The Elon Musk/Twitter saga continues with the billionaire businessman now reportedly supporting the view that his bid for the social media group should be discounted proportionate to the number of spam bots on the platform.
At the weekend, Musk responded to a tweet from Ian Miles Cheong about the $44 billion takeover bid.
The latter wrote: "If 25% of the users are bots then the Twitter acquisition deal should cost 25% less."
Musk responded : "Absolutely".
The Tesla CEO also wrote in another posting: "I'm worried that Twitter has a disincentive to reduce spam, as it reduces perceived daily users.
READ: How long will Elon’s Twitter soap opera run and what’s next?
"They still refuse to explain how they calculate that 5% of daily users are fake/spam! Very suspicious."
Two weeks ago, Musk had tweeted that the US$44bn takeover of Twitter was temporarily on hold due to his concerns about the number of spambots the social media giant reported.
Subsequently, he set transparency on the number of fake or spam accounts as a key condition for his purchase to go ahead.
"My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate," he had said in yet another Tweet.
If Musk backs out of the deal, he will be reportedly required to pay Twitter a $1 billion termination fee and could be subjected to additional litigation.
In the first quarter this year, Twitter's monetizable daily active user base grew 15.9% year-on-year to 229 million, including 39.6 million daily active users in the USA and 189.4 million international daily active users.
Contact the writer at giles@proactiveinevstors.com