Elon Wants to Fight the Bots
It doesn’t really matter how many bots there are.
Programming note: Don’t feel bad about my vacation or anything. I am trying to take some time to focus on other work, so Money Stuff will be published infrequently for the next few weeks. On that note, tomorrow is the Bloomberg Crypto Summit in New York. At 11:25 a.m., I will be moderating a conversation with Sam Bankman-Fried. Every time I talk with SBF it is fun, and last time I did it … might have marked the top for the crypto market? Perhaps tomorrow will mark the bottom. I am looking forward to it.
In some parallel universe, Elon Musk’s dispute with Twitter Inc. is about how many bots there are on Twitter. In that universe, Twitter’s merger agreement with Musk contains a representation that no more than 5% of Twitter’s monetizable daily active users, or mDAUs, are bots, Musk’s obligation to close the merger is contingent on this representation being true, and Musk has discovered that it is wrong. Therefore he is able to walk away from the agreement, and maybe even sue Twitter for damages for misleading him.