Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' until there's clarity on bot numbers: Musk

Billionaire entrepreneur and Tesla boss Elon Musk has said that he will proceed with his $44 billion takeover of the San Francisco-based microblogging platform Twitter only if Twitter is able to prove that less than 5 per cent of its users are bots.   

He was replying to a user on Twitter who wrote that Musk may be looking for a better deal as $44 billion seems too high with 20 per cent users being fake or spam accounts.  

Musk tweeted, “20 per cent 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 more than 5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”  

Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal also tweeted on Monday night that internal estimates of spam accounts on the social media platform for the last four quarters were “well under 5 per cent”, responding to Musk’s criticism of the company’s handling of phony accounts. He responded to Agarwal’s explanation of the company’s methodology with a poop emoji.  

Musk wrote, “So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter?” 

Earlier in the day, Musk had said that there could be at least four times more fake accounts than what the company claims. He was quoted by news agency Reuters as saying, "You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed." 

He also said that Twitter's deal at less than $44 billion is "not out of the question." Musk mentioned, "The more questions I ask, the more my concerns grow." He added, “They claim that they’ve got this complex methodology that only they can understand… It can’t be some deep mystery that is, like, more complex than the human soul or something like that.”