Billionaire Ilan Musk on Monday threatened to drop his $ 44 billion offer to buy Twitter.
According to the Associated Press, Musk, Tesla’s CEO, accused Twitter of refusing to provide him with information about fake accounts.
Musk said in mid-May that his bid to buy Twitter would not be completed unless the company provided evidence that the platform’s fake accounts were less than 5 percent.
Musk said at the time that the deal would not take place unless Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal publicly presented evidence that random accounts accounted for less than 5 percent of the platform’s total accounts.
At the time, it was unclear whether the problem would ruin the deal, but Twitter shares fell 8.8 percent after Mask’s remarks because investors need to think about the problems Mask will face in the futures deal.
A few days earlier, Musk had said that the number of fake Twitter accounts could exceed 20% of the total, which is four times more than what Twitter says, indicating that Agrawal refuses to provide evidence for what it says.
Agrawal tweeted that internal estimates of fake accounts on the social media platform had been “much less than 5 percent” in the past four quarters, in response to Mask’s criticism of the company’s management of fake accounts.
Agrawal added that Twitter estimates, which have remained stable since 2013, could not be reproduced externally because of the need to use public and private information to detect a fake account.
However, Musk responded to Agrawal’s defense of the company’s approach with a “cap” emoji.
The developments came after Musk also said the deal was “temporarily suspended” and was awaiting information about fake accounts.
At a special conference in Miami, Musk said he suspected robot accounts made up about 20 to 25 percent of users.
Source: Lebanon Debate
