Elon Musk said his $44 billion purchase of Twitter Inc. cannot proceed until the company becomes clear about how many of his accounts are bogus, renewing doubts over his planned acquisition of the social-media company. is generating.
Mr Musk’s latest comments raise questions about whether he is committed to completing a deal that came amid a massive sell-off in technology stocks. Last week, he said he had put the deal on hold due to concerns about fake accounts on the platform.
In a tweet early Tuesday, Mr Musk said Twitter’s chief executive had refused to show evidence that less than 5% of Twitter accounts were fake. “This deal can’t move forward until it does,” he said.
Mr Musk said his proposal was based on a filing by Twitter of the Securities and Exchange Commission being correct, and added: “20% of fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, may be *much* higher.”
On Monday, Twitter chief executive Parag Agarwal defended his company’s efforts to fight spam.
“First of all, let me state the obvious: Spam hurts the experience of real people on Twitter, and can therefore harm our business,” Mr. Agarwal said as part of a series of posts on Monday. “As such, we are strongly encouraging that we detect and remove as much spam as we can every single day. Anyone who suggests otherwise is wrong.”
He said Twitter suspends more than half a million spam accounts a day and locks millions of accounts suspected of being fake weekly if they cannot be verified by humans.
Last week, Tesla Inc CEO Musk said he would try to verify Twitter’s numbers and said others should do the same. Mr Aggarwal suggested that external estimates of spam accounts would not be accurate.
“Unfortunately, we do not believe that this specific inference can be made externally, given the significant need to use both public and private information. [which we can’t share]“Outwardly, it is not even possible to know which accounts are counted as MDAUs on any given day,” Mr. Agarwal said on Monday, he said, referring to monetized daily active users.
Mr Musk responded with a series of tweets, one of which featured the poop emoji.
Twitter stock fell 1.6% to $36.78 in early trading Tuesday. This took the shares down to the $54.20 per share that Mr. Musk had agreed to buy the company.
Some external analysis has found that Twitter may have more fake accounts than it reveals – although they use a different method than Twitter and include accounts the company estimates. makes out.
Seattle-based market-research company SparkToro says its analysis of a representative sample of active Twitter accounts found that 19% fit the conservative definition of fake or spam accounts.
But SparkToro specifies that its definition of fake accounts includes all accounts in which no human regularly writes their Tweets, which are common on Twitter for sending information such as news updates, inspirational quotes and stock-price changes. Twitter provides tools for developers to build automated bots.