Billionaire Elon Musk has said on Tuesday that his acquisition of Twitter could not proceed unless he received assurances about the bots that , he said are a problem for the platform, making his fight to purchase the company.
Musk is the chief of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk is currently being ranked in Forbes as the world’s richest person, having a wealth in the region of $230 billion. most of which is Tesla shares.
His supporters regard him for his iconoclastic ability, and by opponents as an unstable megalomaniac Musk shocked investors in April by announcing that he was planning to buy Twitter.
However, his $44 billion offer for Twitter is “temporarily on hold,” due to questions regarding the estimates of the social media company of the amount of accounts that are fake, also known as “bots.”
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5 per cent,” Musk tweeted. Musk who has nearly 94 % of the followers who follow on Twitter’s network.
“This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said that the company suspends more than half a million accounts that appear to be fake each day, typically before they’re even noticed and then locks millions of accounts each week who fail to ensure they are run by humans and not software.
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Internal measurements show that less than 5 percent of the accounts that are active at any given day on Twitter are spam. However, the analysis cannot be replicated outside because of the need to protect user information, Agrawal contended.
Musk who has stated that bots are the bane of Twitter and said he’d make eliminating bots a priority if was the owner of the site, responded to the tweet of Agrawal by using a poo emoji.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” Musk tweets in a later message about the need demonstrate that Twitter the users on Twitter are genuine.
“This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
The methodology used to calculate the amount of bots in a given account is given to Musk, Agrawal insisted.
“It appears the spam/bot issue is cascading and clearly making the Twitter deal a confusing one,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors.
“The bot issue at the end of the day was known by the New York City cab driver and feels more to us like the ‘dog ate the homework’ excuse to bail on the Twitter deal or talk down a lower price.”
Musk has explained his motivations as stemming from an urge to protect freedom of expression on the platform, and also to improve the monetization potential of a site that is extremely influential, but has struggled to achieve profitable growth.
He has also stated that his preference for lifting the restriction against Donald Trump, who was removed from the platform in the month of January 2021 following the ex- US president’s attempts to reverse his electoral defeat resulted in the attack at the US Capitol.
