Elon Musk Withdraws Offer to Buy Twitter

By: Brayden Yin

In April, Elon Musk offered about 44 billion dollars to buy Twitter. He decided to withdraw the deal after Twitter didn’t provide information about how many bot accounts there were on Twitter.

The company stated that spam and bot accounts made up less than 5% of the total users. However, Elon Musk believes that spam and bot accounts make up more than 20% of Twitter users. Musk asked for evidence to back up Twitter’s claim. He has also been trying to obtain information about how many Twitter accounts are used each day. Musk’s lawyer said that Twitter either failed or refused to give information about spam and bot accounts. He said, “Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk's requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” After the announcement about Musk withdrawing his offer, Twitter stock’s share trading fell by 7%.

Spam accounts are made to spread information to Twitter users and change the way they use the social-media platform. On Thursday, July 7, Twitter stated that they remove one million spam accounts every day. Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter so he could change the platform’s moderation policies. He is a self-described free speech absolutist. He stated that he planned to loosen the content moderation rules.

Elon Musk may potentially have other reasons to stop the deal. Lately, the stock market prices for tech companies such as Twitter have tanked. They have dropped steeply in the past few months. He could also be concerned with the fate of Tesla, his electric car company. Since Musk announced that he was buying Twitter, Tesla stock has dropped.

There are many reasons why Elon Musk might like to pull out of the deal to buy Twitter, and he is in many ways well justified. He was unfairly denied information when he asked for it.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62102821