Throwing his already-fraught Twitter takeover bid into more uncertainty, Elon Musk said at a tech conference that a lower price for the sale is “not out of the question.” The company’s shares fell 8.2 percent by the end of Monday's trading, partly fueled by suspicion that Musk could abandon the $44 billion deal altogether. Over the weekend, Musk questioned the percentage of bots on Twitter—the company’s public data estimates that spam accounts compose less than 5 percent of users, while Musk estimated at the conference that they compose at least 20 percent. “Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” he said. “It’s like, as unknowable as the human soul.” The bot drama also extended to Twitter itself, as the company’s CEO posted a lengthy thread about spam accounts that Musk responded to with a single image: a poop emoji.
