Elon Musk's Twitter deal isn't the only one that's fallen apart over the social media giant's bot issue. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger said the entertainment company walked away from a deal to purchase Twitter for the very same reason.
“We did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users…and we at that point estimated with some of Twitter’s help that a substantial portion — not a majority — were not real,” Iger said at Vox Media’s Code Conference in Los Angeles about the 2016 deal.
Iger had originally been interested in the acquisition because he saw Twitter as a “phenomenal” way to distribute Disney’s content globally.
“We were intent on going into the streaming business. We needed a technology solution,” he said, according to Vox’s Recode. “We have all this great IP. We weren’t a technology company. How do we get that IP to consumers around the world? … And we were kicking tires left and right. We thought about developing ourselves. Five years, $500 million. It wasn’t the money, it was the time, because the world was changing fast. And at the same time, we heard that Twitter was contemplating a sale.
“We enter the process immediately, looking at Twitter as the solution: a global distribution platform,” Iger continued. “It was viewed as sort of a social network. We were viewing it as something completely different. We could put news, sports, entertainment, [and] reach the world. And frankly, it would have been a phenomenal solution, distribution-wise.
“Then, after we sold the whole concept to the Disney board and the Twitter board, and we’re really ready to execute — the negotiation was just about done — I went home, contemplated it for a weekend, and thought, ‘I’m not looking at this as carefully as I need to look at it,’” he added. “Yes, it’s a great solution from a distribution perspective. But it would come with so many other challenges and complexities that as a manager of a great global brand, I was not prepared to take on a major distraction and having to manage circumstances that weren’t even close to anything that we had faced before.”
Musk notified Twitter in July that he was terminating the $44 billion deal - a move that Twitter is challenging in court.