to be bad for the pitcher. We're betting on musk, not the global financial system, being the pitcher.
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Aug 15, 2022 04:36
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Main Paineframe posted:why would the judge make them explain it??? it's completely and totally irrelevant to the court case In fact, he could have used due diligence to test his suspicions, but he waived due diligence because he wanted that sweet internet cred. PS: No one is on twitter's side here, we're on the 'haha ol musky really blew his dick off with a shotgun this time"s side. Party Ape fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 04:48
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Klyith posted:That's the thing that everyone is saying has pretty much zero chance whatsoever because twitter gets to select all the criteria for bot-vs-human and MDAU-vs-not, the methodology is whatever they want, and their investor report has a rather steep disclaimer on it. That's because its a metric that doesn't really matter except as a trend. It doesn't matter how you define it as long as you define it consistently each time.
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Aug 15, 2022 04:50
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The metric definition seems pretty important to me since advertisers are paying some amount of money assuming their ads will be seen by a specific amount of people in their target demographic. If twitter is intentionally lying about the actual number of people seeing ads wouldn’t that be fraud?
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Aug 15, 2022 05:12
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Sophy Wackles posted:The metric definition seems pretty important to me since advertisers are paying some amount of money assuming their ads will be seen by a specific amount of people in their target demographic. If twitter is intentionally lying about the actual number of people seeing ads wouldn’t that be fraud? They would have to be intentionally lying with the numbers rather than "we have consistently reported this number which is produced using our dogshit math".
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Aug 15, 2022 05:16
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The trick is that they have to keep updating their algorithm so there is no consistency. Welcome to the stock market where the rules are made up but the points matter.
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Aug 15, 2022 05:20
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Sophy Wackles posted:Pretty sure Elon is going to be forced to buy Twitter and it will immediately go to $100/share and he will be richer than ever and hailed as the greatest business genius of all time. Note to self: buy twitter shares
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Aug 15, 2022 05:35
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Bad Purchase posted:i didn't miss that point, i even called it out in the part of my post you're quoting. Then you don't understand that terms can have extremely specific meanings in industries that don't 100% jive with common language usage. You are literally making the exact same errors as a creationist arguing that evolution is just a theory
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Aug 15, 2022 05:41
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Sophy Wackles posted:The metric definition seems pretty important to me since advertisers are paying some amount of money assuming their ads will be seen by a specific amount of people in their target demographic. If twitter is intentionally lying about the actual number of people seeing ads wouldn’t that be fraud? Lying is the key word in that sentence. If I say "I calculate X metric using Y technique" and you assume it means Z, you don't get to come back later and accuse me of lying because you assumed something I didn't say. Plus advertising is based on more metrics than raw user numbers, an advertiser is more likely to say "I want to advertise to these 500,000 email addresses" or "I want to advertise to people who post about <rival company>" than just spray and pray.
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Aug 15, 2022 06:05
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I haven't bought twitter in years, but I can tell you not once in the process of purchasing twitter did I give a single, solitary, hot gently caress about what their MDAU was. I didn't even know that was a thing they tracked until this court case, and I've done literal million dollar+ deals with these bumbling chuckleguppies.
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Aug 15, 2022 06:08
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Bad Purchase posted:it's not likely, but you're relying on a judge in an american courtroom to act rationally and that doesn't always happen. musk's strategy seems to be to claim twitter was lying about bots before he ever made the offer and waived diligence. it's not a good strategy, but i fully expect them to present whatever bullshit they can scrape together to "prove" twitter was committing fraud before the buyout deal ever got off the ground, and hope that the judge isn't smart enough to understand what bots are and how math works and will require twitter to counter the claim. that's pretty much all they've got. it's obvious that bots make up more than 5% of Twitter's userbase however, Twitter's SEC filing never claimed that they didn't the claims they make in their SEC filings are much more precise and come with a number of caveats written by their lawyers, including a disclaimer that actively acknowledges that their methods may be flawed and are not guaranteed to be accurate bot counts and the corporate courts in Delaware, the corporate center of America, are not generally prone to engaging in bizarre bullshit Bad Purchase posted:yeah, i'm sure that's true. although elon already broke his NDA once, he could do it again. but the bigger thing i don't know the answer to is if the court discovers evidence of fraud in the proprietary information, then what? are they under any obligation to report it? are they under any obligation to keep it sealed? there is no legal grounds for elon to be allowed fish around for stuff if he does not have proof that Twitter has committed fraud, then he can't legally back out of the contract if he can't legally back out of the contract, then there's no reason to go digging through twitter's emails this is actually a very straightforward and simple legal case: elon signed a contract that is extremely favorable to the other side, with specific clauses to make it extremely difficult for him to get cold feet and backing out. now he's getting cold feet and trying to back out
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Aug 15, 2022 06:15
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Barudak posted:I haven't bought twitter in years, but I can tell you not once in the process of purchasing twitter did I give a single, solitary, hot gently caress about what their MDAU was. I didn't even know that was a thing they tracked until this court case, and I've done literal million dollar+ deals with these bumbling chuckleguppies. The thing about elon is that he’s 18 billion dollars in debt so he doesn’t have 44 billion dollars to spend.
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Aug 15, 2022 06:18
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Sentient Data posted:Then you don't understand that terms can have extremely specific meanings in industries that don't 100% jive with common language usage. You are literally making the exact same errors as a creationist arguing that evolution is just a theory i wrote: Bad Purchase posted:of course it may not be a lie technically, because they have a proprietary methodology that involves a human sampling 100 "daily active users" and using some criteria to say that 5 or less are bots on average Klyith posted:This misses the fact that the bot estimate is 5% of MDAU (monetizable daily active users), which don't represent the entire population of twitter. Their sampling method is starting by only looking at that subset. are you really harping on me dropping the word "monetizable" in this one instance? i've used the full term in several other posts, it's obvious i understand the distinction between twitter's filtered metric and the entire set of twitter accounts. Bad Purchase fucked around with this message at 15:14 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 06:48
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Main Paineframe posted:it's obvious that bots make up more than 5% of Twitter's userbase ok good, we agree. Main Paineframe posted:the claims they make in their SEC filings are much more precise and come with a number of caveats written by their lawyers, including a disclaimer that actively acknowledges that their methods may be flawed and are not guaranteed to be accurate bot counts again, we agree, cool. not sure why you think i have a problem with the definition of the metric, i haven't said that anywhere. i am skeptical that they aren't lying or manipulating data intentionally when they compute it, but that's not an issue with the definition of the metric itself. Main Paineframe posted:there is no legal grounds for elon to be allowed fish around for stuff i'm pretty sure his lawyers are going to try to claim otherwise and it's gonna come down to whether the judge thinks 1) whatever analysis they bring has any merit and 2) if he waived the right to complain about past fraud when he waived diligence
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Aug 15, 2022 07:01
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Bad Purchase posted:ok good, we agree. Given ol musky is posting poo poo like this: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1555950698252181507 and Twitter's view is that they've given him everything he's asked for, I'm not sure what you're expecting the judge to order. I'm also not sure what you mean by 'past fraud', could you elaborate?
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Aug 15, 2022 07:10
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Again, there is no fraud he can point to. Twitter says "here is our bullshit math we use, and have always used" then Musk said "good enough for me, due diligence can't have my baby so Im not interested". He can't now go back and say their numbers are made up.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:12
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This is the kind of poo poo that is going to make the Alex Jones trial seem dull and procedural.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:18
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Barudak posted:Again, there is no fraud he can point to. Twitter says "here is our bullshit math we use, and have always used" then Musk said "good enough for me, due diligence can't have my baby so Im not interested". He can't now go back and say their numbers are made up. I'm not Mr Laws, but it seems like that if Musk tries to go into court and says "we should cancel the deal because of past fraud" and when the judge says "what past fraud" he says '"the fraud I said was happening", the judge probably won't reply "well poo poo, lets pause the trial for a year while we gently caress around in their databases". I bet there's probably a rule about needing proof or something.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:22
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Walking around your glassy domicile; throwing bottles hither and thither. Having a fit on Twitter.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:23
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Party Ape posted:I'm also not sure what you mean by 'past fraud', could you elaborate? the "past fraud" thing comes from some reporting i read on elon's initial court filings. since he waived due diligence in the buyout contract, the argument he's going with now is essentially that he was comfortable waiving diligence because he trusted that the statements twitter made to investors in the past were true. so his legal team will try to find something twitter released before elon signed the deal that they can pick apart and call a lie, and i guess they think the MDAUs number is their best shot. even if they had solid proof of fraud in their hands right now, it's still not clear it would work because 1) in the end he still waived diligence, which, lol and 2) he was already casting doubt on the bot metrics before signing the agreement, so it's not like he can argue he was caught by surprise -- i guess maybe he can argue about magnitude or something. but even if elon loses the trial, if his legal team exposes some actual fraud or manipulation, it could still be bad news for twitter. it just depends on if they are hiding anything and what elon's team actually comes up with. i think it's a long shot, but weird poo poo happens in court sometimes. the ultimate lol would be if elon does prove some kind of fraud, is still forced to buy the company anyway, and then immediately has to settle with his great pals at the SEC for twitter's crimes as the new CEO. i doubt we'll be that lucky though.
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Aug 15, 2022 07:37
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actually everything they have filed has been super careful about NOT claiming Twitter did anything fraudulent, but instead having 'inaccuracies'. if he claimed fraud that would be straight up libel. the inaccuracies are, as previously mentioned, impossible, because of the fact that they are always contextualising those numbers with their methodology and include plenty of caveats about them, and also it doesn't matter because Elon's lawyers wrote a contract saying it doesn't matter because he really really wanted to buy it
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Aug 15, 2022 08:41
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I think there have been some pre trial stuff where the judge has already started the bot stuff is outside the scope and expertise of the court. it's only going to rule on the contract and who needs to do what under the contract.
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Aug 15, 2022 08:49
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chaosbreather posted:actually everything they have filed has been super careful about NOT claiming Twitter did anything fraudulent, but instead having 'inaccuracies'. if he claimed fraud that would be straight up libel. the inaccuracies are, as previously mentioned, impossible, because of the fact that they are always contextualising those numbers with their methodology and include plenty of caveats about them, and also it doesn't matter because Elon's lawyers wrote a contract saying it doesn't matter because he really really wanted to buy it don’t know if the word fraud is used in the filing, but it’s more than just “inaccuracies”, it’s “misrepresentation” intended to “distort twitter’s value” (i.e. lies, not just an oopsie math error or something). quote:This action arises out of Twitter’s misrepresentations to the Musk Parties regarding the condition of the company and the “key metrics” Twitter uses to evaluate the number of users on its platform. While the Musk Parties negotiated for representations as to the truth of Twitter’s SEC disclosures, relying on their accuracy, the statements in these SEC disclosures were far from true. Instead, they contain numerous, material misrepresentations or omissions that distort Twitter’s value and caused the Musk Parties to agree to acquire the company at an inflated price. i’m on my phone so it’s a pain to pull a bunch more quotes, but look through the first 10 pages here to read the actual claims. some of it is obviously blowing smoke, but there are very specific accusations about the ways the MDAU numbers were (allegedly) manipulated or inconsistent, and supposedly using data that came from twitter, not a 3rd party, that could amount to fraud if proven (still a very big if). https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22127591-musk-public-version-of-counterclaims-answer-w-cos Bad Purchase fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 09:13
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I'm probably being simple but as far as I know bot numbers, accuracy, etc doesn't form part of the contract that Musk signed. I'm sure I read that there is no mention of bots anywhere in it. He could've done his due diligence beforehand and even made contract fulfilment contingent on bot number verification, but he didn't. On that basis I'm not sure how you can introduce bot numbers in anything but the broadest "this is symptomatic of bad form and a culture of misrepresentation that poisons the well" terms, which sounds very unlikely to get anywhere in a court that is extremely well versed in contract law, being the de facto location for incorporation for this very reason. Durzel fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 11:06
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Main Paineframe posted:the judge doesn't seem to expect this trial to take very long Wasn't it pointed out earlier in this thread that this particular court in Delaware moves cases through pretty quickly? And that the judge in this particular case previously had a very similar sort of case, that was concluded in like a week or two?
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Aug 15, 2022 14:41
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Bad Purchase posted:but the bigger thing i don't know the answer to is if the court discovers evidence of fraud in the proprietary information, then what? are they under any obligation to report it? are they under any obligation to keep it sealed? Yes, if twitter is committing fraud on the level of lying in their SEC filings and the evidence gets in court it will become public. Bad Purchase posted:just because something is proprietary and opaque doesn't mean it can't be fraudulent. like, suppose there was an email out there where jack or whoever was in charge at the time wrote to the bot counting department and said "hey we need to make this problem go away, make sure the number stays below 5%". that would be evidence that investors were intentionally misled. i highly doubt any such evidence will be found or even exists, but fishing for that is basically all elon can do. This is true but it's very unlikely that the judge will allow Elon to go on a fishing trip without much stronger evidence than he has. Elon really *wants* this to happen because it will drag things out and require months of discovery. Then his bank financing commitments will expire, and he might find other reasons to nix the deal. If there was a big discovery process twitter would be motivated to give in and lower their price. The judge has already put a short date on the trial start, meaning she isn't swayed by Elon's initial filing. (Also very few people tend to leave that type of my_crimes evidence around. Even Theranos, the most fraudulent frauds in recent history, were less stupid than that. You have to look at bitcoin to find that type of idiocy.) Bad Purchase posted:but there have been people itt who vigorously defend twitter's honor about their bot metrics when really we don't and can't know. but twitter certainly has a financial motivation to hide the problem and i don't think it's unreasonable to wonder if they're being dishonest. it really shouldn't affect the elon trial, and i guess it's hard for me to say in this thread that i'm skeptical about twitter's metrics without also sounding like i'm rooting for elon, which i absolutely am not. Don't think of it as a defense of twitter's metrics, think of it as a recognition that the game they're playing is rigged. Two things can be true at once: twitter is infested with bots, and twitter's reporting is not legally fraudulent. Bad Purchase posted:i wrote: Those are two different people my dude. Bad Purchase posted:the "past fraud" thing comes from some reporting i read on elon's initial court filings. Court filings will play more games with the truth than twitter's bot metrics, lmao. edit: basically Elon's legal team is giving non-admitted "evidence" (a different bot tracker) and saying "this proves fraud" (it doesn't). That's a totally normal thing for lawyers to do, declare they've won before the trial even starts. Klyith fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 14:43
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Bad Purchase posted:don’t know if the word fraud is used in the filing, but it’s more than just “inaccuracies”, it’s “misrepresentation” intended to “distort twitter’s value” (i.e. lies, not just an oopsie math error or something). He did not include that in the contract and waived hos due diligence over it. He is throwing a tantrum about getting caught with his pants down
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Aug 15, 2022 14:50
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CommieGIR posted:He did not include that in the contract and waived hos due diligence over it. But also he was the one who pulled his pants down and started screaming "hey everyone check out my dick".
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Aug 15, 2022 14:55
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Klyith posted:Those are two different people my dude. oops my bad, meant "they" not "you". it's the right chain of replies quoted, though. they were referencing my reply to you.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:16
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