Elon Musk, the eccentric billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, has been teasing a takeover of social media platform Twitter for some time, but this week saw another potential setback in the deal.
Twitter’s recent restrictive practices, particularly against conservative Americans, seemed to have compelled Musk to offer to buy the site for approximately $44 billion. The business mogul did voice some very public concerns about the number of users on the platform that were “bots” or simply phony accounts, and the two parties have bickered about this out in the open, prolonging the procedures of purchase.
But now there are fears that the whole deal could fall apart still.
People familiar with the proceedings told The Washington Post that Musk’s team has stopped having discussions about funding.
Shares of Twitter were down more than 4% in premarket trading.
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Musk’s team in recent weeks has tussled with the social media platform over “spam bots” and has threatened to walk away from the deal if the company can’t show that less than 5% of its daily active users are automated spam accounts.
It’s a familiar issue for Musk and Twitter.
Musk has argued that Twitter has significantly underestimated the number of these “spam bots” on its service. Last month, Twitter offered Musk access to its “firehose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets, according to multiple reports at the time, though neither the company nor Musk confirmed this.
Musk had suggested that he planned to “unlock” Twitter’s true potential as a conduit for free speech; a move that saw a great deal of support from Americans on the right side of the aisle.
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