Actually, Elon, you can count Twitter bots. Here’s how

ELON Musk’s assertion last month that the number of Twitter bots is as “unknowable as the human soul” may well be a negotiating tactic from a man who’s probably feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse. Yet tallying up how many machines are running around on Twitter Inc’s platform is a pretty straightforward process, if only everyone can agree on what they’re counting.

A “very significant matter” deterring Musk from closing the deal at the US$44 billion price originally agreed is “whether the number of fake and spam users on the system is less than 5 per cent, as Twitter claims, which I think is probably not most people's experience when using Twitter,” he told Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Qatar Economic Forum on Tuesday. Other items to be overcome include debt financing and a shareholder vote on the acquisition, he said.

With shares of the social media company trading at 30 per cent below Musk’s purchase price of US$54.20, there’s US$15 billion worth of reasons for the South African businessman to find loopholes and push for a discount. His comment Tuesday is similar to one made in a June 6 filing, when he claimed that Twitter refused to provide the information needed “to facilitate his evaluation of spam and fake accounts on the company’s platform”.