San Francisco: Elon Musk fueled speculation that he might try to renegotiate his acquisition of Twitter Inc, saying a viable deal at a lower price would not be “out of the question”.
Twitter shares fell 8.2% at the end of trading in New York. The stock is falling on speculation that Musk may walk away with a $44 billion acquisition. That concern has grown over the past week as Musk has questioned the percentage of spam and fake accounts on his social-media service over Twitter’s publicly disclosed data.
Musk pushed further on that front at the Miami tech conference on Monday, estimating that fake users make up at least 20% of all Twitter accounts. This was the low end of his estimate on the number of bots on the network, and he asked rhetorically if it could be up to 90% according to a livestream. Video Regarding his comment posted by a Twitter user.
“What I am currently being told is that there is no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference. “It is as unknowable as the human soul.”
Twitter declined to comment. The San Francisco-based company reports quarterly that spam accounts account for less than 5% of total users.
Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Musk said last week that his bid to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold”, pending details about how many spam and fake accounts are on the platform. Over the weekend, he tweeted that he planned to conduct his own analysis of Twitter’s user base using a random sample of 100 user accounts. Shortly thereafter, Musk claimed that Twitter’s legal team called to complain that he violated their non-disclosure agreement by publicly sharing the company’s methodology.
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Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal disputed that in a tweet thread on Monday, offering more details on the company’s approach to spam accounts. Agarwal said Twitter manually checks thousands of accounts each quarter to determine how many should be counted as spam, but added that the process has to be driven externally due to user privacy concerns. cannot be done.
Agarwal said Twitter “shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago.” Musk responded by first responding to the CEO’s tweet thread asking why Twitter doesn’t simply ask users to verify their identities — and then by posting a poop emoji.
Musk spoke at a conference hosted by a podcast called “All-In” moderated by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sachs and David Friedberg. The event sold for $7,500 per person, and organizers said journalists were excluded from participating. Musk appeared via videoconference at the Miami summit.
The 50-year-old billionaire began buying Twitter shares in January and disclosed a 9.2% stake in the company on April 4. Twitter’s board accepted Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy the company and take it private on April 25, but the deal is months away from closing, and Twitter’s shares are trading well below the offer price. are.
The spread between Musk’s $54.20-a-share bid and Twitter’s share price continues to grow, wiping out The stock had made all the gains since Elon Musk disclosed his stake in the social media platform. bloomberg
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