New twist in the series “Elon Musk buys Twitter”. The Tesla boss has suspended the takeover process because of the large number of fake accounts on the platform. How are these a threat and a scourge to the cryptocurrency ecosystem?
Elon Musk suspends Twitter buyout
This Friday, May 13, Elon Musk announced the suspension of his plan to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Indeed, the CEO of Tesla announced that he was “waiting for details about the calculation that fake accounts and spam would actually represent less than 5% of users”.
As a direct consequence of this announcement, the company’s share, listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), plummeted by more than 10% before the opening of the Wall Street trading session.
As a reminder, on April 26, Elon Musk had initiated a procedure to acquire the company Twitter (TWTR) by buying all the shares of the company for 54.2 dollars per share. This constituted, at the time of the facts, a capital gain of 38% for shareholders.
A news that had moreover allowed the Dogecoin (DOGE) to climb by 40% in the space of a few hours. A rise that seems far away today …
Why is Elon Musk interested in fake accounts?
During the presentation of its quarterly results in early May, Twitter indicated that the social network has 229 million daily users and therefore monetizable. Among them, only 5% would be fake accounts or bots.
Obviously, this information is essential for Elon Musk in his calculation of future revenues of the platform through advertising or paid subscriptions. However, despite the panic caused by this announcement, the CEO of Tesla wanted to “reaffirm his commitment to the acquisition” of Twitter.
At the time of the announcement of the acquisition, the American entrepreneur had rightly mentioned his ambition to fight against fake accounts and bots that pollute the platform. At his level, Elon Musk is himself directly concerned by these accounts that impersonate him to scam users.
Why are fake accounts a scourge for cryptocurrencies?
This phenomenon is particularly present in the field of cryptocurrencies. With the explosion of decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), we have seen the emergence of many fake influencer accounts.
These accounts often have tens of thousands of followers (mostly bots) and are sometimes even certified by Twitter, which tends to reassure investors. However, they promote fraudulent projects whose sole objective is to scam users.
We would like to take this opportunity to remind you to always be vigilant and to do thorough research on each project before investing any of your capital.
