Why was the Twitter purchase deal paused?
What Elon Musk Says 0:52
San Francisco/London (CNN Business) --
Elon Musk escalated his public spat with Twitter's CEO earlier Tuesday, saying his acquisition of the social media company "can't move forward" until he sees more information on Twitter. the prevalence of spam accounts.
Without citing a source, Musk claimed in a tweet that Twitter has "20% fake/spam accounts" and suggested that Twitter's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission were misleading.
The company has said that less than 5% of its daily active users are spam accounts.
"My offer was based on the SEC's Twitter filings being accurate," Musk tweeted.
"Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal can't move forward until he does."
Musk's latest tweet seemed to cast more doubt on the $44 billion deal.
Musk said Friday that he was "temporarily on hold" but that he "remains committed to the acquisition."
That spin by Musk fueled speculation that the world's richest man may be using the bot debate to secure a better price for Twitter, either as a negotiating tactic or out of necessity.
Shares of Twitter were down 1.7% in premarket trading on Tuesday.
The shares have erased all their gains in the weeks since Musk revealed his stake in the company and are now trading at $36.80, well below Musk's offer price of $54.20 a share.
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On Monday, Musk exchanged a series of tweets with Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal about the problem of spam accounts.
Twitter (TWTR) suspends "over half a million spam accounts every day," Agrawal wrote.
He also reiterated the 5% statistic, saying that estimate is based on "multiple human reviews ... of thousands of accounts" randomly sampled.
Twitter has previously acknowledged that while it believes its estimates are "reasonable," the measurements were not independently verified and the actual number of fake or spam accounts could be higher.
Agrawal's initial 13 tweets were met with a response from Musk that reflected the unusual and extremely
online
nature of the deal: a poop emoji.
Musk followed up with a somewhat more thoughtful question.
"So how do advertisers know what they're getting for their money?" Musk asked.
"This is critical to the financial health of Twitter," he added.
Musk has repeatedly spoken out against spam bots and accounts on Twitter, once describing cryptocurrency spam bots as the "most annoying problem on the platform."
Anyone familiar with the replies to Musk's tweets knows that they are full of these types of scams, many of which try to take advantage of Musk's name.
"The bot thing...seems more to us like a 'dog ate homework' excuse to walk away from the Twitter deal or talk about a lower price," wrote Dan Ives and John Katsingris, analysts at Wedbush Securities. , in a note this Monday.
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In his Twitter thread, Agrawal said that most spam campaigns on Twitter use a combination of humans and automation, rather than being driven primarily by bots.
Analyzing legitimate and fake accounts can be tricky, he said.
"The most difficult challenge is that many accounts that appear fake on the surface are actually real people," he said.
"And some of the spam accounts, which are the most dangerous and the ones that cause the most harm to our users, may seem entirely legitimate at first glance."
Agrawal said that Twitter had spoken to Musk about the issue of spam.
"We shared with Elon an overview of the estimation process a week ago. We look forward to continuing the conversation with him and all of you," he added.
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