Elon Musk says his Twitter deal has been “temporarily withheld” after the social network reported that fake or spam accounts made up less than 5 percent of its 226 million active and revenue-generating users. The CEO of Tesla, who offered to buy Twitter for $ 44 billion, tweeted a link to a May 2 Reuters report on Twitter, saying he wanted to see the company’s calculations.
“The Twitter deal has been suspended pending details to support the calculation that spam / fake accounts actually account for less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted.
At the time of writing, Twitter’s share price has fallen 19 percent since the news, while Tesla has risen 5 percent.
Below is the relevant section of the Twitter documentation. He notes that his calculations for the number of fake or spam accounts are “estimates” and that the actual number “may be higher than we calculated”:
We did an internal review of a sample of accounts and calculated that the average of fake or spam accounts in the first quarter of 2022 was less than 5% of our mDAU in the quarter. Fake or spam accounts for a period represent the average of the fake or spam accounts in the samples during each monthly analysis period during the quarter. In making this definition, we have made a significant judgment, so our estimate of fake or spam accounts may not accurately represent the actual number of such accounts, and the actual number of fake or spam accounts may be higher than we calculated.
Twitter has had math problems in the past. A few weeks ago, he said in his income statement that it had exceeded its daily customers for three years in a row. The company said a technical error led to multiple accounts being reported as active, even though they were tied to a single user, and that this led to incorrect reporting of its 1.9 million user numbers each quarter.
Musk has made reducing the amount of “spam and fraudulent bots” and “armies of bots” on Twitter a key part of his field to improve the service, along with prioritizing free speech and open source platform ranking algorithms.
The Twitter deal has been suspended pending details to support the calculation that spam / fake accounts actually account for less than 5% of users https://t.co/Y2t0QMuuyn
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2022
The postponement of the deal is the latest speed that has hit Musk’s attempt to take over the social media network. The company initially announced the so-called “poison pill” measure to prevent the takeover, before finally accepting the buyout in late April.
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