After a pause in the chain of weekly updates regarding Elon Musk’s supposed acquisition of Twitter, we’re back with more news on the matter! This time, it might not be all drama. It appears that the deal is once again progressing, perhaps that ‘Full Firehose’ of Tweets drenched Musk enough for him to see reason.
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Musk has scheduled a meeting with Twitter employees this Thursday, which will give Twitter staff a chance to ask Musk directly about his plans for the app.
As Bloomberg tells it:
“Elon Musk will address Twitter Inc. employees at a company-wide meeting this week, the first time the Tesla Inc. chief executive officer will meet with employees since agreeing to buy the company for $44 billion in late April. The virtual meeting is set for Thursday morning, and Musk will take questions from Twitter employees, the people said.”
Deal or No Deal
Things should go down smoothly. Twitter employees are no doubt totally open to hearing from the man who’s been publicly criticizing their company and its policies since launching his takeover of the platform. As some of you might recall, Musk was originally scheduled to meet with Twitter staff back in April, following news that he had purchased more than 9% of company shares. At that time, Musk easily became Twitter’s largest shareholder. After meeting with company executives, Musk deemed Twitter’s management as non-reliable, opting not to meet with the staff as a result.
Since then, Musk continually criticized Twitter’s processes, taking aim at everything from its growth strategies, to its flawed verification process, to its perceived left-wing bias, to the app’s bot issue. The latter then became a key point of contention – on May 13th, Musk said that the deal was put ‘On Hold’ until Twitter could provide more evidence on its supposed 5% fake-account claim that remained relatively unchanged since 2013.
Just last week, Twitter finally responded to this by essentially dumping its full repertoire of Tweets on Musk and his team so that they can make it out for themselves whether or not Twitter’s claim was true and accurate. The fact that Musk is now willing to meet with its staff is a good indicator that the deal might be on the move once more. However, this is all still largely speculation as there’s no telling what else Musk’s team might uncover.
Even if Musk finds that fake profiles make up more than 5% of Twitter’s active users, that doesn’t essentially grant him a free get-out-of-the-deal card since Twitter can go back to its defense of the SEC accepting its numbers in the past.
The Wrap
If Musk’s team manages to find that the amount of fake profiles actually on the app is, say, around 20%, the Twitter could incorporate its own detection methods into its future reports, but still wouldn’t mean that Twitter was ‘acting in bad faith’ to Mislead Musk and co. in the process. Without clear intent, the deal is likely to push through. Musk also said that he plans to cut a thousand roles from the company over the next year, which will likely make this a rather interesting, tension-filled meeting.
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