Musk Says Twitter Must Prove Bot Claims for $44B Deal to Proceed

The amount of people who knows what Musk is thinking either here or on Twitter as this story has developed that have been continually wrong at every step is, frankly, really surprising. Yet still people speculate as if they know him, know his thoughts, know his intentions.<p>It feels like pure projection.<p>I have been following the story with curiosity because I think disruption at Twitter could be fascinating. The impact other than pretending to know what Musk is thinking has already been profound. I say this as someone without any skin in the fight.

This article gives a really interesting overview of the facts: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2022-05-13&#x2F;elon-musk-trolls-twitter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2022-05-13&#x2F;elon-m...</a><p>Basically, legally Musk is already past this point -- he signed a contract promising to buy Twitter without doing any real investigation. I&#x27;ve felt for a while he&#x27;s looking for ways to squirm back out, but he legally can&#x27;t (unless he simply can&#x27;t raise the funds at all, that&#x27;s what the $1 billion &quot;exit fee&quot; you may have heard about is).<p>Of course it&#x27;s possible Elon will simply ignore the law, as in practice the rich can often simply ignore laws they don&#x27;t like with limited consequences.

I don&#x27;t get it. Was this deal some kind of drunken bar bet? I said before that Musk wouldn&#x27;t buy Twitter. Having glanced at the finance documents, he seemed to have financed a long-term investment with a lot of short-term loans (I&#x27;m thinking especially of the bridging loan and using Tesla shares as margin). Terrible idea!<p>Then there&#x27;s the matter of the $1b &quot;exit fee&quot;. And even if he wrangles out of that, I&#x27;m sure his financiers would have charged a pretty penny just to put the finances in place.<p>I can only assume that Twitter agreed to being acquired knowing full well that Musk will walk away with egg on his face.

Apparently Twitter claims only 5% of users are bots. It seems impossible to me that this claim is remotely true, and I imagine Musk knows this. This kind of sounds to me like he&#x27;s decided he doesn&#x27;t want to buy and is creating a reason not to.

Twitter&#x27;s method for counting bots, according to Parag:<p>1. Sample random X accounts from known mDAU accounts<p>2. Use human analysis to manually review sampled accounts, using public and private data and metadata<p>3. Bucketize account accordingly<p>Twitter&#x27;s process for finding bot accounts may be flawed, but if it&#x27;s the process they use for their SEC filings, the deal is on.

Does Musk hold some puts under another name or something?<p>I mean just all this stuff looks like what I would be doing if I thought, hah hah I am going to manipulate market because I can!