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00:00Elon Musk has floated the idea of a lower price for Twitter while speaking at a conference in Miami. This adds to uncertainty surrounding the 44 billion dollar deal. And then in the last hour Musk said he'll proceed with his takeover of the social media giant only if he can substantiate claims about the proportion of bots on its services. Now for more on all this is Matt Bloxham from Bloomberg Intelligence. Matt you and I never bought it because I mean he's he's a prolific tweeter. He's doing business by tweet. I mean it's actually incredible the amount of information. He's also talking about the RTS. So did he really believe that there were like less than 5 percent of bots on Twitter when he made the offer. Maybe. Probably not. You know he's you know I think that I think there's a lot of things that go on. Clearly the market's gone down a lot since he made that fed. He's perhaps looking for reasons to either kind of renegotiate the deal or kind of step away from it without having to pay this billion dollar termination fee. So difficult to know as always what's going on in his mind as he had a change of hearts or is it a downturn in technology stock isn't it. Reed Yeah I think it's impossible to read him if you'd like. So things always have an issue about spot bots and bank accounts with with Twitter. So I would imagine probably is had he thought it was always more than 5 percent. So you know I think he's now just kind of looking for a way to kind of really really push them and negotiate a better deal. I think so. What do you think happens next. Good question. I think probably he's going to wait to see whether either publicly or privately Twitter provide more information about how they get to this 5 percent calculation. I would think they're better off doing that privately and on on that evidence. He'll decide whether to take the deal. I think it's very unlikely that the original 54 20 price if it comes back for the revised offer it's going to be substantially lower. I privately. Is there anything that's private. I can imagine. It's not really you know trying to negotiate things at such a high profile account and just tweets. Yeah. Yeah. And as I was saying very poor came alive you know. I think if I was CEO of Twitter I'd just be keeping as quiet as I possibly could. You could say that Elon Musk is 100 that owning this. Right. There's not much that the Twitter site can do. No not really. And I think that the more they talk publicly perhaps the more they tie themselves up in knots. So so keep keeping quiet. I think we'd be the better option for me if I was Twitter.

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Musk Wants Twitter to Prove Bot Claims Before Takeover

Elon Musk is casting yet more uncertainty over his $44 billion takeover of Twitter Inc., saying he won’t proceed with the deal unless the social media giant can prove bots make up fewer than 5% of its users. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Matt Bloxham has the details. (Source: Bloomberg)

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