the billionaire Elon Musk stated on Tuesday that the Twitter acquisition will not take place until it has guarantees about the plague of false accounts that abound on the platform, complicating this tense takeover bid from the social media giant.
Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Teslais currently the richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated fortune of 230,000 million dollars.
Considered an iconoclastic genius by his supporters and an erratic megalomaniac by his critics, the businessman shocked the world of finance in April when he announced he wanted to buy Twitter.
But your offer for $44 billion is on hold until the estimated number of fake accounts is resolved, known as “bots.”
“Twitter’s CEO yesterday refused to prove that less than 5% of accounts are fakeMusk, who has almost 94 million followers on the social network, tweeted.
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“Until it does, the deal cannot go ahead,” he added.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal states that the platform suspends more than half a million accounts that appear fake every daymany times before these are public and that each week blocks millions of supposed users on suspicion that they are accounts managed by a computer application.
Internal analysis shows that less than 5% of active accounts on an average day qualify as “spam,” but these accounts cannot be replicated by third parties due to privacy requirements, Agrawal said.
A plague
Musk – who says “bots” are a plague on Twitter and that he makes it a priority to get rid of them if he takes control of the platform – responded to Agrawal’s explanation in a tweet, with a poop-shaped icon.
“So advertisers know what they get for their money?” Musk added in another dialogue about the need to prove that Twitter users are all people.
Musk ruled that “this is critical to the financial health of Twitter.”
The procedure for estimating how many accounts are “bots” has been shared with MuskAgrawal insisted.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives indicated in a note to investors that the issue of fake accounts is making the deal confusing.
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“The issue of ‘bots’ is ultimately something known even by New York taxi drivers and it looks more like a ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse to get out of the Twitter deal or to get it at a lower price.”
Musk has claimed that his purchase motivation stems from a desire to ensure that there is freedom of expression on the platform and to promote the monetization of a page that is very influential but that it has difficulties to have a growth that is profitable.
The businessman also declared himself in favor of lifting the veto on the platform against former US President Donald Trump who was imposed after after his supporters, inflamed by his tweets alleging voter fraud, attacked the United States Congress on January 6, 2021.
