Musk withdraws from Twitter, now what?

Elon Musk withdraws from the project to buy Twitter. He withdraws, for now, because the entrepreneur has left a couple of messages precisely in that social network that suggest that Musk is only forcing Twitter to fulfill its part of the agreement.

The Washington Post reported that Elon Musk was considering leaving the negotiation. It even said that talks with other investors who would join him in the project to buy the company had cooled. Now that news has been confirmed, and Musk has said he is pulling out.

How many bots does Twitter have?

The reason is that Elon Musk believes the company has not given him an accurate figure for the percentage of spam and fake accounts in the social network. This issue is key to Musk's strategy for Twitter: if the percentage of fake accounts is too high, the new management will be able to make less commercial profit because the real accounts will be fewer. The company says it has 217 million "monetizable" accounts, i.e. those with which marketing can be done.

Twitter has provided Musk with the "firehose", i.e. the stream of all tweets from all accounts, for analysis. And it has also provided him with a report that says the percentage of fake users is around 5 percent. Musk doesn't think that's good enough.

Musk, in court

And now, what is going to happen? This is the big question, of which we can only be sure of one part, and that is that Twitter has announced that they will take the South African entrepreneur to court. Thus, the contradictory situation arises that a company that did not want to be acquired, and that resisted Musk's attempt to buy it, is now taking him to court for having withdrawn his offer.

In the brief in which he announced that he was desisting from buying the social network, Elon Musk alleged several breaches by Twitter, the main one of which is not providing information about fake accounts. In addition, he accused it of making decisions without his consent regarding the hiring or firing of personnel.

Musk offered no proof of these accusations, so in principle Twitter might have a chance of winning the lawsuit against the entrepreneur. But this is something that Elon Musk himself might have foreseen. At least that's what he himself suggests in two separate tweets.

The strategy, in two tweets

In one of them he posts a photograph showing Chuck Norris in front of a chessboard. Norris plays with only one pawn and faces a player with all black pieces. Musk adds a word that suggests he will win even if he is outplayed: chuckmate.

The second one directly shows his strategy: He posts four pictures of himself laughing, accompanied by four messages: "They said I wouldn't buy Twitter" / "Then, they said they couldn't provide information" / "Now they want to force me to buy Twitter in court" / "Now they will have to share information about fake accounts in court".

So that is what Elon Musk hopes will happen: since the company has not provided him with the information, it will be the courts that will force it to do so.