The Chief Executive Officer of Tesla, Elon Musk, has suspended the $44 billion acquisition of the microblogging app, Twitter. This is as a result of a recent discovery that shows that over 5% of Twitter users are fake and spam accounts.
Driving the news
Announcing the discovery on his Twitter page, the billionaire says the deal is on hold until the probe into how many fake and spam accounts exist on the platform is complete.
- The announcement of this 5% represents 11.45 million users of Twitter’s 229 million users.
What you should know
- Twitter, in its Q1 report in 2022, had stated that an error in 2019 resulted in the platform overstating the daily active users by 1.9 million.
- The world’s richest man is so strongly against bots that in April 2021, Elon said, “If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!”
- On May 3rd 2022, Elon Musk wrote, “There is so much potential with Twitter to be the most trusted & broadly inclusive forum in the world! “That is why we must clear out bots, spam & scams. Is something actually public opinion or just someone operating 100k fake accounts? Right now, you can’t tell.”
In case you missed it
- Twitter’s board of directors accepted Elon Musk’s $43 billion bid to privatize the company just after acquiring 9.1% of stake in the company.
Since that time, Elon Musk has been raising funds from banks and investors to complete the cash payment of $44 billion for the social media app.