Billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday that his Twitter purchase will not proceed unless he is assured of bots he says have harmed the platform, further complicating sensitive bids. his feelings towards the social media giant.
Chief of SpaceX as Tesla, Musk currently listed by Forbes as the richest person in the world, with a fortune of around $230 billion (approximately Rs 17,87,479 crore), most of which is in Tesla shares.
Regarded by his champions as an iconic genius and seen by critics as a capricious lust, Musk surprised many investors in April with news that he wanted to buy Twitter.
But his $44 billion bid (about Rs 3,41,910) for Twitter is now “temporarily on hold”, pending questions about the social media company’s estimate of the number of fake accounts. impersonation, or “bot”.
“Yesterday, the CEO of Twitter publicly refused to give evidence of a <5% rate," tweeted Musk, who has nearly 94 million followers on the social network.
“This deal can’t move forward until he does.”
20% of fake/spam accounts, while 4x Twitter claims, could be *much* higher.
My recommendation based on Twitter’s SEC filing is correct.
Yesterday, the CEO of Twitter publicly refused to give evidence of rates < 5%.
This agreement cannot continue until he does.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said the platform suspends more than half a million seemingly bogus accounts on a daily basis, often before they’re seen, and locks down millions more weekly if it’s not checked. to make sure they’re controlled by humans, not software.
Internal measures show that less than five percent of accounts active on any given day on Twitter are spam, but that analysis cannot be reproduced externally due to the requirement to keep user data confidential. , Agrawal argued.
Musk, who has said that bots cause disease on Twitter and that he would prioritize removing them if he owned the platform, responded to that tweet by Agrawal with a poo emoji.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk tweeted in a later response about the need to prove Twitter users are real people.
“This is fundamental to Twitter’s financial health.”
The process used to estimate how many bot accounts were shared with Musk, Agrawal emphasized.
“It looks like the ongoing spam/bot issue is so complex and obvious that the Twitter deal is a puzzling issue,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.
“The bot problem at the end of the day was made known to taxi drivers in New York City and we felt like ‘dog ate up homework’ using an excuse to bail out the deal on Twitter or say a lower prices.”
Musk has described his motivation as stemming from a desire to ensure free speech on the platform and drive monetization from an influential website that has struggled to achieve growth. profitable.
He also said he supported lifting the ban on Donald Trump, who was kicked off in January 2021 shortly after the former US president’s attempt to overturn the election defeat that led to the May 6 attack. 1 into the US Capitol.
