First the offer to buy, then the temporary withdrawal and finally a poo emoji. Does Tesla founder Elon Musk want to use idiosyncratic methods to lower the price of the intended purchase of Twitter?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk is offering a cheaper price for his takeover attempt on Twitter.
A deal at a lower bid is “not out of the question,” Musk said in a video interview at a conference on Monday. Twitter shares ended the day in US trading down a good eight percent at $37.38. That’s a far cry from the $54.20 per share that the head of electric car maker Tesla has so far promised Twitter shareholders.
Musk himself sent the stock plummeting over the weekend by declaring the deal to buy Twitter “temporarily suspended.” He first wants to wait for calculations to show that accounts without real users actually account for less than five percent. It is still unclear whether Musk can put his agreement with the Twitter board of directors on hold from a legal point of view.
At his conference appearance, Musk estimated that fake profiles make up at least a fifth of all Twitter accounts, according to financial service Bloomberg. He gave no basis for it. Earlier, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal attempted to explain the service’s methodology in estimating the number of spam and bot accounts in a series of tweets. Musk countered with a poo emoji and asked, among other things, whether Twitter had tried to simply call users with suspicious-looking accounts. Twitter calls the figure of 229 million daily users that the service can reach with its advertising. The fake accounts identified by Twitter have already been deducted from this number.
