Billionaire Elon Musk said on Tuesday that his Twitter acquisition would not go ahead unless he was given a guarantee from the bots that he was hitting the stage, which further complicates his bid to find a social media giant.
Lord of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk is currently listed by Forbes as the richest man on earth, with a net worth of about $ 230 billion, most of it in Tesla stock.
Seen by his heroes as an iconoclastic genius and by his critics as a rare megalomaniac, Musk shocked many investors in April with news that he wanted to buy Twitter.
But his $ 44 billion dollars on Twitter is now “temporarily suspended,” now questions are pending about the company’s social media estimates by the number of fraudulent accounts, or “bots.”
“Yesterday, the CEO of Twitter publicly refused to show 5 percent proof,” said Musk, who has nearly 94 million followers on the social network.
“This agreement cannot go ahead until he does.”
Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal said the platform suspends more than half a million accounts that appear to be fraudulent on a daily basis, usually before they are seen, and locks out millions more per week unsuccessfully to see if they are controlled by people and not by software.
Internal measures show that less than 5 percent of active accounts on any given day on Twitter spam, but that analysis cannot be repeated without the need to keep user data private, Agrawal argues.
Musk, who said the bots are hitting Twitter and will make it very important for you to be the owners of the platform, responded to that tweet by Agrawal with poo emoji.
“So how do advertisers know what they are getting for their money?” Musk tweeted in the following response about the need to show that Twitter users are real people.
“This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
The process used to estimate how many bots accounts were shared with Musk, Agrawal stressed.
“The issue of spam / bot seems to be declining and is clearly confusing the Twitter agreement,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in an article for investors.
“The bot issue at the end of the day was well known by a New York City cab driver and it feels even more like ‘dog ate homework’ reason for giving off bail on Twitter or talking about low cost.”
Musk described his motivation as coming from a desire to ensure freedom of speech on the platform and to encourage making money on a website that has a great impact but is struggling to achieve profitable growth.
He also called for the removal of the barrier from Donald Trump, who was ousted from office in January 2021 shortly after former US president’s attempts to overturn his defeat in an election that led to a January 6 attack on the US Capitol.
