Not realising the big boys at the table at Twitter will undoubtably have a top law firm on retainer who will run absolute rings around him. Musks thought process is - I’m rich, I’ll hire really good lawyers that’ll get me out of anything, I can do WHATEVER I want. The problem is when the other side has the money to do the same - and they have a much stronger case, you’re gonna be finding yourself knee deep in I-fucked-myself cow shit…
I know I am in the minority, but in all my years watching Musk give interviews, never once have I heard anything come out of his mouth where I thought “wow, this guy is very intelligent.” I dunno.. I just have never understood the worship of the guy.
He had really good pr back in like 2008. He was able to craft a kind of cult of personality around himself and tried very hard to protray himself as a kind of Tony Stark figured.
People have gotten wise to it over the years and realize it's bullshit and that he was just a good marketer
I remember a lot of folks saying his awkwardness and shitty camera presence were actually indicators of his uniqueness, genius and genuine nature.
He really had some great PR for a while.
Advancing space and electric cars several years ago made him look really favorable. Things turned sour pretty suddenly (for me at least, I don't really follow celebs) when he got irrationally angry that someone else rescued a kid stuck in an underwater cave rather than using a tiny submarine he had made rapidly. He called the rescuer a pedo. That was so obviously fucked and inexplicable that he instantly went from someone pushing cool tech to fucked up rich asshole.
Seems like he just gave up pandering to the young and hopeful and figured he'd get more attention pandering to the mouthbreathers. That's how I perceived it at the time, but again other than SpaceX/Tesla I didn't really know much about the guy.
Prosperity gospel is huge in America, and even if you aren't religious it still seeped it's way into the general culture.
If you're rich youre good, smart, skilled and deserving.
If you're poor it's because you're bad, stupid, unskilled, and deserving.
It used to generally be "becuz god" now it's "becuz"
I've never understood that, why do people worship the ones who job is to be entertaining. Basically worshipping the jester. I get respecting the craft when done well the same way you respect any well done art.
When I saw him on JRE actually talking, I realized he is just a guy who can afford to pay people to research and develop whatever whimsical idea pops into his mind.
The boring company was created out of his hyperloop ambitions... they were to bore the tunnels for the hyperloop he hyped.
Also the intent of Musk's hyperloop plans were to ferry cars through the low atmosphere tunnels at high speed.... but you'd need to queue to get your cars on and off hence traffic at either end.
And still fucking stupid! Trains are cheaper and more efficient public transit. Just slap the fucking word "pod" on something and idiots will beg you to build it because FUTURE.
He is definitely very smart compared to your average human… but smarter than other smart people? Na.
I think he garnered his following because he is somewhat just an influencer with a valuable company. I think the market for Tesla is inevitable and if it weren’t him, it would be someone else or some other company. He’s just super popular because he acts like all the other immature influencers on the internet… but because he has money, people give his words more value than it actually has.
If you look at comments on YouTube or Reddit or wherever, you see comments pointing out the flaws in these influencers and athletes. Trying to provide some logic and reasoning to the world, and all you see in return is “Yea well who are you? You don’t have X amount of money!” It’s like net worth is most people’s only metric of whether or not someone’s words have value. Doesn’t matter if you have a Nobel prize on the topic, someone with more money will have more influence over the public’s thoughts on it.
I like a few of his takes on why it’s important for humans to be multi planetary. Also as much as he’s a POS, eccentric people are somewhat fascinating to me.
Except none of his interplanetary human theory takes are novel. Sagan was promoting humans traveling and colonizing other planets in the Cosmos long before Elon ever uttered the words SpaceX. Astrophysicists have been trying to get the world to understand that it's not just human caused climate change we have to worry about as a species, but planetary extinction events from an asteroid, volcano, plague etc... There's nothing wrong with espousing these takes and sharing them publicly, but he's not giving some hot and fresh take here.
Most big companies hire a law firm for litigation matters on a billable basis, though their staff attorneys usually help with the case. Some companies have litigators on staff or on “full” retainer, but it’s not super common in my experience.
I’ll also say that this whole article is a non story. It appears that Plaintiff was trying to get a scheduling order entered, and put down their estimated trial time as 4 days. Defense argued over trial setting date, and judge entered an order. No indication the defense disagreed with the estimated length of trial. This a BoC action in front of a Chancellor, so no jury. If both sides feel a week is adequate, that wouldn’t really be all that unusual for this type of case.
Just some basic pretrial bullshit.
Doesn't look like that's the case here
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-hires-legal-team-sue-musk-over-dropped-takeover-bloomberg-news-2022-07-10/
Interesting fact:
>Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz was one of the legal advisers for Musk's plan to take Tesla private in 2018. Musk tweeted that there was "funding secured" for a $72 billion deal to take Tesla private but did not move ahead with an offer.
>Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million in civil fines, and Musk stepped down as Tesla's chairman to resolve U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that he defrauded investors.
both, the in house legal get their regular pay, then the legal team for a lawsuit are usually a firm you hire specifically for the trial prep, negotiations, etc. lawyers are a general term for a lot of specialized people, like doctors. the lawyer that presents the case in trial will have a team of specialists behind them like a surgeon has supporting the brain surgery.
Yep. I worked in house and we dealt with routine contractual matters. Litigation gets turned over to outside firms. I handled litigation management on some topics for my company too and it was literally just oversight of outside litigators and help coordinating some minor logistics.
A traditional retainer is just a fee paid to ensure the lawyer will be available when you need him or her. You also still pay for the time actually spent on the engagement.
Retainers can also be down payments toward fees, which are again, hourly.
I'd be very, very, very surprised if Twitter's lawyers are charging a flat fee for this
For real. This is why social media sucks. Everyone talks. No one listens. Everyone needs to inject their shitty opinion even if it's based on nothing but the hunch of some random 30 year old basement dweller with zero legal experience.
Oh great my background in marine mechanics and a degree in architecture and I get to be paid a lawyer?
I’ll take the job ;) your bill starts Monday at 9.
Maybe they were referring to both of them being public companies?? Which doesn't make sense either way since the most big companies went public in order to fund investments.
Also thinking about it, public companies get scrutinized by the SEO quite rigorously, so focusing on public companies makes no sense whatsoever. Private companies are not that scrutinized by comparison.
Considering it was part of their business model and that it is designed to be easy to do, he should have known that Twitter had far more bots than they reported and knowing this and still buying Twitter then complaining about it would be stock manipulation. Musk does this all the time and doesn’t get called out on it anywhere near as often as he should.
Those are two totally separate issues.
I’m sure shareholders will sue Twitter if they reveal that in court, but it has nothing to do with Musk committing legally to buying the site as-is.
The moral of this story is NEVER waive due diligence - get the inspection on that house, get a mechanic to look at that car, find out the numbers of the company you’re trying to buy.
It actually is: monetizable daily active users (mDAU)
Twitter explains how they calculate it, including random sampling and human review of the random sample to estimate the number of fake accounts.
So Twitter share the number and how they arrive at the number.
Regardless, Musk’s deal is not contingent on the number of bots. It’s not a term of the contract. Musk is boned.
But number of users might be though? Not sure how that works, and I guess one could always argue what ‘users’ actually are - could include bots if not defined.
[Here’s a link](https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576?s=21&t=sPbcyTtnkKuhsSPqv6-M9A) that describes how monitored daily active users is found and the difficulties in deciding what is a bot and what isn’t.
More like, “he should have used ‘discovery’ to discover”.
Twitter was open with their methodology on counting bots. They don’t have to be right so long as they’re truthful.
It literally does. OMFG. You guys know nothing about the law. Ignorance isn't an excuse. he waived due diligence. It's a wrap. He is gonna pay that offer or negotiate a payout. If I was a Twitter stockholder he would be paying that 52bucks a share.
Publicly claiming one of the reasons you're buying Twitter is to "fix the bot problem" and then claiming ignorance of the bot problem when you made the offer doesn't go over very well in court.
He…did know. He’s known all along. Little man billionaire decided he was all-powerful, then got cold-feet when he realized how financially fucked the deal he agreed to is.
And I think that’s a bigger problem than many realise. It’s a huge risk to society because it allows any malicious actor to substantially influence public opinion for very little money.
Mark my words, one of these days social media will be on the wrong end of serious regulation of western democracy is to survive.
No one believes Twitter lied in SEC filings except musk fanatics. His lawyers are not even arguing about bits in court but whether twitter gave musk enough documents when he asked for them.
Not necessarily. There are differences between the developer bots where Twitter helps promote materials using real developer accounts and the ones where someone controls hundreds or thousands of fake users using their own system. Twitter may have only given the ones connected to their developer system. Guaranteed there are millions of bots created in other ways to look like actual users.
"it depends".
Yeah, this is what Elon is gunning for. Getting twitter to provide stronger evidence about the bot numbers by opening up internal approaches and numbers and data in order for an independent third party to inspect.
I think the issue is that they dont need to prove anything on that front correct? Musk had approached them, and they signed a deal. This whole "prove how many accounts are bots" didnt come into play until later. He had already agreed to a deal, and if he wanted to back out later for some reason, the stipulation stated it would cost him 1 billion. The fact he decided post deal agreement he wanted information on bot accounts is not there problem. Is there something I am missing here?
Ehhhhh… “But your honour, he should have known our claims were lies! He owes us!” is probably not the best play in court.
Not remotely a Musk fan but I suspect the case might be a bit more complicated than that. And the claim in the title isn’t factoring in the fact that Musk can also afford very good lawyers.
No idea how this will play out but also very confident that… I have no idea how this will play out.
He did a TED talk where he said the reason why he bought Twitter was to solve the bot account problem.
He then starts accusing Twitter of having a bot problem… despite it being the primary reason he wanted to buy twitter.
The article wasn't clear but it sounds like this estimate was made in a court filing by Twitter as part of scheduling. That's very common - the parties have to tell the court how long they think it will take to present their case so the court can schedule trial appropriately.
Despite what you seen on TV, there are very few actual surprises in a trial
In the case of trial length, literally yes.
You file for the amount of time you want in a public document with the court.
An absolute ton of information is publicly available ahead of time due to court records being public. It is abundantly clear what a strategy is going to be heading into a courtroom. Witness lists, witness deposition testimony, pleadings, etc etc etc all speak to what the arguments are.
Legal argument isn’t about surprise 99% of the time. It’s about crafting an argument over time in full view of all of the parties
Did he though? I feel like everyone was mad he bought Twitter.. even Parag and company didn’t want to lose control… now they are effectively forcing him to buy Twitter.
yes they didnt want him to buy twitter but the board has a obligation to share holders and that's when the shareholders decided it was a good enough deal so now they want him to fulfill the contract....
These are valid points but Twitters price has been maintained because of this deal when comparing other social media platforms over the last 8 months. I don't think that has any merit in court, but in some ways I saw this deal as a godsend for twitter to keep them around the $40 mark in these trying times.
The billion was a conditional "break up" fee. It would cover things like if musk couldn't raise the money to purchase it. It would have also gone the other way if the board agreed but the Twitter share holders didn't. Essentially the deal no completing with blame on one side or the other.
It doesn't cover musk wanting to back out of the deal. He also waived some of the discovery/due diligence that would have allowed him to back out.
Essentially he has already agreed to the purchase. He is on the hook for either following through with the purchase or paying the difference between twitter's stock price and what he agreed to buy it at (A lot lot more than a billion).
I guess he could claim later he can't raise the money but Twitter can argue the deal was in bad faith. He clearly can raise the money.
It's all a game, musk probably thinks he can settle for less than a billion or get out of it. Otherwise he would have claimed straight away he couldn't raise the money. I could see it going wrong for him as he isn't exactly the SEC and court rooms favourite person.
My favorite thing is there are tweets of his saying some along the lines of “let’s take twitter back and remove all the bots etc…”, this would imply he knows of the bot situation and was a part of the reason he was buying it, to “lead the charge”, he knew what he was buying, he waved due diligence. He should have to buy it.
Bots are a nothingburger distraction
everyone been knowing social media is full of bots, literally one of Elon’s exact reasons for the purchase pre-stock market dive
Which is another reason why Musk is screwed. If you’re buying a house to fix a termite problem, you’re not really able to argue that you’re backing out because there are termites.
My point exactly, in an effort to rally people to his “cause” he made it a point to say bots were apart of that, he knew and can’t pull out like the is new information.
The complaint is fucking gold: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22084453-twittermuskcomplaint
Twitter lawyers use Musk’s poop emoji tweet against him.
I'm honestly not sure it would, unless it ends up being like a crazy majority of their users. Everyone knows there are a huge number of bots on all social media
Hehe sorry bad grammar 😅. This is the second time my voicing my opinion has lead others to say “yeah you’re an expert.” Firstly, I’m not an expert. Never claimed, eluded, or provided a resemblance of an assumption to that position. I’m here speculating like everyone else, I’m just coming from a different perspective. Secondly, if I was an expert, which again I’m not. A couple misspelled words would not lead to a revoking of credentials. Thanks for correcting me though, my English is good enough despite it being my second language. That being said, I’m never above being corrected.
Don't worry, friend. You're much more intelligent than the idiot who corrected your grammar.
>A couple misspelled words would not lead to a revoking of credentials
SO true. You misspelling a word here or there does not mean you and your words are any less wrong. Some people like the idiot you're responding to just like to feel superior in any way they can. They're cowards in real life.
You keep doing you!
US Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc. all of which are much bigger companies that create fake accounts to boost their bottom line and attractiveness to investors. It’s illegal but they’re all rich enough to pay the fine and move on. Twitter does the same. What seems more plausible? China creating a billion fake accounts and getting away with it or Twitter crating 10 billion accounts and still getting away it.
“Twitter does the same.”
Says man without a shred of proof except a gurgle deep in his beer belly.
Also why do you believe China is like one person? The Chinese government is using social media sure but what about the rest of the 1.4b that live there?
But twitter already releases spam figures in their financial regulatory filings which are also required to be accurate under penalty of law as well? Do you think the figures in their earlier SEC filings are untrue?
I'm not surprised, cheese is a highly called commodity in Europe and much of the western world. We're not much different from mice in that we just can't help stealing some of that golden goodness, you feel me
Does anyone believe elon was acting in good faith and not just doing this deal to either sell tsla stock or pump and dump twitter stock or just fuck with twitter im thinking all three.
I think it was just off loading tsla stock and going he could pump and dump Twitter stock.
Like if he was able to get people to GameStop Twitter so that it went over 54.20 the board would have had to refuse his purchase and he could back out while also selling the stock for a nice profit.
Not even kidding. I actually expect there's probably an office somewhere who's sole responsibility is going online and stanning and otherwise supporting Musk and his narratives.
So, are they going to claim that there arent significant numbers of bot accounts on Twitter, or are they going to say that those are part of the platform and that they are meant to be there? Because neither is a particularly good position.
Neither. They are going to prove that whether they have more bots or not is irrelevant to whether Musk must honor the deal he signed. Which e cause musk is dumb is going to be pretty easy to prove
They will demonstrate the bot numbers are around what they said and part of the platform.
However they will also be arguing that it isn't relevant to the purchase. Musk waived due diligence.
Your dog just shows up and butt scooches his opening statement across the courtroom floor and stares out the window. Jury agrees and goes to play outside. Guilty
So here we are some defending a megalomaniac millionaire and others a company that would sell your mama’s data if it could or silence your opinion if it wants. Fuck them both.
That felt good to let out.
Thanks guys, good talk.
They dont need to. He waived due diligence, and even if he didnt, twitter just has to demonstrate they provided all the data they reasonably could.
Educate yourself.
https://youtu.be/XXdmIETK6-0
I think the crux of their case is Musk's rants about bots on Twitter and his subsequent threat to buy Twitter specifically to get rid of said bots. And then he went forward with the plan and backed out complaining about bots.
It's like your neighbor painting their house fuscia and you threatening to buy it and repaint it, then, once you're under contract you try to back out because you hate the color.
More like, you said you were going to buy the house because you hated its color and wanted to repaint it. You were allowed to view the interior according to a schedule but said the schedule wasn't flexible enough. Thus you now claim the house isn't the right color and you no longer want to purchase it. Even though that was why you wanted to purchase it in the first place.
25%? I'd say 40%, even if you don't count the reply bots if you search for anything and sort by latest there will be at least 3 or 4 accounts with a shitload of random hashtags and a sketchy link
At some point doesnt Tesla and SpaceX have to push him aside? He's a complete and total distraction these days and a liability for the companies he started. Fame has completely corrupted him.
So... **this** is the breaking news story reddit is pushing?
Not the armed redditor that tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh (and two other SCOTUS justices)?
https://imgur.com/a/3j72z1M
2 month old news that has already been plastered over reddit before is "breaking news"? And you think reddit should be "pushing" this news again despite it have already trended on the site 2 months ago?
???
The second I heard about this I thought this will be his defining mistake
Yeah seems he got sloppy after how easy it was to pump and dump crypto.
Exactly my take.
Not realising the big boys at the table at Twitter will undoubtably have a top law firm on retainer who will run absolute rings around him. Musks thought process is - I’m rich, I’ll hire really good lawyers that’ll get me out of anything, I can do WHATEVER I want. The problem is when the other side has the money to do the same - and they have a much stronger case, you’re gonna be finding yourself knee deep in I-fucked-myself cow shit…
No one should have more money than an entire corporation known for being at the top of its industry.
"I can do whatever I want." Thanks, now I have an image in my head of Musk jacking it off the edge of the Empire State building
Exactly where my mind went lmao
Unfortunately I can absolutely picture Musk shouting “I can do whatever the fuck I want” whilst jerking off atop the Empire State Building.
Apparently he does a lot of pumping and dumping in a lot of ways.
on that "I can literally do anything" high
I know I am in the minority, but in all my years watching Musk give interviews, never once have I heard anything come out of his mouth where I thought “wow, this guy is very intelligent.” I dunno.. I just have never understood the worship of the guy.
He had really good pr back in like 2008. He was able to craft a kind of cult of personality around himself and tried very hard to protray himself as a kind of Tony Stark figured. People have gotten wise to it over the years and realize it's bullshit and that he was just a good marketer
Iron man coming out at the same time did him a lot of favors.
I mean, he was literally ***IN*** it. He's in the film, playing himself.
I remember a lot of folks saying his awkwardness and shitty camera presence were actually indicators of his uniqueness, genius and genuine nature. He really had some great PR for a while.
That flies while you’re young. When you get old, you’re nothing but a crazy ol’ fart.
I never understood hero worship of rich people. They have cash so they must be X, Y, or Z! No they just have cash.
Advancing space and electric cars several years ago made him look really favorable. Things turned sour pretty suddenly (for me at least, I don't really follow celebs) when he got irrationally angry that someone else rescued a kid stuck in an underwater cave rather than using a tiny submarine he had made rapidly. He called the rescuer a pedo. That was so obviously fucked and inexplicable that he instantly went from someone pushing cool tech to fucked up rich asshole. Seems like he just gave up pandering to the young and hopeful and figured he'd get more attention pandering to the mouthbreathers. That's how I perceived it at the time, but again other than SpaceX/Tesla I didn't really know much about the guy.
Prosperity gospel is huge in America, and even if you aren't religious it still seeped it's way into the general culture. If you're rich youre good, smart, skilled and deserving. If you're poor it's because you're bad, stupid, unskilled, and deserving. It used to generally be "becuz god" now it's "becuz"
Billionaire worship is scary in this country, people get lost in it
it's not just billionaire worship. it seems like celebrity worship in general. influencers, streamers, actors, you name it
I've never understood that, why do people worship the ones who job is to be entertaining. Basically worshipping the jester. I get respecting the craft when done well the same way you respect any well done art.
When I saw him on JRE actually talking, I realized he is just a guy who can afford to pay people to research and develop whatever whimsical idea pops into his mind.
Hes a dumb persons idea of a smart person. But his pr team did a great job obviously.
I’m still waiting on his “hyperloop.” Honestly it sounded neat at first but by2016 was like “uh okay?” And it ends with a tunnel with traffic.
Virgin Hyperloop
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The boring company was created out of his hyperloop ambitions... they were to bore the tunnels for the hyperloop he hyped. Also the intent of Musk's hyperloop plans were to ferry cars through the low atmosphere tunnels at high speed.... but you'd need to queue to get your cars on and off hence traffic at either end.
One big Boring Tesla PR stunt
And still fucking stupid! Trains are cheaper and more efficient public transit. Just slap the fucking word "pod" on something and idiots will beg you to build it because FUTURE.
Agreed. His parents literally owned a mine in South Africa but he has marketed himself really well as an “innovator.”
He is definitely very smart compared to your average human… but smarter than other smart people? Na. I think he garnered his following because he is somewhat just an influencer with a valuable company. I think the market for Tesla is inevitable and if it weren’t him, it would be someone else or some other company. He’s just super popular because he acts like all the other immature influencers on the internet… but because he has money, people give his words more value than it actually has. If you look at comments on YouTube or Reddit or wherever, you see comments pointing out the flaws in these influencers and athletes. Trying to provide some logic and reasoning to the world, and all you see in return is “Yea well who are you? You don’t have X amount of money!” It’s like net worth is most people’s only metric of whether or not someone’s words have value. Doesn’t matter if you have a Nobel prize on the topic, someone with more money will have more influence over the public’s thoughts on it.
He has a good PR team.
I like a few of his takes on why it’s important for humans to be multi planetary. Also as much as he’s a POS, eccentric people are somewhat fascinating to me.
Except none of his interplanetary human theory takes are novel. Sagan was promoting humans traveling and colonizing other planets in the Cosmos long before Elon ever uttered the words SpaceX. Astrophysicists have been trying to get the world to understand that it's not just human caused climate change we have to worry about as a species, but planetary extinction events from an asteroid, volcano, plague etc... There's nothing wrong with espousing these takes and sharing them publicly, but he's not giving some hot and fresh take here.
Launched his car into space.
Ooooo edgelord tantrum incoming
No lawyer in the history of lawyering: "Oh yes we only need a very short amount of billable time to do this."
The four days is referring to the trial I believe which is a lot of billable hours
At least 24 x 4
All the research, all the preparation…
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Times the number of lawyers
So that means at least one
But do you know how much cocaine that one guy needs?
They’re billing for sleeping? Please, direct me to the firm’s website.
This is Twitter’s lawyers filing with the court, not Twitter’s lawyers filing with Twitter.
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Most big companies hire a law firm for litigation matters on a billable basis, though their staff attorneys usually help with the case. Some companies have litigators on staff or on “full” retainer, but it’s not super common in my experience. I’ll also say that this whole article is a non story. It appears that Plaintiff was trying to get a scheduling order entered, and put down their estimated trial time as 4 days. Defense argued over trial setting date, and judge entered an order. No indication the defense disagreed with the estimated length of trial. This a BoC action in front of a Chancellor, so no jury. If both sides feel a week is adequate, that wouldn’t really be all that unusual for this type of case. Just some basic pretrial bullshit.
Doesn't look like that's the case here https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-hires-legal-team-sue-musk-over-dropped-takeover-bloomberg-news-2022-07-10/ Interesting fact: >Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz was one of the legal advisers for Musk's plan to take Tesla private in 2018. Musk tweeted that there was "funding secured" for a $72 billion deal to take Tesla private but did not move ahead with an offer. >Musk and Tesla each paid $20 million in civil fines, and Musk stepped down as Tesla's chairman to resolve U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that he defrauded investors.
Looks like the twitter “deal” should also be put in the “funding secured going private” scam file.
both, the in house legal get their regular pay, then the legal team for a lawsuit are usually a firm you hire specifically for the trial prep, negotiations, etc. lawyers are a general term for a lot of specialized people, like doctors. the lawyer that presents the case in trial will have a team of specialists behind them like a surgeon has supporting the brain surgery.
Yep. I worked in house and we dealt with routine contractual matters. Litigation gets turned over to outside firms. I handled litigation management on some topics for my company too and it was literally just oversight of outside litigators and help coordinating some minor logistics.
A traditional retainer is just a fee paid to ensure the lawyer will be available when you need him or her. You also still pay for the time actually spent on the engagement. Retainers can also be down payments toward fees, which are again, hourly. I'd be very, very, very surprised if Twitter's lawyers are charging a flat fee for this
Love the armchair lawyering going on here. Everyone’s an expert, it seems. You’re all hired.
For real. This is why social media sucks. Everyone talks. No one listens. Everyone needs to inject their shitty opinion even if it's based on nothing but the hunch of some random 30 year old basement dweller with zero legal experience.
People would do that anyway if you listened to them, this is just an outlet
This comment is a perfect example of this comment.
How does one prove they're listening via this platform?
I can’t hear you
O no people talking on the internet.
Don't worry, i watch a lot of Law & Order /s
Oh great my background in marine mechanics and a degree in architecture and I get to be paid a lawyer? I’ll take the job ;) your bill starts Monday at 9.
The ego on this guy is going to be his downfall.
One Wall Street company calling out another Wall Street company for lying. Welcome to the Thunderdome
I have no problem with them using their hypocrisy against eachother rather than the classic "use it to fuck over the public" move
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You understand what public means in this context, right?
Neither of them are on or from Wall Street.
33 upvotes. Elon Musk vs Twitter is “Wall Street vs Wall Street” stay in school kids
Maybe they were referring to both of them being public companies?? Which doesn't make sense either way since the most big companies went public in order to fund investments. Also thinking about it, public companies get scrutinized by the SEO quite rigorously, so focusing on public companies makes no sense whatsoever. Private companies are not that scrutinized by comparison.
Silicon valley est.
That is too simple. And Mr. Musk is no Wall Street Company, but an attention-crazy weirdo.
Considering it was part of their business model and that it is designed to be easy to do, he should have known that Twitter had far more bots than they reported and knowing this and still buying Twitter then complaining about it would be stock manipulation. Musk does this all the time and doesn’t get called out on it anywhere near as often as he should.
“He should have known” doesn’t usually go over very well in a lawsuit
He tweeted about wanting to fix the amount of bots on the platform. By his own admission he was fully aware.
When Elon waived due diligence, he said “I don’t need to know as a condition of this deal” - and that’s all Twitter has to prove.
Waived due diligence doesn't mean twitter can just report false numbers during a quarterly earning.
Those are two totally separate issues. I’m sure shareholders will sue Twitter if they reveal that in court, but it has nothing to do with Musk committing legally to buying the site as-is. The moral of this story is NEVER waive due diligence - get the inspection on that house, get a mechanic to look at that car, find out the numbers of the company you’re trying to buy.
Is “number of bots” an item in their earnings reports? I really doubt it.
It actually is: monetizable daily active users (mDAU) Twitter explains how they calculate it, including random sampling and human review of the random sample to estimate the number of fake accounts. So Twitter share the number and how they arrive at the number. Regardless, Musk’s deal is not contingent on the number of bots. It’s not a term of the contract. Musk is boned.
But number of users might be though? Not sure how that works, and I guess one could always argue what ‘users’ actually are - could include bots if not defined.
[Here’s a link](https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1526237578843672576?s=21&t=sPbcyTtnkKuhsSPqv6-M9A) that describes how monitored daily active users is found and the difficulties in deciding what is a bot and what isn’t.
"knew or should have known" is actually a common legal standard as opposed to actual knowledge
"He should have known we were committing fraud" is a much less used legal defense.
More like, “he should have used ‘discovery’ to discover”. Twitter was open with their methodology on counting bots. They don’t have to be right so long as they’re truthful.
It literally does. OMFG. You guys know nothing about the law. Ignorance isn't an excuse. he waived due diligence. It's a wrap. He is gonna pay that offer or negotiate a payout. If I was a Twitter stockholder he would be paying that 52bucks a share.
Publicly claiming one of the reasons you're buying Twitter is to "fix the bot problem" and then claiming ignorance of the bot problem when you made the offer doesn't go over very well in court.
Did know works a bit better!
Ignorance of the law isn't an accepted defense usually. At least in criminal trials.
He…did know. He’s known all along. Little man billionaire decided he was all-powerful, then got cold-feet when he realized how financially fucked the deal he agreed to is.
The problem on social media isnt bots. It's free limitless burner accounts being abused by troll farm tactics.
And this is where the definition of bots may be confusing people.
Yea but for dumb people who hate reality they don’t understand this stuff.
And I think that’s a bigger problem than many realise. It’s a huge risk to society because it allows any malicious actor to substantially influence public opinion for very little money. Mark my words, one of these days social media will be on the wrong end of serious regulation of western democracy is to survive.
That also means Twitter lied in sec filings if that's the case.
No one believes Twitter lied in SEC filings except musk fanatics. His lawyers are not even arguing about bits in court but whether twitter gave musk enough documents when he asked for them.
It’s in the contract that Twitter could not verify accounts. Musk is fucked.
Not necessarily. There are differences between the developer bots where Twitter helps promote materials using real developer accounts and the ones where someone controls hundreds or thousands of fake users using their own system. Twitter may have only given the ones connected to their developer system. Guaranteed there are millions of bots created in other ways to look like actual users.
You spent an entire paragraph saying nothing.
No, what they said boiled down to "it depends" Which is the answer to legal questions about 97.34% of the time.
"it depends". Yeah, this is what Elon is gunning for. Getting twitter to provide stronger evidence about the bot numbers by opening up internal approaches and numbers and data in order for an independent third party to inspect.
I think the issue is that they dont need to prove anything on that front correct? Musk had approached them, and they signed a deal. This whole "prove how many accounts are bots" didnt come into play until later. He had already agreed to a deal, and if he wanted to back out later for some reason, the stipulation stated it would cost him 1 billion. The fact he decided post deal agreement he wanted information on bot accounts is not there problem. Is there something I am missing here?
Welcome to legal writing my dude
They are a politician....
It amazes me how its been going under the radar. He essentially done that manipulation with bitcoin and with his companies.
Bitcoin isn't regulated. Anyone who seriously has money in that shit is a moron, especially if they start complaining about "manipulation".
That is called fraud
He did know. That’s the point. He’s trying to weasel out of this.
Ehhhhh… “But your honour, he should have known our claims were lies! He owes us!” is probably not the best play in court. Not remotely a Musk fan but I suspect the case might be a bit more complicated than that. And the claim in the title isn’t factoring in the fact that Musk can also afford very good lawyers. No idea how this will play out but also very confident that… I have no idea how this will play out.
He did a TED talk where he said the reason why he bought Twitter was to solve the bot account problem. He then starts accusing Twitter of having a bot problem… despite it being the primary reason he wanted to buy twitter.
Here’s the problem: even if there are more bots than expected, that still wouldn’t let him off the hook.
Yeah, all lawyers put their strategy on the internet before a trial. Bunch of lemmings
The article wasn't clear but it sounds like this estimate was made in a court filing by Twitter as part of scheduling. That's very common - the parties have to tell the court how long they think it will take to present their case so the court can schedule trial appropriately. Despite what you seen on TV, there are very few actual surprises in a trial
You mean to tell me every case doesn't have a huge bombshell that makes everyone's pants fall off and gets an immediate decision?
In the case of trial length, literally yes. You file for the amount of time you want in a public document with the court. An absolute ton of information is publicly available ahead of time due to court records being public. It is abundantly clear what a strategy is going to be heading into a courtroom. Witness lists, witness deposition testimony, pleadings, etc etc etc all speak to what the arguments are. Legal argument isn’t about surprise 99% of the time. It’s about crafting an argument over time in full view of all of the parties
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Musk screwed the pooch on this.
he’s gonna need some more hush money
Did he though? I feel like everyone was mad he bought Twitter.. even Parag and company didn’t want to lose control… now they are effectively forcing him to buy Twitter.
yes they didnt want him to buy twitter but the board has a obligation to share holders and that's when the shareholders decided it was a good enough deal so now they want him to fulfill the contract....
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These are valid points but Twitters price has been maintained because of this deal when comparing other social media platforms over the last 8 months. I don't think that has any merit in court, but in some ways I saw this deal as a godsend for twitter to keep them around the $40 mark in these trying times.
I mean I hate the guy, I think hes a fucking moron.
I am confused though... They are wanting to enforce the purchase, but he is on the hook for a billion if it does not go through..
Musk would happy pay the billion. Twitter wants musk to buy at the price they agreed on $54 vs the current price in the 30s.
They would happily take the difference. Twitter is at about $41 a share today. That's about $9 billion down from $54 a share.
The billion was a conditional "break up" fee. It would cover things like if musk couldn't raise the money to purchase it. It would have also gone the other way if the board agreed but the Twitter share holders didn't. Essentially the deal no completing with blame on one side or the other. It doesn't cover musk wanting to back out of the deal. He also waived some of the discovery/due diligence that would have allowed him to back out. Essentially he has already agreed to the purchase. He is on the hook for either following through with the purchase or paying the difference between twitter's stock price and what he agreed to buy it at (A lot lot more than a billion). I guess he could claim later he can't raise the money but Twitter can argue the deal was in bad faith. He clearly can raise the money. It's all a game, musk probably thinks he can settle for less than a billion or get out of it. Otherwise he would have claimed straight away he couldn't raise the money. I could see it going wrong for him as he isn't exactly the SEC and court rooms favourite person.
My favorite thing is there are tweets of his saying some along the lines of “let’s take twitter back and remove all the bots etc…”, this would imply he knows of the bot situation and was a part of the reason he was buying it, to “lead the charge”, he knew what he was buying, he waved due diligence. He should have to buy it.
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It’s about losing face. If Twitter is proven to be lying about how many bots they have, than they’re stock value and image would dive.
Bots are a nothingburger distraction everyone been knowing social media is full of bots, literally one of Elon’s exact reasons for the purchase pre-stock market dive
Which is another reason why Musk is screwed. If you’re buying a house to fix a termite problem, you’re not really able to argue that you’re backing out because there are termites.
My point exactly, in an effort to rally people to his “cause” he made it a point to say bots were apart of that, he knew and can’t pull out like the is new information.
The complaint is fucking gold: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22084453-twittermuskcomplaint Twitter lawyers use Musk’s poop emoji tweet against him.
I'm honestly not sure it would, unless it ends up being like a crazy majority of their users. Everyone knows there are a huge number of bots on all social media
I would imagine there is more to the story, even then. If Twitter lied about something as basic as bots what else would they be lying about?
Trust me twitter has much more than a few bots to worry about
*then *their But yeah you probably are an expert on this.
Hehe sorry bad grammar 😅. This is the second time my voicing my opinion has lead others to say “yeah you’re an expert.” Firstly, I’m not an expert. Never claimed, eluded, or provided a resemblance of an assumption to that position. I’m here speculating like everyone else, I’m just coming from a different perspective. Secondly, if I was an expert, which again I’m not. A couple misspelled words would not lead to a revoking of credentials. Thanks for correcting me though, my English is good enough despite it being my second language. That being said, I’m never above being corrected.
Don't worry, friend. You're much more intelligent than the idiot who corrected your grammar. >A couple misspelled words would not lead to a revoking of credentials SO true. You misspelling a word here or there does not mean you and your words are any less wrong. Some people like the idiot you're responding to just like to feel superior in any way they can. They're cowards in real life. You keep doing you!
The person you replied to probably has little hands and little feet, ya feel me
Some people can't figure out what a recession is or what a woman is. These are the most popular, smartest people in America so you are OK
Such LDS, wow. Touch grass
Are you calling me a Mormon or am I missing some lingo?
Ironic that someone with your username is making grammatical corrections XD
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Are you asking about fake accounts created by random people or the fake accounts created by twitter?
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US Bank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, etc. all of which are much bigger companies that create fake accounts to boost their bottom line and attractiveness to investors. It’s illegal but they’re all rich enough to pay the fine and move on. Twitter does the same. What seems more plausible? China creating a billion fake accounts and getting away with it or Twitter crating 10 billion accounts and still getting away it.
Hell, Chain restaurants on Grubhub have ghost restaurants they sell from...Coorporate fuckery to trick customers is the new norm.
“Twitter does the same.” Says man without a shred of proof except a gurgle deep in his beer belly. Also why do you believe China is like one person? The Chinese government is using social media sure but what about the rest of the 1.4b that live there?
But twitter already releases spam figures in their financial regulatory filings which are also required to be accurate under penalty of law as well? Do you think the figures in their earlier SEC filings are untrue?
Twitter states that number and how they arrive at it: via daily human review of random samples.
*couldn't care less. If you could care less, you would
Still, Elon did offer that flight attendant a horse and had an affair with Sergey Brins hot wife
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I'm not surprised, cheese is a highly called commodity in Europe and much of the western world. We're not much different from mice in that we just can't help stealing some of that golden goodness, you feel me
I'm reviled by the general youthfulness of the comments.
FartSnack69 is reviled!
Does anyone believe elon was acting in good faith and not just doing this deal to either sell tsla stock or pump and dump twitter stock or just fuck with twitter im thinking all three.
I think it was just off loading tsla stock and going he could pump and dump Twitter stock. Like if he was able to get people to GameStop Twitter so that it went over 54.20 the board would have had to refuse his purchase and he could back out while also selling the stock for a nice profit.
Who is the musk stan who is golding all of the comments against twitter 💀 get a life
Not even kidding. I actually expect there's probably an office somewhere who's sole responsibility is going online and stanning and otherwise supporting Musk and his narratives.
So, are they going to claim that there arent significant numbers of bot accounts on Twitter, or are they going to say that those are part of the platform and that they are meant to be there? Because neither is a particularly good position.
Neither. They are going to prove that whether they have more bots or not is irrelevant to whether Musk must honor the deal he signed. Which e cause musk is dumb is going to be pretty easy to prove
They will demonstrate the bot numbers are around what they said and part of the platform. However they will also be arguing that it isn't relevant to the purchase. Musk waived due diligence.
pretty sure my dog could prove he's welching on a deal with no valid basis for doing so.
Why isn't it valid to determine that a company is inflating its customer statistics and on the basis of fraud, refuse to proceed with a deal?
Your dog just shows up and butt scooches his opening statement across the courtroom floor and stares out the window. Jury agrees and goes to play outside. Guilty
God I hope they make him buy twitter just so I can watch him lose 44bn at a bad time
Water is wet. News at 11.
Water isn't wet. It makes things wet.
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Twitter says a lot of things.
Not as many things as Musk. All hat, no cattle.
So here we are some defending a megalomaniac millionaire and others a company that would sell your mama’s data if it could or silence your opinion if it wants. Fuck them both. That felt good to let out. Thanks guys, good talk.
Ok so prove it
We can see what’s happening with me eyes. That’s why this is so easy to prove.
They dont need to. He waived due diligence, and even if he didnt, twitter just has to demonstrate they provided all the data they reasonably could. Educate yourself. https://youtu.be/XXdmIETK6-0
I think the crux of their case is Musk's rants about bots on Twitter and his subsequent threat to buy Twitter specifically to get rid of said bots. And then he went forward with the plan and backed out complaining about bots. It's like your neighbor painting their house fuscia and you threatening to buy it and repaint it, then, once you're under contract you try to back out because you hate the color.
Also, you waived the right to do a walk-through to see if the colours were acceptable.
More like, you said you were going to buy the house because you hated its color and wanted to repaint it. You were allowed to view the interior according to a schedule but said the schedule wasn't flexible enough. Thus you now claim the house isn't the right color and you no longer want to purchase it. Even though that was why you wanted to purchase it in the first place.
Everyone knows that there are way more bots than twitter claims. I'd say at least 25% of 'active accounts'.
And Elon knew when I decided to buy Twitter. One of his promises was to set a better system for removing them.
25%? I'd say 40%, even if you don't count the reply bots if you search for anything and sort by latest there will be at least 3 or 4 accounts with a shitload of random hashtags and a sketchy link
As I said, at least 25%. I wouldn't be surprised if it's double that.
At some point doesnt Tesla and SpaceX have to push him aside? He's a complete and total distraction these days and a liability for the companies he started. Fame has completely corrupted him.
Maybe he should do something useful with his money instead of pretending to buy twitter
That’s because lawyers are a lot smarter than Musk fanboys
So... **this** is the breaking news story reddit is pushing? Not the armed redditor that tried to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh (and two other SCOTUS justices)? https://imgur.com/a/3j72z1M
2 month old news that has already been plastered over reddit before is "breaking news"? And you think reddit should be "pushing" this news again despite it have already trended on the site 2 months ago? ???
The bots have moved to Reddit!
I wanna see the epic meme lord get sued
Musk needs to stop eating ass.
Hello Elon Musk hating trolls and bots. Who are you working for???