the tech tycoon Elon Musk announced this Friday that it “temporarily suspends” the purchase of Twitter, pending more details on the proportion of fake accounts what’s in the social network.
The controversial businessman has linked a Reuters report published on May 2 in which pointed that the platform would have informed the tax authorities of USA that spam accounts account for less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users, something that Musk wants to contrast before going ahead with the purchase operation.
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
“The Twitter deal is temporarily suspended pending details supporting the calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” he tweeted.
Can the deal fail?
That brief statement, of which no further details have been given, has been enough to impact the markets. Thus, the Actions of the company have collapsed more than 23% in operations prior to the opening of the Wall Street stock market, where it is listed. That drop illustrates investors’ fear that the purchase deal will fail.
On April 25, the richest man on the planet reached an agreement with the board of directors of Twitter to acquire the blue bird’s social network for 44,000 million dollars (about 41,000 million dollars), which would be one of the largest acquisitions in your industry. Since then, Musk has worked to secure funding to carry out his takeover, selling some of his stock in Tesla and asking for loans from big banks. Even so, there is skepticism among analysts about whether that purchase process will end up coming to fruition and, if it does, it will be done for the same price established in the agreement. Musk agreed in that deal to pay a $1 billion breakup fee if he ultimately backed out.
What will you do with Twitter?
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The announcement of the acquisition has been a major earthquake in Silicon Valley, a US technological mecca, since it is unknown how Musk wants to shape the platform, one of the most influential in the world in shaping public debate. Among the priorities that the businessman set is the removal of false and automated accounts from Twitter, better known as ‘bots’. He even noted that he wanted to “authenticate all humans,” which could translate to deleting anonymous accounts as well.
Musk already made headlines this Tuesday by leaving the door open for the return of donald trump to the platform. The former US president’s account was permanently suspended in January 2021 after encouraging violent insurrection by his supporters against the Washington Capitol. “I think it was a morally bad decision, to be clear, and dumb in the extreme,” Musk said during an event organized by the ‘Financial Times’. “It was a mistake. It alienated a large part of the country and it didn’t ultimately result in Trump having no voice.”