Elon Musk Is Trying to Back Out of Twitter Deal, Citing Access to Spam Data
Elon Musk has filed to end his bid to take over Twitter on claims the social media company misled him about the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform, among other things.
Though he could face a billion-dollar breakup fee(Opens in a new window), the Tesla CEO on Friday sent a letter to Twitter, terminating the $44 billion merger agreement. The move comes shortly after The Washington Post reported that Musk was planning to extricate himself from the deal.
“Twitter has not complied with its contractual obligations,” Musk’s lawyers wrote. “For nearly two months, Mr. Musk has sought the data and information necessary to ‘make an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.’”
However, Musk claims Twitter failed to supply the information. “Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” the lawyers added.
The letter(Opens in a new window) then goes on to detail Musk's repeated requests about retrieving the company’s internal data on user numbers, and how they’re calculated. Musk’s goal has been to independently verify Twitter’s assertion that less than 5% of the daily active users on Twitter are indeed spam and fake accounts.
In response, Twitter did supply Musk with access to eight developer APIs to help him vet the spam/fake account figures. But according to Musk, Twitter imposed “rate-limiting” restrictions on the APIs, which “throttled” his ability “from performing the analysis that he wished to conduct in any reasonable period of time.”
“While Twitter has provided some information, that
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