The process of buying Twitter by Elon Musk continues on pause after the controversy related to the number of false accounts present on the platform, and it seems that the tycoon will not resume it until he manages to lower the offer that, remember, was closed initially for 44,000 million dollars. The also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has highlighted that the price of the acquisition should be reduced in proportion to the actual number of bots that are active on the social network. According to their estimates, they represent at least 25% of all users, and not 5%, as the company indicated.
The billionaire hasn’t really confirmed his intention to cut the offer price by 25%, but he does agree with this strategy initially shared by Ian Miles Cheong, who is known for his conservative views on Twitter. Cheong, specifically, and according to Business InsiderI think that “If 25% of users are bots, the Twitter acquisition deal should cost 25% less”and Musk replied, “absolutely.”
If Elon Musk finally manages to prove that Twitter is lying about that scarce 5% of active fake accounts on the platform, and decides to bet on a proportional reduction, the The cost of the purchase of Twitter would be about 33,000 million dollars, instead of the 44,000 million that were detailed in the agreement. As long as, yes, the number of bots represents 25% of all users of the social network, as the South African suspects.
Elon Musk suspects the count of bots while Twitter ensures that there are hardly any fake accounts
It is not the first time that Elon Musk has confirmed his intention to lower the price of the purchase of Twitter if it is proven that the company is lying about the number of false accounts on the platform. The tycoon detailed just a few days ago that renegotiating the price is something that “is not out of the question” and also assured that the more questions he asks, the more his concerns grow.
Recently, Musk has also tweeted about Twitter’s suspicious way of counting the number of bots on the social network. “They still refuse to explain how they calculate that 5% of daily users are fake/spam! Very suspicious.”
Despite the accusations of Elon Musk, Parag Agrawall, current CEO of Twitter, maintains that the number of fake accounts is really low, since it calculates that they eliminate more than half a million of this type of accounts every day. Agrawall, however, assured that it is not possible to make a specific estimate of the number of bots on Twitter, while Musk suggested that users take a random sample of 100 accounts and check which ones are fake.