Photo Credit: Elon Musk/Instagram
Elon Musk has been taking over the news as of late with his attempted hostile takeover of Twitter, but many have questioned how seriously he actually has been. Well now we have some insight on how that’s going. Early Friday morning he revealed his plans to buy Twitter were “temporarily on hold” but that he was still committed to buying the company. The hold up is over the amount of fake accounts on the platform. Twitter has stated around 5% of their accounts are fake.
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
Some have looked at Musk’s latest monkey wrench thrown into things and feel he’s using the prevalence of bots as a reason to drive down the price of the platform. And there’s precedence for this. The legitimacy behind the Chinese platform Bigo Live came into question during a recent aquisition. The US research firm Muddy Waters Research said 90% of the app’s revenue was fraudulent as they were virtual gifts that came from their internal network or bot farms. “We conclude that YY’s component businesses are a fraction of the size it reports, and that the company’s reported user metrics, revenues, and cash balances are predominantly fraudulent,” said the report.
While Twitter has its share of bots, they’re not as immediately and easily able to be recognized as Bigo Live. So we’ll see what Musk uncovers and if it will affect his future purchase of Twitter. It’s hard to conclude whether Musk still intends to purchase the site but we’d add he isn’t as much of a bluffer and is a more sound businessman than former President Donald Trump so if he goes through with this, he’s going to be dotting his Is and Ts first. At this point, we’ll just have to see what happens.
