Featured Image Credit: Daniel Oberhaus (2018) via Flickr, Twitter
Topics: World News
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, I have no doubt you’ll have heard the news that Elon Musk, seemingly a specific part of the internet’s favourite man with a lot of money, is on course to buy Twitter. Because why put your unfathomable wealth into solving real world issues when you can acquire an entire social media platform instead?
Predictably, Musk stans (do they have a name?) are unreasonably excited, the rest of the world, not so much. But the $44 billion burning a hole in the Tesla CEO’s pocket is being put on standby, as he confirmed in a strange announcement.
Check out Elon Musk talking about his plans for Twitter right here.
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“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk tweeted, linking to a Reuters article about the topic. As Reuters writes in that very story, Musk has previously said that removing “spam bots” from the platform would be one of his priorities for the platform, so perhaps his hold off is because it’s actually less of a problem than he realised? It’s not an amount of money you want to spend lightly, after all. Either way, the billionaire has been surprisingly vague about what the actual problem is here.
It’ll be interesting to see what Musk’s next move is - it was previously revealed that pulling out of the deal would cost $1 billion, which you’d imagine could definitely deter him from changing his mind on the acquisition. Then again, what’s $1 billion when you have another $264 billion in the bank?
Last month, Musk teased that he may have another acquisition on the horizon, and for a pretty wild reason. He simply tweeted: “Next I’m buying Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in.” The guy’s been known to do some very questionable things for the sake of memes before, and with all that cash to spare, buying the beverage corporation wouldn’t be totally infeasible (although his ‘reasoning’ for doing so almost certainly would be).