Elon Musk will not buy Twitter if company doesn’t clarify its numbers on spam accounts

Elon Musk says he will not take the Twitter deal forward until the company proves that it has less than 5 per cent spam accounts on the platform. As opposed to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Musk recently claimed that the microblogging site at least consists of 20 per cent spam bots.

Update: Twitter said it was committed to completing Elon Musk’s $44-billion deal at the agreed price and terms, Reuters reported. “The deal is subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders and is expected to close in 2022,” the company added.

In a finding published last week, Twitter reported that there was around 5 per cent of spam accounts on the microblogging site in this quarter. The Tesla CEO rubbished Twitter’s claims and put the deal on hold. Musk later clarified that he was still “committed to acquisition”.

It is believed that these are Musk’s tactics to buy Twitter at a lower price than what he initially offered. The billionaire offered to buy the microblogging site for $44 billion in cash last month. Since Musk announced buying Twitter, the company’s stock has lost all its gains since the Tesla CEO disclosed his stake.

Amid all anticipations, Musk recently said that a deal at a lower price is not “out of the question”. This clearly suggests that the billionaire is exploring getting the Twitter bid as low as possible. “You can’t pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed,” Musk said at a conference in Miami on Monday.

The Tesla CEO has always been against spam bots on Twitter. In fact, he once said that spam bots are the “single most annoying problem” on the microblogging site. It is believed that as a Twitter boss, after the acquisition is completed, Musk will first work towards removing spam bots and fake accounts from the platform. One of the recent reports highlighted that around half of Musk’s followers are fake.

Recently, CEO Parag Agrawal in a Twitter thread said that the company works hard to remove fake and spam accounts from the platform. Agrawal said that Twitter suspends “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).”

“Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter,” he added.

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