Former President Donald Trump didn’t waste any time in making his feelings known regarding the announcement by billionaire Elon Musk that his blockbuster deal to buy Twitter had hit a snag.
On Friday morning, Musk tweeted, “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” The news came as a surprise to many, coming less than three weeks after the Twitter board of directors approved the $44 billion deal to have Musk buy out the company.
Within hours of Musk’s tweet, Trump weighed in from his own platform Truth Social later on Friday:
Trump clearly has a vested interest in Twitter’s downfall, so we need to take his prognostications on the matter with a grain of salt. As the face and primary investor of Truth Social, an up-and-coming competitor, Twitter’s losses are Trump’s gains. And there’s no doubt that Trump would love nothing more than to stick it to Twitter after they unceremoniously shut down his account in the waning days of his presidency.
However, Trump makes valid points.
Twitter’s market capitalization has dropped sharply in recent weeks, with after-hours trading over the weekend placing the value at slightly over $40 per share, a far cry from the $54.20 sale price at which the sale to Musk was approved. Musk himself cited a recent Reuters story detailing the problem with Twitter’s fake users, though the outlet put the number at less than 5% of total users.
So, while Musk may indeed be merely doing his due diligence, and though he may be accurate when he says he’s, “Still committed to acquisition,” it’s not unreasonable to expect Musk to be having second thoughts on the deal. Even though Musk is the wealthiest person in the world, $44 billion isn’t exactly chump change. And this was Trump’s main point in a follow-up post on Truth Social on Saturday:
Donald Trump understands marketing, and we can see the angle from which he’s coming.
When it was announced last month that the Musk buyout deal to acquire Twitter was approved, many of us on the right rejoiced. Finally, some sanity amongst the Big Tech giants, we thought, as we considered the impact that such a deal would have on free speech and the reprehensible censorship of conservatives. But Musk’s announcement on Friday is significant, and it makes us wonder.
What if those bots and fake users account for more than 5% of Twitter accounts? What if it turns out that a significant amount of the engagement on Twitter is nothing more than a façade, a fantasy of some Silicon Valley programmers’ imaginations? Twitter is an influential platform, particularly in politics. But if it becomes known that large swaths of that perceived influence is a charade, then Twitter’s credibility plummets, as well as the platform’s value. And that prospect might be even more appealing than having Musk at the helm.
By Jess Lawson
Jess Lawson is a regular contributor to The Blue State Conservative and a passionate, conservative millennial who loves America.
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Featured photos by Musk: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Trump: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
This story syndicated with permission from The Blue State Conservative