(Pocket-lint) – Elon Musk could be set to lower his offer for Twitter from the agreed $ 44 billion.
A disparity on the amount of spam bots he believes are on the social network and the quoted number released by the Twitter board threatens to undermine his takeover.
As he revealed last week, Musk put the deal “on hold” temporarily while the board produced evidence that the number of fake Twitter accounts amounts to less than 5 per cent. Musk himself estimates that at least 20 percent of the daily userbase are bots.
He allegedly also asked an audience during a Miami tech show whether the number could be as high as 90 per cent.
“Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” Musk said at the conference (as reported by Bloomberg). “It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul.”
The Tesla founder plans to perform his own analysis of Twitter users. He tweeted on 15 May that his team will sample 100 random Twitter users to see how many are fake accounts.
To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of twitter.
I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover
– Elon Musk (lonelonmusk) May 14, 2022
What he intends to do with this information is unclear at present, but he has stated that agreeing a viable deal at a lower price is not “out of the question”.
Writing by Rik Henderson.
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