1) The contract states they are obligated to provide information, Elon alleges such information was withheld or curtailed - a contract violation. There doesn't need to be a specific clause about a particular metric because the obligation to provide information is broad.
2) Facebook lied about video watch time for years, including in SEC filings and to advertisers (essentially fraud). Is this an appeal to the sanctity of SEC filings? I don't think Facebook is significantly more reputable than Twitter, they're both pretty shady.
Why should we just trust the company, as you imply? Companies routinely and regularly lie in SEC filings, including big tech -- and Twitter! They paid close to a billion in securities settlements for - wait for it - lying about user engagement!
Twitter admitted to lying about user engagement in 2015 and paid a hefty fine for it. [1]
Is your argument really "the company that has been proven to lie about user engagement wouldn't lie this time"? Seems flimsy.
Contract violations are more complex than that. You can’t simply void a contract over a little technicality. Even if they had given him the data, he wouldn’t have been able to get out of the contract. So a judge is not going to look at that and say, “oh yeah, Musk was paying $44B for the company and the right to review its data, so unless he gets both he pays nothing.” The judge is going to go, “okay the company is worth nominally $44B and reviewing data is worth zilch in light of the rest of the contract, so these aren’t equal parts.”
1) They provided access to their firehose API, how is that not enough? The crap about rate limiting doesn't apply to the firehose, and decent engineers can get around rate limiting, so either way this doesn't hold up.
2) Twitter's CEO gave a pretty good explanation of how they combat bots and how they calculate their mDAUs, Elon Musk responded with a poop emoji. I get that his personal experience on Twitter is heavily bot-infested, a significant proportion of bots on Twitter engage with his account and use his image as a user profile. Twitter doesn't claim that the bots in Musk's feed are under 5% of users, or that the number of bots overall are under 5% of users, they claim that the number of monetizable daily active users is under 5%. Given the definition of a "daily active user", reduce to "monetizable", and consider the number of users who never post anything but read tweets and click on ads and promoted tweets, and this isn't hard to believe.
On the other side we have Elon Musk, notorious liar, claiming that he doesn't want to buy Twitter because Twitter is lying about the number of bots, despite the fact that before tech stocks crashed, he said he wanted to buy Twitter to solve the bot problem. This isn't hard. He has buyer's remorse and the bots thing is the best excuse he has to get out of a contract he signed. It's a shitty excuse and no one other than Musk fanboys have any reason to believe him, and it's not even an excuse in court.
>Twitter's CEO gave a pretty good explanation of how they combat bots and how they calculate their mDAUs
Company that previously lied to investors about engagement and settled a massive billion-dollar lawsuit makes further unproven claims about engagement. You believe them why?
Should corporations which deliberately lie to investors be immediately trusted again, especially on the same topic they got caught lying about previously?
Your argument is an appeal to authority where no authority exists. They're liars. Not just liars in general, but liars about this exact topic. Do you trust BP's offshore drilling because the CEO now insists it's totally safe this time?
>Twitter doesn't claim that the bots in Musk's feed are under 5% of users
He never claimed this, this seems like a strawman. Did you read the complaint?
>this isn't hard to believe
Choosing to believe a company that has admitted to lying to investors is your prerogative, it doesn't make them trustworthy or correct -- and it absolutely doesn't make your argument based in any kind of reality (why should we take the liars at their word?). Why go to bat for a company with a billion in fines for misleading investors? Under what basis do you believe they've reformed and can be trusted?
I don't understand why you believe Elon can't be believed because of his history of lying while you ignore Twitter's sordid past of securities violations and lying to investors.
>Elon Musk, notorious liar
Why don't you label Twitter as notorious liars, given their billion in settlements for lying to investors?
> Choosing to believe a company that has admitted to lying to investors is your prerogative, it doesn't make them trustworthy or correct
More to the point, it's Musk's perogative, which he excercised when he signed a contract to buy the company based on their represenations while choosing not to do any due diligence to verify those representations.
I think Twitter is probably more believable here than you give them credit for, but Musk trusted them 100% for some reason.
> Should corporations which deliberately lie to investors be immediately trusted again, especially on the same topic they got caught lying about previously?
For lies known previously to Musk's offer, he had every opportunity to decide whether to trust Twitter or not, and he chose to by waiving due diligence.
If there's an allegation of an additional lie that's material to the deal, Musk hasn't provided evidence of that here.
>If there's an allegation of an additional lie that's material to the deal, Musk hasn't provided evidence of that here.
Did you read the filing? He provided evidence of them violating their obligations under the agreement (refusing to provide adequate access to data to independently verify claims made about user engagement). Twitter agreed to these terms. Read the original agreement to see for yourself.
>he had every opportunity to decide whether to trust Twitter or not
How does that mean fraud is okay? If Twitter lied again, it would be a clear contract violation. You can't just lie about critical company metrics to acquirers, due diligence or not. It's fraud AND a contract violation.
Given we're talking about a disreputable company with a history of lying, I'm not inclined to believe them and I don't know why you immediately believe their claims. Perhaps you can enlighten me as to why you think they deserve trust in this matter.
