Elon Musk’s lawyer has issued a letter threatening to derail a massive deal, and it all boils down to fake robots.
Elon Musk has threatened to abandon his $ 44 billion (AUD $ 60.9 billion) deal to buy Twitter.
The richest man in the world accused the social media giant of “resisting and frustrating” his right to information about fake accounts, which he mentioned was key to the massive deal that’s going on.
Musk, 50, said the Twitter acquisition deal was “temporarily suspended” after asking the social media platform to clarify how many of its users were robots or spam accounts.
He claims that up to half of the 229 million Twitter users could be fake. Twitter puts that figure at around five percent.
“Musk has a right to search, and Twitter is required to provide information and data, among other things, for ‘any reasonable business purpose related to the completion of the transaction,'” SpaceX CEO’s attorney told the director Twitter. , says Vijaya Gadde.
“Musk believes that Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing more suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concerns about what it will find out. Musk’s analysis of this data.
“As a potential Twitter owner, Musk is clearly entitled to the data requested to enable him to prepare for the transition of the Twitter business to his ownership and to facilitate the financing of his transaction. To do both things, you need to have a complete and accurate understanding of the core of Twitter’s business model: its active user base.
“In any case, Musk is not obliged to explain its reason for requesting the data, nor to submit to the new conditions that the company has tried to impose on its contractual right to the requested data.”
The letter adds that Musk reserves the right to “terminate” the agreement.
The billionaire could receive a $ 1 billion breakout fee if he withdraws from the deal.
It’s unclear why Musk wants to know how many fake Twitter users are, but he could be trying to lower the price of the social media platform by proving he has fewer genuine subscribers.
On May 17, he tweeted that the deal “can’t move forward” until the actual number of spam accounts is revealed.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal said in May that Twitter had explained how many of its accounts are fake.
“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,” Mr Agrawal said at the time.
Agrawal, who has been the CEO of Twitter since Jack Dorsey left office in November last year, added that spammers “are sophisticated and hard to catch.”
The CEO of Twitter added that he was confident that only 5% of the accounts were fake and that they showed thousands of random accounts.
Mr. Musk posted the poop emoji on Twitter in response.
In a later tweet, Mr. Musk added, “So how do advertisers know what they get for their money? This is critical to Twitter’s financial health.”
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