Elon Musk has sparked speculation about renegotiating his Twitter deal by saying that the deal is viable at a lower price and not out of the question.
Musk’s intention to buy Twitter at a lower price
The share price of Twitter fell 8.2% in New York Monday’s trading. The stock has been falling on speculation that Musk would walk away from the $44 billion Twitter buyout. The concern increased last week when Musk questioned the publicly disclosed data by Twitter Inc. about the percentage of fake accounts and Spam on its social media platform.
As per Bloomberg News, Musk further pressed on the same issue at a Miami tech conference on Monday, estimating that fake users account for 20% of the total number of accounts on Twitter. According to Musk, the estimate of bots is at the lower end and rhetorically asks if it could be as high as 90% as per video live-streamed by a Twitter user.
Musk said during the conference that he was told that there was no way to know the number of fake accounts. Twitter declined to comment that its quarterly results suggested less than 5% of the total users.
Last week, the Chief Executive Officer at Tesla and SpaceX said that he has put on hold temporarily his bid to buy Twitter pending details on how many fake accounts and bots are on the platform.
Musk tweeted during the weekend that he plans to analyze Twitter users any taking a random sampling of 100 user accounts. Shortly after that, he was called by the legal team of Twitter, who complained that Musk had violated the non-disclosure agreement by sharing Twitter’s methodology publicly.
On Monday, Parag Agarwal, CEO of Twitter, disputed the claim and offered more details on how the company checks the spam accounts. He said that Twitter checks thousands of accounts manually every quarter to determine whether they can be classified as Spam. He further added that the process could not be outsourced because of privacy concerns.
According to Agarwal, Twitter shared an overview of its quarterly estimation process with Musk a week ago. Musk had replied by asking why Twitter cannot just call the users to verify their identity along with posting a poop emoji.
The conference was hosted by a podcast called “All-In” conducted by David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg. The event, priced at $7,500 per person, was a sell-out, and organizers informed that journalists were excluded from attending. Musk appeared via video conferencing at the Miami summit.
The 50-year-old Billionaire started buying Twitter shares in January this year, and on April 4, he announced he was holding a 9.2% stake in the company. On April 25, the Twitter board agreed to accept Musk’s $44 billion bid offer and take the company private. The deal is still months away from finalizing, and the price of Twitter shares is trading much below the offer price.
