How Twitter?

[Ari]

Texas’s Attorney General is stepping in to defend newly minted Texan Elon ‘horse’ Musk.

Techcrunch

Paxton just announced that his office is investigating how Twitter may be “misleading Texans” about the number of automated bots on its platform.
Echoing Elon Musk, Texas AG is investigating Twitter over bots – TechCrunch

Ironically those automated bots are one of the reasons Trump loves twitter so much, now the man that would unban Trump is coming for those bots! It seems only one will remain standing after this, I don’t know which I want more, Musk to defeat Twitter or Twitter to defeat Musk.

[Ari]

It sounds like ‘too many bots’ isn’t a valid legal reason to skip out on the deal but ‘they refused to give me important information’ might just be. So twitter is seemingly calling his bluff, giving him access to a ‘firehose’ of data on daily activities.

Since Musk’s take over bid Tesla stocks have lost 1/3rd of their value and it’s looking like twitter will make $1B in Musk’s failed attempt to distract from his other constant failing.

Twitter to provide spam data to Elon Musk as part of deal - The Washington Post

[JoeP]

stated the lawyers from the firm Skadden Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

... is this an Onion article?

[Ari]

They’re a 70+ year old law firm with connections to Russian oligarchs including Putin.

Wikipedia

One of company's actions on Yanukovych's [Russian aligned president of Ukraine from 2010-2014] behalf was to produce a report justifying Yanukovych's imprisonment of former prime minister Yulia V. Tymoshenko (who was pro-European) and denying that the action had been a political prosecution, although many Western countries characterized it as such.

…Tymoshenko made plans to sue Skadden, and in May 2020 it was revealed that Skadden had paid at least $11 million to settle the case before a lawsuit could be filed.

In 2019, Skadden agreed to pay a $4.6 million settlement to the Department of Justice over the firm's failure to register as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registrations Act.

(Unrelated, I have just now learned that lower case lol and capitalized LOL are two different smilies. )

[Stormlight]

Elon Musk says Twitter employees doing ‘excellent’ work can continue working from home - The Verge

Aspiring Twitter owner Elon Musk said that Twitter employees doing “excellent” work should be allowed to continue working from home. But Musk clarified that he strongly prefers work in person and would confirm with managers that remote employees were contributing positively to the company.

LIST OF EMPLOYEES DOING EXCELLENT WORK AT TWITTER:

1) Musk, Elon

---End of the paper

[Stormlight]

SpaceX employees fired after writing letter criticizing Elon Musk | SpaceX | The Guardian

Free speech ABSOLUTIST!

[Ari]

A bit expected, it seems like they may have been fired by Gwynne Shotwell, the actual brain behind SpaceX if there was a single one, who seems to have a specific arrangement with Musk that he can shoot his mouth off however he wants so long as her and her real engineers are never dragged into the mess. Part of working at SpaceX is staring mutely as the eccentric CEO rides by on his unicycle and hope you aren’t offered a horse.

[Stephen Maturin]

Mightly lolbertarian ubermench tramples on contract rights

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by Stephen Maturin

Mightly lolbertarian ubermench tramples on contract rights

Soon to learn, like so many before him, that Zarathustra was the Delaware Court of Chancery all along.

[JoeP]

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Elon Musk as committed to Twitter takeover as he is to fatherhoodhttps://t.co/fHNBZP8MrB pic.twitter.com/KXFG3AODoI

— The Beaverton (@TheBeaverton) July 13, 2022

[JoeP]

Twitter experiences longest global outage in years | Twitter | The Guardian

Did anyone notice?

[fragment]

I did, although it was nbd to do something else.

[viscousmemories]

I actually didn't notice, which is odd because I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at Twitter every day.

[Ari]

Self proclaimed big brain Musk has asked the court to delay the twitter trail until next year so he can have time to do his due diligence and research the data. Ya know, that thing he waved. Twitter is not having it and neither is the judge, with the case being set for October.

Arstechnica

"That's not what this case is about," Twitter attorney William Savitt said, calling Musk's spam complaint a "manufactured issue."

Twitter's motion for an expedited trial said the Court of Chancery "has acknowledged that whenever a merger is held in 'limbo' by a buyer's refusal to close, the seller is at risk of irreparable injury." Twitter also said a quick trial "is essential to ensure sufficient time for this Court to grant effective relief and for the Delaware Supreme Court to review this Court's decision."

Musk loses attempt to delay Twitter trial until 2023 as judge expedites case | Ars Technica

[Stormlight]

[Sock Puppet]

Post from the blog that Matlock linked to yesterday:

Elon Musk And Twitter Clash In Court Over How Many Months We Have To Listen To This Before Musk Loses

[Ari]

How to take a random sample, according to Musk. “Toss out the first 1000 followers then pick every 10th, I’m open to better ideas.”

That he’s asking twitter instead of, ya know, an expert, really doesn’t bode well for the rest of this case.

JunkCharts goes into details as to why this is a poor idea,

The Musk Sampling Plan by JunkCharts

So what happens when the first 1,000 followers are ignored, as Musk stipulated? Presumably he believes the earlier followers of any account are unrepresentative. It's not clear this exclusion does what he intends. The exclusion rule won't affect his own account as 1,000 is a rounding error. The set of Musk followers - with or without the first 1,000 - is essentially the same.

Applying this exclusion to other people's accounts may be problematic because 1,000 followers is a pretty high bar. 2838, 70, 133, 564, 3432, 608, 16K, 10K, 982, 4648. Those are the follower counts for the first 10 accounts shown on Musk's feed. Half of those accounts have fewer than 1,000 followers. After removing the first 1,000 from these smaller accounts, there is no follower left to pick from. The next three accounts have between 3000-5000 followers; excluding a third to a fifth of their followers from sampling seems severe. Thus, the Musk sampling plan introduces a large-account bias.

***

The second step of the Musk sampling plan is described as pick every tenth follower. So, take Musk's 90 million followers minus the first 1,000, and we'll get a gigantic sample of 9 million.

Here comes the hard part. What he wants to know is the proportion of those 9 million accounts that are spam accounts. Who is going to decide whether each of the 9 million accounts are "spam", and how?

Nine million is too big a sample to handle. He may be applying the "rule of thumb" that a random sample should be 10% of the population. That's a myth busted in any intro Stats class. We typically only need to interview 1,000 Americans to generalize the sample responses to the entire population of 300 million, which is far, far, far, far smaller than 10%.

The required sample size is not a fixed number. If one can tolerate a larger margin of error, the sample can be reduced. What's our tolerable margin of error? If the true proportion of spam accounts is 5%, as Twitter management asserted, we may want a rather precise estimate, within plus or minus 2%. Reviewing Stats 101, we learn that translates to a standard error of 1%, and a sample size of 475.

What that means is if we take a random sample of 475 of Musk's followers, and learn that 5% (24) of those are spam accounts, then we can conclude that 5% of his followers are spam accounts, plus or minus 2%. (Others may disagree.)
The Musk sampling plan, thought through - Big Data, Plainly Spoken (aka Numbers Rule Your World)

[Stephen Maturin]

Originally Posted by Sock Puppet

Post from the blog that Matlock linked to yesterday:

Elon Musk And Twitter Clash In Court Over How Many Months We Have To Listen To This Before Musk Loses

Oh, FINE. Since Sock moved his post from another thrad, I'll move my response from the other thrad.

@Space Karen

Dumbshit agrees to buy Twitter for more that $54 per share, way over what it's worth, then backs out. That left the directors and officers a couple of options, neither of which involved cutting a quick deal and walking away. They could either (1) sue Space Karen for breach of contract, or (2) sit back and wait for the shareholders to sue them in a derivative action for breaching their fiduciary duties by failing to sue Space Karen.

I lol extra hard upon seeing Space Karen described as a genius. Unless that word has devolved to mean something along the lines of "lacking even rudimentary intelligence," mmmmmm, not so much.

[Stormlight]

So did he call the judge a pedo yet?

[JoeP]

They should block his account.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Originally Posted by JoeP

They should block his account.

Let him incriminate himself for the sake of grandstanding.

[Stormlight]

Musk wants public debate with Twitter CEO instead of that upcoming court trial | Ars Technica

Elon Musk, unsatisfied with the ongoing court case over his attempt to break a $44 billion merger contract, has challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a public debate.

"I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage," Musk wrote in a tweet on Saturday. "Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!"

Brilliant!

[ChuckF]

DEBATE ME

[JoeP]

So much for free thought tweets!