Elon Musk fueled speculation that he could seek to renegotiate his acquisition of Twitter Inc., saying a viable deal at a lower price would not be ruled out.
Twitter shares fell 8.2% near the close of trading in New York. The stock is falling on speculation that Musk could walk away from the $44 billion acquisition. That concern was heightened last week when Musk questioned Twitter’s public data on the rate of spam and fake accounts on the social networking service.
Musk pushed further on that front Monday at a tech conference in Miami, estimating that fake users make up at least 20% of all Twitter accounts. That was the low end of his estimate for the number of bots on the network, and he rhetorically asked if it could be as high as 90%, according to a live video of his remarks posted by a Twitter user. “Right now what they’re telling me is there’s no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference. “It’s as unknown as the human psyche.”.
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Twitter declined to comment. The San Francisco-based company says spam accounts make up less than 5% of all users.
Musk theCEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, said last week that his bid to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” pending details about how many spammy and fake accounts there are on the platform. Over the weekend, he tweeted that he planned to conduct his own analysis of the platform’s user base using a random sample of 100 user accounts. Shortly afterward, Musk claimed that Twitter’s legal team called to complain that he had violated a nondisclosure agreement by publicly sharing the company’s methodology.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawaldisputed that on Monday in a tweet that offered more details about the company's approach to spam accounts. Agrawal said Twitter manually reviews thousands of accounts each quarter to determine how many should be counted as spam, but added that the process could not be conducted externally due to concerns about user privacy.
Agrawal said Twitter “shared an overview of the assessment process with Elon a week ago.” Musk responded to the CEO’s tweet by asking why Twitter doesn’t just call users to verify their identity.
See also: Elon Musk Twitter: There may be charges for some users
Musk - per-person event was sold out, and organizers said journalists were barred from attending. Musk appeared at the Miami session via video conference.
The 50-year-old billionaire began buying shares of the platform in January and acquired 9.2% of the company's shares on April 4. Twitter's board of directors accepted Musk's $44 billion offer to buy the company and take it private on April 25, but the deal is months away from closing and Twitter shares are trading well below the offer price.
The gap between Musk's $54.20 per share offer and Twitter's stock price continues to widen, wiping out all the gains the stock had made since Elon Musk revealed his stake in the social networking platform.
Source: bloomberg.com
