Elon Musk says US$44 billion Twitter buyout ‘cannot move forward’ until he gets proof about bots
- His US$44 billion bid for Twitter is ‘temporarily on hold’, Musk said, pending questions over the social media company’s estimates of fake ‘bot’ accounts
- One analyst called it a ‘dog ate the homework’ excuse on the part of Musk – to either abandon the deal entirely or negotiate a lower price for the network
Seen by his champions as an iconoclastic genius and by his critics as an erratic megalomaniac, Musk surprised many investors in April with news that he wanted to purchase Twitter.
But his US$44 billion bid for Twitter is now “temporarily on hold”, pending questions over the social media company’s estimates of the number of fake accounts, or “bots.”
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%,” tweeted Musk, who has almost 94 million followers on the social network. “This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal has said the platform suspends more than a half-million seemingly bogus accounts daily, usually before they are even seen, and locks millions more weekly that fail checks to make sure they are controlled by humans and not by software.