Elon Musk vs Twitter: the weird number at the heart of the drama

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I wondered if it was possible to measure anything at all after listening to the lawyers argue over which documents needed to be provided.

The argument centered on the number of active users. Most social media companies use daily or monthly active users, which is a non standard measure. It's not a standard social media company.

A lawsuit has been filed against Musk for abandoning a deal to purchase the company. The deal can't be done because Musk was misled about the amount of junk mail on the platform In today's hearing, Musk's lawyers claimed that Twitter cherry-picks documents they requested. Alex Spiro told the court that Musk wants to look at all the accounts on the social network.

Spiro told the court that they don't have to accept their word. We are allowed to ask questions. The case in Delaware's Chancery Court will be taken under advisement before the hearing is adjourned.

I am not sure if the metric mDAU is a good one. The hearing suggests that the revelations from the whistle blower will shape Musk's case.

Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, a former security head for the social media company, said that the method for measuring fake accounts is incorrect. Executives were offered bonuses of up to $10 million, according to Zatko. Executives did not remove bots.

In April, it was admitted that it had overcounted. It had happened before. Questions are being asked by the SEC.

What happened to mDAUs in the beginning? A lot of us look at things that aren't on the internet. There is a website where we can't display ads because they're our ads.

The situation gets worse. I don't use the website of the micro-blogging site on my computer to view it. I use a bot that doesn't display ads. On mobile, the app shows me ads, but I mostly don't use the service on my phone, so I'm thinking of using a different service. I am a daily active user of the service, but I am not seeing as many ads as someone who is on the site. How do you keep track of me?

The questions is at the center of the arguments. The way mDAU is captured is by taking 9000 accounts and randomly reviewing them. They are used to estimate how many people see ads. These calls are made using both private and public data. Some data isn't retained so it's difficult to check the work. It would take about a week for the manual review to be done. Musk doesn't want that much data.

The lawyer for Musk said that mDAU was made up in order to juice the growth of the company. He said tying compensation to mDAU growth was not a good incentive. Musk says that using mDAU is fraud.

There was only one chink in Musk's lawyers' arguments. If there is a method for sampling 100 accounts and how they are confirmed to be real, the deal should go forward.