It appears that there is trouble in paradise. In a series of tweets, Elon Musk threatened to pull his acquisition of Twitter. Much of Musk’s frustration with the app stems from the percentage of fake or bot accounts on the app. Musk claims that he attempted to acquire Twitter under the belief that only 5% of the app’s users were fake or bots. Now, he appears to believe that 20% of the app’s users are bots or fake.
“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 <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does,” Musk tweeted on Tuesday.
As Musk questions the percentage of spam accounts on the app, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal has continued to defend the initial estimate of 5%.
“Our team updates our systems and rules constantly to remove as much spam as possible, without inadvertently suspending real people or adding unnecessary friction for real people when they use Twitter: none of us want to solve a captcha every time we use Twitter,” Agrawal tweeted.
“Now, we know we aren’t perfect at catching spam. And so this is why, after all the spam removal I talked about above, we know some still slips through. We measure this internally. And every quarter, we have estimated that <5% of reported mDAU for the quarter are spam accounts.”
It is unclear how Musk’s tweets may impact his acquisition of Twitter. With that said, it is clear that his tweets will have an impact on the company’s stock price. Prior to the market’s opening on Tuesday, Tech Crunch reports that the company’s share price dropped by 2.5%.
