Alex Bruno
Tosca Musk has high hopes for her brother’s business endeavors. Elon Musk’s sister Tosca spoke with The Sunday Times and shared some information about her family as well as her thoughts on Elon’s Twitter agreement, which was revealed on Saturday. Tosca told the newspaper, “A lot of people will claim things are not going to work because they are not accustomed to taking chances.
“Well, nobody’s ever done that before, at least not with [my family]. Not that it can’t be done, however. When SpaceXMania inquire about the Tesla CEO’s on-hold Twitter deal, Tosca claims she always responds in the same way, regardless of the $44 billion proposals to purchase Twitter that was canceled on Friday. She said, “I would think that he is going to do it if he says he is going to do it.
Elon, 51, appeared at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on Saturday. The billionaire spoke about a variety of issues at the exclusive conference, but Insider notes that his Twitter acquisition wasn’t one of them. Elon actually made a point of avoiding the subject altogether in his interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, which Musk co-founded, according to Reuters.
Elon was more concerned with creating a community on Mars and his conviction that the birth rate on Earth needed to be increased, a source told Reuters. According to one senior media executive who spoke to the site, “it just feels like an awful nightmare.” The individual sets his own rules. I would detest being on Twitter, where you would have to take this man seriously.
Musk announced that he wanted to end his $44 billion contract with Twitter in a court document acquired by SpaceXMania on Friday. He claimed that Twitter was in “breach of various clauses” of the original agreement. In the complaint, Musk complains that Twitter didn’t offer his team enough data to do their own study and didn’t provide enough information on the number of bogus accounts and bots on the social media network.
The lawsuit states that Twitter has “at times disregarded Mr. Musk’s demands, at times rejected them for reasons that seem to be unjustifiable, and at other times pretended to comply while providing Mr. Musk with inaccurate or incomplete information.”
A third of Twitter’s talent acquisition staff was laid off, a general hiring freeze was implemented, “two significant, high-ranking workers” were dismissed, and more, all without Musk’s approval, according to the document. The Twitter Board has announced that it will now sue Musk to guarantee that the purchase closes.
It’s our intention to take legal action against Mr. Musk if he fails to meet the conditions of our merger agreement. In a statement sent to SpaceXMania on Friday, the Twitter Board said, “We are sure we will succeed in the Delaware Court of Chancery.” Musk’s lawyer has been contacted by SpaceXMania for comment.
The announcement followed the CEO of SpaceX’s statement that the $44 billion acquisition was “temporarily on hold” for over two months. During the first quarter of 2018, less than 5% of the social media platform’s monetizable daily active users were made up of fraudulent or spam accounts, according to a Reuters piece Musk posted on April 13.
The purchase was “temporarily on hold for facts supporting computation that spam/fake accounts do actually comprise fewer than 5% of users,” Musk stated at the time, adding that he was “still committed to acquisition.” He continued by saying that in order to figure out the problem, “my team will conduct a random sampling of 100 followers of @twitter,” and he asked other users of social media to follow suit to “see what they uncover.”
Musk said in response to a question about why he chose 100 followers: “I choose 100 as the sample size number since that is what Twitter uses to compute. Tensions between Twitter and Musk seemed to be simmering in the days that followed. The billionaire said on Twitter on May 14 that “Twitter legal just phoned to protest that I broke their NDA by exposing the bot check sample size is 100!”
Musk said that he has “yet to see *any* study that has that has fake/spam/duplicates at 5 percent” in another tweet over the weekend. The company’s guesstimate of spam accounts was then detailed in a long thread released by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on May 16. Agrawal stood by this estimate.
Agrawal said, “Our estimate is based on repeated human assessments (in replication) of thousands of accounts, which are picked at random, consistently through time. “We have been doing this for many years, and we do it every three months.” The CEO continued by saying that each assessment used “both public and private data” (such as IP addresses, phone numbers, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does while it’s active, etc.) to evaluate each account.
Agrawal stated, “Unfortunately, we don’t feel that this exact assessment can be completed outside, given the important necessity to utilize both public and private information (which we can’t provide). The accounts that are recorded as mDAUs on any given day cannot even be known outside, according to this statement. Musk took exception to one tweet in particular and replied with a feces emoji.
Therefore, he said, “How can advertisers know what they’re receiving for their money?” “This is essential to Twitter’s financial stability.” The next day, Musk said that in order to go forward, he would require “evidence” that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are fraudulent.
Musk said on Twitter that “my offer was based on the accuracy of Twitter’s SEC filings.” Twitter’s CEO reportedly declined to provide evidence of the 5% yesterday in public. Until he does, this transaction cannot go ahead. The same day, Twitter said they were “committed to completing the deal on the agreed price and parameters as expeditiously and cost-effectively as possible”
Source: People
