Posted 3 months ago Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion could well be compromised. This is revealed by the washington post in an article published on July 7. As a reminder, the takeover of the social network has been frozen since the beginning of May.
The takeover of Twitter in danger
Several sources close to the case told the washington post that Elon Musk’s teams no longer participated in certain discussions around the takeover. The head of Tesla had paused the acquisition process pending more details on the volume of fake accounts and spam present on the social network.
Twitter has claimed every quarter since 2014 that the number of fake accounts equals less than 5% of its daily active users. After several weeks of research, the billionaire’s employees concluded that they could not verify this data. Elon Musk says they make up at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million daily user accounts.
Since the SpaceX boss’s mistrust of Twitter’s numbers, Twitter’s share price has fallen drastically. Its value fell from around $50 at the end of April, when the takeover was announced, to less than $38.8 on July 7 when the New York Stock Exchange closed.
If the deal does not go through, Elon Musk will have to pay a billion dollar termination fee. However, Elon Musk could use this information to prove that he was misled and have a legal justification for not carrying out this agreement.
Elon Musk still wants more details
Elon Musk seeks to know the potential number of users affected by advertising and Twitter Blue, Twitter’s premium service. By buying the social network, the billionaire intends to double the advertising revenues of the company by 2028. He hopes that they will represent 45% of the turnover.
Twitter has responded many times to his doubts. Parag Agrawalgeneral manager of the social network, has also detailed in a thread how the company calculated the number of bots, declaring “having shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon”.
On July 7, Twitter reported that more than a million spam accounts were deleted every day. This is twice the figures announced by Parag Agrawal last May. He pointed out that “more than half a million spam accounts were suspended every day, usually even before [les utilisateurs] do not notice it”.
We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc).
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 16, 2022
This statement was not enough to reassure Elon Musk. So Billy Markus, one of the founders of dogecoin, asks in a tweet how many real accounts are created each day, the future owner of Twitter asks him respond that ” That is the real question “. This is data that the social network has not yet shared and which could again shake up the terms of the takeover.
