The NuggMD Too-High Hotline is here.

It's worth noting here that the post-truth era of politics has coincided with the late-journalism era of media. I do believe there's a causal relationship between the prevalence of political disinformation and the inability of news publishers to monetize journalism.

It really, genuinely, is fine. At many firms, big, boring clients subsidize the firm's mission-driven work.

One thing doesn't get much attention is the fact that other U.S. president have been charged with criminal conduct internationally. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission, for example, convicted disgraced president George W. Bush, and other administration officials, of war crimes in 2012.

Ah, we have reached the "why won't you debate me!" portion of the matter at hand.

Doesn't matter. Musk has a better chance of pivoting Space X to time travel so that he can go back to April and make better decisions on this deal than he does of convincing a court of law to let him back away from it.

This is graduate-level comms stuff: Put a dumb claim into an official filing or legal claim, pitch it to media as though it were a serious argument, and watch headlines commence. Some real McLuhanesque, "the medium is the message"-type shit.

Musk waived due diligence on the deal in April.

This is ... just wrong? Musk can't "call off" the agreement, and he can't just pay $1 billion to make it go away. I believe the $1b termination fee kicks in if Musk can't come up with the equity financing he promised under the deal, and he may face additional litigation if he does anything meant to torpedo those deals. And Musk has already breached the contract by, among other things, publicly disparaging Twitter. Doesn't matter. Twitter shareholders have the right to $54.20 per share from this clown.

It is not.

This is not what Twitter says. What Twitter says is that less than 5% of monetizable accounts are fake. Big difference. And Musk does not know how Twitter defines "monetizable accounts," he waived his right to have this information, so here we are.

So, this is a lie. As Matt Levine writes:

The spam bots are not why he is backing away from the deal, as you can tell from the fact that the spam bots are why he did the deal. ...

Twitter has published the same qualified estimate — that fewer than 5% of monetizable accounts are fake — for the last eight years. Musk knew those estimates, and declined to do any nonpublic due diligence before signing the merger agreement. He knew about the spam bot problem before signing the merger agreement, as we know because he talked about it constantly, including while announcing the merger agreement.

Poop emojis don't tend to hold up in court.

The algorithms that trade off of headlines must not know what material adverse effect is under Delaware corporate law.

What about the rights of Twitter shareholders to receive $54.20 per share for Twitter, which is what Mr. Musk agreed to?

Some very good hedging from whatever lawyer wrote this filing, who presumably has a professional reputation she'd like to maintain.

Examples? From what I can tell, Twitter has done exactly what you'd expect a company in its situation to do, which amounts to releasing SEC filings and occasionally reminding investors that, yep, that deal we did with Musk for $54.20 per share is still the deal we did with Musk for $54.20 per share. I get that Musk wants to renegotiate the price, but, as they say, that ship's sailed.