Elon Musk is known for his replies and tweets on Twitter. As his association with the Twitter battle continues, now he challenges Twitter CEO to a “public debate”. It is about fake accounts and spam on Twitter.
This challenge is amidst the contentious legal battle over a $44 billion acquisition. Musk filed a bid with the Securities and Exchange to acquire Twitter back in April this year. After the companies agreed to move ahead with a take-private deal, Musk said he was terminating his acquisition, and accused Twitter of presenting false numbers, including in its SEC filings, pertaining to the amount of monetizable daily active users, and the number of spam and bot accounts on the social network.
Twitter then sued Musk in a Delaware chancery court to ensure the deal would go through as promised, and Musk filed counterclaims and a countersuit there on July 29. In a series of tweets that Musk began posting just before 1 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 6, Musk interacted with a fan who had summarized his accusations about Twitter including that it was stonewalling him and giving him, “outdated data,” and “a fake data set” when he asked the company for details about how it tabulates mDAU, and estimates for spam and bot accounts.
I hereby challenge @paraga to a public debate about the Twitter bot percentage.
Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spam daily users!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2022
Twitter poll
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote, “Good summary of the problem. If Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they’re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms. However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.”
By just after 9 a.m. Saturday morning, Musk started a Twitter poll asking his followers to vote on whether ”[l]ess than 5% of Twitter daily users are fake/spam.” Respondents to the informal poll could choose one of Musk’s provided answers which read either “Yes” followed by three robot emojis, or “Lmaooo no.”
A source close to the company says a debate is not going to happen outside of a pending trial. Attorneys for Musk did not respond to requests to comment on Saturday, and an attorney for Twitter declined to comment on Musk’s Saturday tweets. Twitter’s attorneys have argued in court filings that Musk gave the company just twenty-four hours to accept his offer before he would present it directly to Twitter shareholders, and waived due diligence including a chance to seek more information on false or spam accounts. They wrote in court filings, “Musk’s repeated mischaracterizations of the merger agreement cannot change its plain words.”
Credits- CNBC
