Elon Musk: Twitter Purchase ‘Cannot Move Forward’ Until CEO Proves Claim of Less Than 5% Bots
JIM WATSON/AFP
Elon Musk threw another bucket of cold water on a pending deal to acquire Twitter Tuesday morning, saying that it cannot move forward until the CEO of the social media platform can prove the percentage of users are spam accounts and/or bots.
Musk replied to a tweet from the Teslarait Twitter account promoting an article that read “Elon Musk may be looking for a better Twitter deal as $44 billion seems too high with 20% of users being fake or spam accounts.”
“20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher,” Musk commented, adding “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.”
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%,” he continued. “This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Yesterday, Agrawal posted a Twitter thread about his company’s spam accounts, which suggested that an external examination would not allow for a specific estimation of spam accounts.
Musk responded to Agrawal’s tweet with a poop emoji.
Late last week Musk announced that his pending deal to purchase Twitter was suspended due to concerns over the percentage of bots on the social media platforms user base. If, in fact, the percentage of spam accounts is 20% as Musk suggests, then the valuation of the company would surely, both in the potential purchase price, and likely market cap would decrease significantly also.
