San Francisco / London
CNN Business
–

Elon Musk escalated a public confrontation with Twitter’s CEO earlier Tuesday, saying the social media company could not “move forward” until it saw more information about the proliferation of spam accounts.

Without quoting a source, Musk claimed ownership A tweet Twitter has suggested that “20% of fake / spam accounts” and Twitter’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission are misleading. The company claims that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts.

“My offer is based on the accuracy of Twitter’s SEC filing,” Musk tweeted. “Yesterday, the CEO of Twitter publicly refused to show evidence

Musk doubled later in the day and was released Twitter poll With this instruction to his more than 93 million followers: “Twitter claims that 95% of the daily active users are real, unique human beings. Has anyone had that experience?”

He also tagged SEC’s verified Twitter handle Tweet. He seemed to call the regulator that was with him Collided in the past“Is anyone home?” See the thing by asking that.

Musk’s recent tweets have raised more suspicions about the $ 44 billion deal. On Friday Musk announced it was “suspended” but he was “still determined to acquire”. That lead to Musk sparked speculation that the world’s richest man could use the debate over bots to get a better price for Twitter. Unnecessarily.

Shares of Twitter fell 1.7% in freemarket trading on Tuesday. The stock has wiped out all its gains in the weeks since Musk disclosed its stake in the company, and is now trading at $ 36.80 a share – Musk’s offer price of $ 54.20 a share.

Twitter said in a statement on Tuesday that it was committed to completing the transaction based on agreed pricing and terms.

On Monday, Musk exchanged a Series tweets With Twitter CEO Barack Agarwal about the spam account problem.

Twitter

(TWTR) “Every day more than half a million spam accounts are suspended,” Agarwal said Wrote. He reiterated the 5% figure, To say That estimate was randomly taken on the basis of “many human reviews … thousands of accounts”. Twitter

(TWTR) Is Previously agreed While its ratings are believed to be “reasonable”, the measurements are not independently verified and the actual number of fake or spam accounts may be higher.

Musk responded to Agarwal’s initial 13 tweets, reflecting the unusual and highly online nature of the deal: a Boop emoji.

Musk continued with a slightly thoughtful question. “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting paid for?” Musk He asked “This is the basis for Twitter’s financial health,” he added.

Kasturi repeats Spoken against bots and spam accounts On Twitter, he once described cryptocurrency spam bots as the site’s “single annoying problem”. Anyone familiar with the responses to Muskin’s tweets knows that they are riddled with such scams, many of which are trying to use Muskin’s name.

With the excuse of “eating dog homework” to get bail on the Twitter deal or talk at a low price, the bot issue feels more to us at the end of the day, “said Dan Eves and John Cuttingris, analysts at Wetbush Securities, in a note Monday.

In his Twitter book, Agarwal said that most spam campaigns on Twitter use a combination of humans and automation instead of being guided by bots. It would be complicated to discriminate between formal and fake accounts, he said.

“The tough challenge is that there are so many accounts that seem superficially fake – really real people,” he said. Said. “And some spam accounts are actually very dangerous – and very harmful to our users – seemingly legitimate on the surface.”

Agarwal Said Twitter was in touch with Musk over the spam issue.

“We shared an overview of the evaluation process with Elon a week ago and look forward to continuing the conversation with him and all of you,” he added.