Elon Musk has suggested he wants to slash his initial $44 billion takeover bid for social media platform Twitter after accounting for the proportion of bots present on the microblogging site.
“I’m worried that Twitter has a disincentive to reduce spam, as it reduces perceived daily users,” Musk said in a series of tweets on May 21. “They still refuse to explain how they calculate that 5% of daily users are fake/spam! Very suspicious.”
When someone on Twitter pointed out that if 25 percent of users on Twitter are bots, then the acquisition deal should cost 25 percent less, Musk responded, “Absolutely.”
On May 13, Musk wrote on Twitter that the deal is “temporarily on hold” pending details supporting the company’s claim that fake or spam accounts only make up 5 percent of total users….