Elon Musk has just upped his war against Twitter through a heated exchange about the number of bots on the platform.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tried to explain how good Twitter is at identifying and deleting bots from the platform.
But unfortunately he just went and shot himself in the foot because the numbers he published showcased how incompetent Twitter is and that Elon Musk perhaps was right after all.
TWTR share price is trading at $36 this morning indicating that analysts now say it is more likely the Elon Musk deal doesn't happen than it does.
In this video I provide my analysis and commentary of the latest updates in the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition saga.
#Twitter $TWTR #TWTR
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Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal tried to explain how good Twitter is at identifying and deleting bots from the platform.
But unfortunately he just went and shot himself in the foot because the numbers he published showcased how incompetent Twitter is and that Elon Musk perhaps was right after all.
TWTR share price is trading at $36 this morning indicating that analysts now say it is more likely the Elon Musk deal doesn't happen than it does.
In this video I provide my analysis and commentary of the latest updates in the Elon Musk Twitter acquisition saga.
#Twitter $TWTR #TWTR
☕️ JOIN MY PATREON - DISCORD, BONUS VIDEOS, TARGET PRICES, MODELS & MORE
https://www.patreon.com/sashayanshin
💵 GREAT INVESTING APPS I USE
INTERACTIVE BROKERS (Main investing app I use)
https://bit.ly/interactive-brokers-sasha
SIGN UP FOR ETORO (Popular investing platform with trading features and crypto)
https://med.etoro.com/B15358_A95689_TClick_SSasha.aspx
GET $10 IF YOU SIGN UP WITH LIGHTYEAR (UK only)
https://lightyear.app.link/sasha-yanshin
You need to sign up and make a deposit to get the $10 bonus.
GET A FREE SHARE WORTH UP TO $150 WITH STAKE (UK, Australia, NZ)
https://hellostake.pxf.io/qnA3xq
You will get a free share if you sign up using this link and deposit a minimum of £50.
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DISCLAIMER: Your capital is at risk.
DISCLAIMER: Some of these links may be affiliate links. If you purchase a product or service using one of these links, I will receive a small commission from the seller. There will be no additional charge for you.
DISCLAIMER: eToro is a multi-asset platform which offers both investing in stocks and cryptoassets, as well as trading CFD assets. CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. 68% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work, and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial advisor and this is not a financial advice channel. All information is provided strictly for educational purposes. It does not take into account anybody's specific circumstances or situation. If you are making investment or other financial management decisions and require advice, please consult a suitably qualified licensed professional.
Hey guys, it's sasha, the battle between elon musk and twitter just got a lot hotter and i am beginning to run out of popcorn supplies, because in the last few hours twitter, ceo parag agrawal has tried to defend the company from accusations of faking, their user numbers. Elon musk went to town and absolutely destroyed twitter ceo on twitter and the stock market is now thinking. The deal is more than 50 percent likely to not happen than it is to happen. So what the heck just happened, and where is all this going? Well, i'm gon na go and break it all down for you.
The story starts yesterday at half past nine. In the morning san francisco time, when parag agrawal decided to go and defend twitter's sec filings that have claimed that the platform has less than five percent bots. On it, because twitter has been making the exact same claim in every quarterly report, since q2 2014 here is the q2 2014 earnings presentation, and the wording here is pretty much identical to the wording used today saying that false and spam accounts make up less than five Percent of the active users back then it was five percent of the monthly active users. Today is five percent of the monetized daily active users, but i guess it's all the same thing, because the point is, it is always less than five percent.
I am guessing twitter's. Lawyers told the twitter board that five percent is this magic number where, if your spam and bot accounts are less than that, then advertisers won't really care and the sec will probably be fine with the metrics that you report to them, because it is somewhat strange that, If you go and do this analysis every quarter for eight years in a row that you always get exactly the same result of it just being less than five percent instead of maybe i don't know three percent or one percent or six percent or some other number. So, a few days ago, elon musk put the twitter acquisition on hold saying that five percent number seems a little bit low, because anyone who uses twitter can see the huge volume of bots on the platform and parag put together a carefully worded thread to debunk elon Musk now in this thread he said: let's talk about spam and let's do it with the benefit of data fact and context. So, to start with, he took a digger deal on insinuating that elon's point of view and some other people that maybe agree with him is bereft of data facts and context.
You know this one is going to be good when punches are thrown from the get-go. Now i'm not gon na go and read out the entire thread, because it is long most of it is boring as hell, and it is full of garbage. Parak spends a few tweets saying that spam is bad. Blah blah blah feel free to go and read the whole thing yourself.
If you want the full picture, but then he gets to the numbers, he says we suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam if they can't pass human verification challenges, captures phone verification, etc, and here parag shoots himself in the foot without realizing it, by trying to showcase how great twitter's bot detection system is, because if You look at twitter's q1 report. It says that twitter had 229 million monetizable daily active users, and that is up 15.9 percent since last year and just so we're accurate here's. The q1 report from last year, which says that it had 199 million monetizable daily active users except wait. This number is actually wrong because remember, twitter admitted that they've been double counting their accounts for the last three years, so they can't even add up the accounts, let alone identify which out of them might be bots. So the actual number according to twitter in q1, was 197.6 million, so from q1 2021 to q1, 2022 twitter added 31.4 million monetizable daily active users. And if we're going divide that by 365 days, that's about 86 000 new users every day, but parag just said that they delete over 500 000 spam accounts every day and on top of that, a bunch of accounts, no number provided are also blocked. So parag was trying to showcase how epic twitter's bot detection system is, how many accounts it identifies, except.
He just admitted that 85 of all new accounts joining twitter at the moment are bots. Five out of six new accounts are identified as spam and if they don't identify some of the others, that ratio is even worse and so, unfortunately, instead of showing twitter's technological prowess, the ceo of twitter just admitted that the company absolutely sucks balls at stopping those bots From signing up on the platform in the first place, there are plenty of examples of other large tech companies, including social media, that seem to be far better able at doing this. But you know this involves actually trying to build solutions, and it is far easier. Instead of doing work and finding a way to go and say that finding bots is really hard, and you know we did our best - maybe a bit of investment in the signing up process so that you don't have to then identify and delete 500 000 bots.
Every day could help just a tip there, and here is where this screw-up gets even worse, because i am guessing even parag would admit that twitter's bot, detection, algorithms are not perfect. Actually, i am not guessing at all. Parag literally says that in one of the tweets in this very thread, but let's say that twitter is really really good at identifying bots. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt.
Let's say that they catch 90 percent of all the bots out there, because they don't bother trying to stop them from registering in the first place. If they are that good at catching them and by the way, i don't think for a second that they are because that is a ridiculously high bar. But let's say that means that there's only 10 of the bots that they don't catch, and that means that if they catch 500 000 every day they miss another. Roughly 50 000, which is more than half of the 86 000 new accounts per day. The twitter say that they got over the last year and if every day you're adding more spam accounts to the platform than real ones, then how does the total of the spam accounts after this has been going on for about eight years? Every single quarter stay under five percent. A really interesting quandary parag is very careful with his words. He says we have estimated and the word estimated is crucial because it is roughly equivalent to saying we guessed. You can estimate something without basing it on hard specific analysis and data by inference or having some very loose, not very closely related analysis.
Elon musk said that twitter only runs a tiny sample of 100 accounts a month to do these checks and for a multi-billion dollar company. That seems absurd and ridiculous, because this is in no way statistically significant or representative and is completely dismal as a way of doing any meaningful checks. Apparently, twitter's lawyers then called elon musk and were angry that he had the audacity to disclose the fact that they only check a hundred accounts a month, because you know that's sensitive information. I've got a tip for twitter's lawyers here, a free one, maybe try a little harder to make twitter actually do proper statistics that will be actually meaningful recognizable before you know, publishing that data to the sec instead of being angry, when someone points out that your data And you're an analyst completely suck balls, so parrok said our estimate is based on multiple human reviews in replicate of thousands of accounts that are sampled at random consistently over time from accounts.
We count as monthly daily active users. We do this every quarter and we have been doing this for many years - very careful choice of words there. It references thousands of accounts and multiple human reviews, but it does not say if this is maybe per month per quarter per whatever. It doesn't give any sort of time based reference point and because it does not, it really does make sense.
What elon said? Because if you add up loads of quarters of 100 accounts each then yeah you do get thousands? The issue is, if you have 229 million accounts on the platform, then a random sample of a hundred or even thousands, is incredibly low and will give you completely meaningless results. Let's say that thousands means a few thousand. Let's give twitter the benefit of the doubt again and let's call it five thousand paragraph said our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were all well under five percent based on the methodology outlined above. He also says the error margins in our estimates, give us confidence in our public statements each quarter, oh confidence.
Well, let's look at it in a bit more detail, so you want to say that we think the number is five percent and we want a 95 percent confidence interval around it saying that is between four and six percent. You know to get it roughly in the right ballpark. If you want to do that, then you will need to sample 192 000 out of the 229 million accounts, not just five. If the proportion of bots is much lower than five percent, then that sample size would have to increase considerably to get the same level of confidence so yeah. Unfortunately, the ceo of twitter and whoever the waste of space data analysts work. There clearly do not understand even the most basic statistics that get taught in school. Then parag decides to do a bit more defending. He says.
Unfortunately, we don't believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information, which we can't share externally, it's not even possible to know which accounts are counted as monetizable daily active users on any given day so much Wrong with that tweet, first up sure twitter has a lot more data about the users than what i can see. When i look at an account. Twitter knows everything about the behavior. What people look at what they click on, how long they spend on each tweet time stamps ip addresses blah blah blah blah blah.
I get it so in theory, that should mean that they are way better than me at identifying bots right. Well, they have way more information than a bunch of massively overpaid analysts, except i went and did a little experiment. I just posted this on twitter a few minutes ago. Let's see how long it takes to get a bot comment, if i mention trustwallet, bitcoin, luna save moon, dosh coin or flocky inu, especially if i say that i lost my coins and i need help.
I seeded some bait with all the popular crypto, buzzwords and sure enough within about five seconds. I got a reply from trust, crypto wallet, username, joya loads of numbers afterwards, and it says we are sincerely for experiencing this amazing grammar. There kindly get in touch with us via dm by clicking on the below button, and we will be able to help. Please disregard any other messages.
There are scam. This is so epic because i don't have an army of analysts or supercomputers, and i can identify robots by them replying with this sort of message within seconds trying to scam people out of money and that bot literally posts. The exact same thing over and over and over to many people all over twitter every few seconds you know that would be probably extremely difficult to go and identify the truth is twitter, just don't care identifying. This sort of behavior would be ridiculously easy, but the problem is that deleting bots is bad for business, because advertisers pay for brand marketing based on impressions and the more monetizable daily active users.
You have the more money you make from those ads and a couple of minutes later i got another one. This one is terra usd powered by luna. They can also help me if i go and send them a private message. How incredibly useful so perrick is saying that it is not possible to know which accounts are counted as monthly daily active users on any given day, and that means that perhaps they do identify some of these spam robots. But they don't count them towards a metric, which is a really weird thing to infer, because it kind of means that perhaps they know that they have these robots. But you know as long as they don't count them in that special figure that they report it's. Okay. It's okay, that they scam people and steal people's money.
That sounds like a somewhat stupid idea, and here is an amazing thing. I do not have access to twitter's amazing data. I just went and found two spam bots in about five seconds worth of work, and it seems that elon musk agrees with me on the fact that there is a few too many of them because he went and posted a turd underneath the whole parags thread. A very succinct summary of all the information inside it that i completely agree with.
There are many studies out there that place a spam volume on twitter at more like 20 and elon. Musk just spoke on the all-in podcast a few hours ago and he said that the number is incredibly important. You say the house has less than five percent termites. That's that's an acceptable number, but if it turns out it is 90 termites.
That's uh, not okay! You know it's not the same house if twitter is claiming that they have less than five percent of bots, but in reality it is substantially higher. This is a material difference to the value of twitter as a company, because it implies that advertisers are currently wasting a whole lot of money on advertising to bots and paying money for it, and the real user numbers on twitter are considerably lower. Once again, twitter is the most actively traded stock in pre-market this morning, and the share price is now at around 36, as i'm recording this video given elon's takeover bid is at 54.20. That is a 33 discount off the price, which implies that most analysts now don't think the deal will even go through at least not at that price, because if elon wants to pull out of the deal - and he has enough smart lawyers to figure out how exactly To do it, maybe he'll have to forfeit the one billion dollar fee.
Maybe he won't if he uses the twitter numbers as the reason, because if he did, twitter would have to go and sue him to go and force him to buy, and presumably they might have to then disclose their exact methodology for calculating that number in court. During discovery, i have a funny feeling that they really don't want to go there, but if elon walked away, twitter share price would most likely dump all the way to at least 20 to 25, because every other tech stock has had a massive sell-off during this period. While the twitter saga has been unfolding and 36 dollars is much closer to 25 than it is to 54., i'm going to go and load up on some more popcorn to see what happens, and if you like this video, please don't forget to smash the like button. For the youtube algorithm, thank you so much for watching and i'll see you guys later. .
I tought Twitter is gonna be a fantastic online free speach online town square, and Elon isn't financialy motivated, how stupis was I 😂
Nice honest guys never get to the bilionare level, not even close…thay are all the same greed driven. Only difference is that some package their selfish intersts nicer than orhers.
Thank you for showing that clip from the All-In podcast, I was fascinated by Elon's take on it and I thought the termite example is on-point; which I felt that you proved/demonstrated accurately in this piece as well.
[I am a relatively new sub and have gained alot of insight from your videos I have watched so far. Thank you!]
Greetings from 🇬🇧 Sasha you performed a better analysis than twitter’s analyst. Much appreciated for your hard work. This channel is one ☝️ of the best I came across 👍
The FED has lost it and the sad fact is, it's pretty obvious we are headed for hyperinflation. I think stores better have tight security because when people can't afford to feed their families, things might get ugly
You have that kind of issue when you hire, as statistician, someone that has a 120k$ liberal arts diploma who think maths are racist.
fantastic summary. i loaded up my popcorn before i watched. blurp! its all gone! need more….
For every $100 spent by advertisers on Twitter 5% is wasted on bots. That is not good value for money!
Netflix subscriptions are dropping because the true popcorn dramas are on Twitter.
Love this vid and how you show how absurd twitter's numbers ars. Thanks, Sasha.
Hey, i really and dont wanna criticize this 'Blind trust'-Approach to knowing who has the best ideas,
but hey, have you ever considered the Alternative of; ah, i dont know; informing yourself?
I mean, there ARE Experts who can clearly discern Elon-Musk-Projects from 'What-must-be-done-now' just as easy as Doctors can discern Healing-Crystals from Medicine.
Great video as always Sasha 👍 I too have run out of popcorn 🍿 PS, I am not a bot follower, honest 🤣
If you looked at some of the "Elonites" pre Twitter 🌪️ none said it makes sense to buy Twitter. Now they are saying Elon has a master plan to grab Twitter at a discount or build new at a very low price but with all the publicity which means migration from Twitter to "Titter".
I was not paying attention at the time, but now it looks quite likely. Why? Cuz they were saying what you are saying, with the caveat that you are not an Elon boy…
Always enjoy your vids, but this one feels odd. In a good way. Thanks
Fun times. Hope it falls through. Elon can make a new one and launch it when it's good enough.
I'm the greatest Elon fan, but, why say this now and not before making the offer?
I am here to watch Elon burn Twitter. it would be glorious. and if Elon takes the company public I will be an investor but not before then.
what you think that Elon just stage twiter aquisition, so he could sell Tesla with out tanking the price ?
I need to buy shares in a popcorn company. Sales will rising for the foreseeable future
I lost a lot of respect for Musk hearing about him in the Depp case. It's not anything to do with the business part of his life and the common enemy is the SEC but DAMN for a smart guy to get caught up by the lying mess known as Amber Turd is almost unforgivable.
He's doing all this to expose them I don't think he has an interest in actually following through but will if he must.
His conversation with the beasties is already epic! Thank you, Sasha, have a great day!
It’s pretty obvious to me that Musk has kept this bullet in his chamber from the very start and never « just trusted the SEC filing ». This is just masterful.
I love how you try to have a straight face while giving twitter the benefit of the doubt. Ha ha ha.
No matter what happens, this whole episode permanently damaged Elon's reputation for everyone but the staunchest Elon simps (and I say that as a TSLA holder).
So happy I have no exposure to Twitter. So I can enjoy the battle from a safe distance. 🍿
Crypto whale is saying for weeks that Elon is not going to buy twitter for 44 billion$
I literally opened a pack of popcorn when I clicked on this video