Report: Musk Is Now Drinking From a 'Firehose' of Twitter Data

pcmag.com:

Twitter has reportedly granted Elon Musk access to real-time API data so he can keep hunting bots.

Musk announced in April that he planned to acquire Twitter for $44 billion. He then said in May that he put the deal "temporarily on hold" because he wanted to determine how many of the service's users are bots. This back-and-forth has put Twitter's users—and shareholders—on edge.

The Washington Post reported(Opens in a new window) on June 8 that Twitter planned to give Musk access to a "firehose" of data that "comprises not only a real-time record of tweets but the devices they tweet from, as well as information about the accounts that tweet," in response to his requests for more information.

Insider reports(Opens in a new window) that Twitter has now granted Musk access to that stream of real-time information normally reserved for a few developers in a bid to quell the billionaire's complaints about bots so the deal, which the company has said it expects to close despite Musk's antics, can move forward.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Musk said in an SEC filing on June 6 that he reserved the right to cancel the deal if the company didn't provide enough data for him to investigate the service's bot problem. Now the question is how Musk plans to use that data. Will he move forward with the deal? Renegotiate terms? Cancel it?

We don't know, and based on how the acquisition has proceeded to date, it's hard to believe that granting Musk access to what the Post described as "the massive stream of data comprising more than 500 million tweets posted each day" is going to speed up the process in any meaningful way.

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