Musk threatens to walk away from Twitter deal

Musk wants underlying data to do his own verification of what he says are Twitter’s lax methodologies.

Trust but verify. You can't fault Musk in this case to know what he is buying.

The Culture Minds from his favorite space opera from Iain Banks would do no less.

If twitter has as few bots as they claim they should have no problem disclosing those figures. But in reality they know that their user numbers are fake, inflated by bots. They've allowed this for years and profited off it. Now imagine is more than 20% of users are actually bot accounts, and you get rid of them. That's almost 46 million "users". Why would anyone pay billions of $$$ for 46 million bot accounts?

If only he could have done some due diligence before signing a contract.

Oh wait.

Running Twitter into the ground and picking it up for a song, "Money, money, moneeh..."

He lose billion,if he walk away from the deal, Japantoday was really ahead of social media as early as 2001,when they had chatroom,that went away,they could been Japan Twitter, before Twitter

Nero ArchangelToday  07:38 am JST

If twitter has as few bots as they claim they should have no problem disclosing those figures. But in reality they know that their user numbers are fake, inflated by bots. They've allowed this for years and profited off it. Now imagine is more than 20% of users are actually bot accounts, and you get rid of them. That's almost 46 million "users". Why would anyone pay billions of $$$ for 46 million bot accounts?

Exactly.Twitter as one from greatest spy,spam/scam and censorship tool clearly hiding something behind and want erase it.

The percentage of "fake" accounts materially affects the value of the company - that's clear and obvious. Having as accurate an estimate as possible is crucial to a sale, as it speaks to the value for advertising, for both current and future revenue. But if Musk shows they've been lying, they may face legal action from their own stockholders!

I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of Twitter accounts are fake. They have a legitimate interest in protecting fake data, which brings them greater ad revenue.

This comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody ever. From the very beginning there have been critics saying this threats would happen sooner or later.

The theory going around is that Musk never wanted to buy Twitter, he just wanted an excuse to unload a lot of Tesla stock before it crashes over the next few years without scaring shareholders.

Following this line of thought he probably knew about the high number of bots before he even started the deal and was planning to walk away from the beginning.

It makes sense to me, Tesla is overvalued and other major automobile makers are moving into the electric car market.

He can walk away, but it's going to cost him $1 billion.

You can't sign to buy then pull back to try to get a lower price. It doesn't work that way.

That $1 billion won't bother him.

I do think it was a ruse to cash out stock.

Think along the line of Manny Perry, Peter Neil &co. That stinks. From even before the deal, he was expecting a bigger amount of bot thus he would have made an offer taking that in account and/or including the possibility to check the amount at some point and have the deal canceled if not in the expectation zone. If he did not, he sucks even more than me at business. If he did, we should not be hearing of it as it would be part of the contract and done or Twitter is trying to shoot themselves in the foot by not honoring a contract. No matter what is going on, that sound way too fishy.

But if he walks away, how will he be able to Tweet with impunity? Surely that's worth 45 billion dollars.

Some would say Elon is a bot.

This controversy over bots is just a smoke screen. As I have said here before on multiple occasions, Mr. Musk cannot come up with his half of the money to close the deal. He has already borrowed heavily against his stock options. There is a limit on how much he may borrow against his options and he is close to that limit. Unable to borrow more against his options he has to sell stock. If he sells more of his stock, it drives the price down. If the stock price falls too far the banks will call their option loans because his collateral ha lost value and the bank risks the collateral not being valuable enough to cover the loans. In addition falling stock prices will make investors angry. It's not a good look when the company founder is offloading his stock holdings and the price is falling. He tried talking the price down by making all these noises on social about bots, hoping to close the deal at a lower price, but that hasn't worked out either. Now he is looking for an excuse to bow out of the deal hoping he doesn't get sued in the process or fined by the SEC for trying to manipulate stock prices through social media. Elon Musk is just a very wealthy troll.

The percentage of "fake" accounts materially affects the value of the company - that's clear and obvious. Having as accurate an estimate as possible is crucial to a sale, as it speaks to the value for advertising, for both current and future revenue. But if Musk shows they've been lying, they may face legal action from their own stockholder

Elon Musk doesn't give a rodent's rear end about the number of bots on Twitter. All he is doing is trying to grind the board at Twitter to reduce their asking price. He is just trying to make Twitter look bad and drive their stock price down in the process. I would not be surprised if Elon Musk, not Twitter, gets royally sued.

He is just trying to make Twitter look bad and drive their stock price down in the process. I would not be surprised if Elon Musk, not Twitter, gets royally sued.

He's asking for it.

Musk needs to go away and do space, car, battery and perhaps solar engineering oversight.

Twitter is a dead platform with only old people and out of touch companies on it anymore.

Anyplace that allows users to comment are using those users as content creators. We are the product being sold for posting.

Don't forget that his stance on freedom of speech is whatever the local laws allow. He isn't a true believer. He wanted hate speech because it generates more commands and comments are content to be sold.\

Don't play his game.