Elon Musk‘s unique bid to buy Twitter and make it a privately-owned firm made waves amongst Twitter staff and many of the public.
Jerod Harris/Getty Photos for Vox Media
Though Musk claims he’s trying to again out of his $44 billion bid as a result of Twitter execs will not give him an correct reply on what number of bot and spam accounts are on the platform, it seems like Musk wasn’t the primary huge title — or fearful about bots, for that matter.
Former Disney CEO Bob Iger spoke this week at Code Convention in Los Angeles the place he revealed that Disney had as soon as been eyeing a purchase order of Twitter in 2016, lengthy earlier than Musk swooped in.
Iger defined that, on the time, Disney was wanting to enter the streaming enterprise (the corporate now operates the streaming platform Disney+) and seen Twitter as a “world distribution platform,” not only a social media platform.
However Iger had a change of coronary heart when the Disney-Twitter was “nearly carried out” and “actually able to execute.”
“I’d include so many different challenges and complexities that as a supervisor of an excellent world model, I used to be not ready to tackle a significant distraction and having to handle circumstances that weren’t even near something that we had confronted earlier than,” he stated actually.
Iger then alluded to Musk’s main gripe with the corporate and admitted that bots and spam accounts had been of concern — and had been rampant on Twitter even at the moment.
“We did look very fastidiously at all the Twitter customers — I suppose they’re referred to as customers? — and we at that time estimated with a few of Twitter’s assist {that a} substantial portion — not a majority — weren’t actual,” Iger stated. “I do not keep in mind the quantity however we discounted the worth closely. However that was constructed into our economics. Really, the deal that we had was fairly low cost.”
Iger additionally cited Twitter’s “potential to do as a lot hurt pretty much as good” as a motive for not going via with the deal, one thing that will have broken the Disney model in his eyes and one thing he seen as “irresponsible.”
Musk, naturally, caught wind of Vox‘s reporting on Iger’s speak and Tweeted a response.
Attention-grabbing …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 8, 2022
Musk is at the moment within the midst of an ongoing authorized battle with Twitter about whether or not or not he’s legally allowed to again out of his bid to buy.
The 2 are set to face off in trial subsequent month.
