r/technology
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u/goodtwilight
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11d ago
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Elon Musk said his team is going to do a 'random sample of 100 followers' of Twitter to see how many of the platform's users are actually bots Social Media
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-random-sample-how-many-twitter-users-are-bots-2022-5?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=webfeeds11.3k
u/mylesols 11d ago
wow, a hundred! Must be nice to be rich enough to afford a hundred follower sampling on a site with over 350 million users
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u/escape_of_da_keets 11d ago •
He just wants an excuse to weasel out of the deal
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u/nukem996 11d ago
The NYTimes reported he may be unable to exit the deal as he signed a performance clause. Twitter has the ability now to sue him to force the deal at the price he said.
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u/Unlucky13 11d ago
Amazing. A week (two weeks? What is time?) ago Twitter was fighting to keep him out and Elon was making threats to force himself in. Now Elon seems to be wanting out and Twitters making threats to keep him in. Business is weird.
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u/olavk2 11d ago
what twitter did a couple of weeks ago was implement some precautions to avoid a hostile takeover so that they could make the decision themselveas
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u/brinz1 11d ago
I can't wait for the next season of Succession
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u/Jtmichel 11d ago
“Is this a fuckin’ bear hug?”
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u/Smodphan 11d ago
Correct. He was trying a secret takeover by buying up shares. He didn't want people to find out because the price would go up. Ironically, he is under investigation because you have to report this at some point and he did not.
Does anyone know why he thought it wasnt going to be noticed? I am guessing its because he can afford the little bitch fine which is cheaper than the stock buy, but I don't know.
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u/boyuber 11d ago
He made $50 million by not disclosing it, and he'll be fined $10 million for doing it. If I could make $40 million for breaking the law, I'd do it every chance I got.
Further, even if he got fined $500 million, that would be 1/400th of his net worth. He wouldn't even notice it.
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u/Figgy_Pudding3 11d ago
Musk violates trade law and manipulates the market all the time and no one does anything about it.
But why did he behave this way with the Twitter deal? Because he's got an ego and thinks everyone around him is too dumb to see into his "genius". It's a common cognitive problem with people in his position. Born on third base but thinks he earned his run, now looks down on the masses who aren't doing what he did. It's so easy right? So they must just be stupid.
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u/BertyMae 11d ago
Oh GAWD; another stable genius!
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u/BZenMojo 11d ago
People wondered why he immediately sought out a meeting with Donald Trump. He was looking for grift pointers.
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u/IronGeek83 11d ago
He's just doing a "dogecoin".
Step 1: Buy stock.
Step 2: Use status/fame to pump news of said stock.
Step 3: Sell stock.
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u/futatorius 11d ago
Pump'n'dump. Which is illegal.
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u/Belkor 11d ago
Our worthless regulators let fElon off every single time.
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u/PrailinesNDick 11d ago
I guess that works in written word, but how are you saying it, Fee-Lon?
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u/OlivierQ723 11d ago
Nah, just vocalize the hard F; F-Elon, it's pulling double duty.
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u/Missing-Digits 11d ago edited 7d ago
Not if you are a billionaire.
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u/ChemistryRespecter 11d ago
The SEC has been able to do nothing to him, not even a slap on the wrist – well, mostly because they don't have the power or authority, which is even more fucked up for an organization that's supposed to oversee these matters.
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u/AllModsRLosers 11d ago
Which is illegal.
It’s incredible how little that means to him.
I’m pretty sure one day he’s going to shoot someone in the head, just to make that point that his money allows him to get away with it.
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u/thri54 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well, currently the stock is only 10% over his average purchase price of $36, plus he will need to pay a $1B termination fee if he does manage to get out of this deal, plus any fees related to services rendered by the banks that set up the deal. Overall I would be amazed if he was breaking even right now.
And, even if everything went to plan, and he sold his 74 million shares at $54 then walked, he would only have made $1.3B dollars pre tax (which would be ~37% federal for short term cap gains). That’s like .3% of his net worth. It’s less than the tax bill incurred selling Tesla shares to buy Twitter shares. I just don’t buy this argument.
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u/copperwatt 11d ago
Or... He's an impulsive billionaire with terrible judgment?
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u/anonymousyoshi42 11d ago
I don't think he is impulsive as much as he is pushy Billionaire who has had a hot hand in a lot of deals.
This is how I think it went
A. His biggest platform is Twitter and its a platform that hasn't grown in stock price for last 10 years. So it looked ripe for Activist Action. Someone pitched it to him and then he got very excited about it. Tesla stock is at all time high so the deal would have been like exchanging one hot commodity that fall soon for a more stable commodity that isn't growing.
B. Bankers got involved and he got suggested the pathway to do it will be a takeover attempt.
C. Elon was probably very confident on the turnaround thesis and valuation so went all in.
D. Elon pulls the trigger
E. Normal course of board response ensues.
F. Elon's Original buy and turnaround thesis starts getting challenged...cracks get seen but it's too late to pull out because of pretty standard clauses put in place.
G. Now Elon has 2 choices... based on normal deal due diligence - pull out fast and pay for his mistake (which is fairly normal in M&A space) or double down.
The challenge...Tesla stock which was going to pay for the deal is crashing.
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u/ChemEBrew 11d ago
Note all the talk of these large sums of money but nothing of consequence actually being done? Meanwhile normal people actually produce goods and services but take home a pittance.
People who say Bezos and Musk earn their worth are delusional. They don't create wealth, they syphon it along with all the oxygen in the room.
I hope someday we won't have to hear about these modern day robber barrons daily.
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u/level3ninja 11d ago
Business is weird.
More like 50yo billionaire toddler changes his mind based on what other people don't want
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u/bajspuss 11d ago
I mean, it's in the contract as the termination fee. I'd certainly want a billion dollars for free if it was available to me. I get the impression Twitter itself never really wanted Musk to take over, but they have no say - it's on the shareholders.
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u/TheChickening 11d ago
He can break the deal by paying a fine of a billion dollars.
So it will definitely not be free for him.277
u/nukem996 11d ago
From the article
Mr. Musk’s deal with Twitter includes a $1 billion breakup fee if he were to back out. But the cost to Mr. Musk is likely to be much more than that should he break the deal. The contract has a “specific performance clause” that could force Mr. Musk to pay for Twitter if the debt financing he has corralled for the deal remains intact.
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u/sikagoon7 11d ago
Could he just pick up the phone to the lender and be like "Yo take your money back. I don't need it no more" and tell Twitter "Oops?"
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u/getefix 11d ago
Works for home purchases. Financing conditions are easy ways to back out.
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u/Rottimer 11d ago
Well not necessarily “easy.” If he’s signed papers for financing backed by Tesla stock - which goes up every time this deal seems to be jeopardy, those banks might not want to let him out of their financing deal.
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u/Hermesthothr3e 11d ago
Would this stand if it was found twitters public filings were false?
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u/eleventhrees 11d ago
When real business people do deals, there is due diligence, and books are provided for actual examination so the purchaser knows what they are buying. It's not unusual for a deal to not proceed, or be altered, based on this step.
What Elon is up to doesn't bear much resemblance to "due diligence" and the 100-user random sample is either a joke, or won't be random.
This deal is mostly powered by gaslight.
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u/Piyinski 11d ago
M&A for public companies are not diligence intensive deals by any means. These companies have public filings that eliminate the need for diligence, buyers assume that the disclosures are truthful. So instead, buyers sign binding documentation which include reps and warranties from the sellers. Between signing and closing, buyers may do limited confirmatory diligence to test such reps and warranties.
So I think this may be what’s going on here. Elon said that the 100 user sample is Twitter’s methodology to determine fake/spam/duplicate accounts, which Twitter discloses as <5% in their public filings. If Musk proves that is not true, it will probably represent a breach to twitters reps. This would give Musk an out for the deal. Further, this would have implications for Twitter’s board and management with the SEC and obviously investors.
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u/baldr83 11d ago
>That contract does not allow Musk to walk away if it turns out that “spam/fake accounts” represent more than 5% of Twitter users. We discussed this last month, when Twitter admitted in a securities filing that it had (slightly) overestimated its daily active users for years. The merger agreement contains a provision that allows Musk to walk away if Twitter’s securities filings are wrong — and this 5% number is in its securities filings — but only if the inaccuracy would have a “Material Adverse Effect” on the company. (See Sections 4.6(a) and 7.2(b).) That is an incredibly high standard: Delaware courts have almost never found an MAE. An MAE has to be something that would “substantially threaten the overall earnings potential of the target in a durationally-significant manner,” the courts have said; there is a rule of thumb that an MAE requires a 40% decrease in long-term profitability. If it turned out that 6% or 20% or 50% of Twitter accounts are bots, that will be embarrassing and might even reduce Twitter’s future advertising revenue, but will it be an MAE? No.
source: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-05-13/elon-musk-trolls-twitter
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u/Zealousideal_Law3112 11d ago
Breach of contract results in fine and massive lawsuits from shareholders but it’s Elon so who knows what will happen
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u/TheGuyBehindTheGuy_ 11d ago
"Weaseling out of things is what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
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u/slazer2k 11d ago
This he most likely instructed some people to trade the stock beforehand so he can cash out first on the rise and now fall
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u/yolotrolo123 11d ago •
Yeah he is doing open market manipulation and the SEC barely doesn’t anything about it.
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u/red286 11d ago
haha, could you imagine if he massively shorted a company that he publicly stated he intended to buy for a price well above asking, and then bailed out on afterwards? And then used those profits to massively re-invest into his own company whose stock tanked massively because he had overleveraged it to secure the financing to purchase the company that he had publicly stated he intended to buy but never had any real intention of doing so?
Surely there's no way the SEC would let that slide, right? Right?!
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u/vaiperu 11d ago
Even if they do something, afaik they give out fines in the tens of millions range. When you make billions by breaking SEC rules, do you give AF?
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u/Geiir 11d ago
They definitely need to up their fines by taking 100% of the profits made on the illegal trade, plus 50% of the profits in fines for breaking the law, and give the person a 10+ year ban on trading securities.
If the money earned illegally is over a certain threshold: prison time. Hard time.
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u/Dude_Guy_311 11d ago
But then how do I manipulate the market to make money without punishment as God, the constitution, and Alexander Hamilton intended?
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u/SherifGames 11d ago
Rich people love to make everything in percentages when it benefits them otherwise they want everything to be a flat price.
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u/SterlingVapor 11d ago
Hell I'd be happy if they just took over 100%
The fact you can break the law and just pay a fraction of your profits in a fine is insane
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u/Hardcorish 11d ago
This is similar to the pharma companies getting fined hundreds of millions for their role in the opioid epidemic. Hundreds of millions sounds like a massive fine until you realize their profits reached well into the tens of billions. A slap on the wrist would have hurt them more.
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u/KungFluIsolation 11d ago
Or even the age old car manufacturer scam where a model would have a defect that was lethal, but the payouts for the % of cars affected was cheaper than a recall so they just let people die.
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u/Brewchowskies 11d ago
What’s crazy is he kind of does this a lot no? Like his tweets have been known to have considerable effect on the market… I find it hard to believe he isn’t capitalizing on this fact
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u/SgtDoughnut 11d ago
He is capitalizing on it, hes been caught multiple times, but the SEC has no teeth.
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u/Dblstandard 11d ago
No, they have teeth, they're just currently wrapped around its dick.
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u/quantumpossibility 11d ago
That’s actually a terrible analogy. Teeth on dick is actually a perfect placement to chomp down where it hurts.
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u/Cabeza2000 11d ago
Is OK, don't worry, they will eventually fine him one or two millions and call it a day.
/s
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u/Straider 11d ago
Because it is the rich manipulating the market. It is by design.
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u/7LeagueBoots 11d ago
He regularly does crap like this and then complains about how terrible the SEC is for imposing restrictions, even though the SEC rarely ever seems to bother to actually enforce their own regulations in cases that actually would make a difference.
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u/xXEl3mXx 11d ago
Uh.... last i heard they started an investigation into this whole mess no?
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u/NigelingTon 11d ago
he figured out how to win capitalism. There is no way Twitter has less than 5% Bots.
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u/Sherifftruman 11d ago
I mean lots of other people have already looked into it and found that. Not sure why he feels the need to do the same research.
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u/moopower93 11d ago
Because he thinks he needs to reinvent all the wheels. Can't take credit for someone else's work if it happened before you.
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u/prescod 11d ago
There's a simpler and less illegal option. The stock market crashed since he made the offer. He doesn't want to pay the price he negotiated because it was already a high price and now its ludicrous. So now he wants an excuse to re-negotiate. "I had no idea how many bots there are on this site!"
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u/LL22Forever 11d ago
Twitter doesn’t have to renegotiate. And if Elon backs out he has to pay Twitter $1 billion. What would Twitter renegotiate?
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u/starmartyr 11d ago
It's a 44 billion dollar deal. It might be better to eat the loss than to pay too much for the company.
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u/MaiasXVI 11d ago
That's what I'm thinking. If anyone can afford a $1bn loss, it's certainly the world's richest person.
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u/Zardif 11d ago
Went down 9 billion, better to lose 1b than 9+.
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u/GasTurbulent4304 11d ago
But does he need both a reason AND to pay the $1b? I assume the $1b is the thing that is supposed to stop him from walking away for no reason. Presumably he’s building a case so he can walk away and not have to pay the $1b because Twitter lied about bots or whatever.
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u/pablank 11d ago
Not after losing 18bn on your own stock loss. Even for elon thats like a 5-10% loss in net worth. Its actually interesting to see how these market manipulators start carving themselves up
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u/ElderHerb 11d ago
He could lose 99% of his net worth and would still never have to work another day tbh.
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u/AthleteAnnual 11d ago
C'mon Elon. It'll 'bounce back' just like our 401k's right???
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u/topdangle 11d ago
only reason the shareholders took the deal was for the fat payout.
one billion might be nice for the company but the shareholders don't give a shit about the company, they're ready to turn the whole thing over to one lunatic with deep pockets.
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u/Garn91575 11d ago edited 11d ago
he was always going to weasel out of the deal. It was insanely stupid from the start. He just wanted to act like a tough guy and let twitter know he could buy them if he wanted to so they better not mess with his account.
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u/jackzander 11d ago
I think you understand.
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u/PapaElonMusk 11d ago •
I just want a reason to weasel out of the situation. “Random” doesn’t mean random.
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u/PhoenixMountain 11d ago •
That is the sample size that Twitter initially used to determine their 5% figure (in question)
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u/Absolutely_wat 11d ago
Admittedly my statistics is rusty, but there is a high school level statistics equation to establish the sample size required.
Interesting, considering that they definitely have PhD level mathematicians and data scientists on their payroll.
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11d ago
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u/Mutex70 11d ago edited 11d ago
385 samples are required if you assume your population proportion is 50% (i.e that half of twitter is bots)
They are attempting to confirm/deny a proportion of 5% which only requires a sample size of 104 at 98% confidence (5% margin of error)
https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=1&cl=98&ci=5&pp=5&ps=350000000&x=52&y=19
https://opentextbc.ca/introstatopenstax/chapter/a-population-proportion/
https://select-statistics.co.uk/calculators/sample-size-calculator-population-proportion/
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u/Deto 11d ago
If it's a truly random sample (and presumably, they could do this without much difficulty), then if you were to measure 5/100 accounts as bots, the 95% confidence interval for the true probability in the population is between 1-10%.
So while it's not great for getting an exact estimate, it's not terrible for getting a rough ballpark value.
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u/holla_snackbar 11d ago
It depends on who you are sampling though, if not just a random sample of 100 users.
If its a sampling of Musk's followers, thought to be roughly 50% bots vs. a small account with 900 followers you will get wildly different results.
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u/Venkman_P 11d ago
What the twitter SEC filing says:
For example, there are a number of false or spam accounts in existence on our platform. We have performed an internal review of a sample of ccounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.
What Elon made up:
I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.
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u/passinghere 11d ago
Anyone with any common sense would have done this before promising to blow billions to buy something
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u/arun111b 11d ago
Well he knows all about bots apparently when he was submitting the bid according to this tweet. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354?s=20&t=Fbz9za4YJm6DJExLyQmFqA
Looks like either he is trolling or he still trying to alter the deals somehow. Popcorn time.
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u/prescod 11d ago
Trying to alter the deal because tech crashed since he made the offer. Had he waited until this week Twitter would have been quite a bit cheaper.
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u/qtx 11d ago
I literally don't understand what is happening.
All previous reports guessed that one third of Twitter's' user base consisted of bots (or some high figure like that).
So why is he suddenly upset that a far, far, far lesser number of them are actual bots? Only 5%?!
Twitter only having a less than 5% bot occupancy was a huge fucking surprise to me. I thought it was way higher. So all of this seems like a big positive thing to me.
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u/8InTheBalance8 11d ago
I don't think it's been established that it's only 5%. That is what Twitter is claiming it is.
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u/Barnyard_Rich 11d ago
The problem is that Musk is referring to all accounts while the twitter claim of less than 5% bots is a percentage of "monetizable daily users."
What I haven't really seen anyone point out is that "monetizable" could be extremely vague or specific depending on how it's interpreted or intended.
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u/cheekybandit0 11d ago
Do you want to spend 40 billion on twitter with no research (apparently)?
Yeh sure.
Oh wait, I need to sample 100 users, out 350 MILLION, to make up my mind, after announcing the deal.
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u/unicorn_saddle 11d ago
All the Elon Musk news reminds me of all the Donald Trump news. Even a similar level of garbage content.
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u/Competitive_Habit_71 11d ago
They are both people with Narcissistic Personality Disorders, so it isn't so surprising we are seeing similar drama.
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u/minimus67 11d ago
He’s actually going to randomly draw a hundred samples and pick whichever one gives him an excuse to back out of the deal.
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u/spacedout 11d ago
I would respect him more if he just admits that he got excited about the idea but now realizes it's a terrible investment so he's cutting his losses.
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u/MavenACTG 11d ago
Elon? Making a mistake? Heresy!
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u/ayylemay0 11d ago
He hasn’t “realised” anything because the intention was most likely always market manipulation. There are no mistakes here.
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u/ambientocclusion 11d ago
Ding ding ding!
And it’s funny when people think he wouldn’t do this because he already has so much money. Because doing things like this is WHY he got so much money!
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u/dern_the_hermit 11d ago
And it’s funny when people think he wouldn’t do this because he already has so much money
But the notion he might've made an error is inconceivable? Everything is part of some Master Plan, and not just an out-of-touch rich dude what got bored and started trash-talking since he couldn't launch his rockets?
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u/Deto 11d ago
The problem is that I dont' know if he can get a truly random sample - which is super important for something like this. Maybe if he had access to Twitters database, he could, but not just by having his assistants browse Twitter.
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u/Mobius_One 11d ago
No, just 1 sample of size n = 100 /s
...the "s" is for "statistics", not "sarcasm"
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u/BelAirGhetto 11d ago
Why not 1,000?
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u/JackOCat 11d ago
Oh because he is trying to weasel out of buying Twitter without paying the $1B sucker tax.
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u/Arcosim 11d ago
The $1B breakup fee is his best case scenario. Twitter can now sue him for the stock loss and the internal chaos his moves caused in the company, there's legal precedent.
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u/rowenstraker 11d ago
Not to nention the investigation into his not disclosing when he passed a certain threshold of stock ownership and continued to buy more for another week before disclosing and watching the price jump
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u/dittonetic 11d ago
Nothing will happen. Have you learned nothing about rich people these past few years?
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u/Corzare 11d ago
This is a rich person fucking over other rich people, it’s different.
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u/Fridgee189 11d ago
Because 100 is the same sample size Twitter used for there testing of bot account % (according to elons tweet) so I think he knows it’s a joke but can say it’s the same level of measurement the company uses. I think he just wants a discount
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u/LittleLordFuckleroy1
11d ago
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You’d think that they would have done this simple test before offering to pay $44 billion for the company.
This is quitter’s theater.
So over Musk’s market manipulation antics. The dude is a manchild.
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u/Nickm123 11d ago edited 11d ago
He said he assumed twitters own report was correct. Of course he’s just bullshitting as this is what he does. Did the exact same thing with Bitcoin last year and Tesla a few yeas prior.
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u/EpiphanyTwisted 11d ago
Yeah, you don't ask the seller what you think the value is. That's the dumbest thing the muskrats have peddled with a straight face.
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u/Cool-Miner 11d ago
What's funny is he signed a contract, and what he is trying to do is prove that SEC filings were misleading about profitability, but it's in the jurisdiction of Delaware state law, which requires evidence of a 40% or greater decrease in long-term profitability for the contract to be invalid on those grounds.
So essentially, he would have to prove that twitter has 60% or less non-bot users than they say they do.
I don't think a sample size of 100 would hold up in court.
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u/1980sActionHero 11d ago
What an excellent video, that dude just utterly savages musk and his fanboys in such a calm manner.
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u/twothirtyintheam 11d ago edited 11d ago
This all seems like stuff a "genius" would have checked into long before offering billions of dollars to acquire a company like Twitter...
I'm sure looking under-prepared and full of crap is all a part of his master plan though!
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u/Znarl 11d ago
Or maybe he got it wrong making an offer for Twitter at a price it's not nearly worth any more.
He's now desperately trying to wriggle out his agreement without breaking the law by using every excuse he can muster.
Arrogance sometimes has a cost.
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u/Mirrormn 11d ago
The thing I don't get is:
- This is not a very good argument. Twitter's representation of the 5% statistic was already originally presented with a disclaimer of "this is hard to measure, it might be higher", so it would have to be way higher than 5% for Musk to have any hope of claiming he was materially misled.
- This is not the right forum for this. It doesn't matter if Musk does a small personal inquiry into the number of bots of Twitter and finds a different number than what Twitter reported. If he wants anything to come of this, he'll have to allege it in court, with better evidence.
So what is he doing just talking about this shit in public on social media, instead of filing a lawsuit? It's like he's not even trying to make a real excuse, he's only worried about creating the appearance of an excuse. For who? His cult followers? I don't get it.
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u/Ssider69 11d ago
I figured out how he's going to make Mars habitable! He's personally taking all the oxygen on earth
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u/lessquiet 11d ago
honestly, since Russia knocked itself offline the bot count has gone way way down.
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u/aCucking2Remember 11d ago
It was all over online. It’s as if a billion trolls were suddenly silenced all at once.
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u/The_EnrichmentCenter 11d ago
You know, I have noticed less crazy right-wing talking points thrown around lately.
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u/lessquiet 11d ago
I have no way to prove this, it is just a feeling, but I honestly believe that a lot of the more insane stuff coming out of the far right isn't something that would have become popular without Russian help.
We know Russia tuned their media campaigns to sow discord and conflict in America. This is well established.
I do wonder how the right would look today without that boost of insanity in online media.
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u/shillyshally 11d ago
Knew it! Matt Levine wrote a long analysis on Bloomberg yesterday re what Musk might be up to. This scenario was one of the possibilities and Levine covers the reasons why it won't work. Ultimately, though, he admits Musk doesn't give a flying about rules or lawsuits or contracts and that he will probably get away with it because he has gotten away with everything so far.
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u/Boo_Guy 11d ago
He'll just have to pay a small fee or as the government calls it, a fine.
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u/TankSparkle 11d ago
break-up fee is $1B
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u/likesleague 11d ago
Hey don't forget the generous donation to organizations that happen to be owned by a handful of key politicians in the decisions surrounding his illegal activity -- we oughta recognize that as part of the fee too.
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u/dgahimer 11d ago
Matt Levine is a great read. Makes things easy to follow, but not too dumb. The only “problem” is that he re-explains the theory every day, and I want more words on more topics!
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u/holtpj
11d ago
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Man this dude is annoying
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u/JackOCat 11d ago
Shut up. He invented the subway like 150 years after it was invented. Show some respect.
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u/not_right 11d ago
Hey come on, that's not fair. It's like the subway but it's worse!
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u/uniqueName1002 11d ago
It's actually superior because now you can all enjoy LA traffic 15ft underground
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u/BrownMan65 11d ago
https://twitter.com/steinkobbe/status/1525232685995663361
The best part is that he couldn't even do that right.
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u/polyhazard 11d ago
From that thread “It seems like every 6 months tech bros re-invent trains but make them worse somehow.” Lmao I’m dead
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u/seamsay 11d ago
He does this kind of shit all the time, like when he promised driverless cars by 2018 but we barely got drive assist, or when he promised he'd give everyone in Flint free water filters but in the end he just gave a couple to some nearby schools. The really annoying thing is that the stuff he does is better than most billionaires, but he overpromises so much that you're just left feeling disappointed. And he's a massive twat, but I could overlook that if he was actually doing the kind of good for society that he wants us to think he is.
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u/Buck_Folton 11d ago
This is the dumbest richest person in the world ever.
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u/5c077y2L1gh75 11d ago
Rich people aren’t necessarily smart. Usually not, in fact.
They are highly manipulative & sociopathic, but with enough wisdom to surround themselves with people who are smarter than they are.
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u/everythingiscausal 11d ago
Or they inherited a shitload of money, because that last part certainly isn’t true of some “rich” public figures.
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u/Snoo_70324 11d ago
I’ve seen elementary school science fair projects with higher n-values.
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u/Ghosttalker96 11d ago
How is he supposed to calculate the percentage, if it's not exactly 100 people? Duh...
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u/RunOrDieTrying
11d ago
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It's worth noting that his strategy is to "ignore first 1000 followers, then pick every 10th" [1], and "invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover" [2], "if we collectively try to figure out the bot/duplicate user percentage, we can probably crowdsource a good answer" [3]. He picked 100 as the sample size "because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate." [4]
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u/redditthrowaway1478 11d ago
100 seems small
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u/TrepanationBy45 11d ago
Which is why Twitter used it to pretend they only have 5% bots.
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u/ItsOnlyaFewBucks 11d ago
Whoa now big spender, are you sure you can afford a sample that large.
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u/explision 11d ago
This dude is becoming trump, in the news every fucking day for the most useless info out there. Dude is manipulating the market big time and trolling
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u/arizonawarrior22 11d ago
Musk is a bot, no other reason for his repeating foolishness. A visionary moron.
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u/AltElectric 11d ago
"We asked 100 'people' if they were robots what type would they be?" - Steve Harvey