Actually, Elon, You Can Count Twitter Bots. Here's How
Tallying accounts on the social media platform isn’t the problem Musk makes it out to be. Defining what’s “good” and “bad” is the real challenge.
Beats me.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images
Elon Musk’s assertion last month that the number of Twitter bots is as “unknowable as the human soul” may well be a negotiating tactic from a man who’s probably feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse. Yet tallying up how many machines are running around on Twitter Inc.’s platform is a pretty straightforward process, if only everyone can agree on what they’re counting.
A “very significant matter” deterring Musk from closing the deal at the $44 billion price originally agreed is “whether the number of fake and spam users on the system is less than 5%, as Twitter claims, which I think is probably not most people's experience when using Twitter,” he told Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. Other items to be overcome include debt financing and a shareholder vote on the acquisition, he said.