A dispute over API rate limits is at the heart of Elon Musk’s decision to bail out his planned Twitter acquisition.
Musk has made several public statements about his desire to know how many Twitter accounts are managed by robots or which are not authentic, as he believes the number of unreliable accounts affects the value of the company. Therefore, the billionaire sought information on Twitter’s methods for detecting and managing fake accounts before closing the deal.
One of the documents [PDF] Twitter filed after Musk removed the cap includes a letter from Musk’s lawyers detailing those efforts to obtain information.
These APIs contained a lower rate cap than Twitter provides to their business customers
A segment of the document states that Musk and his team sought “a variety of board materials, including a bottom-up financial model for 2022, a budget for 2022, a draft plan or updated budget, and a copy. of Goldman Sachs. Valuation Model Underlying Their Equity Opinion “.
“Twitter has only provided a pdf copy of Goldman Sachs’ final presentation to the board.”
Other disclosures, the paper states, “come with attached strings, usage limitations, or other artificially formatted features, which has made some of the information minimally useful to Mr. Musk and his advisers.
“For example, when Twitter finally provided access to the eight developer‘ APIs ’explicitly first requested by Mr. Musk in the May 25 letter, those APIs contained a lower rate cap than Twitter provides to your largest business customers.
“Twitter only offered to provide Mr. Musk the same level of access as some of its customers after telling us that the acceleration of the rate cap prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from doing so. the analysis he wanted to carry out in a reasonable period of time.
In addition, these APIs contained an artificial “limit” on the number of queries that Mr. Musk and his team can execute regardless of the rate limit, a problem that initially prevented Mr. Musk and his advisors from completing an analysis of the data at any reasonable period of time, ”the document states.
Musk and his team raised the issue of query limits on June 29, but Twitter did not change the limit until July 6, after Musk called for its removal for the second time.
Failure to respond to requests from electric vehicle, tunnels, artificial intelligence, Internet access to space, tequila and rockets from the employer for better access to the data delivered by the API is added to a situation where Musk felt that Twitter was in breach of the merger agreement.
So he pulled the plug, leaving open questions about why Twitter could have provided only limited access to its APIs or why it couldn’t offer more access given that it works on a large scale.
If the decision was a tactic, it will certainly become something that the courts must consider, and Twitter president Bret Taylor has already indicated that the avian network intends the Delaware Chancellery Court listen to the matter so that the agreement can be made.
Musk, meanwhile, spent the weekend tweeting about his space company Starlink and suggesting that the twin children he recognized last week were part of his efforts to address humanity’s demographic crisis. ®