Sam Amico
An inordinate amount of Twitter users were either fake accounts or simply not real at all. This is what former Disney CEO Bob Iger discovered when the company contemplated buying the social media platform.
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That was also back in 2016, several years before the ongoing drama between Elon Musk and Twitter.
But Iger and Disney realized that a “substantial portion” of users were “not real.” At least that is what Iger said during the Code Conference in California.
“Yes, it’s a great solution from a distribution perspective,” Iger said of what he thought about Twitter in 2016.
“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; having to manage circumstances that weren’t even close to anything that we had faced before.”
He also covered the possible Disney takeover of Twitter in his memoir, The Ride of Lifetime, writing about why the deal never actually happened. In the book, Iger cites the “nastiness” of the discourse on Twitter as being a massive turnoff for potential buyers.
Twitter from its early days:
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in March 2006. It officially launched about four months later. The site then became a social media behemoth from about 2009-19. It has seemingly fallen on hard times — or at least harder times — in recent years, with some estimating than less than 23 percent of Americans still use Twitter.
The rest, it seems, could be fake accounts.And if that’s the case, it’s a hard sell. Clearly, that is something that gave Disney reason to pause back in 2016.
“This was just something that we were not ready to take on and I was not ready to take on as the CEO of a company and I thought it would have been irresponsible,” Iger said.
