Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.

I'm not surprised that another one of our crackpot libertarians, Federal Farmer, doesn't understand economics or our financial system.

FF: Insists he supports a limited government with checks and balances.

Also FF: Complains Biden isn't acting like a dictator.

I'd hazard FF wants Biden to act like a dictator so he can bitch that Biden's being a dictator.

Oh, look, another sociopath raising to the top of a capitalist society. We really should do something about that.

Just an anecdote but I remember a conversation I had with a LEO around 2004? who said he was receiving a tremendous amount of phone calls from senior citizens claiming they had lost money through PayPal and were unable to get it back. I know this guy wanted a large FBI/SEC type investigation to be done because local authorities didn’t have much they could do.

I’m sure nothing major would have come of that but it could have put people on notice sooner that PayPal/Musk had a general “F You” attitude towards their customers and society at large.

Fun fact, that's also the way Musk informs the girl he's having erectile problems.

Sorry Elon, as a newly proud Republican we're gonna have to insist you follow through on this thing you conceived.

Assert all you want, you're just going to be on the hook for $1 billion and no judge or jury in the world is going to be sympathetic.

ETA: absent the bot count misrepresentation. That could be material. But likely this is just trying to negotiate a better price.

I mean, at least he's probably, by accident, found some actual fraud. Twitter was pretty stupid to put the obvious fiction that only 5% of their users are fake in their representations. The question is, does anyone actually care? Advertisers, maybe.

Well, if I were an advertiser that bought a placement with the assurance of a million views (I'm making that number up) and it turned out that half of the "views" were from bots, I might be rather upset. If someone dredges up smoking gun documentation that Twitter knew how many of those accounts were phony, I would think there'd be some possibility of a massive civil suit. On the whole, I'm very glad I'm not a Twitter stockholder. I think things are only going to get worse for them.

I believe it's way more than 5%, but you can't base it off just looking at a prominent figure and seeing what percentage of their followers are bots. Bots might be more likely to follow prominent figures. Maybe the average bot follows 10x as many people as your average real user.

Investigating Twitter bots when you're under indictment for securities fraud while living in a state that's having serious power grid problems and just had over 20 kids shot dead at a school sure sounds like a distraction to me

I mean your tax dollars at work investigating Twitter bots, what the actual fuck

Bots will follow prominent figures, but they'll interact with anyone who matches their programmed keywords.

Warned for revealing FF's algorithm.

I thought the conventional wisdom for stock splits was to do it on the way UP....

Doubt this will help stock value:

https://fortune.com/2022/06/10/elon...on-traffic-safety-autonomous-fsd-fatal-probe/

Musk reminds of the Blues Brothers where a whole lotta people were saying "One of these days he's gonna fuck up."

@Ancalagon I'm sure you have a few thoughts on this.

Hehe nice

Electric vehicles are… nice. But they aren’t a serious climate solution. I mean for fucks sake JUST bitcoin and ethereum crashing has kept more carbon out of the atmosphere (through reduced mining) then all electric vehicles in history combined.

Which is why I am so happy we have crypto bros. It is so awesome we are all going to die over some easily stolen narcissistic apes. or was that bipolar apes? Maybe it was ADD apes? Oh no, it was afluenza apes.

So has the deal closed yet?