As Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover attempt drags on, he hits yet another stumbling block. A report from Reuters from the 2nd of May notes that the social media company had estimated the total number of spam and fake accounts to make up less than 5% of users. Musk has now just tweeted out the Reuters report, and says that he’s putting it on hold while he waits to see supporting calculations that prove those numbers.
As a result of Musk’s tweets, Twitter’s share prices had begun nose diving. Musk seems to have some reason to worry too as Twitter doesn’t have a particularly good history with its numbers. Just a couple of weeks ago, they revealed that they had been overestimating their daily users for the past three years due to counting multiple accounts as active, even though they were being used by the same person.
The Tesla CEO had also prioritised reducing the spam and bots on Twitter as part of his takeover plan before this. One particular reason for this is likely that if those numbers were to be higher than Twitter claims it is, it could hurt its advertising revenue in the long run as advertisers will no longer be convinced that their ads are being shown to real people.
Not everyone seems impressed by Musk’s actions though. His tweets have caused Tesla’s stocks to rise and fall on a whim in the past, and his recent tweets now put Twitter into the same boat. Dan Ives, a Wall Street tech analyst, notes that the stock market will now see his actions as Musk potentially trying to wrestle a lower price with Twitter, or maybe even Musk trying to wrangle a way to get to walk away from his Twitter takeover altogether.
This is already the second speedbump Musk is having to deal with too in his USD44 billion acquisition attempt of the social media platform. Just earlier this week, he found himself in the center of a class action lawsuit by the Orlando Police Pension Fund who claimed that Delaware state law requires him to delay the closing of the deal by up to three years.
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