Elon Musk – Twitter deal can't proceed until it has less than 5% fake accounts

At some level, you've got to admire him. He's not going to face any consequences for anything he does, and so he's doing all the naked market manipulation he wants, with an audience of millions of hogs cheering him on and the media breathlessly reporting on his every move. I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out he never intended to buy twitter, and this was all just a ruse to move the market and make millions. Intentionally or otherwise, he's showing just how much of a pure oligarchy America is.

Elon had the opportunity to do due diligence before signing a deal to buy at $54.20, but declined to do so. His signature is already on the contract; it is a little bit late to start getting buyers' remorse.

For what it’s worth, while Twitter has a huge incentive to say that they have an incentive to minimize fake accounts, it’s not clear that they actually do. For instance, it might be the case that their optimal level of BS is not zero.

If they do indeed have such an incentive, it would be very hard to tell using the company’s representations and their own internal metrics would likely implicitly bias away from seeing what was there.

This is also the parsimonious explanation for the junk filling Amazon and, say, the Apple store. While it is optimal for users to have the level of spam at zero, it may be optimal for the purveyors for the level to be above zero.

I’m reminded of a scene in some TV show from many years ago where a mobster goes to a market, whacks an item with a baseball bat, then demands the shopkeeper sell it to him at half price.

When does Elon become the boy who cried wolf? What if he just wanted to harm twitter or just show that rules don’t apply to him? Can people see him as a business partner, or just hope he buys them out and take over the problem(s)?

Forgive my ignorance, but aren’t all users “unreal” in the sense that they’re not paying and often not posting to any significant group? Hasn’t the internet trained people to ignore ads? Or is twitter seen as just the 21st century cable news channel?

Wasn’t there a meme that half of all advertising was ineffective but nobody knew which half?

It has to be 90% fake accounts. Even HN here has plenty of GPT-3 chat bots who apparently work with each other and their herders in upvoting.