Announced with great fanfare in April by the founder of Tesla, Paypal and SpaceX, the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is floundering. The world’s richest man has denounced the takeover contract, arguing that there are too many fake accounts on the social network.
franceinfo: Elon Musk highlights fake accounts active on the network, the number of which is unknown. He is right ?
Mary Turkan: This is the starting argument which shows a little the hypocrisy of the contract. Elon Musk came in saying ‘I’m going to save Twitter but I think there are 30% to 40% fake accounts and they should be hunted down to make it better.’ But there, Twitter has done studies that have shown that there would only be about 5% of robots, which is ultimately a fairly large number all the same, but far from Musk’s figures and above all not debatable. But he continues to say that he is convinced that there are these fake accounts.
He just doesn’t affirm it because I think he knows that, legally, he would get lost in a corner. Today, he is trying a game of poker to try to get out of it at a lower cost and not pay the termination clause of the contract, the amount of which amounts to one billion dollars.
But did he really want to buy Twitter?
Elon Musk is still known for his escapades. You have to remember that four years ago he tweeted that he was going to take Tesla off the stock exchange and that he had secured the funds to do so, when in reality he had no neither one nor the other: neither the desire, nor the funds. He was fined 20 million dollars by the American authorities and that didn’t stop him from doing it again. He’s really a boss who relies on energy, action and thinking a little afterwards. Besides, the amount for which he wanted to buy back from the Twitter base was a cannabis joke.
The amount of 44 billion is a joke, he wanted to make a media stunt. But the problem is that since April, prices have really fallen: the value of Tesla, in particular, of which he is the boss, has fallen by 20%. And what happens if Elon Musk loses 20% of his fortune? He can no longer buy back Twitter for the price of the joke he made in the first place.
And for Twitter, what are the consequences?
The fact that he is playing with Twitter like that has caused stock prices to swing: Twitter’s price is doing an impossible yo-yo, which is what prevents investors from deciding or reinjecting money. ‘silver. On the other side, internally, there’s a Wired investigation. [magazine américain spécialisé dans les technologies] which came out not long ago, which showed it’s a bit of a stampede. There are many, many Twitter employees who have sought to flee in recent months upon learning of Elon Musk’s arrival. There are several fairly important executives who have left. And paradoxically, in the contract that Musk is trying to cancel, one of the arguments that he puts forward is the departure of these executives and the fact that Twitter stops hiring people. Finally, he uses his own trolling to try to get by on a buyout he no longer wants to make, it’s a vicious circle.
Is it a social network that still has a future, in your opinion?
The impact of a tweet from a political or media personality, then taken up by the traditional media, has become such a strong media cycle that today, I don’t think Twitter can die or decline. I think tomorrow you will have a hard time seeing the media news being made on TikTok, for example. Elon Musk called it the “public forum”, the place for all discussion, and it’s true. It’s probably unfortunate, but it’s true.