Musk said at a tech conference in Miami that a viable deal at a lower price wasn’t out of the question.
Musk said at a tech conference in Miami that a viable deal at a lower price wasn’t out of the question.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Monday gave the strongest hint yet that he wants to pay less for Twitter than his $44 billion offer last month.
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According to a report by Musk, speaking at a tech conference in Miami, a viable deal at a lower price wasn’t out of the question Bloomberg Newsthat said it was watching a livestream video of the conference posted by a Twitter user.
Also at the All In Summit, Musk estimated that at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spam bots, a percentage that the report said was on the low end of his estimate.
The appearance came a few hours after Musk began trolling Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who posted a series of tweets explaining his company’s efforts to combat bots and how it consistently estimates that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are fake.
Overall, the day’s events bolstered analysts’ theories that Musk is either looking to go out of business or target a lower price, largely due to a huge fall in the value of Tesla shares, some of which have pledged to fund the Twitter acquisition .
Twitter shares closed a little over 8% Monday at $37.39, down from just before Musk announced he was Twitter’s largest shareholder. Musk made an offer on April 14 to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share.
On Friday, Musk tweeted that his plan to buy Twitter was temporarily on hold as he attempted to uncover the number of fake accounts on the social media platform. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said the hold is pending for details on Twitter’s calculation that fake accounts make up less than 5% of its users.
In tweets Monday, Agrawal acknowledged that Twitter isn’t perfect at catching spam. He wrote that the company estimated less than 5% spam per quarter. “Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews of thousands of accounts randomly selected over time,” Agrawal wrote.
Estimates for the last four quarters were all well below 5%, he wrote. “The margins of error in our estimates give us confidence in our public statements every quarter.”
Musk responded on his favorite platform with a poop smiling emoji, then asked how Twitter’s advertisers know what they’re getting for their money.
Tesla shares closed down nearly 6% on Monday at $724.37. They’ve lost about a third of their value since the trading day before Musk announced his Twitter stake.
Musk didn’t immediately respond to messages asking for comment. The All In Summit announced in an email that they would release the video of Musk’s performance in the coming days.
