Amid bot row, Elon Musk hints at paying less than $44 billlion to buy Twitter

Tech Billionaire Elon Musk on Monday hinted that he would like to pay less than $44 billion for twitter deal, amid bot row. Speaking at the Miami conference, Musk said that a Twitter deal at a lower price would not be out of the question, as reported by Bloomberg News. 

Musk, had last week put his $44 billion Twitter deal on hold over spam accounts. Now this new speculation of taking over the microblogging site for less than $44 billion has reignited the controversy.

“Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots. It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul,” Elon Musk reportedly said at the Miami conference.

He also estimated that the number of spam accounts could be at least 20% or it could go up as high as 90%. However, according to the reports, the conference was restricted to the press only, but a live feed was shared on social media by one of the attendees.

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In the context of Spam or bot accounts, the Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal on Monday shared a thread stating, ‘Let’s talk about spam’.  He wrote, “We suspend over half a million spam accounts every day, usually before any of you even see them on Twitter. We also lock millions of accounts each week that we suspect may be spam – if they can’t pass human verification challenges (captchas, phone verification, etc). The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially – are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous – and cause the most harm to our users – can look totally legitimate on the surface.”

In this long thread, the CEO received a reply from Elon Musk, who  at first commented with a poop emoji and later asked how do advertisers know what they’re getting for  their money?.
 

Tesla shares have lost about one third of their value since the Musk sealed $44 billion twitter deal.