Media
Musk has plans to take Twitter public again in a few years
Billionaire Elon Musk is reportedly toying with the idea of taking the social-media company Twitter back to public ownership in a few years. According to people familiar with the story, Musk. has told potential investors of the plan.
The Wall Street Journal reports “Mr. Musk said he plans to stage an initial public offering of Twitter in as little as three years of buying it.”
“Private-equity firms often take companies private with an eye toward fixing them up outside of the spotlight and then taking them public again within five years or so. Mr. Musk’s signal that he plans to do something similar could help assure potential investors that he would work quickly to improve Twitter’s business operations and profitability” writes The Journal.
Musk agreed to take the company private in a $44 billion deal and has since been finding the funds to seal the deal. “Once he managed to do so, Twitter’s expected resistance eased and the two sides quickly agreed to a deal at his original offer price of $54.20 a share.”
Reportedly Musk will pay $21 billion of his own into the deal, will get loans, and has been speaking to investors such as private-equity firms.
President Joe Biden has an impressive 22.2 million followers on Twitter; but apparently half of them are bots. According to an audit tool from software company SparkToro, “49.3 percent of account’s following the official @POTUS Twitter account are ‘fake followers” reports Newsweek.
SparkToro defines “fake” as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets (either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter.”
Analysis was conducted based on factors such as location issues, default profile images and new users. The information is of particular importance as Elon Musk has expressed his concern at the overwhelming number of fake accounts on the giant platform. Specifically, he claimed 20 percent of Twitter accounts were “fake/spam accounts” and that the figure is “4 times what Twitter claims” or even higher.
“Musk said early on Tuesday that his $44-billion deal to purchase the social media company could not go ahead until issues with fake accounts were resolved and appeared to criticize Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal” adds Newsweek.
The accusation put the acquisition in jeopardy, with the two men exchanging a series of tweets about the fake accounts issue on Monday.
The back-and-forth comes after Musk tweeted Friday that the deal to buy Twitter was placed on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of users.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Musk wrote. “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
“We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam, if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc),” Agrawal wrote.
SparkToro’s tool also found that of Musk’s 93.3 million followers, 70.2 percent of those accounts are fake.
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