Elon Musk sends Twitter boss a poop emoji
The relationship between Elon Musk and the management of Twitter has reached a low point: Twitter boss Parag Agrawal comments on an allegation by Musk – and receives an extremely derogatory answer.
In the turbulent takeover battle over Twitter, company boss Parag Agrawal has denied allegations of too many spam accounts on his platform. The company bans more than half a million fake accounts every day and tens of millions of users every week who don’t follow certain verification procedures, Agrawal stressed on Monday. Feisty entrepreneur Elon Musk, who wants to take over the platform, responded with an emoji of a pile of feces
Musk had previously put his $44 billion takeover bid on hold, citing doubts about the company’s disclosures about the proportion of fake accounts on the platform – and later expressed interest again. He had caused violent price fluctuations in Twitter shares.
Musk explained that he first wanted to wait for calculations that accounts without real users actually accounted for less than five percent. It is still unclear whether Musk can put his agreement with the Twitter board of directors on hold from a legal point of view.
Expert: Musk wants to lower the price
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives sees Musk’s actions as a takeover tactic. In view of the gloomy mood on the financial markets, the latter had “begun to hesitate”. He used the long-known doubts about Twitter’s information as a “scapegoat” to push the price down.
Musk also brought up a lower price for his takeover attempt on Twitter. A deal at a lower bid is “not out of the question,” Musk said in a video interview at a conference on Monday.
Twitter shares ended the day in US trading down a good eight percent at $37.38. That’s a far cry from the $54.20 per share that the head of electric car maker Tesla has so far promised Twitter shareholders.
In several posts on Twitter, Agrawal explained that fighting automated spam accounts is a “dynamic” process that requires fighting “sophisticated and elusive” actors.
He added that some accounts that appear as spam are actually run by real people. An estimate of the number of fake accounts on Twitter cannot be made from outside as the process requires access to sensitive data such as IP addresses and phone numbers.
Twitter calls the number of 229 million daily users that the service can reach with its advertising. The fake accounts identified by Twitter have already been deducted from this number.
Agrawal ended his thread with a link to the company’s blog post about spam accounts, sharing that Twitter spoke to Musk a week ago about estimating its spam count and that the company is looking forward to “the conversation to continue with him”.
Musk responded with the poop emoji and asked how Twitter’s advertisers knew what they were getting for their money. Among other things, he asked whether Twitter had tried to simply call users with suspicious-looking accounts.
