Twitter stock sinks after Tesla CEO Elon Musk pauses takeover
Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss the latest in the Elon Musk-Twitter saga.
Video Transcript
BRAD SMITH: Yes, continuing to cover the Elon Musk Twitter madness. Shares of the social media company, they are down on the day by about 8.8% after a few tweets from Musk this morning, one of which where it looked like he was going to put things temporarily on hold, and then one where he followed up himself in a tweet thread to say, but still very much interested in moving it forward, essentially.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, and one of the interesting things he's referring to here is saying he's not convinced that Twitter's numbers are correct, that only 5% or less of the accounts on the platform are bots or spam or fake in some way. But as our Dan Howley pointed out, going back at least to October of 2018, the company has had language in its filings with this figure. They said, originally they said monthly active users, less than 5%.
Then they changed it to daily active users. The point is, this is not new information. And so it is curious-- put it on the list, I guess-- it is curious why Musk would come out now to say I'm looking into this and I want to figure it out before I go ahead with this acquisition.
- I do wonder how much longer Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal is in this position. This is not what he signed up for. He signed up to try to transform Twitter, run an actual company. But this is now turning into a complete joke of a job for him.
And you saw him come out here earlier in the week, put a freeze on hiring. I have to imagine how much longer is he in this spot, and then also, too, the employees inside of Twitter. It's something we continue to focus on here, how many-- what does the talent exodus look like at Twitter? It's going to happen if it hasn't happened already.
BRAD SMITH: Well, and it comes back to your point as well, too, in the kind of splitting of hairs that we're looking at right now, because it's daily active users versus what we're seeing classified as monetizable daily active users--
JULIE HYMAN: Right.
BRAD SMITH: --from the Twitter side. And so if that's what Elon really wants to go after, to say this is reason for me not to do this deal, the splitting of hairs in terms of how that's classified, then do you really want to do the deal at the end of the day.
JULIE HYMAN: It seems pretty clear he either wants a lower price, or he doesn't want to do it.
BRAD SMITH: Yeah.
- It was good to see him tweet it out though, right?
BRAD SMITH: Using the platform, that he may also own.
JULIE HYMAN: Almost scored. Comes through--
BRAD SMITH: Really there. Really here, there we go.
