DETROIT: Tesla Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Elon Musk indicated on Monday that he would like to pay less than $44 billion to acquire the microblogging website Twitter. Musk last month offered $44 billion to purchase the site.
According to a report in Bloomberg News, at a ‘Tech’ conference held in Miami, Musk said that a low-cost viable agreement regarding the acquisition of Twitter is possible. The website has published this report based on the live video of the conference broadcast by a Twitter user.
According to the report, at the ‘All in Summit’, Musk estimated that at least 20 percent of the 229 million accounts on Twitter are being operated by ‘spam bots’. A ‘spam bot’ refers to automated software on the Internet that sends a large number of spam messages to users or posts a large number of spam messages on online forums. The source of spam messages is not even known to the recipients.
Musk’s remarks come at a time when he has hit out at Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal over his tweets, which said that Twitter is trying to tackle the ‘spam bot’. Less than five percent of the accounts on the site are fake. Overall, Musk’s comments at the conference have led analysts to speculate that the Tesla CEO is either looking to back out of the deal or is looking to acquire Twitter for a low price.
He attributed this to the sharp drop in Tesla’s share price, some of which Musk was supposed to use to raise funds for the Twitter acquisition. On April 14, Musk offered to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share. However, on Friday, Musk tweeted that he had temporarily postponed plans to acquire Twitter as he was trying to figure out the number of fake accounts on the site.
