Amid Spam Bots Row, Elon Musk Hints At Paying Less Than $44 Billion For Twitter Acquisition

Musk had made the offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share on April 14

At Miami technology conference, Elon Musk said that a viable deal with Twitter at a lower price would not be out of the question. Image: Getty

Source : Getty

New Delhi: Elon Musk, chief executive officer (CEO) of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, gave a hint, which suggested that would be like to pay less for acquisition of Twitter, according to a report by AP.

Musk bought the social micro-blogging platform in April for an offer of $44 billion. The world’s richest man made the offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share on April 14.

At Miami technology conference, Musk said that a viable deal with Twitter at a lower price would not be out of the question, quoting Bloomberg, AP reported.

According to the report, at All-In Summit, Musk estimated that about 20 per cent of Twitter’s 22.9 crore accounts are spam bots, percentage he said was at the low end of his assessment.

Musk also trolled Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who posted a series of tweets explaining Twitter’s effort to fight bots and how the platform has consistently estimated that less than 5 per cent of Twitter accounts are fake.

According to analysts, the reason Musk is seeking a lower price, mainly because of a huge slip in value of Tesla stock, some of which he has pledged to fund the acquisition of Twitter.

On Monday, Twitter shares closed down just over 8 per cent at $37.39, below where the stock was just before Musk disclosed that he was Twitter's largest shareholder.

Meanwhile, shares of Tesla closed on Monday at $724.37, down 6 per cent. The firm has lost one-third of their value since the trading day before Elon Musk disclosed his Twitter stake.

Musk, on Friday, tweeted his plan to buy Twitter was placed on temporary hold as he tried to ascertain the number of fake accounts on the social media platform and the hold was pending details of Twitter’s calculation that fake accounts are less than 5 per cent of its users.