Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of usershttps://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
As the world expects a total Musk acquisition of Twitter, Inc. and the company itself prepares for the expected changes, Elon Musk announced that his deal is “temporarily on hold.” The reason behind this, according to the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, has something to do with the report that says less than 5 percent of Twitter’s 226 million monetizable daily active users during the first quarter were made of spam accounts.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted on May 13 and added that he is “still committed to acquisition.”
Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but the billionaire’s recent tweets indicate the deal will only carry on once the issue is settled. Musk tweeted within the same post that his own team will take steps to investigate the situation. “To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter,” the tweet reads. “I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover.”
According to a portion of Twitter’s filing, on the other hand, the percentage of its indicated false accounts is just an “estimate,” saying that it “could be higher than we have estimated.” It reads:
“We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the first quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our mDAU during the quarter. The false or spam accounts for a period represents the average of false or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this determination, we applied significant judgment, so our estimation of false or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of false or spam accounts could be higher than we have estimated.”
Meanwhile, some believe that the delay of the deal is not all about the number of bots or spam accounts on the platform. Some Tweeter users instead say that Musk is only finding a way to back out from it after getting cold feet or was only bluffing the entire time about his intention of buying the company.
It looks like I was right all along. You never actually intended to buy #Twitter. You were bluffing the entire time. How many Twitter shares did you sell before tweeting this announcement?
— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) May 13, 2022
“It looks like I was right all along,” commented Peter Schiff, Chief Economist & Global Strategist at Europac.com. “You never actually intended to buy #Twitter. You were bluffing the entire time. How many Twitter shares did you sell before tweeting this announcement?”
Others believe that the real reason why there seems to be a change of tone from Musk about the deal is because of Twitter’s share dropping to $44.05 last Thursday afternoon. It even went down as low as $43.33 that same day before closing at $45.08 a share.
Despite all of these possible reasons, there are, of course, other guesses: it could be a way for Musk to renegotiate the bid at a lower price (since it means he’s buying the platform more than it is actually worth) or, as we all know the guy, just Musk getting bored and posting another trolling statement.