Elon Musk doubles down on Twitter ‘bot’ problem after deal collapses
Steve Jurvetson/Wiki CommonsElon Musk shocked the world when he announced his 44-billion-dollar bid to buy Twitter back in April 2022, and then further amplified his own shockwaves after threatening to take the deal off the table if the social media giant couldn’t meet his demands regarding the exact number of Twitter users are real people.
On July 9, the billionaire CEO claimed that the deal was dead in the water, but Twitter Chairman Brett Taylor quickly responded and insisted the company will be pursuing a successful transaction even if it means taking involving Delaware’s Court of Chancery.
In the fallout of this news, Mr. Musk has been having some fun with the situation as he’s known to do, insinuating that ‘bot’ accounts spell big trouble for the bird app.
Elon Musk sticks to his guns over Twitter’s ‘bot account problem’
While Elon first took to simply posting memes about the situation, including a bizarre image of Chuck Norris posing over a chessboard that he later captioned “Chuckmate”, Elon also posted a more substantial offering in reply to another commenter.
When Twitter WholeMarsBlog tweeted about how bots would theoretically impact Twitter’s virtual ecosystem, it got the EM seal-of-approval.
“Bots are not ‘an excuse’, they are a reality that Twitter users like me deal with every day,” they said. “If advertisers think they’ve been paying to advertise to humans, but instead they’ve been advertising to robots… that’s going to materially impact the advertising business adversely.”
“Absolutely,” echoed Musk.
Musk hasn’t clearly stated exactly what he saw that caused him to back out of the deal other than it being user-population related, but he has shared another meme suggesting that he’ll be the one with the last laugh if the company has to reveal those numbers in a courtroom.
For now it seems like things have come to a standstill for the two parties, but we’ll be sure to provide the latest updates as they happen.
