[LawTalkingGuy]

Ad buyers can claim to be defrauded because of anything. Welcome to the USA. You're saying there's no reason any of them could sue. That's clearly wrong. You think none of them would win. I doubt that as well. But assuredly they could cause havoc with distractions, subpoenas, and huge losses of public good-will, and giving Musk a reason to petition for delay, etc.

Nothing said by Mudge directly implicates the number claimed, but everything else about his report is a massive indictment of their ability to properly report on it and their honest desire to do so. I imagine their constant reclassification of mDAU applicable-users won't help them here. If their actual numbers were 10% high, because of an accounting error or whatever, then you'd likely be right that it wouldn't be enough to break the deal. But if they misrepresented, or tried to avoid relevant data about, the numbers this very likely would be a deal breaker. If you can prove they lied about one thing you can safely assume they're willing to lie about more.

As for the value of Twitter, the perceived value plummeted when they were revealed to not have decent test/release procedures, fragile DCs, a CEO who hides from data, no privacy controls or logging of dev activity in prod, etc. There are a lot of things other than the mDAU numbers that are materially changing the industry's view about, and thus the reasonable value of, Twitter.