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Since it seems all his claims have been substantiated now.

Since it seems all his claims have been substantiated now.

Since it seems all his claims have been substantiated now.

a) Just because a whistleblower claimed something doesn't mean it's true.

b) Even if the whistleblower's claims are true it still doesn't mean Musk gets to leave the deal. The whistleblower claimed bot numbers were understated, Musk never believed those numbers so why should it matter? And Musk's stated motives are obvious pretexts for simple buyer's remorse.

c) Musk also violated the agreement by disparaging Twitter execs and by generally trashing the company non-stop since he got cold feet.

I think the whistleblower makes it unlikely that Musk is forced to buy, but I don't think he's simply walking away.

Also people keep miscontruing the twitter "bot" statement. They have never made the claim of "we have 5% bot users". What they always have stated is "here is the process we use to estimate how many MDU's we have on the platform, this process gives us a result of around 5% bots" which are very different statements.

Except the whistleblower explicitly states their mDAU numbers are bullshit too.

Well lucky for all us lookyloos this is all going to court so we won't have to guess or speculate.

Except the whistleblower explicitly states their mDAU numbers are bullshit too.

Except the whistleblower explicitly states their mDAU numbers are bullshit too.

False. He explicitly concedes he is not challenging those numbers. He merely says it would be more splenderific if they used a different method of calculating the numbers than their disclosed method.

The execs in question got a 10 mil bonus for growing daily users and no monetary incentive for detecting spam or bot accounts.

Why wouldn't bonuses be tied to profitable accounts? This is lunacy, the total number of spam accounts has nothing to do with their business model, it's only relevant to the user experience and a government with a hardon for stopping misinformation campaigns. They don't need to know the total number of bots any more than /. needs to know the total number of sock puppet accounts. They need to know how many people they can realistically claim to be selling ads for, and the total number of sock puppets need

Where does he say that? All I keep finding are weasel worded things like this quote that misconstrue percentage of bots in the mDAU and total users. Twitter's goal seems to be to identify monetizable users with less than 5% of them being inaccurate. That doesn't mean everything they exclude from that count is a bot, it means they lack confidence to make a determination. So they don't know. That's irrelevant to their count of high confidence assumed real people accounts.

Zatko says that Twitter arrives at its official percentage of bots on the platform by sampling only from a subset of accounts known as "monetizable daily active users," or mDAUs. But that subset, created by Twitter to give advertisers an idea of how many real humans are looking at their ads, already attempts to exclude bots. Zatko says that his own internal attempts to find out what percentage of total Twitter accounts were bots were met with a lack of enthusiasm.

Zatko says that Twitter arrives at its official percentage of bots on the platform by sampling only from a subset of accounts known as "monetizable daily active users," or mDAUs. But that subset, created by Twitter to give advertisers an idea of how many real humans are looking at their ads, already attempts to exclude bots. Zatko says that his own internal attempts to find out what percentage of total Twitter accounts were bots were met with a lack of enthusiasm.

The percentage of total accounts

Musk: "I want to buy Twitter because I think they underestimate how many bots there are and I want to fix that!" Twitter: "Ok, we've negotiated a price." Musk: "I want to back out because I think you underestimated how many bots there are."

Amazing insight right here folks. The language in a legal contract was written by lawyers in a specific legal way to cover their legal bases to make sure the company has not extended itself in a way that would leave the company needlessly open to legal liability.

In fact talking about the process is more valuable than the statement. Advertisers are free to decide if the process is acceptable for their ad dollars rather than taking a statement of fact with no knowledge of how that number is grounded. Neverm

The bot question is bunk (check my posting history if you want to know why I believe that).

However, Musk has amended the claims in his defense and it now includes data security and other issues raised by whistle blower which afaik has been allowed by the judge. As the specifics of Peiter Zatko's information isn't yet known I'd wait that out before trying to draw absolute conclusions, and then there is the question of how and how much of that information is usable by Musk in court.

And you'll find my relevant comments under that very article.

That's admitted because it could theoretically benefit the Material Adverse Effects part of the case.

However, in all of history, the Delaware courts have found a Material Adverse Effect one (1) time. Once. In history. So twitter's SEC filings would have to be so wrong that they're the most, or second-most, misleading SEC filings ever. That doesn't really line up with what is alleged.

And Delaware has a huuge interest in defending the sanctity and enforceability of merger agreements. The contract says that in case of dispute, specific performance is to be the preferred resolution. That translates to forcing both parties to complete the agreement as written. If twitter doesn't win... the result would be an instant shift of merger agreements to being executed under the laws of some other State. Delaware knows that. They have very very strong legal precedents that protect these contracts. What the contract says will be enforced, because the contract says to resolve disputes that way. Some contracts say something different; that if they fight over it, it could be cancelled by either party. Either way, when you sign a contract in Delaware, you live with what you signed.

I concur. But I'm not sure that material adverse effect would have to be confined to SEC filings, nor of the outcome should Musk lose (which I believe he will). Markets aren't pricing for specific performance and I wonder if the difference here is that it isn't a merger but an outright purchase and Delaware isn't expected to put the full difference in share price on Musk? You don't happen to have any insight on the stats of specific performance vs monetary damages, I can't find anything substantial?

a) Just because a whistleblower claimed something doesn't mean it's true. b) Even if the whistleblower's claims are true it still doesn't mean Musk gets to leave the deal.

a) Just because a whistleblower claimed something doesn't mean it's true.

b) Even if the whistleblower's claims are true it still doesn't mean Musk gets to leave the deal.

If Musk can prove fraud, it absolutely means that he can leave the deal.

The whistleblower claimed bot numbers were understated

The whistleblower claimed bot numbers were understated

It might be a narrower claim than that.

The "whistleblower" claimed that the metric used to measure users was not the most useful, and that they should use (unspecified) instead, taking more consideration of bots.

Musk is in many ways not very bright, and the way he approached this deal was profoundly stupid. This is likely not going to save him.

Guy was their head of security. And now they're paying for his silence? I think that's a bit different than "hacker".

I know the media made for general audiences typically means "attacker" when they use the term "hacker". That's not how We use the term.

Last night I hung out with my friends at Dallas Hackers Association. HACKERS association. One of the guys I mostly hung out with last night, at the hacker gathering, knows Mudge. Mudge is one of us, a hacker.

Check out Mudge's latest tweet (@dotMudge). In his latest tweet, he mentions being a hacker. See the photo attached to his latest tweet. That's what he looks like *when

I didn't finish my thought on Defcon, so that sentence my not make a lot of sense. What I forgot to say is Mudge has spoken on the the same stage, more than once. At the HACKER conference, Defcon.

> People calling themselves "hacker", aren't.

Lol Mudge doesn't know whether or not he's a hacker, only you know? And his friends, who literally INVENTED the term, don't know what they mean with the word they invented.

The self-centeredness of you actually believing that you know more about the guy than he knows about himself, of thinking that because you once watched a movie with a "hacker", you understand the culture better than the people who created the term, in astounding. Really. Think about how pomp

If by "literally" you mean not at all, then you are literally correct.

Hacker, in the sense you use, dates back to the early 70s.

> Hacker, in the sense you use, dates back to the early 70s.

Mid 1960s, at MIT, in relation to computers and telephony (phreaking), or in relation to deep understanding of a machine in order to make it do weird things.

It was brought over from the model railroad club, where hacking had the much older meaning "messing around with" something, typically in a sloppy way. As if hacking at it with a hatchet (in contrast with, say scalpel or X-Acto knife). Think "duct tape and baling wire", or messing with a syst

PS - I curious where in the world you get the idea that guys like Munge and DT would never hang out with the likes of Captain Crunch, Gosper, and Greenblatt?

Would you be surprised to see photos of them together?

FYI if you'd like to learn more, this is a pretty good book: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers... [amazon.com]

> See the photo attached to his latest tweet

That's 1998. :) He's a bit more clean-cut these days; looks like a distinguished gentleman. Did at tour at DHS in the mid 2000's IIRC.

Anonymous non-nerd confused by technical lingo; news at 11

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