Musk Ignites Takeover Battle... Twitter Stock Plummets 8.2%

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Jeong Hyunjin] Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, stated that he does not rule out renegotiating the acquisition price of the social networking service (SNS) Twitter. This was interpreted as an indication that the acquisition price might be adjusted, causing Twitter's stock price to fall more than 8% on the 16th (local time) compared to the previous day.

According to Bloomberg News, Musk said at a tech conference held in Miami, USA, that day, regarding the acquisition price adjustment, "It is not entirely impossible." Since Musk declared on the 13th that he would temporarily suspend the Twitter acquisition, the market has analyzed this as a move to adjust the acquisition price, and Musk expressed his related stance within three days.

At the conference, Musk once again emphasized concerns about fake accounts and spam bots mentioned three days earlier, claiming, "Spam and fake accounts on Twitter account for at least 20% of the total."

On the same day, Parag Agrawal, Twitter CEO, posted a tweet refuting Musk's claim. Twitter calculated the proportion of spam accounts to be less than 5% as of the first quarter. Agrawal pointed out that "Twitter is strongly detecting and removing spam accounts," and that estimates of Twitter's spam account numbers by external organizations are inaccurate. He also said, "I shared the process of estimating spam accounts with Musk a week ago."

In response, Musk retweeted Agrawal's post and wrote, "Then how do advertisers know what they are getting for the money they pay? This is a fundamental element of Twitter's financial soundness," leaving a poop emoji.

Immediately after Musk's remarks, Twitter's stock price closed at $37.39, down 8.18% from the previous day. As a result, the gap widened further from the acquisition price per share of $54.20 proposed by Musk, and the price fell below the closing price of $39.31 on the 1st of last month, when Musk announced he held 9% of Twitter's shares.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.