FOX Business Senior Correspondent Charlie Gasparino has the latest on the billionaire’s countersuit on “The Claman Countdown.”
Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter may still go ahead, if details of the social media platform’s actual user accounts can be confirmed.
Musk wants to know how many are “spam bots” and how many are real people.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, but has been trying to back out of the deal since July, accusing Twitter of misleading his team about the true size of its base of users and other issues that he said were fraud. and breach of contract.
Twitter sued him last month to complete the acquisition, and Musk countersued.
Elon Musk’s Twitter profile is shown on a computer screen and the Twitter logo is shown on a phone screen. (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)
The two sides are headed to trial in October in a Delaware court.
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“If Twitter simply provides its method of sampling 100 accounts and how they are confirmed to be real, the deal should proceed on original terms,” Musk tweeted early Saturday. “However, if it turns out that its filings with the SEC are materially false, it should not.”
Musk, who has more than 100 million followers on Twitter, challenged Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal to a “public debate about Twitter’s percentage of bots.”
There’s a sign outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jed Jacobsohn/AP Newsroom)
Twitter declined comment Saturday. The company has repeatedly disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission an estimate that less than 5% of user accounts are fake or spam, with a disclaimer that it could be higher. Musk waived his right to further due diligence when he signed the April merger agreement.
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In the reported details of Musk’s counterclaim, he accuses Twitter of intentionally “miscounting” the number of spam accounts it hosts in order to leverage its user metrics “as part of its scheme to mislead investors about the company’s prospects”.
Elon Musk, left, and Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. (Reuters | Twitter / Reuters Photos)
He also claims that Twitter’s reliance on the mDAU metric, or monetizable daily active Twitter users, as a revenue base is itself misleading.
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Twitter responded in a Delaware Chancery Court filing, calling Musk’s reasoning “a story, concocted in an effort to escape a merger deal that Musk no longer found attractive.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.