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Elon Musk has expressed support for receiving a discount on his Twitter bid equal to the percentage of users who are spam bots.
The billionaire, who claims to be spending less than 5% of his time on the $44bn takeover, has made a number of comments in recent weeks criticising Twitter and its management team.
Mr Musk recently said the acquisition was temporarily on hold as he wanted to confirm the company’s own figures that accounts not operated by real humans represented less than 5% of users.
Responding to the suggestion that “if 25% of the users are bots then the Twitter acquisition deal should cost 25% less” he wrote: “Absolutely.”
So what is the argument really about?
Mr Musk has claimed that much higher than 20% of accounts on Twitter could be “fake/spam” and said that his offer to acquire the company was based on Twitter’s own reports being accurate.
He criticised Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, for publicly refusing “to show proof” that less than 5% of accounts were “fake/spam” and wrote that he was “worried that Twitter has a disincentive to reduce spam, as it reduces perceived daily users”.
Mr Agrawal had written a fifteen-post thread denying this incentive and explaining that Twitter actively attempts to reduce spam accounts; suspending over half a million spam accounts every day and locking millions of accounts each week that can’t pass human verification challenges.
The chief executive did not point out that if Mr Musk is to receive a discount on his bid proportionate to the number of user accounts that are considered “fake/spam” then Mr Musk himself is incentivised to inflate that figure.
Musk replied with a pile of poo emoji and asked: “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
Mr Musk proposed users conduct their own test to see if they could see if accounts were authentic or not, although Twitter cautioned that it was not possible for…
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Source : skynews
