They literally never claimed this was accurate and even said their methodology could be wrong. Nothing in the contract says anything about bots. They don’t have to prove anything at all.
Yeah that's my point, their supplied number is unusable for investors, advertisers, etc.
Combine that with the bot experiences on Twitter, the 3rd party estimates of 10-20% if looks way off.
I don't see why NOW anyone would trust 5%. Diligence has NOW been done and that "methodology could be wrong" looks likely.
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> But that's the whole point - Musk waived his right to do due diligence, so he is pointing at this statement being wrong (and not unusable) as his way out.
@suresk, that's not a thing, but it is a talking point, but I'm not debating that. I'm saying NOW that the diligence is done and we know it's probably not accurate. See my first post.
People keep trying to explain to you why you're wrong and you keep on ignoring them and persisting with your original false statement.
The 5% number claimed by Twitter is not the percentage of all accounts that are bots. That has never been the claim. Twitter separates its accounts into "mDAU"s and "other", and they are claiming 5% of the mDAUs are bots. You cannot falsify this claim with "bot experiences on Twitter", because all the bots you're seeing could be correctly classified as "other". Indeed, nobody outside Twitter can falsify this claim because it's a statement about Twitter's internal classification. The only thing that can falsify Twitter's claim is their own internal data, so that's why discovery is being done.
I'm not talking about all bots. I'm talking about mDAU bots. You guys are trying to argue against a point I'm not making.
3rd party estimations range from 10-20% for mDAU bots, Twitter's is 5%.
Others were defending it by saying "well the number doesn't have to be accurate legally" or "well Musk should have known it's not really accurate".
My counter is that weasel legal wording and logic doesn't give much confidence in Twitter's number at all for FUTURE buyers, advertisers, investors, etc.
They should show their work and prove their number or investors / advertisers / buyers should lower their valuations to reflect somewhere in the middle.
But Twitter hasn't really ever been about the money so the status quo will stay the same.
Ah, this one. It was discussed on HN back in May [0].
The main problem is that they aren't performing an analysis of mDAUs, as you imply. Their datasets are:
1. Followerwonk Random Sample – "Marc wrote code to randomly select public accounts from Followerwonk’s active database, and passed them to SparkToro for analysis. Casey on our team further scrubbed this list and ran 44,058 public, active accounts through our Fake Followers spam analysis process"
2. Aggregated Average of the Fake Followers Tool - "Over the last 3.5 years of operation, SparkToro’s Fake Followers tool has been run on 501,532 unique accounts, and analyzed thousands of followers for each of those, totaling more than 1 billion profiles (though these are not necessarily unique, and we don’t keep track of which profiles were analyzed as part of that process). ... We’ve included it for comparison, and to show that an analysis that includes simply random Twitter accounts (vs. those that have been recently active) may not be as accurate."
3. All Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter
4. Active Followers of @ElonMusk on Twitter
5. Random Sample of 100 Users Following the @Twitter account
The last three datasets are obviously not relevant for getting a good estimate of mDAU authenticity. The second dataset may include inactive/duplicate accounts, and it's not clear how random the account selection is. The first dataset (as well as the second, to some extent) suffers from only including public, active accounts, which very much is not the same population Twitter is working with:
> We define mDAU as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions.
In particular, note that Twitter has no requirement that mDAUs have public activity.
In addition, the article contains this bit at the bottom, which further reinforces that these numbers aren't comparable:
> We are not disputing Twitter’s claim. There’s no way to know what criteria Twitter uses to identify a “monetizable daily active user” (mDAU) nor how they classify “fake/spam” accounts. We believe our methodology (detailed above) to be the best system available to public researchers. But, internally, Twitter likely has unknowable processes that we cannot replicate with only their public data.
But that's the whole point - Musk waived his right to do due diligence, so he is pointing at this statement being wrong (and not unusable) as his way out.
Musk seems like a smart guy who got overconfident and out of his area of expertise and made a series of incredibly stupid decisions. Pretty much every legal and financial professional without a vested Musk related interest seems to think similarly. Matt Levine has been lights out on this topic. Everyone knows his bot claims are just FUD to try and weasel out of writing a check he no longer has the guts to cash with current valuations.
Prediction: They settle for a couple billion OR Musk buys them at a slight discount to the currently agreed price. Maybe $49.69 because he is a clown?
The private at 420 thing was absolutely worth $40 million. It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one.
> It helped elevate Tesla to the meme stock stratosphere even more than they already were. His Twitter antics turned a 200 billion dollar company into a trillion dollar one
Zoom out! Everybody loved GagnamStyle and Baby Shark too, but they are not getting on radio and people would be indifferent to the disappearence of the artist who made those songs.
MarketCap is a flawed measure for tons of reasons (in my opinion FCF is king) but if you want to use such flawed measure then time spent in the S&P500 would be a meaningful way to go about it.
Tesla has been in the SP500 for how long? 1.5 years?
If JPMorgan went bankrupt tomorrow you'd see people literally in the streets crying (for a whole bunch of reasons both at the macro and micro level) much like when Michael Jackson died. If Tesla went bankrupt tomorrow it would be like if PSY of GagnamStyle fame died, a bunch of hardcore devote followers would mourn but the world would move on pretty quickly.
I have understood the same. This is Delaware, meaning they aren't going to give special treatment if they want to keep companies there. Deal is a deal. And Musk will pay, now how much might vary, but it will not be 1 billion cheap.
Where was there ever evidence Musk is a smart guy? His only skills appear to be self-aggrandizement and being born rich. Musk is proof that our economic system rewards being already rich, not creating value.
He did not found Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, or anything else that's been successful with his name attached. He did not contribute any tech to those efforts. At best he's contributed publicity, but it's only ever with a flavor of celebrating how great he is.
He's an example of an utter failure of capitalism. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me that he's celebrated for it. Everyone wants to fail like him. But most people skipped the step where they're born rich, and it's just too hard to recover from that miss.
Even most people being born richer than him and why happen to have a better relationship with the family wealth don't become billionaires not to speak of the richest person on the planet.
So he definitely has some skills in leading businesses through hard times and making them succeed in the end (I've no idea how or what he does so).
Founding a company doesn't matter as much as making it grow and succeed.
Ray Kroc didn't found McDonald's (he didn't even join early) but he turned it into the massive company it is today, so it doesn't really matters who once initially signed the incorporation form.
I think that’s a little much. Definitely was estranged from his dad and it seems for good reason. No evidence his alleged childhood wealth funded his adult businesses.
Founding doesnt matter as much as making them as viable as they are today. Seems to have a knack for something, either PR, hiring others, repeatedly betting the farm, slamming his head into a wall etc. whatever it is its on average working.
His companies create thousands of jobs and pay billions in taxes, capitalism seems to be doing its thing very well. (Yay global reduction in poverty!)
Friends who have worked with him say he is very sharp and extremely relentless and hard working. I don’t think he’s a pure confidence man. I do wonder if he has had a bit of a mental break in the past 5yrs or so.
> Also have worked with phenomenal Indian devs who were paid the same as me.
I have almost never seen a company where people are paid exactly the same... Usually there are differences. I'm pretty sure your Indian buddies didn't have exactly the same salary.
If you pay 80% less to Indian remote worker it would stupid to expect the same result. But maybe you are in some bullshit corporate environment and don't even want the results, you just want to look like you are saving the corporate some money or whatever. Often these outsourcing choices are about corporate bullshit.
However if you are looking for results, you could hire top people from cheap cost of living like India or so with maybe 10% or 20% cheaper than the western counterparts. I'm pretty sure that's possible, you don't save 50% but you can for sure get a little bit more bang for the buck if you are willing to do the work of filtering good candidates remotely.
It's weird, once they get integrated with a team and have regular communication, peer reviews, and defined goals, the software quality goes up. I wonder what explains this phenomenon.
No. Not when the forum would flag open discourse because traditions dictate certain emotional tones are forbidden.
I don’t consider metaphorical sticking fingers in ears over colloquial language a sign of maturity. Social media moderation fosters thought ending behavior more so than “foul language.”
The result is what conforms closest to expectations.
Salary is not a "sign of respect" it is an indicator of how the company makes money and values software engineers. Software companies have software margins other companies... do not. Software engineers want to work at companies where software is the product because:
1. They get to contribute more to the success of the company
2. What they built typically has real users
3. They are valued and get paid commensurately with the near infinite leverage they bring to the company.
4. They get to work with other like minded software engineers.
5. There is probably an established career path for them if they perform well.
Good engineers typically ALREADY work at a place they enjoy. The market is too competitive for good talent to put up with any BS whatsoever. You are trying to get them to leave a good place for another hopefully better place. However, there is risk because they don't know your company/have to trust you a bit. You MUST compensate for this risk.
My risk premium is easily a 25-50% salary increase. Which means I need a job to pay about $100-200k more or have significant high probability upside (IPO etc.) for me to jump all else equal (passion products maybe an exception).
If you waste my time with a job ad that doesn't tell me up front what to expect I will:
1. Not accept your interview request or offer.
2. Will flame your company throughout my entire network.
Also if you want me to do a "take home" anything that will be $500/hr with a max of 4 hours spent.
If your RSUs are significantly devalued due to a price drop most tech companies will just give you a supplemental refresh to bring you back up. You might not be 100% whole to your target total comp but nobody is letting good engineers take a 35%+ cut to TC (65% to stock) because if they do they will lose their top talent.
If I am a strong engineer and my comp gets cut by a 65% reduction in share price and I am at a BigTechCo then I can probably pretty easily:
1. Move to a peer company in regards to comp (Meta, Goog, Twtr, Msft, uber, airbnb)
2. Get a signing bonus of $40-100,000+ To do so
3. Get a new hire set of RSUs with a valuation at the current share price vs my previously underwater ones (which if the whole sector has gone down will probably work out really well for me long term).
TL;DR total comp at the elite/liquid RSU level wont go down much.
But when, for the vast majority of history, the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence than what the modern worker faces then you jolly well can.
> the population faced a much poorer, more monotonous, and less free existence
That's an over simplification.
People could still have more free time than we do now[1], while their life could be more monotonous on some aspect, I believe an average office worker life today can be even more monotonous than what a serf life could be. You also have to consider labor alienation, which is a something that didn't exist so much before industrialization.
Most importantly, life commonly revolved around tight communities, while today most people live in individualist societies.
Individualism certainly has a larger impact on happiness than most modern convenience has.
If there are people today who want to put their money where their mouth is and give up the conveniences of modernity to go back to communal subsistence farming under serf-like conditions (and there are places in the world that still live like that), more power to them. I haven't seen any takers.
I don't understand this need to make everything white or black, unless we want to pretend we live in a word as simple as a kids' novel. You can't just throw away milleniums of history and people because in the past 60 years we have become too lazy and addicted to modern convenience.
No, preindustrial ages weren't the hell they're made to be nor a golden age by any means. The same can be said of today. Stop playing defensive and think openly instead, there's lot we can improve by learning from the past.
It isn’t someone’s personal/unique suffering that I am invalidating. They are saying that we are having uniquely depressing times _in general_ which if you take a brief look at history is laughably invalid.
We have it way better than almost any period in history and are profoundly unhappy.
Also, we always like to think we will be happy “once I have…X” and then we get X and say well actually what I need is Y.
Most unhappiness is driven by vanity and desire (a bargain you make with yourself where you chose to be unhappy until you get something) to be better than our peers.
Until you can be content with nothing you wont be content even with everything.
If people can be happy in concentration camps we can be happy in dead end office jobs. They cant stop us from being happy.
How are we measuring "better"? If suicide rates have risen significantly, then perhaps there are ways in which our modern paradise is worse than the past.
This is an article about clinical depression, not 'unhappiness'. While distress can result in clinical depression, they aren't at all the same thing. One gets better if the stressor is removed, the other does not.
They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.
It's a process without a purpose. It is a process that kills flow and causes less work to get done. Everything important must fit within a short story 24/h later which means work gets packaged into easy to explain daily concepts.
It serves no purpose because if you are blocked today waiting till a morning meeting is a bad approach because the meeting than expands to discussing an issue that belongs at another meeting. Plus the time wasted adds up.
Asking for help today is something seniors do.
Standup meetings treat developers like children and encourage bad habits.
That is a fair point, a friend is working on ChromeOS tooling for testing/deploys and seems to be able to move fairly quickly and his work has large impact internally but not millions of users directly, also less coupled to a multitude of internal services.
Just to push back a bit, the promise/allure of software engineering is that you can have massive impact with a small dedicated team. Eg. WhatsApp had ~20 employees and was delivering more messages than the global SMS system.
Yes, I agree, but partially that is due to the cost of replication being negligible to the product manufacturer - the user bears the primary cost, being the device.
Also, 20 people, while it could happen, I doubt they self organised. There was at least one person with an architectural vision, plus there would have been back end, front end, mobile variants all needing to coordinate, I would have thought there was a number of "planners and organisers" and a number of "doers" in the mix, not to mention maybe some testing specialists.
I've not seen any background to the WhatsApp team and story, it would be interesting if anyone has any good links.
