Elon Musk has said his planned $44 billion (€43.2 billion) takeover of Twitter should go ahead if the company can confirm some details about how it measures whether user accounts are “spam bots” or real people.
The billionaire Tesla CEO has been trying to back out of his April deal to buy the social media company, prompting Twitter to sue him last month to complete the acquisition.
Musk fired back, accusing Twitter of misleading his team about the true size of its user base and other issues that he said amounted to fraud and breach of contract.
Both sides are headed for an October trial in a Delaware court.
“If Twitter simply provides its method of sampling 100 accounts and how they are confirmed to be real, the deal should continue under the original terms,” Musk tweeted Saturday.
“However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then they shouldn’t.”
Twitter declined to comment.
The company has repeatedly disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission an estimate that less than 5% of user accounts are fake or spam, with a denial that it could be higher. Musk waived his right to due diligence when he signed the April merger agreement.
Twitter has argued in court that Musk is deliberately trying to stop the deal because market conditions have deteriorated and the acquisition no longer serves its interests.
In a court filing Thursday, he describes his counterclaims as a made-up story “contradicted by evidence and common sense.”
“Musk invents representations that Twitter never made and then attempts to use, selectively, the extensive confidential data that Twitter provided to him to conjure up a violation of those alleged representations,” the company’s lawyers wrote.
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