How Much It Would Cost Elon Musk To Avoid Buying Twitter :

Elon Musk's Twitter purchase deal has gone through so many twists and turns now that it isn't exactly clear whether Elon Musk still truly wants to purchase the social media website at all, or if he ever really did. At least not for the full $44 billion promised to complete the sale. On May 13, over two weeks after the original announcement that the Twitter buy had successfully gone through its early stages, Elon Musk tweeted that he would prefer to put the deal on hold for the foreseeable future. According to Musk, this move was inspired by a need to discern how many spam bot accounts had access to the social media website, for reasons that could be anybody's guess, though the Tesla mogul has been a consistent detractor of unbound artificial intelligence, which could play a part of it.

Alternatively, it could be a way to drive down the price of the final sale, predicated on the idea that Musk was misled about the number of spambots that exist on the social media network. The aforementioned price-plunging tactic is far more likely, and the May 15 report published by research groups at SparkToro and Followerwonk certainly doesn't do any favors for Elon's case. The SparkToro report indicates that about 23.42% of Elon Musk's followers have set off one of 17 flags which could indicate that they are spam bot accounts themselves, and this certainly puts a wrench into Elon's claim, at least in the sense that he himself benefits from the 26.8 million spam accounts that follow him. Thus, he hasn't seriously been misled by investors on any issues that matter -- unless Elon is keen on losing all of those allegedly "fake" followers during his spam bot account sweep.