New twist in the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk. The businessman suspended the transaction pending an important verification.
It was the soap opera of April: after investing heavily in Twitter, Elon Musk, the extravagant billionaire, finally decided to buy the entire company and take it out of the stock market. Total cost of the operation: 44 billion dollars. But now the maneuver is now on hold…
Stop the count!
Elon Musk announced it himself on Twitter:agreement with Twitter temporarily suspended pending details that spam/fake accounts actually represent less than 5% of users“.
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
It must be said that the rich tycoon does not take over the social network out of joy of heart: he intends to make a quick profit from it, and he made his calculations on the basis of the latest quarterly results from Twitter. In the latter, we can read that fake accounts represent less than 5% of monetizable users of the platform and that 229 million users saw advertisements over the period.
If the percentage of fake accounts is higher, the cost of advertising may drop, and so will the income of the richest man in the world. He therefore waits for an account detail to be provided to him in order to be sure.
This announcement obviously caused Twitter’s share price to fall on Wall Street.
Sweaty palms
The number of fake accounts is at least the official explanation. We can’t help but wonder if there are other reasons behind this backpedaling by Elon Musk. After all, he wanted to erect his new Twitter as a pinnacle of absolute freedom of expression, reinstate Donald Trump and let everyone express themselves as they wish, even if the messages conveyed were hateful… before realizing that certain laws regulate freedom of expression in certain countries, obliging him to confirm publicly that he would comply with the various legislations. What taint his project a little.
At the same time, many Twitter executives are taking to their heels and fleeing to other horizons and the uproar is mounting internally. Suffice to say that the takeover will not be a walk in the park if it comes to an end.
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