Tesla CEO Elon Musk suggested early Saturday that his acquisition deal with Twitter could end if the social media platform provides information on how it confirms the mock accounts are real.
“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. “However, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then they shouldn’t.”
He later tweeted that he was challenging Twitter’s CEO to a debate.
“With this I challenge@paraga in a public debate about bot percentage on Twitter. Let him prove to the public that Twitter has <5% fake or spammy daily users!” Musk posted on Twitter.
Musk too posted a poll on Twitter asking if less than 5 percent of daily Twitter users were spam or fake.
The tweets from Musk are the latest in drama between the SpaceX CEO and the social media platform following legal action over his bid to buy Twitter.
Earlier this year, Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, but less than three months later, he called off the deal. His legal team argued at the time that there was insufficient information about bots on the Twitter site. The team also alleged that the social media company had fired several employees in violation of their agreement and that its statements about bots were inaccurate.
The social media platform sued Musk to force him to complete the acquisition.
“Having staged a public spectacle to mock Twitter, and having proposed and then signed an amicable merger agreement with the vendor, Musk apparently believes that he—unlike any other party subject to contract law— Delaware — is free to change its mind, dump the company, cease its operations, destroy shareholder value and walk away,” the lawsuit against Musk says.
But Musk filed a counterclaim earlier this month, with his lawyers claiming he was not consulted on major decisions at the social media company and that the billionaire had entered into the deal without knowing about the platform’s “misrepresentations or omissions”. which influenced his perception. of site value, according to the Associated Press.
Twitter hit back at the counterclaim, saying the argument was “conceived in an attempt to escape a merger deal that Musk no longer found attractive as the stock market — and with it, his massive personal fortune — plummeted. value”.
– Updated at 3:26 p.m
