‘Cannot Move Forward’ on Deal Until CEO Proves…: Musk Gives Ultimatum To Twitter

Billionaire Tesla boss and the majority stakeholder of microblogging platform Twitter, Elon Musk refuse to stay out of the headlines. Musk on Tuesday announced that his deal of Twitter acquisition will not move forward until he gets to see the proof that Twitter has less than 5 percent of spam accounts as the microblogging platform claims. 

The fight over spam accounts on Twitter has taken an ugly turn as Musk believes that more than 20 percent of Twitter accounts could be fake and in his tweet, he has mentioned that his offer was based on SEC filings of Twitter being ‘accurate’. He claimed that Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on Monday publicly refused to show proof of spam accounts’ count is less than 5 percent.

The Tesla CEO tweeted, “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.” He added, “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%.” And also he stated, “This deal cannot move forward until he does.”

Musk’s tweet had come hours after Twitter CEO had tweeted a long thread on the microblogging platform detailing the spam on Twitter. He was referring to Agrawal’s tweet in the thread in which he had said, “Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share). Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs (monetizable daily active users) on any given day.” 

Musk replied to this defense of Agrawal with a poop emoji. He further asked, “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”

As per the claims of the Tesla CEO, ‘many of the spam accounts’ are ‘bots’ and the microblogging platform has not mentioned the same in its SEC filing. Agrawal in his Twitter thread while defining spam said, that spam is not just ‘binary’ which means that it can not be simply distinguished as human or not human. According to him, the most advanced spam campaigns use a combination of coordinated humans and automation. He also added that spam also includes real accounts in order to use them to advance their campaign.

Earlier, Musk and Twitter had officially announced the acquisition of the microblogging platform for over $44 billion with a per-share valuation of $54.20. The world’s richest man, Musk had firstly revealed his interest in buying Twitter on April 14.