Elon Musk Floats Potential Competitor To Twitter | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the The Daily Wire. The author of this post is Ben Zeisloft.

    Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk floated the idea of starting his own social media platform Wednesday if he ends up no longer purchasing Twitter.

    Musk, who formerly made a proposal to buy the social media company at $44 billion, argues that Twitter's disclosed number of false or spam accounts is inaccurate - possibly numbering as high as 33% rather than Twitter's reported 5%. The multibillionaire is therefore locked in a legal battle, with the company trying to force the completion of the deal.

    In an exchange on Twitter about his recent sale of $6.9 billion in Tesla stock, Musk explained that he is avoiding an "emergency sale" of shares in the "hopefully unlikely" event Twitter forces the deal to close.

    When asked whether he would start his own social media platform if the deal is terminated, Musk simply replied with a link to "X.com."

    Musk co-founded X.com as an online bank in 1999, which merged with Confinity in the following year to become PayPal. In 2017, Musk purchased the domain name from PayPal while citing "sentimental value," according to Business Insider. The site currently shows nothing more than a small black "X" in the corner of the page.

    The outlet noted that Musk referenced X.com at a recent shareholder meeting for Tesla. "I do sort of have a grander vision for what I thought X Corporation could have been back in the day," Musk said. "It's a pretty grand vision and of course that could be started from scratch but I think Twitter would accelerate that by three to five years."

    Musk, the world's richest man, has said that he does not "care about the economics" of the potential Twitter acquisition "at all," repeatedly citing the need to address the lack of free expression on the platform.

    "It's important to the function of democracy, it's important to the function of the United States as a free country and many other countries, and to help freedom in the world more broadly than in the U.S.," Musk said. "Civilizational risk is decreased the more we can increase the trust of Twitter as a public platform, and so I do think this will be somewhat painful."

    The trial to determine the outcome of the acquisition deal is scheduled for October.

    "Adoption of the merger agreement by our stockholders is the only remaining approval or regulatory condition to completing the merger under the merger agreement," Twitter argued in a recent earnings report, which pinned a loss of $0.08 per share on the proceedings with Musk. "The exact timing of completion of the merger, if at all, cannot be predicted because the merger is subject to ongoing litigation, adoption of the merger agreement by our stockholders and the satisfaction of the remaining closing conditions."

    Meanwhile, Musk's attorneys said in a July 8 letter that Twitter has neglected to provide accurate information about its user base.

    "Mr. Musk and his financial advisors at Morgan Stanley have been requesting critical information from Twitter as far back as May 9, 2022 - and repeatedly since then - on the relationship between Twitter's disclosed mDAU figures and the prevalence of false or spam accounts on the platform," the letter said. "Notwithstanding these repeated requests over the past two months, Twitter has still failed to provide much of the data and information responsive to Mr. Musk's repeated requests."