When the new York Times got their hands on some of Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter, a company he’s currently buying, you’d be forgiven for thinking Musk knew what he was buying.
According to the Times report, we learned that Musk expects to increase Twitter’s revenue to “$26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year,” while the company’s user base is growing from “217 million at the end of last year.” year to nearly 600 million by 2025 and 931 million over six years,” increasing average revenue per user by nearly $6 over the same period.
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Those numbers may have made SPACs blush, but they showed something crucial in the Musk pitch: that Twitter had huge amounts of value that he, Musk, could unlock with his plan.
Since then — the Times broke Musk’s investor pitch 11 days ago — things between Musk and the social media company have become tenuous as the would-be acquirer engaged the company’s service to complain, poke and bounce back.
Musk’s displeasure with Twitter centered around the issue of bots. Not all bots on Twitter are malicious or bad; some are even entertaining. But too many bots, or even the wrong kind, matter because they can weaken the social service user experience by spamming real users, and inflate the company’s advertiser-focused stats.
On May 13, Musk threw the financial world into a frenzy by posting on Twitter that his deal to buy the company was “on hold pending details to support the calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed account for less than 5% of users.” represent”. Whether he was able to make such a decision is not clear based on the deal documents.
While he said he was still “committed” to the deal, Musk conducted an experiment with a set of 100 users to see how many bots there were.