He claims he's concerned about 5% of the accounts being spam bots, meanwhile it's estimated that of the 53 million followers that musk has, that approximately 53% of those are fake.
Two hours later he tweeted that he's still committed. Part of that was someone probably reminding him that he's on the hook for $1 billion if he terminates the takeover.
Among his claims of what he's going to do with Twitter is to get rid of all bots, which is a pretty big boast as it's something that Twitter has tried to do for ages now. It's a continuing game of whack-a-mole: as soon as you figure out how to close one hole, the bot programmers have three new holes opened. Much like trying to stop spam bots. Very strong incentives for the bad guys to win, i.e., MONEY. Just a couple of days ago Elon announced that he would restore Donald Trump's account, even though Trump himself has said he wouldn't go back on to Twitter and that he'd stay on Truth Social, even though he's made very few posts on it. And of course Trump never goes back on his word, so who knows that he would do. Musk says that Twitter is a town square. No it isn't, it's more like a parlor where people may come and go, but the owner is allowed to kick people out. And if a purple baboon runs in and starts jumping up and down shouting "SNARF! SNARF! SNARF! SNARF!" and annoying people, the owner has the right to kick out the baboon and lock the door on it. Private ownership means private rules.
Meanwhile, both Twitter and Tesla have lost an awful lot of stock valuation in the past few weeks and a lot of people are wondering if Elon has the bucks to seal the deal on Twitter, even after he sold off so much Tesla stock. If either Twitter or Musk cancel the sale, it's $1 billion to the other party, pretty solid incentive to get the deal done. But with this reduced valuation, is there room to renegotiate the price, or is price stuck at the price as negotiated in the deal?
And at Twitter, there's already been a general exodus of tech talent, perhaps a sense of betrayal at the possibility of sale and/or maybe working under Musk? Hard to say. And the CEO has eliminated some executives. Musk himself says he'd fire over 1,000 people in his first year in order to hire 2,000 in the next year. Excellent way to have 50-100% additionally leave based on trashing the corporate culture.
What a mess.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/musk-says-twitter-deal-on-hold-over-concern-about-number-of-spam-accounts/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
