Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, provided the strongest signal yet Monday that he would want to pay less for Twitter than his $44 billion bid last month.
According to Bloomberg News, which witnessed a Livestream video of the conference provided by a Twitter user, Musk told a Miami technology conference that a credible transaction at a lower price would not be out of the question.
According to the story, Musk also claimed during the All In Summit that at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spambots, a figure he indicated was on the low end of his estimation.
Musk’s visit came only hours after he began taunting Twitter CEO Park Agrawal, who had sent a series of tweets outlining his company’s efforts to combat bots and how it has repeatedly assessed that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are phony.
Overall, the events of the day strengthened analysts’ views that Musk either wants out of the transaction or is seeking a cheaper price, owing to a massive drop in the value of Tesla shares, some of which he has committed to finance the Twitter acquisition.
Twitter shares closed Monday at $37.39, down slightly more than 8% from where they were right before Musk revealed that he was Twitter’s top shareholder. In April, Musk made an offer to purchase Twitter for $54.20 per share.
Musk announced on Friday that his ambition to acquire Twitter had been put on hold while he investigated the number of false accounts on the social media network. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX stated that the delay was pending specifics of Twitter’s conclusion that fraudulent accounts account for fewer than 5% of its users.
In a series of tweets on Monday, Agrawal admitted that Twitter isn’t perfect at spotting spam. He claimed that the corporation estimates less than 5% spam every quarter. “Our estimate is based on repeated human inspections of thousands of accounts picked at random, over time,” Agrawal said.
Estimates for the last four quarters were all well under 5%, he wrote. “The error margins on our estimates give us confidence in our public statements each quarter.”
Musk, using his favorite platform, responded with a smiling emoji of poop, then asked how Twitter’s advertisers know what they’re getting for their money.
Tesla shares closed Monday down nearly 6% at $724.37. They have lost about one-third of their value since the trading day before Musk disclosed his Twitter stake.
