Last Saturday, businessman Elon Musk agreed to a proposal made by conservative writer Ian Miles Cheung, regarding reducing the price of the “Twitter” deal according to the percentage of fake accounts on the platform, or – for example – asking for a 25 percent discount if this percentage is from The Twitter users are fake, according to Fortune magazine.
Musk has previously confirmed his annoyance with fake accounts on Twitter, and vowed to drive spam bots off the platform when his takeover offer passed.
Since declaring that his attempt to buy Twitter has been “on hold” since May 13, Musk has repeatedly challenged Twitter’s claim that spam bots make up only 5 percent of the platform’s users, arguing that the number of fake accounts may be closer to 20 in percent, and may reach 80 percent.
In this context, Musk tweeted that he was concerned that “Twitter has discouraging factors to reduce spam, because it reduces the number of users per day.” He claimed that the social media platform was refusing to explain how it calculated the number of bot users, describing it as “extremely suspicious”.
When Twitter’s CEO tried to explain how the company counted spam accounts last week, Musk responded with a poo emoji.
Musk may have other reasons for wanting to renegotiate his deal with Twitter, at a time when a major decline in tech stocks may encourage Musk to reevaluate the value of the social media platform.