Elon Musk requires less than 5% of Twitter accounts to be fake to proceed with his $44 billion buyout deal. The deal is on hold until the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX receives more details about Twitter’s spam accounts.
In an early Tuesday morning tweet, Elon Musk stated that he is not ready to go through with the $44 billion buyout deal unless Twitter provides official statistics on the number of spam accounts.
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.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 17, 2022
This action follows Musk’s Tuesday tweet-based run-in with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, in which he criticised the company’s handling of spam data. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter,” Musk responded to Agrawal’s thread.
So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 16, 2022
Musk said from the beginning of his highly publicised deal that he intended to purge the platform of spam and false accounts. On May 13, he said that the deal was temporarily suspended to await Twitter’s response to its spam accounts. However, Twitter has not yet published any precise figures that below 5% of accounts on the platform are fake.
Musk reached an agreement with Twitter last month to purchase a 100% ownership of the firm for $54.20 per share. Since then, the crypto community has speculated about Musk’s potential usage of bitcoin as part of his plan to revamp the app. Musk, who previously disclosed that he owns Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin, added $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin to Tesla’s balance sheet last year. However, he hasn’t provided full details on his plans for the social media giant, other than a commitment to eradicating bots and enabling free speech, which includes reinstating Donald Trump’s account.
Nevertheless, he has suggested that Dogecoin be used for Twitter’s subscription service. Even without the deal being finalised, Twitter has taken moves to embrace crypto technology in recent months. It already accepts Bitcoin and Ethereum payments and tests Stripe’s new stablecoin payment service, while NFT holders show off their tokenised JPEG using the app’s authentication function.