Elon Musk: Twitter deal 'cannot move forward' without fake accounts proof
Elon Musk's $44 billion Twitter acquisition is getting less and less likely – at least at the terms initially agreed upon.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Musk is looking to renegotiate the deal terms and possibly look to acquire the social media site at a lower price. Musk previously said he'd put the deal "on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users."
The report follows the remarks Musk made at the "All In" conference in Miami on Monday, where he said that he believes as many as 20 percent of Twitter accounts could be fake.
On Tuesday, Musk offered some more details on Twitter. The number of fake and spam accounts on could be "much higher" than 20 percent, he wrote.
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"My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of
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Responding to one Twitter user's comment which claimed that there's a "high possibility that the number of fake/spam/bot accounts could be well over 50%," Musk answered "exactly." Additionally, in a response to Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal's thread about the number of fake accounts on Twitter being extremely hard to estimate, Musk tweeted a poop emoji.
"So how do advertisers know what they’re getting for their money? This is fundamental to the financial health of Twitter," he wrote in a subsequent tweet.
Musk recently said he's still committed to the Twitter deal, but it now appears he's ready to stand his ground on the issue of fake and spam accounts, which he previously said he'd eradicate if he became the new Twitter owner.