Elon Musk gives condition to complete Twitter acquisition deal

Billionaire investor, Elon Musk, has issued a warning to Twitter over actual number of users with active accounts on the social networking site, as completion of the acquisition remains blurry.

The Tesla boss had previously demanded to know if 5% of the over 200 million monetised daily active users were bots or spam accounts, which led to him suspending the completion of the deal.

Twitter board had earlier accepted Musk’s $44 billion offer to acquire 100% of the social media company, and had began talks to finalise the deal before the issue of bots came up.

Explaining the challenges Twitter was facing in detecting the actual number of bots on the platform and eliminating them, on Monday, the firm’s Chief Executive Officer, Parag Agrawal, had said over 500,000 handles suspected to be spam accounts were suspended daily, while millions are locked weekly.
While Agrawal admitted that “every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.” Musk wasn’t convinced, and he took to his Twitter account on Tuesday to query the CEO.

With reports emanating that the actual active user figure released to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in United states could be false, Musk explained that his acquisition offer was based on the SEC document.

He hinted that the spam handles could account for 20% of the total Twitter users, and that Agrawal has refused to show evidence of less than 5% fake accounts, and this won’t allow him move forward with the deal until proof has been shown.

“20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher. My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.

“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.” The world’s richest man wrote on Twitter.