Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover in 'Serious Jeopardy,' New Report Warns
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Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover in 'Serious Jeopardy,' New Report Warns

2 Minuten
1 year ago

"Potentially drastic action" could be taken by Musk soon — with speculation growing that Tesla's CEO may attempt to wriggle out of the deal.

Elon Musk's Twitter Takeover in 'Serious Jeopardy,' New Report Warns

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Elon Musk's plans to buy Twitter are in serious jeopardy, according to a new report.

The Washington Post claims that the billionaire has been unable to verify Twitter's figures on how many spam accounts exist on the social network.

This has been a significant bone of contention for Musk, not least because a higher number of fake users would affect advertising revenues.

Musk's team has now halted discussions surrounding financing for the $44 billion deal, which at the very least would delay any acquisition being finalized.

"Potentially drastic action" could be taken by Musk soon — with speculation growing that Tesla's CEO may attempt to wriggle out of the deal.

Critics have claimed that Musk is also motivated to exit the takeover because of a fall in Twitter's stock price, far below the $54.20 a share he had been offering.

Unfortunately for Musk, there's real doubt over whether he would be able to back away from the deal without consequences.

When the agreement was made, he relinquished the right to perform certain aspects of due diligence — with Musk only able to exit if a significant new development substantially affected Twitter's operations. There's division on whether the bot issue qualifies here, not least because he was aware of the issue before commencing the takeover.

The social network is expected to continue fighting for the takeover to be finalized, and Musk may have to pay a $1 billion fee if it falls through.

Twitter had attempted to furnish the billionaire with further information by granting him access to a firehose of data — but experts at the time predicted that this wouldn't shed light on the social network's battle with spam bots.

An Update from Twitter

To complicate matters further, Twitter has now revealed that it removes more than one million spam accounts every day.

Although this shows that the tech giant is waging war on fake users, this is a far higher figure than the one provided by Twitter's CEO Parag Agrawal back in May. At the time, he had posted:

"We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc)."

Crypto enthusiasts have been keeping a close eye on the deal because of Musk's enthusiasm for digital assets — and the entrepreneur has previously suggested that Twitter should facilitate crypto payments.

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