Musk: Twitter Deal 'Cannot Move Forward' Without Fake Account Data
Elon Musk says he won’t buy Twitter until the company can prove than less than 5% of its daily active users are spam or fake accounts.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” Musk tweeted(Opens in a new window) early Tuesday morning.
Hours earlier, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal published a thread explaining why his company estimates that the number of fake and spam accounts on the platform has, historically, been less than 5%. However, the thread was met with trolling and pushback from Musk, who claims Twitter has been massively undercounting its fake account problem.
“It seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of real unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%,” Musk told(Opens in a new window) the All-In Summit conference on Monday. “Does anyone have that experience?”
Musk claimed the true number of spam and fake accounts may be actually “four or five times” higher than Twitter’s own calculations. “The lowest estimate would be 20%,” he said, citing unnamed outside firms that have researched Twitter’s user base.
“Something doesn’t add up here,” he added. “And my concern is not that it is 5%, 7% or 8%, but is it potentially 80% or 90% of bots.”
Musk then went on to say it’s “not out of the question” he’ll try to buy Twitter at a lower price; last month, he agreed to acquire the social media company for $44 billion.
“In making the Twitter offer, I was obviously reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings. And if those filings are not accurate, you can’t pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed,” he said.
However, Tuesday's tweet from Musk is
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