DISNEY’S BOB IGER, WHO ALSO BACKED OUT OF BUYING TWITTER, SAYS LOTS OF USERS WERE BOTS:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s excuse for trying to back out of his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter—too many bots, he says—is gaining steam. First, it was the Twitter whistleblower’s claims. Then, on Wednesday, Musk received an assist from former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who had wanted to buy Twitter for the House of Mouse years ago but ultimately didn’t. Iger’s revelation: Bots made up “substantial portion” Twitter’s users.

In an interview at the Code Conference, Iger went into detail on why he decided to back out of the potential acquisition in 2016. Many points he touched on were not new. At that time, Disney was looking for a distribution platform to get into streaming, and Twitter seemed like a great fit. However, the level of “nastiness” on Twitter did not mesh well with the entertainment company’s squeaky-clean brand, and acquiring it seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

Iger dropped a new nugget of information he hadn’t spoken about before, one that quickly caught the attention of the richest man in the world: bots.

“Interestingly enough, because I read the news these days, we did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users—I guess they’re called users?—and we at that point estimated with some of Twitter’s help that a substantial portion, not a majority, were not real,” Iger explained. “I don’t remember the number, but we discounted the value heavily. But that was built into our economics. Actually, the deal that we had was pretty cheap.”

Why, it’s like “Twitter sentiment is a Styrofoam iceberg. You may think 9/10 of it is underwater, but actually, 9/10 of it is visible,” to coin an Insta-phrase. Somebody should write a book about this stuff.