Elon Musk it takes place in yet another coup de theatre: after conquering quickly Twitter, also announcing his intention to become CEO ad interim, the owner of Tesla takes a sensational step back to say the least: the agreement for the acquisition of the social network is “temporarily suspended awaiting details that support the calculation that the spam/fake accounts represent less than 5%” of its 226 million daily active and monetizable users. Elon Musk himself wrote it in a tweet.
The consequences on Wall Street: Twitter collapses, Tesla flies
Predictably, the communication pushed her into free fall Twitter shares, which – according to reports from the Bloomberg news agency – fell by 20% in the pre-market. Mirror the progress of the Tesla stock, which in the same minutes travels up by about 5 percentage points, demonstrating how the investors of the car company would gladly do without Musk's commitment on Twitter.
In the face of such unscrupulousness and such significant consequences on the financial markets, it cannot be excluded that Musk will go towards a new investigation by the Security and Exchange Commission (Sec), the American Consob.
What is behind the suspension of the deal?
After all, Twitter's calculation on fake accounts is nothing new in the last few hours: these are numbers that have been in circulation for days now. Musk may therefore have come into possession of different numbers than those provided by the company. Or, but the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, he could have decided to suspend the deal just to try to lower the price, which is very high even for the richest man in the world (44 billion dollars, equal to $54,20 per share).
The Twitter bot problem
For Musk, weeding out bot accounts from Twitter and authenticating humans on the social network are declared priorities. Currently, however, bots are allowed on Twitter, although according to the company's policy, such accounts should indicate that they are automated. Spam bots, on the other hand, aren't allowed, but the company hasn't done much over the years to limit them.
