Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, tried to respond to the concerns of Elon Musk, who suspended his takeover of the social network. Judging by his response, things seem off the mark.
Update 10:30 a.m.:
After publicly provoking Parag Agrawal, Elon Musk detailed his thoughts on the Twitter takeover. According to him, the social network is lying by saying that less than 5% of accounts are fake. Instead, he is counting on the figure of 20% and indicates that he will not buy Twitter as it is. The billionaire also shared a questionable calculation estimating that more than 50% of accounts could be fake as “only” 4.8 million people liked his most popular tweet. The takeover of Twitter seems to be off to a bad start, Elon Musk is looking for excuses to cancel the operation.
Original article, published on May 17 at 9:50 a.m.:
We would almost start to feel sorry for Parag Agrawal, the boss of Twitter since November 2021, at the heart of the Elon Musk storm since the beginning of April. Heckled by the billionaire who forces him to make decisions reluctantly (such as the resale of Twitter for 43 billion dollars), the neo-boss must now face the new coup from Elon Musk who suspended the takeover of the company, supposedly because Twitter is lying that less than 5% of accounts are bots. Twitter stock has crashed, employee confidence is at an all-time low, and right now it’s hard to have any visibility on what’s going to happen.
No doubt to do well, Parag Agrawal decided, on May 16, to speak in a Twitter thread of 15 tweets, precisely dedicated to bots and spam on the platform. Unfortunately, what was supposed to reassure Elon Musk turned against him. The billionaire publicly mocks Parag Agrawal.
A poo emoji to level up
What does Parag Agrawal’s thread say? Well documented, he explains that it is not easy to count the number of fake accounts on Twitter since not all of them are robots and their methods are changing every day. However, Parag Agrawal is certain that Twitter’s calculation is correct. There are less than 5% of accounts that are not used by real people, which makes the CEO optimistic about continuing discussions with Elon Musk.
Parag Agrawal was no doubt hoping to receive a “thank you for the explanation” from Elon Musk, he finally received two responses: a “?” and a mockery. Not convinced by his explanations (Elon Musk wants the data to be made public), the boss of Tesla and SpaceX had fun publicly humiliating the boss of Twitter and asked him if he had thought of calling the holders of fake accounts to verify that they exist. This debate, not very constructive, leaves us skeptical about the follow-up to the takeover. Will Parag Agrawal accept being walked on for a long time?
Since the announcement of the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, many have wondered about the real motivations of Elon Musk. Is he serious about buying the company or is he having fun testing the limits of his power of chaos? What seems to have accelerated his withdrawal from the project is the drop in Tesla stock, due to investors’ concern over his involvement in the event of a Twitter takeover. Between his electric cars and the social network, would Elon Musk have chosen the former?