News

Elon Musk: Twitter deal ‘can’t go ahead’ until total bots are proven

And the saga of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter continues. Earlier this month, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO stated that he could not complete the platform purchase agreement until the number of fake accounts and spam was proven.

This Monday (17), the executive reiterated his position, saying that the US$ 44 billion would be a lot of money if considered the number of fake accounts. Musk believes the total number of fake accounts could be “much higher” than 20%.

He states that “my offer is based on the accuracy of Twitter documents submitted to the SEC [Comissão de Valores Imobiliários dos EUA]” and that “the company’s CEO publicly refused to show evidence about [o número de usuários falsos] be less than 5%. This agreement cannot go ahead until it is proven [o montante total de bots]”, he said, via post on his profile on the platform (of course!)

Previously, Musk had already publicly mocked the case, also via his profile on the platform (where he is well known for the controversies, that is to say) commenting that “bots are annoyed to be told”.

The deal between Elon Musk and Twitter

After the executive’s demands, Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, came to speak, unrolling a long thread via the platform, clarifying some details about how fake accounts and bots are identified and how many are suspected daily.

“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, often before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also block millions of accounts every week that we suspect are spam – if they fail to pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc),” said Agrawal.

The executive also stated that: “Our actual internal estimates for the last four quarters were well below 5% – based on the methodology described above. The margins of error in our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.”

But that “unfortunately, we do not believe that this particular estimate can be carried out externally, given the critical need to use public and private information (which we cannot share). Externally, it is not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on a given day.”

How did Musk react to the thread? Well, you can see it in the image below.

You can read the CEO’s posts in full on this link here.

The Tesla CEO also countered Agrawal’s claims by asking, “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is critical to Twitter’s financial health.”

Was it a negotiation tactic?

Some market analysts speculate, however, that Musk’s statement could just be a tactic he was using to negotiate the deal at a lower price – especially after the CEO told Bloomberg that a rearrangement of the deal, putting a lower price would not be “out of the question”.

Image: Rokas Tenys/Shutterstock

Currently, the company estimates the number of monetizable daily active users at 226 million – which is why Musk would have offered the $44 billion.

“Currently, what I’m told is that there’s simply no way to know the number of bots,” Musk previously told Bloomberg. “It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul,” he snapped.

He goes on to state, however, that he is “still committed to the acquisition.”

Yeah, it looks like this fight is going to go a long way.

Via: The Verge

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *