Elon Musk may be about to withdraw his $44 billion takeover bid on Twitter. The social network had accepted Musk’s offer in April, but the transaction appears to be jeopardized by the number of fake accounts.
The Washington Post reports that Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy Twitter is “in jeopardy,” based on three unnamed sources who told the paper the billionaire’s camp “has stopped having “certain discussions about funding.” Tesla’s CEO camp is said to have concluded what many data experts had guessed: Twitter numbers on spam accounts are not verifiable.
As a reminder, this isn’t the first time we’ve reported Musk may withdraw its takeover bid. The Last Time The Billionaire Threatened Twitter By accusing the company of withholding information about the number of bot and spam accounts on the platform. Twitter then quickly agreed to be more transparent about the transaction in order to salvage the transaction
On Thursday, Twitter told reporters that it removes over a million spam accounts from its platform every day. That’s twice as much as CEO Parag Agrawal said in a Twitter thread in May, though the company maintains its long-held position that bots make up less than 5% of its active user base. Twitter even explained how it got its 5% figure, saying it came from “multiple human reviews from thousands of accounts, randomly sampled, consistent over time.”
The exams also use private account information, such as the user’s IP address and location. However, this does not seem to be enough to convince Elon Musk, who is still convinced that fake accounts abound on the social network, so their high numbers could greatly reduce the company’s value. Anyway, if the deal isn’t done, Musk risks $1 billion severance pay in addition to the risk of high legal costs for a breach of contract lawsuit.
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