Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his deal to buy Twitter can’t be approved unless the company publicly shows that less than five percent of accounts on the social media platform are fake or spam.
Musk made the comment in a reaction to the user on Twitter early Tuesday. He spent much of the past day going back and forth with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who posted a series of tweets explaining his company’s efforts to combat bots and how he has consistently estimated. that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are fake.
In his tweet on Tuesday, Musk said that “20% of fake/spam accounts, while four times what Twitter claims, can be much higher. My offer is based on the accuracy of Twitter’s SEC filings. “
He added: “Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show the 5% test. This agreement moves forward until it does. “
Twitter declined to comment.
This is Musk’s latest salvo on inauthentic accounts, a challenge he said he was looking for to get rid of Twitter.
At a generation convention in Miami on Monday, Musk estimated that at least 20 percent of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spam bots, and says it’s at the bottom of his rating.
The war on spam accounts began last week when Musk tweeted that twitter’s deal was suspended pending confirmation from the company’s estimates that they account for less than five percent of the total number of users.
Also at All In Summit, Musk gave the most powerful signal to date that he would like to pay less for Twitter than the $44 billion offer he made last month.
Musk’s comments are likely to reinforce analysts’ theories that the billionaire wants to pull out of the deal or buy the company at a lower price. it could be a bigger deal on Twitter because $44 billion is too high. “
“Twitter’s stock will be under pressure this morning, as the chances of a deal, even though everything has been reached, don’t look smart now,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, which covers Twitter and Tesla, said in a study note. He calculated that there was a “60% chance” that Musk would eventually quit the deal and pay the $1 billion breakout fee.
Musk made the offer to buy Twitter for $54. 20 based on the percentage on April 14. Twitter’s consistent percentages have fallen since then. They fell Tuesday morning to $37. 28.
To fund the acquisition, Musk pledged some of his Tesla shares, which have fallen about a third since the deal was announced.
In tweets Monday, Agrawal said Twitter isn’t very good at catching bots. He wrote that each quarter, the company estimated less than 5% spam. constantly over time,” Agrawal wrote.
Estimates for the past 4 quarters were well below five percent, he wrote. “The margins of error in our estimates give us confidence in our quarter of public statements. “
Twitter has put the estimate of less than 5% on its quarterly filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for at least two years, long before Musk made his offer last month.