E69: Elon Musk on Twitter's bot problem, SpaceX's grand plan, Tesla stories, Giga Texas & more

Yeah, that is a good hair day for you.

Great hair day, my pal and your favorite CEO and twitterer, Mr. Elon Musk.

How you doing, pal?

Appreciate you coming to the event, zooming in. What's new in your world?

Well, let's see. I guess right now I'm sort of debating the number of bots on Twitter with Para on Twitter, and currently what I'm being told is that there's just no way to know the number of bots. It's like as unknowable as the human soul, basically. We have no idea what level of witchcraft and alchemy is needed to determine these bot percentage. Have you determined, I said, why not try calling people? But I haven't got a response. Have you tried calling people or something? Maybe answer, it's not a bot. No, I don't know. But I think that would be one of the things to do to say, have you tried calling them as opposed to trying to read the tea leaves here? That's impossible. Obviously you can have an account that looks exactly like a human account or is being operated where one person is operating 1000 accounts or something, but that person can only buy one toaster. They're not going to buy a thousand toasters. So you care about number of unique real people that are on the system. It's extremely fundamental. And anyone who uses Twitter is well aware that the comment threads are full of spam, scam and just a lot of fake accounts. It seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of essentially said another way. The number of real unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%. That is what they're claiming. Does anyone have that experience?

I mean.

It'S really. There's a bridge I'd like to sell you and also you could buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

What do you think it is?

Yeah, it's not 5%.

What is it?

I think it's a number that is probably at least four or five times that number. I'd say if you did sort of the lowest estimate would be probably 20%. And this is a bunch of quite smart outside firms have done analysis of Twitter and looked at the sort of daily users, and their conclusion is also about 20%. But that's a lower bound. It's not an upper bound if you look at, say, the most liked tweets on Twitter. So I have the honor of having the most liked tweet of any living human. Thank you, everyone, for liking my tweet, including some of the bots out there. But that tweet is less than 5 million likes. It's like 4.7 or something like that. And that was where I tweeted about that. Next, I'm buying Coca Cola to put the cocaine back in. It's clearly something that the public really wants, and Coca Cola corporations should really think about going back to their roots some. Ooh, Coca Cola. This, I guess, is the reason why our grandparents could sort of walk 20 miles in the snow, because they had Coca Cola with cocaine. This is real reason. Anyway, that is literally the most popular tweet of any living human. But Twitter says that the sort of monetizable daily active users is 217,000,000. So why would it be that the most popular tweet ever basically is only two and a half percent of the entire user base? This seems a very low number. The most popular tweets generally are clustered around that sort of 4 million like level. So it's like basically 2% or less than 2% of the daily active users. And technically monetizable daily active users is how Twitter refers to it. So it just seems. How is this possible? Surely there's something that maybe 10% of people would like, not merely 2%.

Well, actually, if you think about it, elon, there's a corollary on YouTube. What's the total user base of YouTube, and what have the most popular videos gotten there? And I think there's a billion or two, maybe a billion people using YouTube, and the most popular videos have tens of billions of views. Yes, that might be instructive.

Exactly. That ratio makes a lot more sense. So something doesn't add up here. And my concern is not that, is it five or seven or 8%, but is it potentially 80% or 90% bots? I certainly know there's some real people on Twitter, but is it an order of magnitude? Is it 50% instead of five? And that's obviously an incredibly material number, especially since Twitter relies primarily on brand advertising, as opposed to specific click through advertising, where you make a purchase. If you make a purchase, it doesn't really matter that much. But for brand advertising, which is really just awareness advertising, it matters if real humans are seeing that or.

So I guess, stepping back for a second, people are curious why you want to buy Twitter. Why is this so important to you? And then, I guess, what are the chances you think the deal gets done at this point?

So, a two parter, why is it so important to mean some of this I've articulated before, but I think there's a need for a public town square, digital town square, where people can debate issues of all kinds, including the most substantive issues. And in order for that to be the case, you have to have something that is as broadly inclusive as possible, that has as much of the people on the platform as possible, where it feels balanced from a political standpoint. It's not biased one way or the other, and where the system is transparent. This is why I think it's important to put the algorithm on GitHub and actually allow the public to see it and critique it and improve it. And if there are any manual changes, sort of shadow banning, as it's called, or increasing or decreasing the prominence of a tweet that's done manually, that that should be noted. So you know what has happened, and it's not just where it is right now, where you don't know what the heck is going on. Why is one tweet doing well? Why is another tweet not? Is it the algorithm? Did someone manually intervene? Why are some accounts banned with no recourse? Apparently? And the reality is that Twitter at this point has a very far left bias. And I would class myself as a moderate, neither the Republican nor Democrat. And in fact, I have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. Historically, overwhelmingly. I'm not sure I might never have voted for Republican. Just to be clear, right now, this election, I would.

Well, hold on, David, you going? Keep going.

He's fine. He's fine. We're going to resuscitate him.

We're going to resuscitate David Sack. I mean, let me ask you, a.

Point I'm trying to make is that this is not some sort of attempt to, it's not some right wing takeover as, say, people in the left may fear, but rather a moderate wing takeover and an attempt to ensure that people of old political beliefs feel welcome on a digital town square and they can express their beliefs without fear of being banned or shadow banned, and that we obviously need to get rid of the bots and scams