The “temporary” brake on the millionaire acquisition by the owner of Tesla causes the shares of the social network to fall by up to 25%
After three weeks of negotiations, the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk is not yet closed, nor does it show signs of concluding in the short term. The American billionaire and owner of Tesla announced this Friday that he was paralyzing the acquisition of the company until he knew “more details” about the number of false accounts and ‘bots’ that make up the social network.
And although the acquisition had been viewed favorably by Twitter investors–not so by those of Tesla–, the new turn of the script by the businessman caused the company’s shares to plummet up to 25% before the opening on Wall Street, although at the close of the European markets it moderated to 7%.
“The Twitter agreement is temporarily suspended pending details that support the calculation that fake/spam accounts represent less than 5% of users,” Musk himself announced in his account. The company has already advanced that its estimate on the ‘bots’ could fall short and now the richest man in the world asks for explanations to close an operation of more than 43,000 million dollars (40,000 million euros).
The entity acknowledged in a document sent to the United States Securities Market Commission (SEC) after publishing its quarterly accounts that “there are inherent challenges in measuring the use and participation” of the large number of total accounts of the social network.
And while it estimated that the average number of fake accounts during the first quarter of 2022 “represented less than 5% of active monthly users in the quarter,” the company admitted that such calculation “may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts.” and that spam could be “higher than estimated.” An error that is already the second time that the social network has to confirm. Specifically, in 2017 it discovered that it had overestimated its active users for three years.
Free of ‘bots’
It is precisely the elimination of these empty profiles one of the priorities that the American tycoon had set after getting control of the company.
Musk, who at the beginning of April already entered the board of directors by buying 9% of Twitter, wants the social network “to be better than ever”, making the algorithms open source, ending the ‘bots’ and verifying all human users. For Musk “Twitter is the digital town square where important issues for the future of humanity are debated.”
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