Tesla CEO Elon Musk has hinted that he may seek to renegotiate the price of his Twitter acquisition, saying that implementing the deal at a lower price “would be out of the question.”
Twitter shares fell 8.2% at the close of trading yesterday in New York. The declines come amid speculation that Musk may dismiss the $44 billion acquisition.
That concern intensified last week, as Musk questioned Twitter’s publicly disclosed data about the proportion of fake and spam accounts on its social media service.
Musk pressed that point further on Monday at a tech conference in Miami, estimating that fake users make up at least 20% of all Twitter accounts.
“What I have been told right now is that there is no way to know the number of robots,” he said at the conference.
This comes as Twitter reports every three months that spam accounts make up less than 5% of total users.
The 50-year-old American billionaire began buying Twitter shares in January and revealed a 9.2% stake in the company on April 4.