LONDON - Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his deal to buy Twitter can't move forward unless the company shows public proof that less than 5% of the accounts on the social media platform are fake or spam.Musk made the comment in a reply to another user on Twitter early Tuesday.
He spent much of the previous day in a back-and-forth with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who posted a series of tweets explaining his company’s effort to fight bots and how it has consistently estimated that less than 5% of Twitter accounts are fake.In his tweet Tuesday, Musk said that "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."He added: "Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of 5%.
This deal cannot move forward until he does."It’s Musk's latest salvo over inauthentic accounts, a problem he has said he wants to rid Twitter of.At a Miami technology conference Monday, Musk estimated that at least 20% of Twitter’s 229 million accounts are spam bots, a percentage he said was at the low end of his assessment, according to a Bloomberg News report.FILE IMAGE - Elon Musk enters the 2022 Met Gala Celebrating "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" at the Metropolitan Museum on May 2, 2022, in New York City.