JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says 'very smart' Elon Musk should 'clean up Twitter' and remove bot accounts
- JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC he hopes tech billionaire Elon Musk "cleans up Twitter."
- He expressed concerns about the number of spam accounts on the site.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that tech billionaire Elon Musk should put Twitter in order, in part by removing bot and spam accounts.
"I hope Musk cleans up Twitter," Dimon told CNBC at the JPM Techstars conference in London.
"Why can't Twitter know who you are when you come on board, so they can eliminate all those people in the public square who are robots and emails and stuff like that?" he added.
Twitter says that bots make up less than 5% of the platform's monetized daily active users. Research by the digital-intelligence provider Similarweb backs up these claims, but found that because these accounts tweet so much, between 20% and 29% of US Twitter content is generated by spam accounts.
Musk, who is the world's richest person and CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, is in the midst of a tumultuous $44-billion deal to buy the social-media platform. Musk first offered to buy the company in April after accumulating a 9.2% share, making him its biggest shareholder, and trying to join its board of directors.
But the next month he seemed more hesitant on the deal, tweeting that he'd put it "on hold" until Twitter gave him more data related to the number of bots on the platform. He also told his lawyers to "slow down" the deal, text messages show.
In early July, he sent a letter to Twitter terminating the deal, which he attributed to a lack of data on bots. In some cases Twitter had refused to share data, while in others it gave him "incomplete or unusable information," Musk's lawyers said.
Within days, Twitter sued Musk, accusing him of "refusing to honor his obligations." Musk countersued later in July, alleging that the company intentionally miscounted the number of spam accounts as part of what he called "its scheme to mislead investors about the company's prospects."
But after months of Musk trying to abandon the deal, it is now back on the cards. Musk and Twitter came close to agreeing a deal at a roughly 8% discount for the tech mogul. In the end, however, Musk's lawyers sent Twitter a letter renewing the original offer on October 4.
Banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and Barclays are helping Musk raise a total of $13 billion in financing through the debt market, but JPMorgan isn't among the group of lenders. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2021 that Musk has spurned the bank for years and that Musk and Dimon have personally clashed.
But in the interview with CNBC, Dimon praised Musk.
"In my view, Elon is very smart," he said.
Dimon also spoke about the US economy, which he said is likely to enter a recession in the next six to nine months.