Elon Musk claimed that potentially 90% of Twitter users are bots on May 16, putting hole in his Delaware court argument

TLDR - this goes against his argument that he believed Twitter's claim of only 5% of users being bots. https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/12/23301932/elon-musk-twitter-tesla-shares-money-negotiation-leverage Here is a lightly edited version of what Musk says in this video snippet: https://twitter.com/PPathole/status/1555988862522245120 "…it’s extremely fundamental and anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam, and just a lot of fake accounts. So it seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that… the number of real unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95 percent… That is what they’re claiming. Does anyone have that experience? [laughter from the audience and from Musk] Exactly." The video is snipped from the All-In Summit in May (his comments start at 2:00 or so). By the time of this recording, Musk had signed the agreement to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. Now, to the content. Musk says that “anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam, and just a lot of fake accounts.” This is something of an exaggeration — my reply guys are top-tier — but it hits on something true. No one can claim they haven’t noticed bots, spammers, and people pretending to be Musk to get your money. I have noticed a lot of them in Musk’s mentions specifically. Musk goes on to ask if anyone has the experience of interacting with real people 95 percent of the time, to laughter from the audience and his own chuckles. The intent here, with apologies to John Crowe Ransom, is to elicit contempt for the notion that 95 percent of Twitter accounts are people. If you watch the longer video — not just the clip — Musk is being interviewed. The clip on Twitter cuts off before Musk suggests that if you do believe you’re mostly interacting with people, “there’s a bridge I’d like to sell you.” (I… guess I’d like to hear about the bridge?) He then suggests that the “lowest estimate” of fake accounts is something like 20 percent. This estimate appears to be based on nothing — if there is a source, Musk sure doesn’t cite it. Musk also brags that he has the most popular tweet of any human, about acquiring Coca-Cola “to put the cocaine back in,” a stunt I would support if I thought Musk could actually close the deal. Musk wonders, how is this popular tweet not even more popular? Literally, he says, “Twitter says the monetizable daily active users [on the platform] is 217 million. So why would it be that the most popular tweet ever, basically, is only two, two-and-a-half percent of the entire user base?” When the camera cuts back to the in-person event, David Friedberg appears to be holding his forehead. One possible answer, Elon, is that many people use reverse chronological feeds, so if you didn’t tweet it while they were actively looking at Twitter, they didn’t see it. Or maybe, just maybe, they didn’t think it was very funny! Just strategically speaking, “why am I not more popular” is not a great question to ask in public because someone will answer it. Musk digs in further. (Again, I have lightly edited this quote to make him sound like he speaks in full sentences.) “Something doesn’t add up here. My concern is — it’s not is it 5 or 7 or 8 percent, but is it potentially 80 percent or 90 percent bots? I certainly know there’s some real people on Twitter. Is it an order of magnitude? Is it 50 percent instead of 5?” The added context doesn’t really improve the clip — it makes it worse. I say “worse” because Musk’s lawyers have to argue he was defrauded by Twitter in order to get out of the contract he signed. So he’d have to have believed the representations Twitter made about its user base and then been surprised to find out that, whoopsie, nope. But this video contradicts that idea — it suggests that everyone knows Twitter is full of bots. There’s no way Twitter could have lied to him. Forget about the argument over whether inauthentic accounts are material to the Twitter deal. We don’t even need to have this conversation! Here’s Musk saying he definitely knew Twitter was full of bots and scams, as any sane person would.

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