Musk Says Twitter May Fetch Lower Price
Elon Musk has said he might try and get a lower price for Twitter due to what he says is a large infestation of fake accounts, Reuters writes.
Musk has famously offered $44 billion to buy the social media company, but has lately been talking about possibly backing out.
Musk said there are potentially “four times more” fake accounts than the number the company claims.
“You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed,” he said, according to Reuters, adding that the more questions he asked, “the more my concerns grow.” He was speaking at the All-In Summit conference in Miami.
“They claim that they've got this complex methodology that only they can understand ... It can't be some deep mystery that is, like, more complex than the human soul or something like that,” he reportedly said.
The issue has become an important factor in the possible purchase of the social media company, with money at stake for investors if the deal changes dramatically.
Musk has said the deal was on hold because of his suspicion of a far greater number of fake accounts on Twitter.
This has been rebutted by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who said that only about 5% of the user base was deemed to be bots or fake accounts — if talking about those who access Twitter every day.
Agrawal has said it’s tough to look at spam accounts — some of them might be real people.
Agrawal disagreed, too, with Musk’s assessment of the way Twitter looks at those metrics. Musk said he wanted to do his own test by sampling 100 random accounts following the @Twitter handle, saying this was because Twitter did this itself.
Agrawal said the company actually has human reviewers looking at “thousands of accounts,” though he couldn’t share more because of privacy concerns.
Read more: Twitter CEO, Musk Disagree Over Number of Spam Bots on Platform