Elon Musk said Saturday 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 \u2018spam bots\u2019 or real people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The billionaire and Tesla CEO\u00a0has been trying to back out\u00a0of his April agreement to buy the social media company, leading Twitter to\u00a0sue him last month\u00a0to complete the acquisition.\u00a0Musk countersued, accusing Twitter of misleading his team about the true size of its user base and other problems he said amounted to fraud and breach of contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both sides are\u00a0headed toward an October trial\u00a0in a Delaware court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf Twitter simply provides their method of sampling 100 accounts and how they\u2019re confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,\u201d Musk tweeted early Saturday. \u201cHowever, if it turns out that their SEC filings are materially false, then it should not.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Musk, who has more than 100 million Twitter followers, went on to challenge Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a \u201cpublic debate about the Twitter bot percentage.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter declined comment Saturday. The company has repeatedly disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission an estimate that fewer than 5% of user accounts are fake or spam, with a disclaimer that it could be higher. Musk waived his right to further due diligence when he signed the April merger agreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Twitter has argued in court that Musk is deliberately trying to tank the deal and using the bot question as an excuse because market conditions have deteriorated and the acquisition no longer serves his interests. In a court filing Thursday,\u00a0it describes his counterclaims\u00a0as an imagined story \u201ccontradicted by the evidence and common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMusk invents representations Twitter never made and then tries to wield, selectively, the extensive confidential data Twitter provided him to conjure a breach of those purported representations,\u201d company attorneys wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While Musk has tried to keep the focus on bot disclosures, Twitter\u2019s legal team has been\u00a0digging for information\u00a0about a host of tech investors and entrepreneurs connected to Musk in a wide-ranging subpoena that could net some of their private communications with the Tesla CEO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Elon Musk said Saturday his planned $44 billion takeove […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1718"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1720,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1718\/revisions\/1720"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.viewworld.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}