Elon Musk stoked speculation that he could seek to renegotiate his takeover of Twitter, saying a viable deal at a lower price wouldn’t be “out of the question.”
Twitter shares have continued to slump on Wall Street, and closed 8.2 per cent lower in late trade on Monday in New York. The stock has been dropping on concern that Musk could walk away from the $US44 billion ($63 billion) acquisition altogether. That concern has grown over the past week as Musk has questioned Twitter’s publicly disclosed data on the percentage of spam and fake accounts on its social-media service.
Analysts believe that Elon Musk may be trying to lower the price he pays for the social media giant.Credit:Getty Images
Musk pressed further on that front at a tech conference in Miami on Monday, estimating that fake users make up at least 20 per cent of all Twitter accounts. That was his low end of his estimate on the number of Twitter bots, and he asked rhetorically if the number could be as high as 90 per cent, according to a livestreamed video of his remarks posted by a Twitter user.
“Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference. “It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul.”
Twitter declined to comment. The San Francisco-based company reports quarterly that spam accounts make us less than 5 per cent of total users.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, last week said 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 Twitter’s legal team called to complain that he had violated their non-disclosure agreement. Twitter has declined to comment.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal disputed that on Monday in a tweet thread that offered more details on the company’s approach to spam accounts. Agrawal said Twitter manually checks thousands of accounts every quarter to determine how many should be counted as spam, but added that the process could not be conducted externally because of user privacy concerns.
Agrawal said Twitter “shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago.” Musk replied to the CEO’s tweet thread by first asking why Twitter doesn’t just call users to verify their identity — and then by posting a poop emoji.
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