Elon Musk has stated that the $44 billion takeover bid from microblogging site Twitter has been put on hold.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that his $44 billion bid will not go through until Twitter Inc proves that spam bots make up less than 5% of total users, hours after suggesting he could seek a lower price for the company.
“My offer was based on the accuracy of Twitter’s SEC filings. Yesterday, the Twitter CEO publicly refused to show evidence of <5% (spam accounts). This deal cannot go through until he does,” Musk said in a statement. tweet.
20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims could be *much* higher.
My offer was based on the accuracy of Twitter’s SEC filings.
ADVERTISEMENTADVERTISEMENTADVERTISEMENTYesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.
This deal can’t go through until he does.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
After putting his offer on hold last week pending information about spam accounts, Musk said he suspects they make up at least 20% of users — compared to Twitter’s official estimates of 5%.
“You can’t pay the same price for something much worse than they claimed,” he said Monday at the All-In Summit 2022 conference in Miami.
Asked if the Twitter deal is feasible at a different price, Musk said at the conference, “I mean, it’s not out of the question. The more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow.”
“They claim they have this complex methodology that only they can understand… It can’t be a deep mystery more complex than the human soul or anything like that.”
The stock was down more than 8% Monday to close at $37.39, below the level the day before Musk announced his Twitter share in early April, raising doubts as to whether the billionaire entrepreneur would go ahead with his takeover against the stock. agreed price.
Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal tweeted Monday that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform for the last four quarters were “well below 5%” in response to days of criticism from Musk over the company’s handling of fake accounts.
Twitter’s estimate, which has remained the same since 2013, could not be reproduced externally given the need to use both public and private information to determine whether an account is spam, Agrawal said.
Musk responded to Agrawal’s defense of the methodology with a poo emoji. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to Twitter’s financial health,” he wrote.
Musk has pledged changes to Twitter’s content moderation practices, opposing decisions such as former President Donald Trump’s ban as being overly aggressive, while pledging to crack down on “spam bots.”
Musk has called for tests of random samples of Twitter users to identify bots. He said, “there’s a chance it’s over 90% of daily active users.”
Independent researchers estimate that between 9% and 15% of millions of Twitter profiles are bots. Spambots or fake accounts are designed to manipulate or artificially incentivize activity on social media platforms such as Twitter.
Twitter currently does not require users to register with their real identities and expressly allows automated, parodied, and pseudonymous profiles.
It prohibits impersonation and spam, and penalizes accounts when it determines their purpose is to “mislead or manipulate others” by participating in scams, coordinating abusive campaigns, or artificially inflating engagement.
Musk’s comments to a private audience could heighten concerns about his disclosures of market-moving information.
Musk, known for his candid Twitter posts, has a long history of skirmishes with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Recently, a US judge criticized him for trying to escape a settlement with the SEC that oversaw his Tesla tweets.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
