Centi-billionaire Elon Musk provoked Twitter and called on the company’s CEO Parag Agrawal for a “public discussion” about fake accounts and spam amid a contentious legal battle over the $44 billion acquisition.
In April of this year, Musk applied to the Securities and Exchange Commission to buy Twitter. After the companies agreed to move forward with a private deal, Musk said he was halting the purchase and accused Twitter of providing false numbers, including the number of monetized daily active users, and SEC filings. spam and bot accounts on the social network.
Twitter then sued Musk in a Delaware court to enforce the deal as promised, bringing claims against Musk. to counterclaim on July 29 there.
In a series of tweets Musk began posting just before 1 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 1. 6, Musk contacted a fan Asked for details on how he tabulates mDAU and estimates for spam and bot counts, he summed up his accusations about Twitter, saying it stonewalled him and gave him “outdated data” and a “fake data set.”
CEO of Tesla and SpaceX wrote“Good summary of the problem. If Twitter simply provides the way it selects 100 accounts and how it verifies they’re real, the deal should continue on the original terms. But if their SEC filings turn out to be substantially false, then it shouldn’t.”
After 9 a.m. Saturday, Musk Twitter has launched a poll asking his followers to vote “[l]More than 5% of Twitter’s daily users are fake/spam.” Participants in the informal survey could write one of Musk’s answers, “Yes” followed by three robot emojis, or “Lmaooo no.” (“lmao” is a slang abbreviation,” laughs my a– off.)
Musk also wrote Saturday morning: “I hereby protest @paraga To the public debate on Twitter bot percentage. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spammy daily users!"
A source close to the company says the expected out-of-court debate will not take place.
Musk’s attorneys did not return requests for comment Saturday, and Twitter’s attorney declined to comment on Musk’s Saturday tweets.
Twitter’s attorneys argued in court filings that Musk gave the company just twenty-four hours to accept his offer before pitching it directly to Twitter shareholders and denied due diligence, including the chance to seek more information about fake or spam accounts.
“Musk’s repeated mischaracterizations of the merger agreement cannot change his plain words,” they wrote in court filings.
At the annual shareholder meeting for Tesla in August. 4, Musk was asked to talk about Twitter during a question-and-answer session after the proxy vote.
I said, drawing laughter from the audience in attendance, saying, “I have to be a little careful about what I say on Twitter because there’s this lawsuit and stuff.” I confirmed that he only had two outstanding securities Tesla and Twitter.
And then he spoke as if he still wanted to own the social networking company, a stark contrast to the arguments Musk made through his attorneys in legal filings in Delaware.
At Tesla’s 2022 shareholder meeting, Musk said: “I think about Twitter because I use it a lot, I shoot myself in the foot a lot, you know, I dig my grave, etc. I think I understand that the product is good enough, so I think I think I have a good understanding of where to focus the engineering team at Twitter to make it fundamentally better.”
He added that Twitter will help “accelerate” the “pretty big vision” a tech entrepreneur has to build a business he’s envisioned since his early years, like X.com or X Corporation.
“Obviously it could be started from scratch,” he said, “but I think Twitter is going to help accelerate that by 3-5 years. So it looks like something that I think will be useful for a long time. What do I know. To Twitter for that You don’t have to have it, but like I said, it’s probably at least a three-year accelerator, and I think it’s something that’s going to be very beneficial for the world.”
Musk did not go into further details in that meeting. However, he said during the town hall In a meeting with Twitter staff in June this year, he said that he wanted to increase Twitter’s user base to one billion people and that Twitter could become an app like China’s WeChat, a “super app” that includes everything from messaging to video. to social media, mobile and point-of-sale payments with a robust app ecosystem.
If they don’t come to an agreement first, Twitter and Musk are headed for a five-day trial starting in Delaware in October. 17. Judge Chancellor Kathaleen St. who decided on the case. J. McCormick.
