Elon Musk on Disney not buying Twitter due to ‘substantial portion’ of bots. See posts
Premium- Former Disney CEO Bob Iger said the Walt Disney Co and Twitter Inc boards were prepared to enter negotiations when he got cold feet, as per report
In the wake of former Disney CEO Bob Iger stating on Wednesday that the entertainment giant had determined that a "substantial portion" of Twitter's users were "not real" in 2016, when Disney was weighing a purchase of the social network, Elon Musk weighed in on it tweeting ‘interesting’.
Interestingly, Iger said the Walt Disney Co and Twitter Inc boards were prepared to enter negotiations when he got cold feet, while noting that with Twitter's help, Disney had learned that "a substantial portion - not a majority -" of users were fake, according to Reuters report.
This development comes in days after Elon Musk making similar comment earlier this week on September 5 claiming that 90% of the comments on his tweets are made by bots.
Meanwhile, Iger said, in remarks at the Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California that "I remember discounting the value" as a result, while Iger did not specify what he meant by "substantial" even as Twitter has consistently reported that fewer than 5% of its "monetizable" daily users are bot or spam accounts as per Reuters report.
It is important to note that Iger's comments come amid a legal battle between billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and Twitter over Musk's deal to buy the social media company for $44 billion. Musk, who is trying to walk away from the deal, has claimed that Twitter has misrepresented the prevalence of spam or bot accounts on the platform.
Iger did not mention Musk by name in his remarks on Wednesday, but he did say: “Interestingly enough, because I read the news these days, we did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users," before going on to say that "a substantial portion" of Twitter users "were not real," as per Reuters report.
In his memoir, "The Ride of a Lifetime," Iger wrote that he had second thoughts about a deal with Twitter because of the "nastiness" of the discourse on Twitter that he feared would become a distraction. Twitter has sued Musk to hold him to the deal, and the trial is to begin on Oct. 17. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
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