Elon Musk Says Twitter Deal ‘Cannot Move Forward’ Until Company Proves Spam, Fake Account Numbers
variety.comTodd Spangler NY Digital EditorIn the latest turn of Elon Musk’s will-he-or-won’t-he Twitter buyout saga, the billionaire is demanding hard proof of the social network’s assertion that less than 5% of its users are fake accounts or spam bots — and he said the deal cannot “move forward” until Twitter does so.Without citing any evidence for his claim, Musk tweeted that Twitter’s base could represent “20% fake/spam accounts,” four times what the company claims, and it “could be *much* higher.” He cited Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s reply Monday to Musk’s assertion about the fake/spam accounts, in which Agrawal said in part that “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).” “My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.
Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” Musk tweeted early Tuesday.As Agrawal pointed out, Twitter has disclosed the estimate that spam and fake accounts represent less than 5% of its active users for years.Wall Street has viewed Musk’s sudden latching on to the sub-5% spam/bot metric as a bid to either bail on the $44 billion acquisition or as an attempt to drive the price down.On Monday, Musk said at a Miami conference that a deal at a lower price wasn’t “out of the question,” Bloomberg reported. “Currently what I’m being told is that there’s just no way to know the number of bots,” the mega-billionaire CEO of Telsa and SpaceX said at the conference.
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