Elon Musk Challenges Twitter CEO to Debate to Prove Bot Reporting – Twitter Materially Restated Its SEC Reporting on Bots 3 Days After Signing Deal with Musk without Telling Him

 

For an update on the Elon Musk – Twitter case, some good information is on the current status is actually on Twitter.  

It’s actually fun to watch Elon Musk run free on Twitter, had this been anyone else, Twitter would have censored them and kicked them off.  But yet again, Musk has Twitter in a position where it can’t kick Musk off the site because he is the potential new owner.

As one Twitter user points out – the entire case comes down to the number of bots on the site.  Twitter for at least the last three years has shared with the SEC that less than 5% of its accounts are bots.  Twitter reports on its mDAUs or valid users (monetizable daily active users).  These users are identified and reported to the public in Twitter’s SEC filings.  If the number of mDAUs or the percentage of bots are no what Twitter reports to the SEC, then Twitter has a very serious problem – its financials and reports cannot be trusted and boom, there goes the stock price…

When Musk asked for more information from Twitter on its reporting related to mDAUs and bots, Twitter did the following according to the below Twitter account:

Twitter provided a vague response
Then provided outdated data
Then offered a fake data set (not the real “firehose” of data it claimed)
Then provided a cleaned data set where Twitter had already suspended the malicious accounts.

Elon Musk read the above tweets and responded by noting that it was a good summary of the problem.  Twitter won’t provide its sampling techniques and how it determines if an account is a bot.

(Sampling techniques are important.  If a sample is random it holds more weight than if a sample is judgementally picked where the sampler knows which accounts to select and can distort the end result.  Also after years of working with Democrats and censoring conservative free speech most prudent observers would have little regard for what Twitter says and would like to see the data.)

In response to the above tweets, Elon Musk challenged the CEO of Twitter to a debate where the CEO proves that Twitter has less than 5% fake or spam daily users.

Others have asked where is the SEC on this?  Are they investigating Twitter’s numbers?  This is very serious stuff.  Investors have potentially been bamboozled by fake reporting.

Others have asked why Twitter has taken 3 months to provide the data that Elon Musk requested.

It actually was even worse –  3 days after signing the deal with Elon, Twitter materially restated (lowered) their mDAU figures in their SEC filings (!), due to “overcounting” (!!).  Twitter management knew this, but kept it secret from Elon’s team during the negotiations. (!!!)

(On a final note, if Elon Musk shared this post on Twitter would  Twitter allow this to be shared coming from a censored account for reporting on Hunter Biden or the 2020 Election?  Not likely.)