Elon Musk said Saturday that his planned $44 billion takeover of Twitter should move forward if the company can confirm some details about how it measures whether user accounts are ‘spam bots' or real people.
The billionaire and Tesla CEO has been trying to back out of
his April agreement to buy the social media company, leading Twitter to sue him
last month to complete the acquisition. Musk countersued, accusing Twitter of
misleading his team about the true size of its user base and other problems he
said amounted to fraud and breach of contract.
Both sides are headed toward an October trial in a Delaware
court.
“If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100
accounts and how they're confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on
original terms,” Musk tweeted early Saturday. “However, if it turns out that
their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.”
Musk, who has more than 100 million Twitter followers, went
on to challenge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a "public debate about the
Twitter bot percentage.”
The company has repeatedly disclosed to the Securities and
Exchange Commission an estimate that fewer than 5 percent of user accounts are
fake or spam, with a disclaimer that it could be higher. Musk waived his right
to further due diligence when he signed the April merger agreement.
2/ When @elonmusk requested more information about spam and fake accounts; Twitter provided a vague response.
— Andrea Stroppa (@Andst7) August 5, 2022
Then provided outdated data;
Then offered a fake data set (not real "firehose");
Then provided a cleaned data set where they already suspended the malicious accounts;
Twitter has argued in court that Musk is deliberately trying
to tank the deal and using the bot question as an excuse because market
conditions have deteriorated and the acquisition no longer serves his
interests. In a court filing Thursday, it describes his counterclaims as an
imagined story “contradicted by the evidence and common sense.”
“Musk invents representations Twitter never made and then
tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided
him to conjure a breach of those purported representations,” company attorneys
wrote.
While Musk has tried to keep the focus on bot disclosures,
Twitter's legal team has been digging for information about a host of tech
investors and entrepreneurs connected to Musk in a wide-ranging subpoena that
could net some of their private communications with the Tesla CEO.