After announcing that he wanted to terminate his contract to buy Twitter, Elon Musk spent the weekend in Idaho at the Sun Valley Conference.
He spoke on stage, mostly off the record, but a source in the room told CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter that Musk tripled his decision to try and get out of the deal and claim that it was all about the bots.
“Musk originally said he was going to fix the bot problem,” Stelter told Reliable Sources on Sunday. “The same problem he says now is preventing him from closing the deal.”
New York Times reporter Lauren Hirsch said there’s been an interesting confluence of events since news of Musk’s offer first broke. The stock market “virtually fell off the cliff”, including shares of Tesla, which Musk was presumably counting on to fund much of the deal.
That may be part of the reason Musk apparently doubted his takeover offer would materialize — almost from the moment he made it. “He was kind of throwing daggers there and then walking away and we never really knew what his intention was,” Hirsch said.
At least until Friday, when Musk’s attorney sent a letter to Twitter saying he was pulling out of the deal because the social media platform is “in material breach of multiple provisions” of the original agreement. .
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And some have wondered if Musk’s concerns about the bots were just an excuse to end the deal.
Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump said it was hard to say what his true motives were, but acknowledged Musk was a “quirky character”.
“I’m kind of fascinated by the repercussions of his announcement that he got entangled in American politics very quickly,” Bump said.
Twitter was seen by some as an “elitist leftist organization” that was now to be taken over and reshaped by a libertarian conservative.
One of the potential beneficiaries of Musk’s takeover of Twitter, former President Donald Trump, who was banned from the platform following the Jan. 6 violence on Capitol Hill, recently took the stage during a a political rally in Alaska and called Musk a “bulls–t artist,” calling his decision to pull out of the Twitter deal “rotten.”
One of the big questions now is what will happen to Twitter, from its employees to its ad revenue to its stock price.
The saga has been going on since April and employees still don’t know who their boss will be, Insider’s chief media correspondent Claire Atkinson said.
“If you plan to advertise on the platform, you want to know ‘Is this product suitable? ‘” Atkinson said. “And what are their rules?
Stelter said bots are definitely a problem for Twitter, although it’s still unclear how widespread they are. But Musk may be affected by them more than the average user.
“I suspect what’s happening here is that Musk has a very different experience on Twitter than the average user,” Stelter said. “It’s overwhelmed with BS replies and spam.”