Musk: Doubt about spam accounts could scuttle Twitter deal

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that he will not go through with his $44 billion takeover of Twitter unless the social media platform offers definitive proof that less than 5% of its daily users are spam and bot accounts.

“My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5% (spam accounts). This deal cannot move forward until he does,” Musk said in a tweet.

Twitter responded hours later by insisting that it was committed to completing the deal at the agreed price “as promptly as practicable.”

Shares of Twitter fell by more than 8% in pre-market trading on Tuesday morning.

Before the opening bell on Wall Street, Twitter was trading at $37.39 a share – well below the $54.20 a share that Musk agreed to pay in order to buy out stakeholders and take the social media company private.

At a Miami technology conference Monday, Musk estimated that at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spam bots, a percentage he said was at the low end of his assessment, according to a Bloomberg News report.

Also at the All In Summit, Musk gave the strongest hint yet that he would like to pay less for Twitter than his $44 billion offer made last month.

He said a viable deal at a lower price would not be out of the question, according to the report by Bloomberg, which said it viewed a livestream video of the conference posted by a Twitter user.

Musk responded with a poop emoji after Twitter’s chief executive insisted that the social media platform is doing everything it can to stamp out spam and bot accounts.

Just days after the Tesla boss said the issue forced him to put his $44 billion acquisition of the site “on hold,” Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal defended his company’s handling of spam and bots and denied claims that Twitter wasn’t doing enough to purge automated accounts.

He tweeted on Monday that spam “harms the experience for real people on Twitter” and that the company is “strongly incentivized to detect and remove as much spam as we possibly can, every single day.”

“Anyone who suggests otherwise is just wrong,” Agrawal tweeted.

Musk appeared to be unimpressed, tweeting a poop emoji in response. He then commented: “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.”

Last week, Musk claimed that there is “some chance” the actual number of fake accounts on Twitter “might be over 90% of daily active users.”

Agrawal said that operators of spam and bot accounts are becoming ever more sophisticated — which makes it harder for Twitter to identify and eliminate them.

Nonetheless, Agrawal claims that less than 5% of all of Twitter’s “monetizable daily active users” — or mDAUs — are spam.

Agrawal declined to reveal how the company came up with the data, though he said: “We shared an overview of the estimation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him, and all of you.”

Over the weekend, Musk tweeted that Twitter’s legal team accused him of violating a nondisclosure agreement by revealing that the sample size for the social media platform’s checks on automated users was just 100 accounts.