He spoke on stage, essentially off the record, but a source in the room told CNN chief correspondent Brian Stelter that Musk tripled his decision to try to back out of the deal and claimed it was all about the bots.
“Initially, Musk said he was going to fix the bot problem,” Stelter told Reliable Sources on Sunday. “The same issue he’s talking about now is preventing him from making a deal.”
This may be one reason Musk seems to have doubts that his purchase offer will materialize – almost from the moment he made it. “He would throw daggers in there and then leave, and we never knew what his intentions were,” Hirsch said.
Twitter is resisting, promising to sue Musk.
And some are wondering if Musk’s concerns about bots are just an excuse to get out of the deal.
Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump said it’s hard to tell what his true motives are, but admitted that Musk is “an eccentric character.”
“I’m kind of fascinated by the implications of his claim that he got tangled up in American politics very quickly,” Bump said.
Some perceived Twitter as a “leftist elitist organization” that now needed to be taken over and reformed by a libertarian conservative.
One of the big questions now is what will happen to Twitter, from its employees to ad revenue and share price. Shares fell another 5% in premarket trading on Monday.
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 are considering advertising on a platform, you want to know if this product is right for you?” Atkinson said. “And what are their rules?”
Stelter said that bots are no doubt a problem for Twitter, though it’s still unclear how common they are. But they can affect the Mask more than the average user.
“What I suspect is happening here is that Musk has a very different experience on Twitter than the average user,” Stelter said. “It’s overloaded with BS replies and spam.”
