Elon Musk’s Poop Emoji Submitted as Evidence of Disparaging Behavior by Twitter

As the legal battle between Twitter and Elon Musk gets underway, the social media company decided to use the Tesla CEO’s own tweets against him, including the one where he directed the poop emoji at Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal.

Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk in response to his decision to back out of his deal to buy the social media platform. The company is seeking to legally compel Musk to close out the transaction he previously agreed upon to buy Twitter for $44 billion, and they say Musk “refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

Musk’s lawyer justified terminating the agreement by claiming that Twitter has been misleading about the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. This has been a frequent source of contention between Twitter and Musk, and now the company is using it as evidence of his disparagement.

Back in May, Agrawal penned a Twitter thread where he insisted that Twitter actively works to limit spam and bot accounts.

“First, let me state the obvious: spam harms the experience for real people on Twitter, and therefore can harm our business,” Agrawal tweeted. “As such, we are strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong.”

Agrawal’s explanation clearly failed to impress Musk, who responded on Twitter with the poop emoji:

Musk followed that up with a tweet asking “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”

Musk replied to a Tweet about this story from ShackNews, by ostensibly clarifying what he meant by the poop emoji:

The company invoked Musk’s tweet in their complaint, calling it a violation of his non-disparagement agreement with them. They argue that under the terms of the agreement, Musk was free to tweet “so long as such Tweets do not disparage the Company or any of its Representatives.” Now, however, they say that “since signing the merger agreement, Musk has repeatedly disparaged Twitter and the deal, creating business risk for Twitter and downward pressure on its share price.”