Elon Musk hints Twitter is not worth $44 billion, may seek lower price

Elon Musk has been talking about the increasing spam bots on Twitter for a really long time. Just a few months ago, he said that spam bits are the “single most annoying problem” on the platform.

Elon Musk first offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion but now he wants to lower the bid. One of the latest Bloomberg reports suggests that Musk plans to pay a lot less than what he initially pitched to buy the popular microblogging platform. As per the publication, the Tesla CEO said that a deal at a lower price is not “out of the question”. This also hints at more drama between Musk and Twitter going forward.

Last week, Musk put the deal on hold after Twitter reported around 5 per cent of its monetisable daily active users to be bots in the past quarter. The billionaire, who previously called the bots the most “annoying” problem on Twitter, disagreed with Twitter’s claims. Musk, on the contrary, estimated that there could be around 20 per cent bots among all users.

"You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed," Musk said at a conference in Miami on Monday.

With these statements, the Tesla CEO is clearly trying to negotiate the deal that it initially offered.

Musk has been talking about the increasing spam bots on Twitter for a really long time. In fact, just a few months ago, he said that spam bots are the “single most annoying problem” on Twitter.

It is believed that removing spam bots and fake accounts from the platform will be among the first things that Musk will do once he officially acquires Twitter. In fact, one of the recent reports highlighted that around half of Musk’s followers are fake.

While Musk has been publically highlighting issues related to spam bots for a long time, CEO Parag Agrawal countered and said that Twitter is working hard to get rid of these bots.