Elon Musk fights Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal on spambots, puts deal on hold AGAIN

Elon Musk has put the Twitter deal on hold AGAIN. In case you were lucky enough to have evaded this drama that has been playing out on Twitter for the last few months, here’s the TL/DR - Musk offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion and an agreement has been put in place. The billionaire has reportedly managed to pool in the money by selling some of his Tesla stocks with the rest being rolled in by investors. Now, it is going to take a few months for the deal to go through and once it does, Musk will become interim CEO till new appointments are made. 

However, if the deal does not go through, Musk has to pay $1 billion as a termination fee.  

Ever since the deal was agreed upon, Musk appears to have taken it upon himself to steadily and consistently attack Twitter, its employees, its algorithm, and now the CEO Parag Agrawal, and the list goes on. 

One of Musk’s main “promises” while the talks between the social media platform and the billionaire were on was that he would remove all the spambots from Twitter. Or die trying. 

Last week, Musk shared a Reuters report that stated that less than 5 per cent of Twitter’s users were bots or fake accounts and said that the Twitter deal was being put on hold temporarily. "Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5 per cent of users,” he tweeted.

  Musk added that he was still committed to acquiring Twitter, but clearly, the issue of spambots is clearly rather personal. Or so it appears. 

Since then, Musk advised his followers on how to possibly count these bots and outlined his plans: 

“To find out, my team will do a random sample of 100 followers of @twitter. I invite others to repeat the same process and see what they discover …” he tweeted. Then he added that “The bots are angry at being counted” with ROFL emoji. 

On May 16, Agrawal shared a long thread explaining how spam works on Twitter - “Let’s talk about spam. And let’s do so with the benefit of data, facts, and context…”.

Ideally, following this, the future owner of Twitter should have acknowledged the explanation and perhaps pledged to improve the process and the algorithm and work with the team, to ensure that all bots and fake accounts would be removed from the platform. Instead, he tweeted a poop emoji. 

And then made another dig at bots.

Musk replied to a story shared by Teslarati titled “Musk seeks Twitter deal discount, believes 20 percent of accounts are spam” with - “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

Musk also mentioned on his May 17 tweet about putting the deal on hold that his offer on Twitter was based on Twitter's SEC filings being "accurate", directly attacking Twitter of lying in its SEC filings.

At this point, it seems like Musk is just trying to derail the deal entirely or is trying to chip away at Twitter’s share prices so he can wrangle a better deal. Both are possible and given the way Musk has been behaving, neither is surprising. 

What is surprising here though is the fact that the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), the agency in charge of inking the deal and the clauses involved, has been completely silent throughout Musk’s Twitter rampage. If Musk is attacking the company, its employees, and the CEO in the run-up to takeover in such a public manner, it does count as market manipulation since Twitter’s share prices have been falling. And this could allow Musk to try and lower the $44 billion price that has been decided on. 

This is exactly what the SEC is meant to prevent - market manipulation. Musk has run into trouble with the SEC in the past due to his tweets on Tesla stocks, so another run-in is expected, but it hasn’t happened yet at the level it ought to have. And the question is - why hasn’t it? 

As of May 12, SEC is investigating Musk’s late disclosure of his Twitter stakes that allowed him to buy more stock without alerting other shareholders. There is also a separate FTC (Federal Trade Commission) probe ongoing. 

The question is being asked if Musk is too “powerful” for the SEC to control. We’ll have to wait and watch, sadly. 

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

Also Read: Elon Musk, Twitter buyout, and a saga of ridiculous tweets: The timeline so far