Billionaire Elon Musk said Tuesday that the Twitter acquisition will not go ahead until he has assurances about the plague of fake accounts that are rife on the platform, complicating a tense takeover bid from the social media giant.
Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is currently the richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated fortune of $230 billion.
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 his $44 billion bid is on hold until the estimated number of fake accounts, known as “bots,” are resolved.
“Twitter’s CEO yesterday refused to prove that less than 5% of accounts are fake,” tweeted Musk, who has nearly 94 million followers on the social network.
“Until it does, the deal cannot go ahead,” he added.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal says that the platform suspends more than half a million apparently fake accounts every day, many times before they are public, and that every week it blocks millions of suspected 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 Musk, Agrawal insisted.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives indicated in a note to investors that the issue of fake accounts is making the deal confusing.
“The ‘bots’ issue is ultimately familiar to New York cabbies and seems more like a ‘dog ate my homework’ excuse to get out of the deal on Twitter or to get it at a price.” lower,” said the expert.
Musk has claimed that his buying motivation stems from a desire to ensure free speech on the platform and to drive monetization for a page that is hugely influential but struggling to grow profitable.
The businessman also declared himself in favor of lifting the veto on the platform against former US President Donald Trump that was imposed after his supporters, inflamed by his tweets alleging electoral fraud, attacked the United States Congress on March 6. January 2021.
