Elon Musk has suggested he could seek a lower price for his purchase from Twitter, saying there could be at least four times as many fake accounts as the social media giant has revealed.
Most important points:
- Elon Musk thinks 20 percent of accounts on Twitter could be spam and fake accounts
- On Friday, he announced that his deal to buy Twitter had been shelved for $61.4 billion pending information on fake accounts.
- He says he is open to buying the social media site at a lower price
“You can’t pay the same price for something much worse than they claimed,” he said at a conference in Miami.
On Friday, Mr. Musk said his $US 44 billion ($61.4 billion) deal to buy Twitter was on hold pending information on spam accounts.
He said he suspects fake accounts make up at least 20 percent of all site users — compared to Twitter’s official estimate of 5 percent.
When asked at the All-In Summit conference whether the Twitter deal is viable at a different price, Mr. Musk replied, “I mean, it’s not out of the question.”
“The more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow,” he said.
“They claim they have this complex methodology that only they can understand.
Twitter shares extensive losses in late afternoon trading following Mr. Musk’s comments.
The stock fell more than 8 percent, closing at $37.39 ($53.44), lower than the day before Musk announced his Twitter share in early April, raising doubts as to whether the billionaire entrepreneur would go ahead with his acquisition of the company. company on the stock exchange. agreed price.
Loading
Earlier, Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal tweeted that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform were “well below 5 percent” for the past four quarters, in response to days of criticism from Mr Musk over the company’s handling of fake accounts.
Twitter’s estimate, which has remained the same since 2013, could not be reproduced externally given the need to use both public and private information to determine whether an account is spam, he added.
Mr. Musk responded to Mr. Agrawal’s defense of the company’s methodology with a poo emoji.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to Twitter’s financial health,” Musk wrote.
Musk promises to tackle fake accounts
Musk has pledged changes to Twitter’s content moderation practices, opposing decisions such as the company’s ban on former US President Donald Trump as overly aggressive, while pledging to crack down on “spam bots” on the platform.
Musk has called for random sample testing of Twitter users to identify bots. He also said, “there’s a chance it’s over 90 percent of daily active users.”
Independent researchers estimate that 9 to 15 percent of millions of Twitter profiles are bots.
Twitter currently does not require users to register with their real identities and expressly allows automated, parodied and pseudonymous profiles on the service.
It prohibits impersonation and spam and penalizes accounts when the company determines their goal is to “mislead or manipulate others” by committing scams, coordinating abusive campaigns, or artificially inflating engagement.
Mr. Musk’s comments to a private audience could heighten concerns about his disclosures of market-moving information.
The CEO of Tesla, known for his candid Twitter posts, has a long history of skirmishes with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Musk was recently criticized by a US judge for trying to escape a settlement with the SEC that required oversight of his Tesla tweets.
Reuters
#Elon #Musk #Considers #Paying #Twitter #Doubts #Fake #Accounts #Grow