Elon Musk said on Saturday that his planned $44 billion takeover of Twitter should move forward 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 early Saturday. “However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then they shouldn’t.”
Musk, who has more than 100 million Twitter followers, went on to challenge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a “public debate about the percentage of bots on Twitter.”
Twitter declined comment on Saturday. The company has consistently disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission an estimate that less than 5% of user accounts are fake or spam, with a disclaimer 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 scuttle the deal and using the bot’s question as an excuse because market conditions have worsened and the acquisition no longer serves its interests. In a court filing Thursday, she described 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.
While Musk has tried to keep the focus on bot revelations, Twitter’s legal team has sought information about a host of Musk-related investors and tech entrepreneurs in a wide-ranging subpoena that could link some of their private communications with the CEO. of Tesla.
