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Musk says lower price for Twitter ‘not out of the question’, wiping out stock gains since deal was revealed

  • Elon Musk has questioned the accuracy of Twitter’s bot data, estimating fake users make up 20 per cent of all accounts
  • Recent comments have stoked speculation that Musk could walk away from the deal, driving Twitter shares lower

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Elon Musk’s Twitter profile seen on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos in this picture illustration taken April 28. Photo: Reuters
Bloomberg
Elon Musk stoked speculation that he could seek to renegotiate his takeover of Twitter Inc, saying a viable deal at a lower price wouldn’t be “out of the question”.

Twitter shares fell 8.2 per cent at the close of trading in New York. The stock has been dropping on speculation that Musk could walk away from the US$44 billion acquisition. That concern has grown in the past week as Musk has questioned Twitter’s publicly disclosed data on the percentage of spam and fake accounts on its social-media service.

Musk pressed further on that front Monday at a Miami tech conference, estimating that fake users make up at least 20 per cent of all Twitter accounts. That was the low end of his estimate on the number of bots on the network, and he asked rhetorically if it could be as high as 90 per cent, according to a live-streamed video of his remarks posted by a Twitter user.

“Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference. “It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul.”

Twitter declined to comment. The San Francisco-based company reports quarterly that spam accounts make up less than 5 per cent of total users.

Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc and SpaceX, last week said his bid to buy Twitter was “temporarily on hold” pending details about how many spam and fake accounts are on the platform. Over the weekend, he tweeted that he planned to do his own analysis of Twitter’s user base by using a random sample of 100 user accounts. Shortly after, Musk claimed that Twitter’s legal team called to complain that he had violated their non-disclosure agreement by publicly sharing the company’s methodology.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal disputed that on Monday in a tweet thread that offered more details on the company’s approach to spam accounts. Agrawal said Twitter manually checks thousands of accounts every quarter to determine how many should be counted as spam, but added that the process could not be conducted externally because of user privacy concerns.

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