I hope he isn't forced.
After hearing all of those stories and reading those articles about Twitter employees traumatized by the potential of Elon Musk buying out Twitter, I can't fathom why Twitter would force Elon Musk to buy their company and reintroduce those traumas to their employees again.
Well, let's go through it step by step.
1) Twitter makes money based on ad revenue.
2) Twitter's ad revenue comes from people looking at the ads that other companies pay them to have.
3) Twitter has a bot problem. You might think of it in terms of people spamming the community with false opinions, but for Twitter, those bots probably count as seeing ads, which Twitter gets paid for. Twitter has very little reason to go hunting down bots.
Look at Twitter's supposed growth for the US:
Number of Twitter users with in-depth details on user demographics, platform use, and comparison with other social networks
financesonline.com
2017 -- 25.5 million
2018 -- 26.25 million
2019 -- 29.5 million
2020 -- 35 million
Where is this growth coming from? Twitter has been purging conservatives with glee for the past 2-5 years. It's almost as bad as SB. If you get hit with an automated ban, you can sit it out. If you challenge the ban and you get a mod who doesn't like you or what you said, you get a permaban. No way of challenging it, no second chances. You're just gone. And from what I've experienced and from what I've seen others experience, I don't expect that their numbers have gone up. In fact, I expect their active users have gone down. The QAnon purge alone would have accounted for 70,000 members. Not counting the 7,000 accounts sometime before that.
Looking at wikipedia, the last time that Twitter did an actual purge of bot accounts in 2018, they went from 326 million users to 325 million users...and proceeded to lose 20.5% of its stock, equivalent to 6 billion dollars.
Twitter says it’s wiping out fake accounts faster than ever
www.theverge.com
So my guess? My guess is that after the purge in 2018, they didn't want to do anymore because of the market damage to Twitter. And after they started purging conservatives in 2020 (and a bit before that), my guess is that they've either stagnated on growth or they've lost active users and are letting the bots run amok to bolster their numbers.
If Musk were to purchase the company as is, without any investigations, then he likely wouldn't out the information AFTER he purchased the company, because he'd have destroyed his own investment. The people in charge would be able to walk away, leaving Musk holding the bag. 2018's purge took out a million accounts--0.31% of the company's user base...and lost nearly 21% of the company's value.
So the question to me is, was it only the million bot accounts? Or did they stop at a million and after seeing the damage, never bothered with a serious purge again? One might expect that the people who were a bit cannier to what was going on behind the scenes at Twitter or saw the signs sold their shares immediately and hence inflicted a heavy loss on Twitter's stock.
Twitter has already calculated that 5% of its user base are bots. What if it's worse? What if it's 20%?
An academic source suggests it's between 9-15%. That's not insignificant and imagine what it means for people who pay for Twitter's promotion, when there's a good chance that 10-15% of your bill is caused by bots.
Twitter advertising costs $0.26 - $0.50 per first action and $1.01 - $2.00 per follow for promoted accounts. View more Twitter advertising costs here!
www.webfx.com
That may not just sink the company, potentially bankrupt the board members, open them to lawsuits--it means prison sentences. It would be fraud and I think, given Twitter's behavior over the past few months, there is a good chance that a good chunk of their userbase is bots. Not only have they not reported it, but they also concealed it, and continued to charge people for twitter views.