Elon Musk says he won’t buy Twitter until the company can prove than less than 5% of its daily active users are spam or fake accounts.
“Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” Musk tweeted early Tuesday morning.
Hours earlier, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal published a thread explaining why his company estimates that the number of fake and spam accounts on the platform has, historically, been less than 5%. However, the thread was met with trolling and pushback from Musk, who claims Twitter has been massively undercounting its fake account problem.
“It seems beyond reasonable for Twitter to claim that the number of real unique humans that you see making comments on a daily basis on Twitter is above 95%,” Musk told the All-In Summit conference on Monday. “Does anyone have that experience?”
Musk claimed the true number of spam and fake accounts may be actually “four or five times” higher than Twitter’s own calculations. “The lowest estimate would be 20%,” he said, citing unnamed outside firms that have researched Twitter’s user base.
“Something doesn’t add up here,” he added. “And my concern is not that it is 5%, 7% or 8%, but is it potentially 80% or 90% of bots.”
Musk then went on to say it’s “not out of the question” he’ll try to buy Twitter at a lower price; last month, he agreed to acquire the social media company for $44 billion.
“In making the Twitter offer, I was obviously reliant upon the truth and accuracy of their public filings. And if those filings are not accurate, you can’t pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed,” he said.
However, Tuesday's tweet from Musk is also setting off more speculation he may try to back out of the deal. Last Friday, Musk put his offer to buy Twitter on hold over concerns the company has been miscounting the numbers of spam and fake accounts on the platform. At the same time, the stock value for Tesla, where he serves as CEO, fell from over $1,000 to about $750. Musk plans on using his own funds and loans borrowed against his investments to buy Twitter.
As Reuters notes, Musk wavied due diligence on the deal when he agreed to acquire it. He'll also be subject to a billion-dollar breakup fee if he backs out.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But on Monday, its CEO said the company conducts human-led reviews on thousands of accounts at random to determine the ratio of fake and spam users on the platform. This involves looking at both public and private data about the user account, including IP address, phone number, geo-location information "client/browser signatures, what the account does when it’s active," Agrawal said.
Twitter's CEO added that the company usually "locks millions of accounts each week" for being suspected spam. "The hard challenge is that many accounts which look fake superficially—are actually real people. And some of the spam accounts which are actually the most dangerous—and cause the most harm to our users—can look totally legitimate on the surface," he said.