Elon Musk.Photo: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty
Elon Muskwon’t be buying Twitter after all.
In the filing, Musk claims that Twitter did not provide enough information about the number of fake accounts and bots on the social media platform, and didn’t give his team enough data to do their own analysis.
“Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while giving Mr. Musk incomplete or unusable information,” reads the filing.
The filing also states that Twitter fired “two key, high-ranking employees,” laid off a third of its talent acquisition team, instituted a general hiring freeze, and more without Musk’s consent.
The Twitter Board says it now plans to sue Musk to ensure the deal goes through.
“We are committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr. Musk and plan to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement. We are confident we will prevail in the Delaware Court of Chancery,” the Twitter Board said in a statement provided to PEOPLE Friday.
PEOPLE has reached out to Musk’s attorney for comment.
The news came nearly two months after the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, 50, said that the$44 billion dealwas “temporarily on hold.”
At the time, Musk — who said he was “still committed to acquisition” — shared that his purchase was “temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 percent of users.”
He went on to note that in order to get to the bottom of the issue, “my team will do arandom sampleof 100 followers of @twitter,” and invited other social media users to do the same to “see what they discover.”
Asked in a comment why he picked 100 followers, Muskwrote, “I picked 100 as the sample size number, because that is what Twitter uses to calculate <5% fake/spam/duplicate.”
In the days that followed, tensions appeared to simmer between Twitter and Musk.
In another message over the weekend, Muskwrotethat he had “yet to see any analysis that has that has fake/spam/duplicates at <5%.”
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“Our estimate is based on multiple human reviews (in replicate) of thousands of accounts, that are sampled at random, consistently over time,” Agrawalwrote. “We do this every quarter, and we have been doing this for many years.“The CEO went on to share that each review utilized “both public and private data(eg, IP address, phone number, geolocation, client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active…) to make a determination on each account.”
“Unfortunately, we don’t believe that this specific estimation can be performed externally, given the critical need to use both public and private information (which we can’t share),” Agrawal wrote. “Externally, it’s not even possible to know which accounts are counted as mDAUs on any given day.”
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This tweet in particular got a rise out of Musk, who responded with apoop emoji.
“So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money?” headded. “This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”
The following day, Musk said that he would need “proof” that less than 5 percent of Twitter’s accounts are fake in order to proceed.
“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate,” Muskwroteon Twitter. “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
In a series ofTwitter posts, Musk continued to address the scandal, alleging the timing purposefully coincided with his bid to buy Twitter.
In his own statement, Musk called free speech “the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” and said Twitter was “the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” (He later said that should the deal go through, he wouldlift the permanent banagainst former PresidentDonald Trumpthat was put in place following the riots at the U.S. Capitol.)
source: people.com
