Alex Bruno
After Twitter’s top executive maintained that the social media network is doing all it can to root out spam and bot accounts, Elon Musk reacted with a feces emoji. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal defended his company’s handling of spam and bots, denying charges that Twitter wasn’t doing enough to remove artificial accounts, only days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed the problem led him to put his $44 billion purchase of the site “on pause.”
He said on Monday that spam “harms the Twitter experience for genuine people” and that the firm is “highly encouraged to identify and delete as much spam as we possibly can, every single day.” “Anyone who thinks otherwise is just incorrect,” Agrawal said on Twitter. Musk responded with a poop emoji, indicating that he was dissatisfied. “So how can advertisers know what they’re receiving for their money?” he continued. This is critical to Twitter’s financial stability.”
Musk suggested last week that the number of fraudulent accounts on Twitter “could be above 90% of daily active users.” Spam and bot account operators are growing more sophisticated, according to Agrawal, making it more difficult for Twitter to identify and eradicate them. Despite this, Agrawal maintains that spam accounts for less than 5% of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users”.
“We gave an overview of the estimating process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the dialogue with him, and all of you,” Agrawal added, declining to say how the business came up with the statistics. Musk claimed on Twitter over the weekend that Twitter’s legal team accused him of breaking a nondisclosure agreement by disclosing that the sample size for the social media platform’s automatic user checks was just 100 accounts.
The Tesla CEO wrote, “Twitter legal just phoned to protest that I broke their NDA by stating the bot check sample size is 100!” “This truly took place.” On Monday, Twitter’s stock was down around 6.5 percent. On Wall Street, Twitter shares was trading at little over $38 per share, significantly below Musk’s offer of $54.20 to buy out the company’s shareholders and take it private.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives believes Musk’s use of the bot problem is a ruse to get the firm to agree to sell itself at a lower price.
Several variables, including the shifting stock market and funding challenges, have “led Musk to develop cold feet,” according to Ives, who believes the “bots” issue is “likely more of a scapegoat to push for a cheaper price.” Nobody will even come close to matching the breadth of Twitter’s offer, and Musk, whose electric car company Tesla has lost $300 billion in market value since the transaction was disclosed last month, is well aware of this.
According to Ives, “the elephant in the room for the Twitter board is Musk may walk away for a $1 billion breakup fee (for Musk-all relative) and likely claim the bot/fake account problem as the reason, even though this would likely be fought by Twitter in the courts.”
“If Musk and Twitter reach an agreement, it will very certainly be at a lower price after discussions begin and due diligence is completed on the Twitter DAU and algorithmic hot button topics.” Since the company’s board of directors revealed last month that it had accepted Musk’s $44 billion acquisition bid, Twitter has been in upheaval. Agrawal sacked two senior executives on Thursday after informing employees that the firm had missed its sales and growth targets.
