Elon Musk has served notice of his intention to pull out of his deal to acquire Twitter if the company doesn’t provide him with information about spam and fake accounts.
Yesterday (6 June 2022), Musk filed an amended securities document for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), saying he believed Tiwtter is “refusing to disclose the information” that he has demanded and that this put Twitter in breach of the $44-billion acquisition agreement.
Musk has previously gone on record saying he wouldn’t proceed with the deal unless Twitter could prove that bots make up fewer than 5% of its users.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has stated that the number of fake accounts is less than 5% when measuring daily users, but Musk says doesn’t agree with with this assessment.
“Twitter’s latest offer to simply provide additional details regarding the company’s own testing methodologies, whether through written materials or verbal explanations, is tantamount to refusing Mr Musk’s data requests,” the new filing reads.
“Twitter’s effort to characterise it otherwise is merely an attempt to obfuscate and confuse the issue. Mr Musk has made it clear that he does not believe the company’s lax testing methodologies are adequate so he must conduct his own analysis. The data he has requested is necessary to do so.”
The new filing goes on: “At this point, Mr Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover.”