Musk says that he tried to back out of his deal to buy the micro-blogging site because it was too much. The first thing that came to mind was the whistle blower. On Wednesday, Musk received an assist from Bob Iger, the former CEO of Disney, who once tried to buy the company. Iger said that bots made up a large portion of the users.
In an interview at the Code Conference, Iger explained why he decided to back out of a potential acquisition. Many of the points he talked about were familiar to him. At that time, Disney was looking for a distribution platform to get into streaming, and it seemed like a great fit to use the social network. The entertainment company's brand was not compatible with the level of "nastiness" on the social networking site.
The richest man in the world was immediately interested in the new information Iger dropped.
I read the news these days and I noticed that a lot of the users were not real, so we looked closely at all of them. We discounted the value so much that I don't remember the number. That was part of our economics. The deal that we had was inexpensive.
Gizmodo reached out to Musk's lawyers about Iger's comments, but they didn't reply by the time they were published.
Musk responded to a message about the comments the former Disney CEO made.
He said it was an interesting thing to say.
Iger's comments are good news for Musk and his team, who are claiming that the company lied about how many bots are on its platform in order to wriggle out of the deal. Musk claims that the number of fake accounts is much higher than what the company says. The two parties will go to trial in October over the future of the acquisition deal.
Iger didn't sign a binding contract to buy the company, but he did announce to the world that he was buying it. Disney did not sign an acquisition agreement.
Peiter Zatko, who was the company's former head of security, alleged in a complaint to the SEC that the social media company showed no interest. Zatko claimed that, even if it wanted to, it couldn't figure out how many bot were on the site because it didn't have the resources to do so.
Musk and his team were given the go-ahead to add Zatko's complaint into the case. A former employee of Musk has agreed to testify.
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