Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday said the Twitter deal will not go ahead without clarity on spam accounts. He said that his purchase of Twitter would not go ahead unless he was assured that fewer than five percent of accounts on the platform were fake.
"My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5% (spam accounts). This deal cannot move forward until he does," Musk said in a tweet, reported Reuters.
Musk had earlier suggested that he could seek a lower price for Twitter Inc, saying that there could be at least four times more fake accounts than what the company has said.
"You can't pay the same price for something that is much worse than they claimed," he said at a conference in Miami.
Musk, who on Friday said his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter was on hold pending information on spam accounts, said that he suspects they make up at least 20 percent of users - compared to Twitter's official estimates of 5 percent.
Twitter does not currently require users to register using their real identities and expressly permits automated, parody and pseudonymous profiles on the service. It does ban impersonation and spam, and penalizes accounts when the company determines their purpose is to "deceive or manipulate others" by engaging in scams, coordinating abuse campaigns or artificially inflating engagement.
With inputs from Agencies
First Published: May 17, 2022 2:11 PM IST
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